Why do you come here each week? Why do you give up
an hour or so of your time to come to a church, listen to readings
that were written thousands of years ago and watch a strange ritual?
I’m sure it’s not just to listen to me.
After the ascension of Jesus into heaven, the word
began to spread about what had happened and that Jesus had begun to
appear to the Apostles and others. He was still alive and He was
speaking to people. Anywhere there have been rumors of Jesus, or Mary
appearing in different parts of the world, people come in their
thousands to find out more. Why, because we always want to know about
the other world and what it is like. In Medjugorje, an apparition site where Our Lady is said to have appeared to six children in 1981, over 40 million people have been there to date. It was the same back then. So
people began to come together and listen to the stories of the
Apostles about what had happened and what it meant. The Apostles
began to explain to them what Jesus had taught them, what the point
of his life and death was and that He now became present to them in
the breaking of the bread. People were eager to hear about this,
especially when they saw that the Apostles were so completely
dedicated to spreading this message that they were quite happy to
sacrifice the rest of their lives for it and even be killed for it,
which most of them were.
What exactly was it that the Apostles were teaching
the people? They were fitting all the pieces together going back to
the earlier writings of the Scriptures, what we call the Old
Testament, and telling the people what Jesus had taught them. Jesus’
teaching was what made sense of their lives, of our lives, of why we
are here and where we are going when we die; that heaven is real and
that we have to be careful how we live this life and about the
choices we make.
All that, the reading of the Scriptures, the
teachings of Jesus and the Apostles, the breaking of bread, is what
we now call the mass which we continue to do each week. It may not
always seem that interesting and often we are distracted, but we keep
coming back because we also want to try and make sense of our lives
and what is going on around us. Why is there so much suffering in our
world? It wasn’t a whole lot different in Jesus’ time either.
There was also much killing, injustice, wars, disease and famine,
just as there is now.
Jesus ascending into heaven was the time when he
told the Apostles to start spreading this message, so that we would
know and understand the purpose of our life. When we understand why
we are here we live differently.
It also says that when Jesus appeared to them just
before He ascended into heaven that they worshiped
It might surprise you to know that a many people
have spiritual experiences. Sometimes of loved ones who have died,
sometimes of the Lord himself. Most people will keep this to
themselves, but they will often tell me about it because I am a
priest. That is my privilege. A few years ago a man came to me early on a Saturday morning asking if he could speak to me for a few minutes. I thought he was looking for money. He proceeded to tell me that a friend of his who had died some months before had appeared to him in a dream. He was obviously quite shaken by the event and he wanted to go to confession. It was a wake-up call for him. It is good to know that these things happen because it is a sign of how real the spiritual world is, that
God is all around us, speaking to us, guiding and encouraging us. It
is real and sooner or later we will be shown just how real it is and
then everything will make sense.
For now we will continue to come together, to listen
to the Scriptures, the teachings of Jesus and the Apostles and to
receive Jesus in the Eucharist. We don’t understand, but we
believe.