14/09/2023

The story of Jesus' life on Earth is told by the Evangelists who spent three years of their lives with him. Paul is totally a response to the Resurrection. Mathew Mark and Luke are records of God's deeds and words in the limited human time that Jesus spent on Earth. St John's is the last Gospel to be written. St John records the direct teaching of Jesus in greater detail than the other three. It was written towards the end of his long life and for Christianity it fits that definition of poetry as "Emotion recollected in tranquility".

St Paul who was trained as a "Theologian" in the school of Rabbi Gamaliel was the most formally educated of the writers accepted as inspired by the Holy Spirit and hence accepted into the Canon of the Church at the end of the fourth century.

St Paul's letters were the earliest part of the New Testament to be written. They were Paul's attempt to explain and understand the events of Jesus' life and teaching that he had learnt from the first Christians who had accepted their fierce prosecutor as a brother in Christ. St John would have known of St Paul's letters but St Paul could not have read St John's Gospel. It was written after St Paul's martyrdom.

Today's passage from Paul's letter to the Philippians is not only beautiful but it is one man's inspired meditation on the Glory that is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. St Paul who would have willingly  cried "Crucify him, Crucify him" with the crowd that bayed for the life of the blood covered, thorn crowned reject of humanity presented to them by Pilate can now find only the Glory of God in the humility of that broken man, soon to die on the cross.

The cross is the center of Paul's paean of praise so rightly celebrated. John reports what he must have learned directly from Nicodemus. John was uneducated at the time of the first converts. He had listened to Jesus for three years and had thus grown in wisdom. The fluency of the discourse he attributes to Jesus is not the unlettered Aramaic of the fisherman called by Jesus but the Hellenic sophistication that he has acquired since the time at the foot of the cross when he witnessed the death of all his hopes and also accepted Mary into his home. 

All Christian Theology is based on Scripture and is foreshadowed particularly by John and Paul but the reality of our belief is not the billions of words that have been written about our individual response to God. It is God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, ever greater yet humble "even to accepting death on a cross" . "Yes God  loved the world so much that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life."

That is why we celebrate today the "Feast of the Holy Cross".

Dear Lord, I hope that I am not only "pleased with myself" for this mornings thoughts and words. I am pleased that they must have been inspired by the Love you have for me. Let me come to accept this Love and return even the tiniest bit that is known by You who are the provider of only good to me and mine. May Mary who must have inspired St John on Earth and talked with him about her Son lead all the saints in heaven in prayer for their struggling brothers and sisters here on Earth and for the benefit of the Holy Souls in Purgatory.