Thursday, May 23, 2019

Pope to Caritas: The Gospel is our programme of life


The Gospel

Humility, communion, and renunciation are three “essential elements” for the Church to go forward, Pope Francis says in his homily during Mass with representatives of Caritas Internationalis.

In his homily during Mass for the Opening of the XXI General Assembly of Caritas Internationalis, Pope Francis reflected on the “first great meeting in the history of the Church”, described in the day’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles. He warned against the temptation of a “cult of efficiency”, of wanting the Church to have everything in order. “The Lord does not work that way,” but instead sends the Holy Spirit. The Gospel, he insisted “is our program of life. It teaches us that questions should not be confronted with a ready-made recipe, and that the faith is not a road map, but a ‘Way’ to travel together… with a spirit of trust.”

Three essential elements

Pope Francis described “three essential elements for the Church ‘on its way’: thehumility of listeningthe charism of togethernessthe courage of renunciation.”
He began with the “courage renunciation,” letting go of our own “human convictions and traditions” in order to find the best way of proclaiming the Gospel. He emphasized the importance of reforming ourselves, first of all – and not a cosmetic reform, but a “conversion of the heart which happens through renunciation.”
We can do this, he said, beginning with the “humility of listening”, allowing the voices of all, and especially the least among us, to be heard. The Pope said that in order to really hear others, we must be disinterested in ourselves, willing to listen to and accept other people’s ideas. Further, we must also “listen to life,” that is, look at reality as it is, rather than focusing solely on ideas.
“From the humility of listening to the courage of renunciation, it all passes through the charism of togetherness,” Pope Francis said. At the meeting in Jerusalem, the Church was gathered around St Peter, through charity “which does not create uniformity, but communion.” Although there were strong personalities present, each with their own ideas, they worked together on account of “the strength of loving each other in the Lord.”

“Remain in my love”

Finally, Pope Francis turned to the Gospel, where Jesus calls on His disciples to “Remain in my love.” We do this, the Pope said, especially by remaining close to Jesus, present in the Holy Eucharist in the tabernacle; and in the “many living tabernacles who are the poor.” Jesus, he said, asks us “to remain in Him, not in our own ideas.”
“Let us ask the Lord that He might free us from the cult of efficiency, from worldliness, from the subtle temptation of worshipping ourselves and our own prowess, of obsessive organisation,” Pope Francis said in conclusion. “Let us ask the grace of welcoming the way indicated by the Word of God: humility, communion, renunciation.

Monday, May 20, 2019

Fiery Judgment in the Valley of Jehoshaphat


 Image result for valley of jehoshaphat


by
 
Damien F. Mackey
 
 
 
 
 
 
“In Joel 3: 11-17, details of a major conflict in the Valley of Jehoshaphat are given.
This account runs parallel to that battle of Armageddon recorded in Revelation 16:14-18”.
 
biblefocus.net
 
 
 
 
 
That the Kidron Valley to the east of Jerusalem is the same as the Valley of Jehoshaphat is apparent from this statement by Dr. Ernest L. Martin, in his article “Updated Information
on the Crucifixion of Jesus” (1992):
http://www.askelm.com/doctrine/d920401.htm
 
There are numerous historical reasons for selecting Olivet as the place of Jesus’ crucifixion. In the recently translated Temple Scroll, Yadin pointed out that all people bearing religious defilements which prevented them from entering the holy city or the Temple were directed to stay east of the ideal Sanctuary region mentioned in the scroll (Yadin 177). Evil and defiled people (sinners) were kept east of Jerusalem in order to prevent any "winds of evil" from flowing over the holy city from the west. This is one of the reasons the sin offering of the Red Heifer and those of the Day of Atonement (which were to atone for sins) were burnt to ashes in this eastern area "outside the camp" (Leviticus 4:21; 16:27). Yadin suggested that a part of this eastern region which had been put aside for defiled persons was even referred to in the New Testament (e.g. Mark 14:3).
 
Since all sin offerings were sacrificed (or "executed") east of the Holy Place of the Temple, and the most important ones were sacrificed further east at the Red Heifer altar on Olivet, this easterly region of the Temple became known as the place where God dealt with sin -- where all the sins of the world will be judged. This is one reason why the Kidron Valley separating the Temple from the Mount of Olives became known as the Valley of Jehoshaphat (the valley where "God judges"). Even to this day Jews, Muslims and Christians consider the summit and western slope of Olivet as the ordained place where God will judge all people in the world for their sins. Charles Warren in Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible listed over fourteen [Christian] … authorities (from the deaux Pilgrim onward) who attested to this belief (II.562). This is why it was important, from the Christian point of view, that Jesus died in this eastern region which was reckoned the judgment place for all mankind. For Jesus to be judged as dying for the sins of all mankind, Christians thought he had to be judged in the place where all mankind were designed to be judged for their sins.
 
