Musings from the High Desert

The question is: was the Lord really serious? Are we do leave ancestry and progeny, land and life, behind? What is this call to such a radical Gospel? This week we consider these awesome and sometimes frightening words.

One of the greatest gifts of the Spirit is the reunion of people above and beyond and through the medium of language, the great turnaround and reversal of the Tower of Babel. Fr. Gabriel Rochelle dwells on this gift in the light of this past weekend when four new members entered the faith in our parish through the awesome rites of initiation.

This week we commemorate those who, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, crafted a narrow passage between denying Christ as fully human and Christ as fully God. This faith still informs and undergirds the faith to this day.

Fr. Gabriel Rochelle looks at an overview of the Gospel of John, noting that all that needs to be said about the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist has been completed by the sixth chapter. Then the gospel moves us to understand the fullness of the sacramental life beyond the rituals themselves, to see that we are caught up in God's presence in the everyday, if only we can see it. In this time of coronavirus, when not all of us can participate in the rites of the sacraments, we can understand ourselves in a larger context.

What do the soliloquies of Jesus Christ (as we find in the Gospel of St. John) lead us to? What is the confusing language leading to? How are we like the Samaritan Woman? Listen in.

We all experience some sort of paralysis in our lives, some inability to move off dead center and take a step forward into new life. How does this paralysis affect us, how do we respond to it, and how can the message of the resurrection come to us in the midst of our own paralysis? That's at the heart of today's gospel, and especially important is the news that we can change with Christ's help.

Fr. Gabriel Rochelle uses a waterfall of quotes from early fathers of the church to show the cosmic meaning of the resurrection of Christ, ending with reflections on St. Maximos the Confessor. Christ is risen!

Fr. Gabriel Rochelle asks us to set aside the preconceptions we approach the entry with, chiefly the compartmentalization of aspects of our lives. This would not have been the case in the time of Jesus Christ and so we need to hear this message from a different perspective. We are "prisoners of hope" (the third lesson from Vespers) and we look forward to our release and the constitution of a new life in keeping with the servanthood of Christ.

Fr. Gabriel Rochelle takes off from one of the stichery from Vespers, which has the words (about St. Mary) "through violence you broke the rebellion of your flesh, taking the Kingdom of God by force." This is a reference to Matthew 11:12, which forms the basis for reflections on that passage and on both the Gospels assigned for this Sunday.

Father Gabriel Rochelle considers the humor in this week's Gospel and, as an aside, muses on why the text was placed on this Sunday by the ancient lectionary compilers. (The texts for the Sunday of Orthodoxy precede the commemoration historically and have remained in place.)

Fr. Gabriel Rochelle takes a slightly different view of the passage we know as "inasmuch": "Inasmuch as you have fed the hungry," and so forth. Listen in to hear how this passage ultimately applies to all of us in its specificity and concreteness.

Forget humility! Forget pride! Forget, for sure, comparing yourself to anyone else on the spiritual journey. In an alternative reading of the Greek at this point in Luke, we hear that the Pharisee and the tax collector go away together justified. What's that all about? We shift the focus this week from the characters in the parable to the God who stands in and behind Christ the parable teller.

Fr. Gabriel Rochelle surveys the whole message of the First Letter of Timothy, focusing on the concept of godliness, a word that doesn't occur until later in the New Testament witness. What does this word mean and how does it apply to both Timothy as minister of the gospel and us as faithful Christians?

Fr. Gabriel Rochelle focuses on the hymn of Simeon, "Lord now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace" and shows its origin in his life and its meaning for our lives today.

The rich young man who comes to Jesus is a model of those who cannot part with their material possessions. He hopes to take it with him! Jesus drives us all deeply into our understanding of life in order to make us confront the lust and even anger that fuels our desires. For those who live like this, salvation is impossible. The rich man cannot be saved in and with his richness. But with God, all things are possible.