Fr. Thom's Homilies

          “I am the vine, you are the branches.”   If we are careful students at all of our Lord, we know that He often uses these kind of earthy, agrarian images to get His point across – whether He’s talking about sheep and shepherds (as we heard last week), sowers and seeds, vineyards, fig trees, mustard seeds, harvesting wheat, or about a vine and branches.   Sadly, these are images that might not “translate” quite as well to us as they did to Jesus’ original audience, many of whom would have understood these images readily from their daily lives.   I have managed to keep a few plants alive at my house and in my office, and the past couple of summers have had a small garden, but that’s about the extent of my agricultural “know how.”   Unless perhaps you grew up on a farm, we have lost something of our access to these images in our modern, very technology-driven world.         ...

           “A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.  A hired man, who is not a shepherd and whose sheep are not his own…leaves the sheep and runs away…This is because he works for pay and has no concern for the sheep.”           There is a saying, “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”   And I think there is a lot of truth to this statement.   We are all looking for that thing that gives ultimate meaning and purpose to our lives; that thing we feel we can’t not do because it’s just so in our bones; that thing that we love so much that even to toil at it feels more like a blessing than a burden.   You students, especially, are here at St. Ambrose hopefully not just to get an education so that you can get a good paying job, but to discover that thing about which you are so passionate that you would devote your whole self, your whole life to it...

On this third Sunday of Easter, we hear yet another account of our Lord’s appearance to His unbelieving disciples.   Last week we heard John’s account, with the episode with Thomas.   The account we hear today comes from Luke’s Gospel, and it follows right on the heels of the story of our Lord’s appearance to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus and in the breaking of the bread.   Something that we see both in John’s account of Jesus’ appearance (from last week’s gospel) and Luke’s account (this week) is that Jesus shows His disciples the wounds in His hands and His feet as proof that it is He; that He has truly risen from the dead. If you have not done so before, reflect for a moment on the fact that our Lord’s resurrected body still bore the wounds of the crucifixion.   We might expect that in this glorified body any trace of His sorrowful passion would be removed, that we might have a more “sanitized” or perfected version of the Lord, but this is not the ca...