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Word To Life
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Sunday Scripture Readings: May 28, 2006
By Jeff Hensley
Catholic News Service
May 25 or 28 Ascension or Seventh Sunday After Easter
Cycle B Readings:
1) Acts 1:1-11
Psalm 47:2-3, 6-9
2) Ephesians 4:1-13 or Eph. 1:17-23
3) Gospel: Mark 16:15-20
Since most folks' experience of the supernatural comes primarily in the context of daily life and seldom is talked about, these verses in Mark are often troublesome to people. The Gospel is confirmed in signs and wonders. How can that be in our sophisticated and secularized modern age?
While I understand people being taken aback by stories associated with cults that handle snakes or do other outlandish things to "prove" the validity of the Gospel commands, such cultic interpretations of the text here are not bound up with the original intent. Handling poisonous snakes in religious ceremonies is more analogous to taking Satan up on his dare and jumping from the rooftop because God has promised to protect his chosen ones.
Though it doesn't have to happen this way when the good news of God's redemptive love is proclaimed, it sometimes does.
In 1982, my wife and I visited Catholic charismatic communities in El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico, for a story I was writing for New Covenant magazine. We were told how, a few years before, an El Paso prayer group, led by Jesuit Father Rick Thomas, had decided to take quite literally the Gospel command to give a dinner for those who were not their friends, family and acquaintances, but the poor.
Together, several of them set out on Christmas Day for the dump at Juarez where two warring communities of the poorest of the poor scavenged for discarded metal scraps and bottles to resell to recyclers. Stories of their shared meal tell of the beginnings of a community proclaiming the Gospel to the poor and dispossessed of these two borderland communities. One participant later recounted watching as a ham failed to grow smaller as slice after slice was pared off for the gathering poor of the dump community.
The two warring factions came together to share in the feast and sing simple Christmas carols. Thereafter they began to learn to work together, eventually taking over the recycling business themselves, cutting out the middle man and increasing the return on their labor in a miracle of both peacemaking and economics.
And why did all of this happen? Not as the result of tempting God, but of obeying him with the signs and wonders following the proclamation.
QUESTIONS:
When have you found obedience to God's commands to bear fruit beyond your expectations?
SCRIPTURE TO BE ILLUSTRATED:
"Signs like these will follow those who have professed their faith" (Mark 16:17a).
END
Copyright © 2006 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The CNS Word To Life column may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed, including but not limited to such means as framing or any other digital copying or distribution method, in whole or in part without the prior written authority of Catholic News Service.
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