Even Muslims (who inherited many traditional beliefs from the Jews and Christians) firmly believe that the summit and the western slope of the Mount of Olives is the judgment area for mankind. The Encyclopaedia Judaica has an interesting excerpt about this. "All the dead will congregate on the Mount of Olives and the angel Gabriel will move paradise to the right of Allah’s Throne and hell to its left. All mankind will cross a long bridge suspended from the Mount of Olives to the Temple Mount, which will be narrower than a hair, sharper than a sword, and darker than night. Along this bridge there will be seven arches and at each arch man will be asked to account for his actions" (IX col.1576). This is the Muslim account.
 
It is easy to see that this traditional Muslim belief is based on the geography of the Temple and the Red Heifer arched bridge over the Kidron Valley that existed in Jesus’ time. Indeed, the Hebrew word for the altar where the Red Heifer was burnt to ashes is miphkad (see Ezekiel 43:21)…..
[End of quote]
 
 
Armageddon, or “Hill of Megiddo”, does not refer to the famous site of Megiddo about 90 km north of Jerusalem. For one thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armageddon
 
Mount" Tel Megiddo is not actually a mountain, but a tell (a hill created by many generations of people living and rebuilding on the same spot)[4] on which ancient forts were built to guard the Via Maris, an ancient trade route linking Egypt with the northern empires of Syria, Anatolia and Mesopotamia.
 
Joel links Armageddon with the Valley of Jehoshaphat (or Kidron):
https://biblefocus.net/consider/v01Armageddon/Armageddon-To-Occur-In-The-Valley-of.html
 
The reference to Armageddon in Rev 16:16, “And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon” is very closely linked to Joel 3:14, “Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision (or threshing).”This link can be related to the battle that will take place when Yahshua returns to set up God’s kingdom on earth. The connection is established by the meaning of the word Armageddon, which as already shown signifies, “a heap of sheaves in a valley for judgement.”
 
In relation to the Valley of Jehoshaphat in Joel 3, it is recorded, “I will also gather all nations, and will bring them down into the Valley of Jehoshaphat,” (verse 2) and “let the heathen be wakened and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat: for there will I sit to judge round about.” (verse 12)
[End of quote]
 
It is the ancient site of Jerusalem, against which the pagan armies of the Book of Apocalypse were to assemble in 70 AD (conventional dating). We read about it in “Titus' Siege of Jerusalem”: https://www.livius.org/articles/concept/roman-jewish-wars/roman-jewish-wars-4/
 
Titus now decided upon a show of strength, and staged an army parade, which lasted for four days. Meanwhile, his adviser Flavius Josephus was to talk to the men on the walls, trying to induce them to surrender. The Jewish leaders were not impressed by the arguments of the turncoat, and on the fifth day, the Roman soldiers renewed the struggle: they started to build four large siege dams, aimed at the Antonia fortress. (It was to be taken by force, because it had large stores and two great cisterns.) The Roman attack was no success: John's sappers undermined one of the dams and managed to raise a fire on a second one, and Simon's soldiers destroyed the remaining dams two days later.
 
The Roman commanders now knew that their enemies would fight for every inch of their city, and understood that the siege of Jerusalem would take a long time. Therefore, Titus changed his plans. There were signs that the supplies of Jerusalem were giving out: some Jews had left the city, hoping to find food in the valleys in front of the walls. Many of them had been caught and crucified - some five hundred every day. (The soldiers had amused themselves by nailing their victims in different postures.) The Romans decided to starve the enemies into surrender. In three days, Jerusalem was surrounded with an eight kilometer long palisade. All trees within fifteen kilometres of the city were cut down. The camps of the legions V Macedonica, XII Fulminata and XV Apollinaris were demolished; these troops were billeted on Bezetha. 
 
