Tuesday of the Fourth
Week of Easter
(Acts 11:19-26; John 10:22-30)
In his Mass Leonard
Bernstein composes a marvelous tribute to Scripture. The song “The Word of the Lord” declares that
autocratic powers may incarcerate God’s preachers, but they cannot imprison the message
they preach. In today’s reading from Acts,
Luke also shows how the word spreads in the primitive church with similar
dynamism.
Followers of Jesus, after being persecuted in Jerusalem, evangelize
in other places. They preach exclusively
to Jews, but their converts do not discriminate. When they come to Antioch, they preach to
everyone. The Greek followers of Jesus cannot
be called Jews because they do not
follow the Jewish Law. The entire
community – Jews as well as Greeks – must re-identify. They call themselves Christians. It is the
beginning of a new era for the Church which is still in existence.
If the word of God seems stymied today because of secularism
in many Western countries, it has hardly lost its dynamism in Africa and
Asia. It is convincing large numbers of
people in these places that Jesus is the way to happiness. In today’s gospel it tells of Jesus delivering the message: “I give (my sheep) eternal life, and they shall never perish.”
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