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Working with the Word
Fifth Sunday of Easter A
May 18, 2014


Focusing the Gospel

Key words and phrases: Do not ... be troubled, I am going, I am the way, know my Father, how can we know the way?, do the works

To the point: Jesus’ words in this gospel from the Last Supper discourse are reassuring ones: “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” Yet Thomas and Philip, who hear Jesus also tell them that he is leaving, are not reassured and question him anxiously. The leap from the Jesus at the Last Supper to the Jesus after the resurrection is one giant step, one the disciples have not yet taken. But we have taken this leap. We are an Easter people. We have received the Holy Spirit who empowers us to know Jesus, through him to know the Father, and to do the works of Jesus. Believing this mitigates all troubles, all anxiety.


Connecting the Gospel

to the second reading: Peter can confidently invite people to “Come to [Christ]” and name them “a people of [Christ’s] own” because he is writing from an Easter faith; he has encountered the risen Lord. He has made the leap that the troubled and anxious disciples in the gospel have not yet made.

to our experience: Being troubled and anxious is a fact of our stress-filled lives. “Do not be troubled” the surgeon says to someone before major surgery; “Do not be troubled” a parent says to a child wakened by a nightmare; “Do not be troubled” . . . The only way we can truly not be troubled



Copyright © 2014 by The Order of St. Benedict, Inc., Collegeville, Minnesota.
All rights reserved.
Used by permission from Liturgical Press, St. John’s Abbey, P.O. Box 7500 Collegeville, Minnesota 56321-7500

Living Liturgy: Spirituality, Celebration, and Catechesis
for Sundays and Solemnities
Year A - 2014, pp. 131.
Joyce Ann Zimmerman, CPPS;
Kathleen Harmon, SND de N;
and Christopher W. Conlon, SM

Living Liturgy 2011

Liturgical Press

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For more information about Living Liturgy 2014 click picture above.

Art by Martin Erspamer, O.S.B.
from Religious Clip Art for the Liturgical Year (A, B, and C).
Used by permission of Liturgy Training Publications. This art may be reproduced only by parishes who purchase the collection in book or CD-ROM form. For more information go to: http://www.ltp.org/

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