We offer our prayers and sympathy to Barry, Eileen and Mick as their father Jerry Keohane entered eternal life last Thursday having received the Sacrament of Viaticum (Holy Communion for the road– via (Latin) that morning from our Communion Minister to the Sick, Jean. Jerry was one of our parishioners for 26 years and was very fond of Sunbury which he found very friendly and which reminded him of the rolling hills of County Cork, Ireland. Vigil Prayers will be recited on Thursday evening at 7.00pm and his Funeral Mass will be at OLMC Church at 2pm on Friday being a pupil free day.

Reflection on the Gospel-33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time C, 17 November 2013
Sister Veronica Lawson rsm

(Luke 21:5-19)

Sixty years ago there was no Sydney Opera House. A hundred years ago there was no Harbour Bridge. It is hard to imagine a time when they did not exist or a time when they will cease to be, such is the status these monuments have acquired over a very short span of history. They are a source of wonder for tourists and locals alike. They have their counterparts elsewhere in our contemporary world. A few years ago, New York’s World Trade Centre was another such icon, seemingly indestructible and holding the pride of an economically and politically dominant nation, even if less aesthetically engaging than Sydney’s monuments.
In first century Palestine, the newly refurbished Jerusalem Temple was both aesthetically stunning and symbolically charged. It functioned primarily as the centre of religious worship. It was also an important locus of financial and political power. Its significance can hardly be exaggerated and its destruction at the hands of the Romans in 70CE was a devastating blow for the Jewish people. Luke is writing some twenty years after this event. He wants to tell his communities that the destruction of the Temple did not signal the end of the world, though that is how it might have seemed at the time.
There is life to be lived and there are struggles to be endured before God’s final judgment. Luke wants to offer hope and encouragement in the face of conflict and persecution and family division. He wants to offer his readers a caution not to listen to everyone who claims to know the time [kairos] of God’s visitation.
Like Jesus, disciples can expect to be ‘handed over’ and brought before political authorities. They are to find in this an opportunity to give witness or ‘to testify’. In his second volume, Luke has Jesus commissioning the disciples to be his witnesses ‘in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth’ (Acts 1:8). They don’t have to worry about what to say in their own defence: ‘I will give you words and wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.’ Endurance or patience is the way to life. The Greek term used here evokes the parable of the sower: ‘but as for that [the seed] in the good soil, these are the ones who, when they hear the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bear fruit with patient endurance’ (Luke 8:15].
As we approach the end of the liturgical year, we are called to witness to a gospel way of life, to hold the word of God fast in honest and good hearts, and to trust that we are not alone in the everyday struggles of life, even when the world seems to be collapsing around us.

 

A Sing-a-Long will be held at Goonawarra Aged Care on Friday 20th December from 2.30pm to 3.15pm. All welcome. Come and catchup with old parishioners and friends and relatives. Help to spread a little Christmas cheer to those who don’t get out much……….no, sorry, that’s actually me!

“BETRAYAL OF TRUST”

The Victorian Parliamentary Inquiry into the Handling of Child Abuse by Religious and other Non-Government Organisations released its report last Wednesday. 
For access to the report, the responses by the Church, recent updates, or to sign up for email alerts, visit the Church’s website: http://www.facingthetruth.org.au. As you know, we gathered as a parish last Wednesday for our Prayer Service of Sorrow for the victims of abuse. Those present appreciated all the planning by our Liturgy Group.

Reflection on the Gospel-2232nd Sunday in Ordinary Time C, 10 November 2013
Sister Veronica Lawson rsm

(Luke 20:27-38)

Is there life after death? If so, what does that mean? Will we be united in death with those whom we have loved in this life? Do the bonds of love experienced in this life continue beyond the grave? Are our loved ones far from us in death? How do they live on, if indeed they do? These are questions that have preoccupied human beings for millennia. Our Christian faith tradition, grounded in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, offers no clear answer to any of these questions. It simply offers a call to faith in life after death and in God as ‘not of the dead, but of the living.’

As the liturgical year draws to a close, the readings invite us to ponder this mystery of the bonds of love that persist, in unimagined and unimaginable ways, even after death. Some Sadducees ‘who say there is no resurrection’ put a loaded question or case study to Jesus in an attempt to expose as nonsensical the Pharisaic belief in resurrection. In the process, they try to discredit Jesus as a teacher of the Law.

As usual, Jesus refuses to be entrapped. The diversity of Jewish opinion and belief implied in this passage may come as a surprise to those who think of Judaism at the time of Jesus as a religion with a unified theological system. There was certainly agreement among the parties or sects on four key aspects of their faith, namely, monotheism (one God); election (Israel as God’s chosen people); the call to be faithful to the covenant; and the Jerusalem Temple as the meeting place between God and God’s people. At the same time, there was room for considerable diversity. Life after death and the resurrection of the dead were among the many contested beliefs.

As I sit with a 93 year-old Mercy elder who still has a twinkle in her eye despite her failing health, I ponder the mysteries of life and death. I know in my heart that the life she has generated and the love she has known and brought to others over the best part of a century will somehow continue through the grace of the God of the living. For the moment, that is sufficient response to the reading for this Sunday. Jesus of Nazareth refuses entrapment and invites belief in a God for whom all the dead are alive. We live by faith in that God, and in hope of the resurrection.