The death rate among the besieged increased. Soon, the Kidron valley and the Valley of Hinnom were filled with corpses. One defector told Titus that their number was estimated at 115,880. Desperate people tried to leave Jerusalem. When they had succeeded in passing their own lines and had not been killed by Roman patrols, they reached the palisade. Here they surrendered: as prisoners, they were at last entitled to some bread. Some of them ate so much, that they could not stomach it and died. In that case, their oedemaous bodies were cut open by the Syrian and Arab warders, who knew that some of these people had swallowed coins before they started their ill fated expedition. Titus refrained from punishing these violators when he discovered that there were too many. One of the defectors was the famous teacher Yohanan ben Zakkai, who escaped in a coffin and saved his life by predicting Titus that he, too, would be an emperor. ….
 

Site of Ascension of Jesus Christ


 'Jesus Ascension to Heaven 23' photo (c) 2011, Waiting For The Word - license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/


by
 
Damien F. Mackey
 
 
 
 
“When [Jesus] had led them out to the vicinity of Bethany, he lifted up his hands
and blessed them. While he was blessing them, he left them and was taken up into heaven. Then they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy.
And they stayed continually at the Temple, praising God”.
 
Luke 24:50-53
 
 
 
 
Jesus Christ, a Divine Person, having completed his earthly work of Redemption of our fallen human race, returned to his Father in heaven from whence he had come.
 
This Gospel incident will be taken up and aped by Islam in one of its many biblical appropriations. According to Roger Waite in The Lost History of Jerusalem:
 
The Dome of the Rock was built 50 years later by another Muslim Caliph, Abd al-malik. Part of his reasoning for building on the site of the Rock was to lure christians away from worshipping at the site where Jesus footprints were supposedly embedded in the Rock. Later Muslim traditions of Mohammed s ascension from it and many others were added in centuries afterwards. That massive oblong rock features in the descriptions of Fort Antonio [sic] and is completely absent in the biblical and extra-biblical descriptions of the true Temple of God.
[End of quote]
 
Mohammed could not have ascended into heaven for the simple reason that – apart from any other considerations – Mohammed was a non-historical composite (mainly biblical) character. The fictitious Mohammed has - like other such creations of world religions, such as the Buddha (who is probably based largely upon Moses), Apollonius of Tyana, and the like - some uncanny similarities to the Jesus Christ of the Gospels, especially in Jesus’s miraculous aspects.
 
Roger Waite tends to follow the late Dr. Ernest L. Martin in his identification of key sites for Jesus in relation to Jerusalem, and I think that Roger has made a wise choice in so doing. Here is what the latter has written in the same article re various sites, including that of the Ascension, with reference to Dr. Martin:
 
The following quotes from Ernest Martin show the evidence supporting the fact that the tomb of Christ was located on the Mount of Olives and how the Mount of Olives became a new Mount Zion for early christians: What is not usually recognized even by many Christian people today is the fact that the area of the Mount of Olives was where Jesus actually lived when he was in the vicinity of Jerusalem. Not only was the region his "habitual" place for meeting with his apostles (Luke 22:39), and "where he many times met there with his disciples" (John 18:2), but "by day he was teaching in the Temple, but by night he would go out and lodge on the Mount of Olives" (Luke 21:37). Even the village of Bethany where … he sometimes resided was on the eastern slopes of this same Mount of Olives (Mark 11:1). Jesus' home in Jerusalem was on Olivet. It could be rightly said that the district of the Mount of Olives was the "home" of Jesus when he was in Jerusalem. Other than the time he taught in the Temple or the occasion of the Last Supper (which took place within the city of Jerusalem), all the other teachings of Jesus near Jerusalem were conducted on the Mount of Olives It was customary in Jewish circles to call the Mount of Olives by the name "the Mount of the Anointing" (Parah 3:6) [The olives produced there were used for anointing oil]. If one use the Greek language to translate this Hebrew rendering, it is quite a significant sign of identification. Through the Greek the Mount of Olives would be called "the Mount of the Christ [Anointed One]." Christians were well aware of this significance. When Jesus was in the Jerusalem area it was on the Mount of Olives that he made his abode (Mark 11:1; Luke 21:37; 22:39; John 18:2). Olivet was truly "his" mount. There were other things that made it "the Mount of the Anointing (Christ)." The Mount of Olives was also the holiest area around Jerusalem other than the Temple itself. I have explained the reason for this in previous chapters. We should recall that the Mount of Olives had its special sanctification because it housed the Miphkad Altar (where the Red Heifer and the other sin offerings were burnt outside the camp). But to Christians it had even a greater anointing. More significant than anything else, it was the area where Jesus was crucified, buried and resurrected from the dead. It was also near the place of Jesus' ascension, and the site to which he will return from heaven (Acts 1:9-11; Zechariah 14:1-4)
In the period before Constantine it is not difficult to see why Christians from around the world would pay attention to the Mount of Olives as a place of special holiness. What may be surprising to some of us is the fact that they paid particular attention to the cave very near the summit of Olivet and located about a hundred yards to the south and a little west of the monticulus "the little hill on the mountain" that the Bordeaux Pilgrim described. But why a cave? This may at first seem puzzling because there is not the slightest mention of such a cave in the Gospels nor in any place in the New Testament. That's right, there is no attention attached to any cave, but there is considerable importance shown to a TOMB - the tomb of Jesus from whence he came forth from the dead! Could the cave on the Mount of Olives have been the tomb of Jesus? There is every reason to believe that it was! In the work called "The Gospel of the Nazaraeans" (written in the second century) it was said that a guard of armed soldiers sent to the tomb of Jesus were set "over against THE CAVE" (Hennecke Schneemelcher, The New Testament Apocrypha, vol.l, p.150). This record shows that even the tomb itself was already reckoned as a cave at the time that Jesus was placed in it. But there is more. In the late second or early third century work called "The Acts of Pilate," Jesus' burial place was called both a tomb and a cave in the same context. That work has Joseph of Arimathea saying: "See, I have placed it [the body of Jesus] in my NEW TOMB, 176
 
