Passing Along a Secret
May 18: Thursday of the Sixth Week of Easter
Unless you’re in the Ecclesiastical Provinces of Boston, Hartford, New York, Omaha, Philadelphia, today is the sixth Thursday of Easter. That’s because in the rest of the country,1 moved the celebration of the Ascension to Sunday. It’s not really my place to say whether or not that’s a good thing, but some people have opinions:
Transfer of holydays is also destructive of a sense of history. Take the shift of the Ascension as an example. For the New Testament, Jesus’ visible post-Resurrection appearances spanned forty days, i.e., to Ascension Thursday. For the New Testament, Easter closes on the fiftieth day, with Pentecost. The Catholic tradition of “novena,” nine days in preparation for a particular feast or in prayer for a particular intention, originated with the Ascension, as the Apostles returned to the Upper Room to await the coming of the Spirit. Just as Holy Thursday to Easter gave us the liturgical notion of “triduum,” so Ascension Thursday to Pentecost gave us the liturgical notion of “novena.”
But transferring the Ascension to the Seventh Sunday of Easter destroys this notion, because the interval between the Ascension and Pentecost is reduced to a week. Is it any surprise that the decline of popular devotions—which often included novenas—has practically disappeared? How many parishes in the United States today have any novena devotions even over nine weeks? Suggesting an actual nine day novena might even elicit calls for hardship pay!
Reading I
Acts 18:1-8
Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. There he met a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla because Claudius had ordered all the Jews to leave Rome. He went to visit them and, because he practiced the same trade, stayed with them and worked, for they were tentmakers by trade. Every sabbath, he entered into discussions in the synagogue, attempting to convince both Jews and Greeks.
When Silas and Timothy came down from Macedonia, Paul began to occupy himself totally with preaching the word, testifying to the Jews that the Christ was Jesus. When they opposed him and reviled him, he shook out his garments and said to them, “Your blood be on your heads! I am clear of responsibility. From now on I will go to the Gentiles.”
So he left there and went to a house belonging to a man named Titus Justus, a worshiper of God; his house was next to a synagogue. Crispus, the synagogue official, came to believe in the Lord along with his entire household, and many of the Corinthians who heard believed and were baptized.
So, at this point in time, the Jews had been exiled from Rome, which is a thing that people do to Jews from time to time. What’s interesting, though, is that a Roman historian, Suetonius, wrote: Iudaeos impulsore Chresto assidue tumultuantis Roma expulit, which can be translated “Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from Rome.”2
Corinth is over 600 miles from Rome, as the crow flies, so Aquila and Priscilla had taken the expulsion order quite seriously. Paul only traveled about 40 miles to get there from Athens.
It’s funny to see networking happen in the ancient world, from across far flung ends of the largest empire the world had ever seen. “You’re a tentmaker? I’m a tentmaker, too! Let’s talk business. Oh, and have you heard of Jesus Christ?”
It’s worth considering taking this approach in our own lives, in our business. We form friendships with our co-workers, sometimes even romances. So many people have met their future spouse on the job.
Why not try and start an apostolate at the office, too?3
Try not to get kicked out and forced to move into the house next to the synagogue, though, like Paul did.
Responsorial Psalm
98:1, 2-3ab, 3cd-4
R. The Lord has revealed to the nations his saving power.
Sing to the LORD a new song,
for he has done wondrous deeds;
His right hand has won victory for him,
his holy arm.
R. The Lord has revealed to the nations his saving power.
The LORD has made his salvation known:
in the sight of the nations he has revealed his justice.
He has remembered his kindness and his faithfulness
toward the house of Israel.
R. The Lord has revealed to the nations his saving power.
All the ends of the earth have seen
the salvation by our God.
Sing joyfully to the LORD, all you lands;
break into song; sing praise.
R. The Lord has revealed to the nations his saving power.
The Psalmist is singing about God’s supernatural interventions, such as parting the Red Sea or helping them defeat the far larger army of Amalek.
But of course, we Christians interpret this a little different. The victory is over death itself, the resurrection the most wondrous deed imaginable. That’s the salvation all the end of the Earth have seen, from Athens to Rome and beyond.
Alleluia
See Jn 14:18
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
I will not leave you orphans, says the Lord;
I will come back to you, and your hearts will rejoice.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Jesus will dwell in our hearts, if we let Him.
Gospel
Jn 16:16-20
Jesus said to his disciples: “A little while and you will no longer see me, and again a little while later and you will see me.”
So some of his disciples said to one another, “What does this mean that he is saying to us, ‘A little while and you will not see me, and again a little while and you will see me,’ and ‘Because I am going to the Father’?” So they said, “What is this ‘little while’ of which he speaks? We do not know what he means.”
Jesus knew that they wanted to ask him, so he said to them, “Are you discussing with one another what I said, ‘A little while and you will not see me, and again a little while and you will see me’? Amen, amen, I say to you, you will weep and mourn, while the world rejoices; you will grieve, but your grief will become joy.”
Since we already know the story, we know Jesus is talking about His death and resurrection.
But Jesus doesn’t want to spoil the ending for the Apostles, because they need to actually live through it. They can’t be the first witnesses to the Good News if Jesus simply tells them. They need to experience the actual loss and despair of death to truly appreciate Jesus’ conquering of it.
Remember, as Paul says,4 “If Christ has not been raised, then empty, too, is our preaching; empty, too, your faith.” It’s the central tenet of our faith, the pivot on which all of history turns.
So Jesus speaks in veiled language here, at the Last Supper, which they’ll only understand in a few days’ time. Which is why John recorded it, and passed it down to us two millennia later.
My stats tell me all of my readers are American, but Mexico also moved the solemnity.
You ever hear apologists talk about outside sources referring to Jesus? This is one of them.
Some people incorrectly claim this was inserted by later Christian copyists, to line up with Acts and 1 Corinthians. But first of all, they wouldn’t have misspelled “Christ;” and secondly, they wouldn’t have written that Christ instigated “disturbances” (probably riots, or at least street fighting, if it was bad enough for Claudius to expel all Jews from the city).
Suetonius probably misunderstood the expulsion order. The Jews were likely fighting about Jesus, not at the prompting of Jesus.
This, by the way, despite what Dan Brown will tell you, is what Opus Dei is about. It literally translates “Work of God,” by which St. Josemaría meant, we can sanctify our own daily lives and secular occupations.
1 Cor 15:14, the letter he wrote to the church he founded in today’s first reading!