12/05/2023

Today we read what is the prototype of a Pastoral Letter. James who was leading the Church in Jerusalem was responding to Paul and Barnabas' request for guidance about how to accept the Pagans into the baptised community that was the fledgling Church in Antioch and other cities in Asia Minor. It is interesting that there is nothing Creedal in this first recorded advice to the Baptised. 

I suppose that all of the Jewish "converts"still did not see themselves as anything other than the Chosen People lead out of Egypt by Moses for they had already made the great leap of Faith that was accepting that Jesus' whose preaching and miracles had brought turmoil to their Priests, Scribes and Rabbis and who had been legally crucified for blasphemy had returned to life on the third day of his burial. Many had seen him and it was this fervour of Resurrection belief in Jerusalem that kept on inspiring further conversions.

The letter is a record of how freed from the need to become physically the same as Jews, the Pagan converts were now able to learn how to understand themselves as being united with all the Jewish Baptised Believers. Antioch is where the name "Christian" was first used as the consciousness that the teaching of Christ, repeated by the Apostles, and Supernaturally witnessed by the Resurrection was the beginning of a new and final Covenant.

At the time that St John completed his "memoir"of his life with God the first codices of the Gospels were circulating and St Paul's letters were already taking on the character of divinely inspired Scripture. St John's special mission was to take care of Mary. Mary has been seen as the  obedient heart of the Church. Jesus' humanity is her humanity. Mary's "be it done unto me according to thy word" is the perfect exemplar of how we should all react to whatever God shows to be his mission for us.

John's prayerful remembrances of being in Palestine with Jesus gives us a firm base on which we can build and verify our own Faith for as Mary is Theotokos, so is he the Theologian.

Dear Lord thanks be to you, Father, Son and Holy Spirit for the grace that has dragged me out of the mire of my own making that was my life of sin. I know that I can let your grace into my being and thus can continue to atone for, no matter how I try otherwise, it is only through the intersession of your Mother and all the Saints that I will be able to purge the effects of my sins in Purgatory.