Daily Mass - Easter Friday

We are still in the octave of Easter, the eight-day celebration of the feast of the Lord's Resurrection. There is therefore no Friday fast, and we should be continuing the feasting of last Sunday. Mass was offered this morning for the peaceful repose of the soul of John Hood (+), may be be blessed in the Resurrection of the Lord. It's another beautiful day out, weather-wise, and I'm starting to see lots of people finding excuses to escape the doors of their homes.

Let us continue to pray hard for those suffering from this infernal viral infection, those who have died from it, and for the families and friends of these people. It is a terrible thing to watch those you love sicken and die before your eyes and not be able to do anything to help. It is worse when you cannot even get close, because of the risk to yourself and others. 

The daily Mass readings continue with the theme of hope. In the first reading yesterday and on Wednesday, Saint Peter and Saint John, two of the holy Apostles, have met a badly disabled man and restored him to full health using the name of Christ. Today, they are interrupted after Peter's second homily by the Sadducean Temple priests, arrested and imprisoned overnight. When they are then called to give account to a council of priests and elders, Peter again boldly sets forth about the Resurrection and then speaks of the power of the holy Name of Christ: 

"'If it is over kindness done to a cripple, and the means by which he has been restored, that we are called in question, here is news for you and for the whole people of Israel. You crucified Jesus Christ, the Nazarene, and God raised him from the dead; it is through his name that this man stands before you restored. He is that stone, rejected by you, the builders, that has become the chief stone at the corner. Salvation is not to be found elsewhere; this alone of all the names under heaven has been appointed to men as the one by which we must needs be saved.'" - Acts of the Apostles 4: 9-12

Just so. Even as they are being arrested, two thousand more are added to the band of the earliest converts to Christianity. Miracles are flashy things, designed to create a powerful impact. And they don't just happen without any references; they have an intent and are always attached to a name. Just as yesterday's Saint, Bernadette of Lourdes found that the miracles of the spring she discovered was attached to the name of the Immaculate Conception, so the council of Temple priests and elders discover in this story that the healing of the cripple was attached to the name of the man they had just had executed, and whom they had tried to seal in his cave-tomb. 

And there are agents - mediators - that stand between the power of the Name and the effects it produces. Just as the people of Lourdes could not feel the presence or power of the Lady of Massabielle without the help of Saint Bernadette, so the Jewish priests who had rejected Christ could not feel his presence or power except through the miracles the Apostles were beginning to work in Jerusalem, and soon enough beyond the holy City. The gospel story today is that of the Apostles trying to fish once more on the Sea of Tiberias/Galilee (you will remember that the three chiefs of the Apostles, Peter, John and James, were fishermen before they were called) and catching nothing on their own. Christ repeats an earlier miracle of His from the shore and they immediately draw in a number of fish. Saint John carefully records that number:

"'Bring some of the fish you have just caught,' Jesus said to them: and Simon Peter, going on board, hauled in the net to land. It was loaded with great fish, a hundred and fifty-three of them; and with all that number the net had not broken." - Gospel of S. John, 21: 10-11

As an exercise, I thought I'd look up that number. Sure enough, it has its own Wikipedia page, according to which 153 has several mathematical properties. In those days as in the succeeding centuries of the classical period and the medieval period, people like Saint John (Apostle on the boat and writer of the gospel) gave particular numbers particular significance. Saint Augustine himself identified it as the sum of the first seventeen integers and so one a triangular number, as shown on that Wikipedia page. Saint Augustine added the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit to the ten commandments to describe a spirituality for the number seventeen. I'll stop at that, but do feel free to study the rest of the Wikipedia page. Possibly, John simply counted and reported the number accurately, but it doesn't prevent Augustine and the rest of us from speculating about any significance John may. 

Good heavens, this is a long post. I shall end with a video of the tilapia, the uncomfortably bony fish that is native to the sea of Tiberias and must have been well represented in the 153 fish on the boat that day.