Homily for the Wednesday in the Fourth Week of Eastertide, delivered Our Lady Star of the Sea Church, Gladstone, Qld.

"The word of God continued to spread and to gain followers, [and] in the church at Antioch [were] prophets and teachers... One day while they were offering worship to the Lord and keeping a fast, the Holy Spirit said, ‘I want Barnabas and Saul set apart for the work to which I have called them.’ So it was that after fasting and prayer they laid their hands on them and sent them off — these two, sent on their mission by the Holy Spirit, went down to Seleucia and from there sailed to Cyprus... John acted as their assistant." (cf. Acts 12-13).

"Jesus declared publicly: Whoever believes in me
believes not in me but in the one who sent me, and whoever sees me, sees the one who sent me; if anyone hears my words and does not keep them faithfully [but] rejects me and refuses my words... the word itself that I have spoken will be his judge on the last day. For what I have spoken does not come from myself; no, what I was to say, what I had to speak,
was commanded by the Father who sent me, and I know that his commands mean eternal life..." (cf. Jn 12:44-50).

There are in this world "sacred signs which bear a resemblance to the sacraments. They signify effects, particularly of a spiritual nature"; such signs "do not confer the grace of the Holy Spirit in the way that the sacraments do, but by the Church's prayer, they prepare us to receive grace and dispose us to cooperate with it", making us "disposed to receive the chief effect of the sacraments, and [rendering] various occasions in life... holy." In all this, "[p]astoral discernment is needed to sustain and support popular piety and, if necessary, to purify and correct the religious sense which underlies these devotions so that the faithful may advance in knowledge of the mystery of Christ. (cf. CCC 1667, 1670, 1676).

Artwork: Christ and the woman taken in adultery (by Rembrandt, c. 1639–41).