Undusted Texts

         After a thirty-three year trip, with a detour to Hell, the truly prodigal Son now returns to the Father.  (For “prodigal” does not mean “wicked’ or “wandering,” but “lavish in spending,” and Jesus was truly lavish in grace.)  He Who departed from the heavenly courts in order to become man has now ascended back to His home. This is a simple way to describe today, but too simple, and so simple as to be wrong.  “Does He abandon the cherubic throne if He receives worldly birth?” 1   No, He does not: in His fleshy birth, He is still with His Father, and even “when Your body was in the tomb and Your soul in Hades, when You were in paradise with the thief, You were also seated upon the throne with the Father and the Holy Spirit.” 2   (How does that ever-presence in heaven mesh with His declaration of abandonment by the Father on the Cross?  A harder question, one that we won’t tackle now.) Not only did He not fully depart—for ...

Christ is risen! Today is the Sunday of the Paralytic, when we read the story of the pool of Bethesda, or the "Probatic Pool" (as the Douay-Rheims has it, the pool "by the Sheepgate").  It is an example of Jesus' healing miracles; it is an example of His breaking the Sabbath; it is an example of His mercy for the over-looked.  (It would be easy to read this pericope as a rebuke of "survival of the fittest": the pool only healed the one who got there first, who either was less ill or could hire faster bearers.)  Striking, though, is that odd description of the working of the pool: "For an angel of the Lord, according to season, descended into the pool and troubled the water; then the first one entering after the troubling of the water became healthy from whatever illness he had" (Jn 5:4).  Many early Greek manuscripts omit this verse, and modern translations do as well (as some also do with the stoning of the woman caught in adultery in Jn 8),...