Mary Of The Angelus Association

22-4-2010 Thursday of the Third Week of Easter Year II

MEDITATION based on the readings for today’s Mass.  These readings can be found in your bible or daily missal.

FIRST READING Acts of the Apostles chapter 8: verses 26 – 40

The wonderful story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, “an officer at the court of the kandake or queen, of Ethiopia, and was in fact her chief treasurer.”  “The Spirit said to Philip ‘Go up and meet that chariot’”.

The eunuch invited Philip to get up into his chariot and explain to him a passage from Isaiah.  Philip told him of the good news of Jesus and how Isaiah referred to him.  The eunuch was baptised by Philip, then “Philip was taken away by the Spirit of the Lord” and the eunuch went on his way rejoicing.

Has the Spirit of the Lord asked you to explain the good news to a friend?

RESPONSE TO THE PSALM: `Let all the earth  cry out to God with joy.

PSALM 116(117)

“To him I cried aloud,

With high praise ready on my tongue.

Blessed be God who did not reject my prayer

Nor withhold his love from me.”

GOSPEL:  A reading from the holy Gospel according to John chapter 6: verses 44 – 51.

John 6 is about the Eucharist.  One can read it time and again, and this is a wonderful thing to do, and we encounter something new, something even more wonderful, some realisation that hadn’t been apparent before.  St. John is a poet and a mystic.  He tells us the truth of the Eucharist in many ways.  We look at this incredible truth from different angles, as if we were walking around a beautiful sculpture.  We hear from Jesus that He is the living bread which has come down from heaven.  “Anyone who eats this bread will live forever.” And “the bread that I give is my flesh, for the life of the world”.

Is this all too good to be true? English author Gilbert Keith Chesterton, an Anglican who was converted through his intellectual understanding to Catholicism in the early 1920’s, said this of the Eucharist;  Catholics who believe that the bread and wine has been transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ at Mass should crawl on their knees to the altar to receive such a grace.