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The heights of despair and the depths of depression will be leveled out. 

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Advent begins in the dark.  In this dark landscape, we are invited to describe life “on earth as it is," to name the seeming  absence of God. We sit in darkness, longing for light.  We sit in exile, longing for home.  We sit with aching, empty arms, waiting to cradle a life that’s still unformed, still hidden, still in process.  


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“Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice,” Jesus said. And Pilate asked Jesus, in a line that is omitted from today’s reading: “What is truth?” The Greek word for truth literally means, “Remember not to forget.”

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Last week Jesus was in the Temple, sitting opposite the Treasury. Now Jesus is  opposite the Temple mount, on the Mount of Olives. The prophet Zechariah declared that the last days will begin at the Mount of Olives. Jesus takes his place on the mountain  long foretold to be where that new day will begin.

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The widow says nothing, and yet her actions speak volumes. The Greek word for her "giving her whole life" prefigures the sacrifice Jesus is about to make. 
It is both a judgment on the temple cult  -  that demanded giving that so impoverished the widow  -  and as prelude to Christ giving his whole life for the life of the world.

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Rabbi Rami Shapiro points out that the four-letter Hebrew Name of God -  Y-H-V-H, yod-hey-vav-hey - when written vertically, takes on the shape of a human being.  Each one of us is the Name of God incarnate.

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Pope Francis, who has been reading these same passages in Mark’s Gospel, had a close encounter with this Gospel during his papal audience this past Wednesday.

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James Carroll, in his new memoir, “The Truth at the Heart of the Lie,” recalls this experience.  On his first visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, he was taken aback by the rudely jostling pilgrims fighting for the best places. When he returned a few days later, he saw it with new eyes:

“I saw for the first time what it actually meant that Jesus Christ was a human being, in the thick of human life, with all its chaos, treason and ruined dreams. The Holy Sepulcher, as I saw it now, was a sacrament of Christ’s part in our human condition.”

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The prohibitions are like the bottom of a glass. If the glass does not have a bottom, everything just spills out; it can’t hold anything.

The prohibitions create a boundary or container -the bottom in the glass -but there is nothing in it yet. To fill up the glass, then, is not merely not doing something;  it actually demands doing something positive.

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The children are at the center of the three passion predictions.  Jesus is teaching us what it means to follow the Messiah and therefore, what it means to be church.

I am presiding at the 5 pm Sunday mass at St. Andrew Rochester. 

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