How can you tell that there’s a gang of really faithful Catholics here? No one’s sitting in the front. I often dreamt of building a church that had only one pew, then one day I found one. I was visiting a Byzantine rite church in Ulster County. The church is built as a circle and there were benches all around three-quarters of the walls, and the last quarter of the wall was where the altar was hidden behind an iconostasis. But everybody got to sit up front and in the back at the same time.

1959 was a banner year for an otherwise obscure country western singer named Stonewall Jackson, named after the great Confederate general. At the beginning of the year he had a number one hit called “The Battle of New Orleans,” but later on in the year he made it into the top five, which means he sold several million copies of a song called “Waterloo.” And, if you remember the song, as maybe two or three people in the congregation might, the first verse went like this.

Now old Adam was the first in history
With an apple he was tempted and deceived
Just for spite the devil made him take a bite
And that's where old Adam met his Waterloo

Waterloo, Waterloo, Where will you meet your Waterloo?
Every puppy has his day [Why he didn’t like puppies, I don’t know, but …]
Everybody has to pay
Everybody has to meet his Waterloo

So, I asked you, before the first reading, “Do you love God?” It’s a difficult question because we can’t see or feel or touch God. He’s an intellectual concept. How do we love an intellectual concept? Even if we talk about loving Jesus, the stories we know about Jesus took place 2,000 years ago. And we’re told that He’s with us in the Church and in the Eucharist but, aside from that little piece of bread, we can’t see Him or feel Him or touch Him, so it’s hard to love Him.

Today’s gospel provides one avenue through this puzzle. But, before we talk about it, we have to talk about today’s gospel. Because last Sunday, at the end of the gospel, John, the writer, told us that, “… there were many other things that were not written down in this book, but these are written so you may believe and, believing, have life in His name.” End of story! He just finished writing his gospel, then this morning we read the next chapter of the gospel. It’s got two endings. And the two endings are very different.

We must not mistake the title, Divine Mercy Sunday, to have an exclusively individual or personal meaning. It has a much broader meaning than that. In order to understand today’s gospel, a couple of things we need to keep in mind. The first is that scripture scholars caution us not to read modern psychological motivations into the scriptures. That doesn’t mean that the ancients didn’t understand human psychology much the same as we do, but they didn’t have the same analytical approach to human emotions and human intentions. And so, they would not be thinking in the same framework that we think. So, what I’m about to do, I say with a caution.

The other thing to realize is that there are not 1, but 3 elephants in this upper room and each of them is huge. The first elephant is denial. Peter, one of the disciples in that room, had denied knowing Jesus, not once, but three times. The second is abandonment. The other ten, along with Peter, had run away at the crisis hour. They ran and hid in the very room they’re hiding in now, with the doors locked. The third is, for want of a better word, withdrawal from the community. Thomas, who is another of the ten, refuses to enter into the community’s newfound faith. Although he’s still a member of the community, and sitting there with the rest of them, he has shut himself off from their view of reality. And so, as Jesus enters the room, He has to deal with all 3 elephants. And he does it in the simplest way. All He says, as He enters the room, is, “Shalom.” “Peace be with you” in English. And that one word contains so many meanings it’s just incredible.

It’s like a very serious game of “Where’s Waldo Now?” Who’s missing from the story? This is the great feast of Easter, the Lord’s Resurrection, and He’s the only one that doesn’t show up in the gospel story.

There are four gospels. Each one tells a different story of the Crucifixion, the Death, the Empty Tomb, and the Resurrection. But all of them have the three elements that we heard in today’s story. The women go at dawn. The tomb is empty. Strange messengers tell them, “He is not here. He is risen. Go tell.” Go tell. The story ends there in two of our three Easter celebrations. This is Year C, the year of Luke. In Year A, the year of Matthew, Jesus does show up in the last line of the story. In Year B, the year of Mark, Jesus isn’t there. This is not the gospel. This is the liturgy, the church’s use of the gospel to make a point.

Pilate’s renown line, “What is truth,” is found exactly in the middle of St. John’s Passion gospel. There are just about 40 lines leading up to it, and just about 40 lines leading away from it. Which meant that, when this gospel was composed, its writer meant it to be the high point of the story. As though Jesus and Pilate are standing on a stage that represents the whole world, and they are looking backwards and they are looking forward.

