Fr. Joseph Jacobsen! God often does the impossible! Believe in Jesus!! April 16, 2024 Dear Family of Mary! Today I am sharing with you a wonderful homily: English Homily in Medjugorje Thursday, April 4, 2024 Fr. Joseph Jacobsen Fr. Jacobsen shares several very important points about our faith and how it should work!! It is well worth the read!! Fr. Jacobsen was once a Lutheran Bishop, but has become a Catholic priest!! He loves Our Lady of Medjugorje!! Thank you, Fr. Jacobsen!! April 4, 2024. HOMILY Lord, sanctify us in Your truth. Your word is truth. Amen. Dear friends, Today, we want to celebrate the fact, and at the same time take some warning from the fact, that when God does something that is humanly impossible in our presence and we see it and witness it, and then He tells us that He’s going to do something else that is humanly impossible after that, we are responsible for believing what He tells us. Okay. Now, most people don’t. Because it’s difficult, even when you see something that is humanly impossible done by God, it’s difficult for us not to think that the humanly impossible is impossible. That’s the way that normal people think. I’m going to give you a few examples of that before we tie into the main example that I want to use for my homily today. The first example of that is Moses and the children of Israel as they fled from and were driven out of Egypt. They had 10 plagues to drive them out. None of those plagues were humanly possible. They could only have come because God willed them to come. And they got to the Red Sea, and they were between the Red Sea and the hosts of Egypt, the humanly impossible occurred again. They fully expected to be massacred there, because they were trapped. Well, the cloud came and prevented the Egyptians from seeing where they were going, the sea opened up, they went through the sea – has that ever happened in a humanly possible way? So, they went through there and out the other side to the other end, and then the cloud lifted and the Egyptians followed them, and the humanly impossible happened again. The water returned and drowned all of the army. Now, okay, they witnessed all of that. Do you suppose they should have believed that they would actually be led through the desert to the Promised Land by somebody who had done all of those things already for them? Of course, they should have believed that. But they didn’t. Well, a few did. There was Joshua. There was Caleb. There was Moses; and I presume Aaron and Miriam thought so, too. There may have been a few others. But for the most part, it was very difficult for them, once they were facing another set of difficult circumstances where their survival seemed to be humanly impossible to believe that God would do once again what He had done for them several times already. Right? Okay. Let’s look at another example. The man in our first reading today was healed at the Beautiful Gate. Okay, the whole upshot of that, as we heard in our first reading, is that Peter challenged the people to believe that the power that raised the man who they knew had been lying at that gate for years with legs that were so useless that he couldn’t even crawl. Okay, the implication here is that the power that accomplished that is the power that they should have faced up to in terms of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. So, the one led to the other. If you believe your eyes as to what humanly impossible thing that happened with this man that was crippled here, then why in the world don’t you believe that the one who did this was the one who was raised from the dead, as we proclaimed? Once again, the humanly impossible in one instance, should have led… And did it? Yes. We did see quite a few people that were converted because of that. But not very many of the Sanhedrin; not many of the leaders. A number of common people were, in fact, converted by that. To tie in a little bit into what Father was saying before Mass, the same thing is true here. We have seen so many confirming signs of the truth of what’s happening here. Now, what should that be leading us to do? It should be leading us to take seriously what Our Blessed Mother has told us is coming upon the world. If the confirming signs have been humanly impossible… anyone who anything about the history of Medjugorje at all knows that there have been a lot of humanly impossible things happening here. Well, that should lead us to believe the message. That’s what it’s all about. The message is what counts. And those confirming signs, and the humanly impossible things that have happened initially here, are intended to bring us to a place of accepting the message; about how we live our lives in an unbelieving world, about what’s coming upon the world, and about the era of peace that we are being led into, and about the purging and the chastising that’s happening in order to get us there. All of those things that we need to believe, because of the credibility of what’s happened here already. Alright. Now, the theme that I want to bring to our attention. The heart and soul of Medjugorje – and this is by the will of our Blessed Mother, herself – is the Eucharist. That’s why you’re here. It’s the Eucharist. Now what is the Eucharist? I want to take us a little bit through John chapter 6 today, and show you how in that