A Jesuit Adventure

Conflict management and organisational development – not words that you would expect to hear in the Bible. But that’s precisely what the readings on this Fifth Sunday of Easter Year A present before us.  In the first reading taken from the Acts of the Apostles, we witness the beginnings of friction in the early church community. After Pentecost, the apostles were completely given in to the ministry of preaching and healing and they were witnessing mass conversions much to the chagrin of the Jewish authorities. The Hellenists were immigrant Greek-speaking Christians who had adopted elements of Greek culture. The church had established a system of daily distribution to provide for widows and since the believers had pooled their resources there shouldn’t have been a problem. However, the Greek believers thought that the church was discriminating against their widows in the daily distribution. This discrimination could be financial or perhaps even social – related to the distr...

  Three weeks ago we celebrated Easter and if you were at the Easter Vigil mass then you would have noticed that in the liturgy there was a moment when we all stood with lighted candles in our hands and renewed our baptismal promises. The celebrant began by saying “Dear brothers and sisters, through the Paschal Mystery we have been buried with Christ in Baptism, so that we may walk with him in newness of life. And then he asks: Do you renounce Satan and all his works and all his empty show?? Do you renounce sin, so as to live in the freedom of the children of God? Do you renounce the lure of evil, so that sin may have no mastery over you? On this fourth Sunday of Easter Year A the first reading taken from the Acts of the Apostles highlights a very important aspect of our Christian Life - Baptism and our turning to God. In the reading, we see the beginnings of the first mass conversion movement in Christian history. Filled with the power of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, Pe...

My dear friends on this Third Sunday of Easter, the readings highlight the connection between the resurrection and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and make us reflect on the presence of the risen Lord in our life. The first reading taken from the Acts of the Apostles is the latter part of Peter’s sermon following the powerful experience of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The first part of Peter’s sermon which is not covered in today’s reading is about the fulfilment of prophet Joel’s promise of God’s Spirit being poured out on all people. The second part focuses on the death and resurrection of Jesus being part of God’s plan as revealed in the prophetic Psalms. Jesus is both Lord and Messiah as it is in fact the risen and exalted Jesus who has poured out the gift of the Spirit. Thus Peter establishes that Jesus’s life and the giving of the spirit both fulfil the Old Testament prophecies. Also, we see that the resurrection of Jesus and the giving of the Holy Spirit are integrally rela...

My dear friends on this Second Sunday of Easter the readings take us deeper into the mystery of the resurrection and its implication in our life. In the first reading taken from the Acts of the Apostles, we are given a picture of the life of the early Christians. There are four fundamental elements to which this believing community was continually devoted. First, apostles’ teaching : This was the fundament on which all the other elements are built. The content of this teaching was the Gospel message about resurrection. The second is fellowship or koinōnia : The reading tells us that they “had all things in common”. They sold their possessions and goods and distributed the proceeds to those in need. A point to keep in mind is that contrary to the common perception of there not being any private property at all, the text only asserts that when there was a need then the properties were sold and distributed. Thus, there was no total common ownership of goods. Giving up the private proper...

“Happy Good Friday!” this is how one of my non-Christian friends in college once greeted me. I was taken by surprise as no one really says “Wishing you a Happy Good Friday.”   I remember having corrected my friend back then, but after all those years I now agree that he was not wrong after all. The readings for today bring out what makes this Friday a Good Friday. The first reading taken from Isaiah consists of the fourth servant song known as the Suffering Servant song. In the New Testament, the servant is identified with Christ. The servant suffered and sacrificed his life in reparation for the sins of others. Closely connected with the reading is the concept of substitutionary atonement or vicarious atonement . Atonement is an often-used Old Testament term representing making amends for sin or repairing the spiritual damage and restoring relationships broken by sin St. Paul in the letter to the Romans tells us that ‘The wages of sin is death’ (Rom 6:23) meaning that death is w...

  Imagine you invest all your money in the stock market and the markets collapse. What would you go through? Certainly immense fear, panic, hopelessness and anxiety. The first disciples of Jesus experienced something similar. They had invested everything in the hope that Jesus was the Messiah and that he would come to power soon. However, he was crucified in front of their own eyes and laid in a tomb and to add to that their own lives were now at risk. On social media, I come across many reels in which some deny the crucifixion and some doubt the resurrection. The important point here is what made a group of fearful followers of Jesus, suddenly begin preaching to the public even to the point of accepting martyrdom? The entire Christian faith rests on one historically verifiable point: the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. St. Paul says ( 1 Cor. 15:17 ), “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins.” If you can disprove ...