How can we preach on today’s gospel and on what we celebrate these four days without further dividing humanity into “them” and “us?” That’s the real problem. We don’t live in Christendom anymore. We live in a secular society where we have been taught, since we were little children, that all religions are of equal value. And, yes, they are, in the public arena. But, no, they are not from the point of view of truth. And that is why Pilate’s question is extremely important. Because it represents the rest of the world, asking the one person who represents all of Christianity, “What exactly is truth?”

Some years ago, there was a book written, called “You Are What You Eat,” by a woman named Gillian McKeith. But she borrowed the expression from someone who wrote something similar about a century and a half before that, a French philosopher and doctor named Jean Savarin. And what he wrote was just a little bit different. He said, “Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you what you are.” Slightly different. He was also a medical professional, so he was interested in good nutrition, the same way that Gillian was, but his words bear a broader interpretation.

For us Catholics who believe that Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist, bodily present - body and blood, soul and divinity – we have, each time we receive Holy Communion, a moment when Christ’s body is part of our body, and we carry that with us throughout our lives. Each time we receive Holy Communion we renew that intimate earthly and divine contact with Christ. Which means that we carry within ourselves all the time the scene that St. Luke portrays in today’s gospel - the part we didn’t read, the longer form – where, right in the middle of the Last Supper, Jesus’ closest friends are continuing to argue over which one He loves best, who’s the greatest. And Jesus, in the midst of that squabble, takes bread and says, “This is my body, broken for you.” And then He takes the chalice on the table from Passover and says, “This cup is filled with my blood, just about to be poured out for everybody for the forgiveness of sins, so you can forgive one another’s sins.”

Many contemporary scripture scholars refer to this story as ‘a gospel without a home,’ an orphan story, because they’re almost certain that it didn’t begin where we now find it in the bible, in the beginning of chapter 8 of John’s gospel. And they think that the story was in written form by the mid-80s, but finally it found a home when John composed his gospel. Because it’s a very gentle beginning to an ongoing controversy between Jesus and the Pharisees and doctors of the law. This chapter ends, after several more bitter disputes, with Jesus finally saying something and the scribes and Pharisees picking up stones to throw at Him. And it says He simply disappeared from their sight and slipped away.

I was going to put a stone on each of your chairs, but it really was too hard to do, so I just brought three of them in from outside. Stoning is a terrible form of execution which we still see today in some places in the Mideast. It begins with little, tiny stones like this. If I hit you with this, unless I hit you right between the eyes, it wouldn’t even hurt much. Then the executioners slowly graduate to larger stones. If I hit you with this one, it would hurt. But it would go away.

Before I proclaimed the gospel, I said that the opening paragraph and the last scene are the most important parts of the gospel and of Jesus’ story, but that the middle is more emotionally satisfying.

In order to understand Jesus’ teaching, we have to recognize who the story was told to, what they were saying to Jesus, and Jesus’ reaction to what they were saying. But when the story comes to an end, it’s a very unsatisfying conclusion, isn’t it? We’re standing outside the house with the older brother and the father in a face-off. And we never find out whether the older brother went into the party finally or not. That was very deliberate on Jesus’ part because He needs His listeners to end the story in their own minds.

I recently read an article written by a woman who was Leader of Song in her parish, and she used to practice at home on her piano and sing with it. And one day she was practicing the psalm that we just sang, “The Lord is kind and merciful,” and her little daughter, about 5 years old, was singing with her. And her daughter was singing, “The Lord is 'kinda' merciful.” And that’s what today’s scriptures are all about – that the Lord is 'kinda' merciful.

The first story is a fascinating story and we don’t really understand it because, after all, it’s about Moses and, for us, Moses remains one of the key holy figures of our scriptures. But the Moses in the story is, at best, an agnostic and, at worst, what his fellow Jews would call a pagan. Because, remember who he is. He is a prince of the royal Egyptian family. He was raised in the household of the pharaoh. And whether or not either his mother or her maidservants ever told him the story of his founding, he is only vaguely aware of anything Hebrew. Not only that, but he is a hunted fugitive. Even though he’s a member of the royal family, he has broken Egyptian law by killing an Egyptian. The Hebrews were slaves. And one day Moses saw one of the highly placed officials beating a Hebrew slave and, whether out of simple fellow feeling for another human being, or whether he had some connection to his roots, he killed the Egyptian and that made him an outlaw.

