Magnificat - Praying with Saint John’s Gospel: Daily Reflections on the Gospel of Saint John

ISBN: 9781936260775

Foreword

Father Peter John Cameron, O.P.

A ND IT WAS NIGHT. Thats how Saint John the Evangelist ends the passage where Judas Iscariot slithers off to betray Jesus Christ (Jn 13:30). Johns purpose is not to tell us the time of day, but to symbolize the oppressive darkness and evil that befall the world through the treachery of Judas.

First words

For the last few years, the parish where I have been offering Mass on Sundays is Saint Rose of Lima Church in Newtown, Connecticut. On the evening of the Sandy Hook School massacre, an impromptu memorial Mass was held...attended by nearly two thousand. Because it was night.

It hurt to look upon the sea of faces wracked with darkness and desolation. In my head I kept repeating the first words of Jesus in the Gospel of Johna question: What are you looking for? (Jn 1:38). The crowds had come to Gods housenot to a therapist, not to a counseling center. Clearly they were looking for something from heavensomething from God to make sense of the horror. What drove them was the intuition, the expectation that the light shines in the darkness, / and the darkness has not overcome it (Jn 1:5).

The parish, the town had become instantaneously overwhelmed by catastrophic violence and inconceivable loss. Yet we sensed that someone had foreseen and tended to our need before it had a chance to crush us. They have no wine, says the Mother of God to her divine Son at Cana (Jn 2:3). Mary sees what is missing long before that lack can rob the wedding feast of joy. And Christ responds with a flood of wine signifying the outpouring of God himself: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life (Jn 3:16).

Most likely many in the congregation that night had not been to church in a long time. They were like the Samaritan woman at the well who, through her history of consistently bad choices, had become alienated from others, alienated from God, even alienated from herself. But when Jesus gets her to think about her thirst, and promises whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life (Jn 4:14), she leaves her old lifeher water jarbehind. She runs to town bursting with love, proclaiming this Good News to the world!

More than a few in those pews resembled the lame man who had lain by the Sheep Gate pool for thirty-eight years. They ached to hear Jesus ask, Do you want to be well? (Jn 5:6). But the events of that abominable day seemed to augur a bleak and dismal future. Yet, even at that Mass, we could hear Jesus whispering, Rise, take up your mat, and walk (Jn 5:8).

What the assembled multitude craved that Friday evening was a Presence. They had come to the Eucharist. Jesus promises in the Bread of Life discourse, I will not reject anyone who comes to me (Jn 6:37). In the wake of incomprehensible death, drawing close to Jesus Christ in certainty...eating his very Body and Blood was, they knew, the most reasonable thing to do. Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you (Jn 6:53).

Words of eternal life

Even when hundreds found themselves stuck outside owing to the limited seating in Saint Rose Church, they did not leave. Their staying put in the daunting December cold silently professed, Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life (Jn 6:68). For all were counting on the life-giving words of Jesus Christ to give them a reason to go on living. As even non-believers in Johns Gospel declare, Never before has anyone spoken like this one (Jn 7:46).

That night nothing could keep us from staying close to Jesus. Not the shame of our sins, which the atrocity made us face with new gravity. Sin gave way to the mercy of the Son of God: Has no one condemned you?... Neither do I condemn you (Jn 8:10-11). Not the blindness of our worldly ways, countered squarely by Christ: While I am in the world, I am the light of the world (Jn 9:5). No, we had drawn near to what our hearts told us we longed for the most: the Good Shepherd. Lost, alone, the voice of our Good Shepherd wooed us: I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly (Jn 10:10).

Maybe we would not witness a miracle like the raising of Lazarus. But the Lords assurance to the dead mans sister Martha seared our souls with hope: I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live (Jn 11:25). We would like to see Jesus, our voiceless anguish begged (Jn 12:21). Came the response, as if from an empty tomb, While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of the light (Jn 12:36).

Children of the light...

We recognized that we had been called to share in the Passion of Christ to a degree no one ever could have imagined. And even as we grieved and wept, Jesus himself stooped to wash our feet (Jn 13:1-5), tears mingling with water in the basin. Each touch of his towel brought a new tenderness: I will not leave you orphans (Jn 14:18).... I am the way and the truth and the life (Jn 14:6).... Remain in me, as I remain in you (Jn 15:4).... Take courage, I have conquered the world (Jn 16:33).... May all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you (Jn 17:21).

Last words, lasting words

At that Mass we encountered the absolute answer to Pontius Pilates infamous question: What is truth? (Jn 18:38). Truth is this Man, who looks at us in a way that no one has ever looked at us before. Even from the cross, with our agony in mind, radiating a peerless gaze of love, Jesus confers an incomparable gift: Behold, your mother (Jn 19:27). What was granted at the beginninga Mother at Cana to anticipate and accommodate our needis given now at the end and for ever to accompany us in our pain.

One month after the school shooting, Jenny Hubbard spoke to the people of Saint Rose of Lima Parish about her beautiful, red-haired, six-year-old daughter Catherine who had been brutally murdered:

What made it possible for one so devastated by suffering and sorrow to speak with such conviction, such utter serenity? Only the fact of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the deadan event more present and alive in her life than the absence of her beloved little girl. For us Jenny was another Mary Magdalene who went and announced to the disciples, I have seen the Lord (Jn 20:18).

In the end, only one question seemed to matter...a question of the risen Jesus: Do you love me? (Jn 21:16). To answer yes is to know that we are loved.

J ANUARY

Starting from the Beginning Every Day

Father Vincent Nagle, F.S.C.B .

In the beginning was the Word, / and the Word was with God, / and the Word was God. / He was in the beginning with God .

(Jn 1:1-2)

J ohn begins by telling us, In the beginning was the Word. This is an experience that we can have today, for not only was the Word in the beginning, but also our own beginningand especially our beginning againis in the Word. As a confessor you hear again and again the frustration of people who are there to confess what they have confessed so many times before. And you feel the fear of those who, having committed betrayals, are afraid that they have definitively and permanently undone the weave of life that had sustained them up to that point.