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Reflections of Family and Faith
"The family that prays together stays together." - Venerable Patrick Peyton
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Today’s dramatic healing in the first reading takes place just outside the Temple at what was called the Beautiful Gate. We’re told it was named this because it was grand in size and ornate in design… something to behold, something fitting. But what took place just outside of it that we’ve just heard… brought a different kind of beauty…one that was wrought from the power of Jesus’ Name…one that was shared by Peter and John with that man begging for alms. The meaning of the Beautiful Gate changed…when a man born with a physical disability encountered Peter and John, who had faith in Jesus. If you think about it, the man whose life was changed forever, up until that day, had the same routine, which included being carried to the Temple gate to beg for alms to survive each day. And it must have worked; he must have received enough money or food from others to make it through the day, and then been carried home. That is, until he met two men who had something else to offer.
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As we move towards Holy Week in this Lenten season, the tone of our readings is gradually changing. There is increasing opposition or resistance to Christ. There is opposition to who Christ was, and opposition to his mission. Today in our gospel we hear that “the Jews picked up rocks to stone Jesus” and his response to their action was that “I have shown you many good works from my Father. For which of these are you trying to stone me?” He had healed the sick, made the blind see, raised the dead, made the lame walk, and here he was being harassed and almost being killed.
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In Lent we often speak about prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. But Lent is also a search for truth: not just ideas about God, but a deeper knowledge of God himself, and a clearer decision about whether we will live as his people. In today’s Scriptures, the Lord reveals two great truths. First, God binds himself to his people in a covenant—a promise he began with Abraham that he intended not for Abraham alone, but for every generation, including our own. God commits himself to us: “I will be your God, and you will be my people.”
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The reading from the Book of Wisdom that we heard today will return to us on Good Friday. It speaks of a righteous person who becomes the target of resentment and hostility—not because he has done wrong, but because his goodness exposes the darkness around him. His very life is a challenge to those who reject God. They plot against him, tear at his reputation, and test him to see if God will defend him. Yet, as we hear elsewhere in Scripture, he does not retaliate. He turns the other cheek.
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Saint Joseph is a great bridge figure between the Old and New Testaments, in the image of the Hebrew patriarchs and the adoptive father of the promised Messiah. When we think in the broadest sense about what the Jewish covenant with the Lord consists of, the two words that come to mind are “the Law and the Prophets.” The Law, or the Torah, guided the Jewish people to live their lives well; it was more than a set of just dry rules, for a more accurate translation of Torah would be “the teachings,” the teachings of Who God is and how we can follow His plan for our lives. And we might best think of the Prophets not so much as predictors of the future, but as the pinnacle figures of Jewish prayer, similar to the great prayer mystics in our Catholic tradition.
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Holy lives of inspiration | Learn more about our faith
In the era before the Industrial Revolution, it was quite common for a son to learn a trade or a profession directly from his father. In fact, some of the medieval guilds, automatically accepted the son of a member into their ranks. Of course, this kind of dynamic played out explicitly in the life of Jesus. Joseph was a carpenter, and Jesus was known as both “the son of the carpenter” and as a carpenter himself. It’s beautiful to imagine a teenage or young adult Jesus and Joseph going out on jobs together or working with each other on projects at their home in Nazareth.
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