Once upon a time. And they lived happily ever after. Those literary gimmicks are called tropes. The first one tells us what we're about to hear, that it's a fairy tale. The second one tells us the story is over, even if it's really not. The “Peanuts” comic strip used to use a goof on one of those tropes. Every now and then there'd be a series of comic strips where Snoopy would decide to write his great novel. But it would always begin the same way with him at a typewriter the balloon would say, “It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly a shot rang out. Somebody screamed.” In the westerns of the 1940s and 50s, there were tropes that were embedded in the visuals. Bad guys almost always wore black hats, especially in the days before colored movies. And good guys almost always wore white hats. But the other tell was the bad guy almost always had a small bristly mustache and all the good guys in all the Western movies were almost always clean shaven in the forties, fifties, and sixties. That told you, when you looked at the screen, who to root for and who to hiss at.

Often, during Lent, we sing the song “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” and that is what I hope to do with my Lenten homilies every Sunday of Lent, to allow us to walk more closely with Jesus. In order to walk through the desert with Jesus this morning, first we have to understand the story better. This story appears in the gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke, and Mark’s was the first.

Mark’s story is very simple, only a couple of lines long. It says, “After Jesus was baptized, the spirit drove Him out into the desert. Like a punishment. Like being whipped. Drove Him out into the desert where he was tempted by the devil and ministered to by angels. End of story. No temptations are described. But Matthew and Luke have the same set of three temptations, in slightly different order. Where did they come from?

We have an important message from the Cardinal this morning and, since this is his pulpit, I will spend most of my homily time reading that letter. But just two observations first about this passage from St. Luke’s gospel.

We are still in Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain, where He is speaking directly to His followers, His disciples, those with whom He entrusts His mission, and allowing a crowd of skeptics, non-believers, and believers to listen in. Luke creates that scenario so that he understands, and wants his readers to understand, that he is speaking to the leaders of the church in the 80s, recognizing that the whole church, and the pagan world around, is listening with a mix of hope and curiosity.

Sometimes we are at a disadvantage when we hear the Sunday morning scriptures because they’re almost always taken out of context. St. Luke meant for last Sunday’s gospel and this Sunday’s gospel and next Sunday’s gospel to be read or heard all at the same time.

Remember what happened last Sunday. We had the beginning of a bunch of sayings of Jesus which were handed down in the earliest years of Christianity, and both Matthew and Luke took a shot at putting them in a context. Matthew’s context is very interesting. He has Jesus speak His beatitudes - …blessed are those… - at the very beginning of Jesus public life, and pronounce His woes against the Pharisees and scribes as part of His very last public speech. Luke, on the other hand, puts them all together. And, whereas Matthew had Jesus go up on a mountain, St. Luke is explicit in saying Jesus came down from the mountain, stood on a level stretch - in other word, eye to eye – with his audience.

You may have noticed that the ‘blesseds’ are just a little bit different from the way you remember them being. What happened to ‘poor in spirit?’ What happened to ‘the meek?’ Where’d they go? And where’d these ‘woes’ come from instead? In order to understand today’s gospel, we have to understand how the gospels were created.

During St. Paul’s lifetime, by the time he and Peter were executed by Nero in Rome, in the mid-60s, almost all Christians, small little communities dotted here and there around the Mediterranean, almost all Christian communities knew about Jesus and basically what He said and did. They knew it by word of mouth. First Jesus’ inner circle, then other people, spread the word from town to town and person to person. So, the gospels were written, beginning with St. Mark, after those events. They were written for a purpose. Each gospel writer wanted to retell and already-known story to add more detail and to make a specific point that he thought was essential to the spiritual life of his community.

Have you ever tried to build a house of cards? You know what happens, right? Bump the table slightly, or a breeze comes along, a bottom card falls, everything collapses. Today, in the second reading, St. Paul builds us a house of cards. He deals us four cards. Two of them are fact cards. Two of them are interpretation cards.

The first fact card is this – He was seen. That’s why I had us read the long version of the second reading this morning, so that you would hear all of the names and situations where the risen Jesus was seen by somebody or a bunch of somebodies. And St. Paul says that his experience on the road to Damascus was equivalent to all those other experiences of seeing the risen Jesus.

I noticed during the past week that the TV station is promoting the 20th anniversary season of American Idol. Twenty years. And you may recall, if you ever watched the series on a regular basis, that the week before the finals begin, each of the finalists go home. And the camera crews follow them to their hometown, where there’s almost always the same set of things. There’s a parade through town, if weather allows, in an open car, and they are followed to their parents’ homes, and to meet a couple of their friends here and there. It’s all very carefully rehearsed. And finally it ends with a concert, usually in their high school gym. Every now and then, people are interviewed who say nice things about the candidate. And we’ll never know if that candidate was really that beloved in the community or not. The whole thing is very carefully staged.

