Catholic san Francisco Northern California’s Weekly Catholic Newspaper
(PHOTOS BY RICK DELVECCHIO/CATHOLIC SAN FRANCISCO)
Demonstrators pro and con Proposition 22, which excludes state same-sex marriage, gathered outside the state Supreme Court building in San Francisco March 4. Above, Luke Otterstad of Placerville (left) exchanges views with men who oppose Proposition 22, including Kerry Coles (center) and Luis Ituril. Below, Dick Otterstad of Garden City told police both his pickup’s back tires were slashed.
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Archbishop: Do you believe Jesus is the Resurrection? Following is the advance text of the homily which Archbishop George H. Niederauer plans to deliver this Sunday, March 9, the fifth Sunday of Lent, at the 11 a.m. Mass at St. Mary’s Cathedral, San Francisco. In the Gospel reading today the Church draws us into the last two weeks of the life of Jesus. The Lord is in Galilee. He tells his disciples that Lazarus, their close friend, has been very ill, and that now he has died. Jesus then says that he will go to Bethany, the town where Lazarus lived with his two sisters, Martha and Mary. This was a deadly dangerous trip for Jesus to make. By now he had become a wanted man, almost an outlaw, because of his opposition to the Pharisees. Bethany was only a few miles from Jerusalem, the capital of their power and they would seek to arrest him and put him to death. The raising of Lazarus from the dead is the last sign Jesus works in St. John’s Gospel. Indeed, John’s narrative of the Last Supper starts one chapter later, followed immediately by the story of the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus. The raising of Lazarus from the dead is the final, precipitating cause of the events of Holy Week: the Pharisees say to each other, “We must kill him!” It’s hard to understand that kind of hardened evil: This man raised someone from the dead, therefore he must die. But we are not unfamiliar with such evil in our lifetime. Under the Nazis, the penalty for hiding and protecting Jews was death; missionaries who feed children and run medical clinics in Central America are targets for right-
“Raising of Lazarus,” a painting by Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337).
wing gunmen: they are not political or revolutionaries, but for them to help the poor is enough to deserve death. No one is indifferent to this story of the raising of Lazarus, because very few human beings are indifferent to death. In one sense, Jesus’s raising of Lazarus is a “holding action.” After all, eventually Lazarus died again, of some cause, and that second time his body
stayed in the tomb. In this sense, all of Jesus’s miracles of healing were temporary in their effect: the reversal of blindness, deafness, paralysis or death itself. But Jesus Christ was not a “walking clinic”; he was the Savior, the Messiah of God. Jesus worked his signs mainly to strengthen faith and to give glory to his heavenly Father, our heavenly Father. Like the other miraculous signs, the raising of Lazarus is a promise: Jesus asks you to believe, to trust in his promise to you that even though you die, he will raise you up to life, the eternal life of love in the Father who raised him up. What looked final with Lazarus was not, and what looks final for us, is not. That is the meaning. Human death can be a “dead-end” (pun intended) if the world around us (and what it offers) is what you and I make our ultimate value: when life ends for us, everything ends for us, because we made it our everything. We can make a cave out of this life, and it ends at the tomb. If we choose Jesus Christ and his kingdom as our ultimate value, then this life is a veil through which we pass, and the continuity between this life, which ends in death, and eternal life is the Spirit of Christ. St. Paul says that if you live merely in the flesh, you cannot please God, but if the Spirit dwells in you, you have Christ in you. Then, even if the body is dead because of sin, the spirit lives because of Christ: “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, then he who raised Christ from the dead will bring your mortal bodies to life also RESURRECTION, page 16
INSIDE THIS WEEK’S EDITION Wattson Lecture . . . . . . . . . 6 Baptism scrutiny . . . . . . . . 7
Iraqi prelate kidnapped; pope calls for peace ~ Page 5 ~
March 7, 2008
Travel ideas . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Scripture . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
High schools staging old fashioned musicals
Book records daily life of priests at Dachau
~ Pages 12-13 ~
~ Page 20 ~
SEVENTY-FIVE CENTS
Datebook . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Classified ads . . . . . . . 22-23
www.catholic-sf.org VOLUME 10
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