nunblog: Read the Bible with Me!

Welcome to the Pauline Family's "Year of the Bible"! We've been reading the Bible clear through this year. We've reached the New Testament, so read along with me. But first, let us pray:

Father,

When the fullness of time had come, you sent your Word in the One who said, “Whoever sees me, sees the Father.” No revelation can surpass this, until Jesus comes again in glory.

Open my mind today to the gift of life and truth your Word offers me through the Church. By your Holy Spirit, grant me wisdom and strength to put this Word into practice and to become, myself, a presence of Jesus for people who are looking for you.

Jesus, eternal Word and Son of the Father, live in me with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Today's chapters are John 14-16.

We have entered the "Last Supper Discourse," the mystical heart of the New Testament.

The Gospel of John does not tell us about what Jesus did with the bread and the wine. John wrote his Gospel decades after the others. Christian communities around the Roman world had already been celebrating the Eucharist and reciting the narrative we know every week on the Lord's Day for decades, even in persecution. Instead, in John's Gospel Jesus explains, just hours before his arrest, what the Eucharist is going to accomplish in them once he has been "glorified."

That is because Jesus is "the Way, the Truth, and the Life," and he is "going to prepare a place for them." He is the vine, and the disciples (we!) are his living branches, remaining in the world to bear fruit. That fruit is the unmistakable sign that they, that we, belong to God: it is charity, the divine love that only God can bring about in the world. "Love one another as I love you." That is why it is so important that they, that we, remain in him. He will send the Holy Spirit from the Father to live in them (in us!).

No matter what happens, no matter what it looks like, he has already conquered the world.

Start reading here.

For additional background

This year for "Buy a Nun a Book Day," one of the first books I received was Dr John Bergsma's Jesus and the Old Testament Roots of the Priesthood. As I read it, I saw how many of the Old Testament "types" and institutions we read about through the year were fulfilled (super-abundantly) in Jesus and in the Church. This is especially clear in the Gospel of John, which in a way is the most "priestly" of the four Gospels.

If you have questions about the priesthood in the Church, or about the difference between our baptismal participation in the priesthood of Christ and that exercised by our ministerial priests, or even simple questions like why Catholics call priests "Father" (when Jesus said, "Call no one on earth 'father'"), or if you would like to see in a fuller way how very many Old Testament types were pointing to Jesus and to the Church, this very readable book is for you.

I am happy to recommend this volume of The Four Gospels in an edition directed to young readers and their parents. The text of all four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) in the New Revised Standard Translation is accompanied by FAQs that a middle-school reader might ask (or, to be honest, anybody reading the Gospels for the first time). The footnotes were prepared by a team of Scripture scholars for parents and guardians, making the book ideal for family Bible reading.