chapter the same principle that I just enunciated in these three instances applies as well. It’s very interesting how it starts. The disciples and Jesus are in the wilderness, and they look around and they see a bunch of people coming toward them – a whole lot of people – and Jesus does something very interesting at that point. He says to Philip, “How are we going to feed all these people?” And then John makes a comment which is fascinating. He says that Jesus did this to test him; because He, Himself knew what He was going to do. Get that? He knew what He was going to do. And what He was going to do was the humanly impossible. And the test was: Do you believe that we can feed these people through what I do that is humanly impossible. And so it happened. They fed the people; and there were twelve baskets left over. So, they had the experience of Jesus doing the humanly impossible in feeding this multitude, precisely because He said that to test Philip. Now a little bit later, the next day, there He is in Capernaum. And the people come up to Him and they say to Him, “How did you get here?” and so forth; but the key point that I want to get at here is that the dialogue goes like this, at this point. Jesus says, “I am the Bread of Life sent from Heaven. He who eats of me – who eats my flesh and drinks my blood – will live forever. What I will give for the life of the world is my own flesh.” And, of course, the Jews will go, “How can you do that?” Just like the question of Philip, “How can we feed so many people? There’s no way we can do this.” But Jesus says, “I will do this.” But the people say, and the Jews ask, “How in the world can we eat His flesh and drink His blood?” That’s a good question, right? That seems impossible. How in the world is He going to do this. How is He going to achieve that? Now in the Tridentine Mass, the Latin Mass, when you come to the Daily Requiem Mass, it’s a marvelous Mass that we use for praying for the souls in Purgatory. The gospel for the day is the one I just gave you a summary of from John’s gospel, about, “I am the Living Bread from Heaven, and who eats of me will live forever. My flesh and my blood are true food.” And just about 10 minutes later in the mass, we come to the point where, standing at the altar, the priest says, “This is the Body of Christ. And this is His Blood.” That’s how the humanly impossible there is achieved. We eat the flesh and drink the blood of Christ through the sacrament. Now it was so impossible that so many of His disciples just left when he said it. “How can He do this? He can’t give us His flesh and His blood. That’s impossible.” Off they went. And Jesus says to the disciples, “Are you going to leave me, too?” And Peter says, “Where will we go? You have the words of eternal life.” Peter maybe didn’t get the whole point that Jesus was going to figure out a way to do this, but he got some of the point. He got some of the point. And we sure know from Our Blessed Mother that we had better take very, very seriously that when we receive the Eucharist, we are getting the flesh and blood of Jesus, and nothing else. The flesh and blood of Jesus. Now there’s one more interesting point that I want to make in this little homily, and that’s this: We get the whole Jesus now in the Eucharist. Because we are sinners, we tend to emphasize the Crucified Christ. But, we also receive the Risen Christ. Okay. The whole Christ. Well, in a sinful world, it’s good for us to have the forgiveness of our sins. The sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross is our focus as sinners, because we need that desperately in order to get through to eternal life. The forgiveness of sins is the basis of salvation. And you and I need that desperately. We are told by many credible sources that in the age to come, it will be the same sacrament but the emphasis will shift from the Cross to the Resurrection – from what happened on the Cross, and also at the Last Supper; to what happened at Emmaus, when Jesus gave Himself to them as the Living Bread. They experienced Him now as alive. Now, this is very interesting; because the first time they received the Eucharist, they thought He was going to live, when He was going to die. The second time, they thought He was dead, while He was alive. Big surprise! Okay? Now, we often are in exactly the same position, if you look at yourself spiritually. The things we consider about Him as dead, are actually alive; and the things that we consider as alive, are actually dead. We need the Eucharist to set us straight on this point a lot. But the main point I want to make is this: When Jesus starts off by saying in John 6, “I am the Bread of Life,” He’s underscoring the fact that the whole Christ – the Christ who died on the Cross to save us from our sins, and the Christ who rose from the dead to justify us and bring us to paradise – is received in every last Eucharist. And the emphasis today in our sinful world is certainly on the Cross. The emphasis in the era of Peace will be more on the Life and on the Resurrection (for obvious reasons). (Homily of April 4, 2024, Medjugorje) Amen, Fr. Jacobsen!! Thank you!! Fr. Jacobsen gave his testimony on Mary TV – Fruit Show 309! You want to watch it! In Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Cathy Nolan (c) Mary TV 2024
