PaddlingPadre

Tonight Jesus stands on the brink of his Passion, Esta noche, Jesús se encuentra en el umbral de su Pasión, and knowing this, sabiéndolo having loved his own in the world to the end, habiendo amado a los suyos que estaban en el mundo hasta el extremo, he leaves them with a great testament of his love. les deja un gran testamento de su amor. Love, of course, El amor, por supuesto, is never from St. John’s mind in any of his writings. nunca está ausente del pensamiento de San Juan en ninguno de sus escritos.  God is love, as he says elsewhere in his first epistle, Dios es amor, como dice en otro lugar en su primera epístola, and in this the love of God was made manifest among us, y en esto se manifestó el amor de Dios entre nosotros: that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. en que Dios envió a su Hijo único al mundo para que vivamos por medio de Él.

We have just heard St. Matthew’s account of our Lord’s passion, from his entry into Jerusalem to his death and burial. It is an account that, however familiar it might be to us, yet moves us again and again to compassion for this innocent man, cruelly tortured and put to death by the very ones he came to save.

 One may well sympathize with the suffering that Mary and Martha, to say nothing of Lazarus, are left to endure during this episode. You can imagine how things must have gone, how Lazarus must have fallen ill, how, in spite of the care of his sisters, his condition must have dangerously worsened, and of how with growing alarm their minds must have turned to their friend Jesus, who had worked so many healings and so many wonders. With what great anxiety, then, must they have sent word to Jesus, an anxiety that was, I am sure, tempered also with hope because of who they knew Jesus to be, but a hope that, with each passing hour, must have waned until that final disappointment and agony that was the death of their brother.

Our Lord’s conversation with the Samaritan woman starts off casually enough, even if there is a bit of underlying tension arising from the strangeness of the encounter: a man and a woman, one a Jew the other a Samaritan, speaking at a well at midday. Still, Jesus initiates the conversation rather straightforwardly: Give me a drink. By this question Jesus is getting his foot in the door, and once he’s done that the conversation quickly gets more profound and more theological. If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” Jesus says to the woman. By these words, and by the ensuing conversation, Jesus is proclaiming to this woman the good news, proposing to her to the means of her salvation, and in such striking language! Whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

 La conversación de nuestro Señor con la mujer samaritana comienza de manera bastante informal, aunque hay una cierta tensión debido a lo extraño del encuentro: un hombre y una mujer, uno judío y la otra samaritana, hablando junto a un pozo al mediodía. Aun así, Jesús inicia la conversación de forma bastante directa: Dame de beber. Con esta pregunta, Jesús abre la puerta y, una vez hecho esto, la conversación se vuelve rápidamente más profunda y más teológica. «Si conocieras el don de Dios y quién es el que te pide de beber, tú le pedirías a él, y él te daría agua viva», le dice Jesús a la mujer. Con estas palabras, y con la conversación que sigue, Jesús le proclama a esta mujer la buena nueva, proponiéndole el medio de su salvación, ¡y en un lenguaje tan impactante! El que beba del agua que yo le daré, nunca más tendrá sed; el agua que yo le daré se convertirá dentro de él en un manantial capaz de dar la vida eterna.

What is the proper way to approach the law? This is the question that lurks in the background of today’s gospel, as Jesus challenges his hearers to not only obey the commandments, but to go to the heart of the commandments – to not only not kill, but to not even give in to anger, to not only not commit adultery, but to not even look at a woman with lust, to not only not take a false oath, but to be so genuine that one’s simple “yes” and one’s simple “no” are sufficient.

¿Cuál es la forma adecuada de abordar la ley? Esta es la pregunta que subyace en el evangelio de hoy, cuando Jesús desafía a sus oyentes a no solo obedecer los mandamientos, sino a ir al corazón de los mandamientos: no solo no matar, sino ni siquiera ceder a la ira; no solo no cometer adulterio, sino ni siquiera mirar a una mujer con lujuria, no solo no jurar en falso, sino ser tan sincero que un simple «sí» y un simple «no» sean suficientes.

This call that Jesus makes to us to be the salt of the earth, a city on a hill, a lamp on a lampstand – this gets to the heart of our evangelizing mission as Christians. It is, you could say, integral to who we are that we radiate the light of Christ to the world, a fact which we celebrated liturgically just this last week at Candlemas, the Feast of the Presentation.

Esta llamada que Jesús nos hace a ser la sal de la tierra, una ciudad en un monte, una vela en un candelero, llega al corazón de nuestra misión evangelizadora como cristianos. Se podría decir que es parte integral de lo que somos irradiar la luz de Cristo al mundo, un hecho que celebramos litúrgicamente la semana pasada en la Candelaria, la fiesta de la Presentación.

This weekend we begin reading from the Sermon on the Mount, that great discourse of Jesus that we find in Matthew’s gospel, which we will be hearing from for these next three weeks until the start of Lent. And it’s important, I think, that we not lose sight of the unity of this discourse, which can easily happen when we are hearing short excerpts of a sermon that takes up a full three chapters, because if we lose sight of this sermon’s unity then we can lose sight also of its prophetic character. Skipping ahead from the beginning of the Sermon, which we hear today, and jumping all the way to its conclusion at the end of chapter of chapter seven, we read there that when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he was teaching them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes. In saying this, Matthew is doubtlessly directing our attention to the book of Deuteronomy, where Moses spoke the words of God to the Israelites on the far side of the Jordan, saying: The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers – it is to him that you shall listen.