That’s kind of the same thing that we have in Luke’s story this morning. Very often, when we have our Sunday reading, for the sake of making it a little bit shorter, they cut out the connections. But, in ancient writings, the connections between one story and another are very important. So this is what it says in the gospel just before I began to read. “And so Jesus came to Nazareth, where He had been raised. And, as was His custom, He entered a synagogue on the Sabbath day. And when He was handed the scroll of scripture to read, this is what He said.” Now, that connection is extremely important because it tells us an awful lot of things. First of all, He’s coming to His own home town. He’s been out on the road preaching and working miracles ever since He picked up the fallen mantle of John the Baptist, who had been arrested. And He is beginning to change the content of John the Baptist’s preaching. So, when He gets home, it says, on the Sabbath He went to the synagogue. Which means He got home before the Sabbath. Where did He go?

Enthronement of the Word of God is all the readings we have today. Enthronement of the Word of God. Nehemiah, with a red face, had to tell us the story of what happened in exile, fifty years of exile. Where Nehemiah himself was in the king’s court as a cup-bearer in that place. And so he was somebody who was known in the place. Ezra himself, as a scribe and a priest was also, almost at the same time, over there. And, you know, the Persian kings were powerful people in those days. Artaxerxes, himself, was a very powerful king. But there was another small king rising up to become somebody we call Cyrus the Great, who overtook and defeated Babylon. So, when he came to Babylon, and as their king, he told the Israelites, who had been in bondage for fifty years, they can now return to Jerusalem. That was the handiwork of God anyway. So, Nehemiah, when he heard that the city was in ruins, he decided to go there to rebuild the city walls, to fortify the place. His intention wasn’t to stay there, but he had to stay there for so many years, rebuilding, and then trying to help the people for twelve years and more.

Ezra, himself, acted like Moses. Moses read the Law of God, the Commandments, to the people at an elevated area. You know, when they got annoyed, he threw the Commandments at them. But Ezra had to do that for a long, long time. And people listened. They didn’t complain. Rather, they cried after hearing the Word of God. He read from the Torah. The Torah is the first five books of the bible, we call it the Pentateuch. He read from there for so many hours. So, instead of the people complaining about, “Oh, the preacher was so long, what now are we going to do? Why does he expect as if we have nothing to do at home.” They didn’t. Rather, they cried after hearing it. And he told them not to cry because, “Today is not the day of crying. It is the day of worshiping, honoring, glorifying God through His words. It’s the day of the Lord, the “Yom Yahweh,” the day of the Lord,” he said. And the people were happy after that because now they have decided to listen to the Word of God. They have decided to come back to God. They have decided to come back and reconcile with their God. That was the joy created by Ezra, the priest and the scribe.

I want to show you something. This is just about a gallon. It’s actually four liters, but it’s like a gallon-point-something. If we put this here, and put another one next to it, and another one next to it, right across, and then start putting them down the center aisle, we would get to here with gallon jugs of wine. That’s how much wine Jesus made. Do a little bit of math. It says six jars holding twenty to thirty gallons. So let’s split the difference, and call the jugs twenty-five gallon jars, ok? Six twenty-five gallon jars is one hundred and fifty gallons of wine. The average serving of wine in a restaurant or bar today is five ounces. So, if you multiply… First you divide five ounces into each gallon, and you get thirteen servings to a gallon, times one hundred and fifty gallons, means that Jesus made one thousand nine hundred fifty servings of wine.

Historians tell us that there were probably about four hundred people living in Cana at that time. Most weddings in villages at that time would have involved most of the village; everybody was welcome to drop in at the wedding ceremony. And so, if you divide the number of drinks of wine Jesus made by the number of people in Cana at the time, everybody would have gotten five more drinks of wine out of what Jesus made. That’s a lot of wine.

So tell me if this is the story you just heard. Three wise men follow a star from the East to Jerusalem. Stop off a Herod’s palace to get directions. Go to see the Christ child. And because Herod is plotting to kill Jesus, they go home another way. Pretty much sums it up right?

Nope, every single detail of the story that I just told you is not in the gospel. It’s not there. The gospel does not say how many magi there were. Magi are not kings. They don’t follow the star from the East. They saw the star only at its rising and, because they were interested in astrology, believed that when a new star appeared it portended the birth of an important person. Herod does not reveal to them the reason why he wants them to go and search diligently. And so they have no understanding that Herod means to do Jesus harm. All those details I gave you have been added to the story over the years. You have to understand whose writing this gospel, and who it’s for, and the fact that the first line would have caused scandal to its readers.