The first reading is Luke’s narrative of the Christian Pentecost event in his Acts of Apostles. In last Sunday’s first reading for the Solemnity of the Ascension of Jesus, the apostles were told by Jesus that they “will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and will b...
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When searching for the meaning of the ascension, we are faced with a problem. What happen-ed? When did it happen? How did it happen? At the original ending of the Gospel of Mark, our oldest gospel, there is no ascension of Jesus, only a promise of a post-resurrection appearance. The gospel which th...
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The first reading is a watershed moment in Luke’s Acts of Apostles – the conversion of Gentiles to the Christian faith. The background: Cornelius was a Roman military officer at Caesarea on the Mediterranean seacoast.  He was a devout man, generous to the poor, and prayed constantl...
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The context of the first reading is the conversion of Saul of Tarsus. Eventually, he would become St. Paul, but that would take the next thirty years. He had been a violent persecutor of the Christian movement in Jerusalem. He had witnessed and was involved in the lynching of Stephen, one of the fi...
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The first reading continues the Lectionary’s post-Easter series of selections from Acts of Apostles. The high priestly families, responsible for the arrest and execution of Jesus are on the move against The Way – a name used of and by early Christians for their own mission still within...
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The post-Easter series of readings from Acts of Apostles continues. On Easter Sunday the Lectionary presented us with a sermon (speech, homily) which Luke attributed to Simon Peter. The context was the conversion of the first Gentiles (non-Jews) to the Christian faith. Today the Lectionary offers u...
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The first reading for this Sunday is another excerpt from Acts of Apostles. Luke composed a glowing report of the earliest Christian Community in Jerusalem. “All believers were of one heart and mind, no one claimed anything as his or her own, but had everything in common.” A kind of Chr...
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Acts 10:34a 37-43; Ps 118:1-2, 16-17, 22-23; 1 Corinthians 5:6b-8; JOHN 20:1-9  Easter is the central liturgical feast of the Year of Grace. Every Sunday is a celebration of Easter. But the name “Easter” seems meaningless to designate this major solemnity of the year. What does thi...
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This Sunday’s first reading is the third of four poems (Psalms, songs) inserted by editors in the oracles of an unknown prophet we call Second Isaiah. The four poems are known as “The Servant Songs.” This prophet’s oracles form the second part of the Book of Isaiah, chapters...
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The context of this Sunday’s first reading is the ministry of the Prophet Jeremiah in Jerusalem sometime between the city’s first fall to the Babylonians in 597 B.C., and the final destruction of the city by the Babylonian army in 587 B.C. This excerpt from the oracles of Jeremiah is kn...
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