[End of quote]
 
The Ascension of Jesus is often linked with his so-called Second Coming.
But, re the numbering here, see my article:
 
Beyond the "Second Coming"
 
 
The connection between the two events is properly made based upon Acts 1:9-11:
 
After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.
They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. ‘Men of Galilee’, they said, ‘why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven’.
 
The first return of Jesus Christ was to be like (‘will come back in the same way’) his Ascension (‘[as] you have seen him go into heaven’).
 
The Preterist Archive, in the article:
The "Second Coming" of Jesus
Associated with the End of Jerusalem in A.D.70, the End of Life, or the End of the World
 
includes a “Comment” that I think offers a far preferential timetable for that Coming of Christ, by contrast with what I would call his Final Coming (I do not necessarily accept the following identification of the 666 Beast with the emperor Nero) 
 
I have been a partial preterist for about 20 years now. I don't hold to know everything about eschatology, but I can tell you I know a lot better than some of the so-called teachers of it today. Some of the absolute nonsense that is circulating in the Church today is one reason why the Church is in riducule [sic] amongst the unbelievers. The last great world kingdom is not the revived Roman Empire ….The last great world kingdom is THE KINGDOM OF GOD! That Kingdom began at the Ascension when Jesus sat down at the right hand of the Father and began to rule over the affairs of mankind without the benefit of human government. The events of the Tribulation Period occurred from 66AD until the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD, a span of 42 Biblical months, based on a 360 day year, just as Revelation stated it would. The Fourth Beast was Rome. 666 was Kaisar Neron. The False Prophet was the Sanhedrin which sold out the Jewish people of the time and supported Nero. The Mark of the Beast is the antithesis of the command of God for the Jews to bind the words of YHWH upon their hearts and minds. (i.e. the head and the hand) Since they refused to obey, they instead bound the Mark of Nero to themselves, trusting (and in essence worshipping) the Beast. They worshipped Neron Kaisar rather than Yeshua ha Mashiach and therefore reaped the fiery judgment of 70AD. Jerusalem (which incidentally also sits on 7 hills) became the seat of the Beast, Israel figuratively became a whore. (See also Ezekiel 16, Jeremiah 50-51). God judged unbelieving Israel, but spared the remnant (the Church) to give the Gospel to the Gentiles (the remainder of the world). If we understand the 1000 years to mean figuratively a long period, then a lot of things make sense. It also makes sense to consider that the end of the 1000 years has come and Satan has been released from the bottomless pit …. There will be one last attempt by Satan to rule mankind, which will result in the Last Day Coming of Christ, i.e. the Judgment of the World. The Great Tribulation and destruction of Jerusalem were the End of the Age, not the End of the WORLD. ….
[End of quote]
 
For my view of Satan’s latter day release from the pit and his worldwide effect, see:
 
 
 
Satan, permitted by God to test holy Job to the limit, and almost beyond it, for a greater good, has been allowed by the Almighty again, in the case of the Church, that same terrifying liberty.
 
Church Undergoing Test of Prophet Job. Part Two: Saint John Paul II