Saturday 19 th november 2022
St. Nerses the Great
Bishop and martyr, in 353 he was made Catholicos of the Armenians. Nerses devoted much effort to reforming the Armenian Church, founding hospitals and monasteries. His reforms and denunciation of King Arshak’s murder of the queen led to his exile and assassination.
Entrance Antiphon : Jer 29: 11, 12, 14
The Lord said: I think thoughts of peace and not of affliction. You will call upon me, and I will answer you, and I will lead back your captives from every place.
Collect
Grant us, we pray, O Lord our God, the constant gladness of being devoted to you, for it is full and lasting happiness to serve with constancy the author of all that is good. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
First reading : Apocalypse 11:4-12
I, John, heard a voice saying: ‘These, my two witnesses, are the two olive trees and the two lamps that stand before the Lord of the world. Fire can come from their mouths and consume their enemies if anyone tries to harm them; and if anybody does try to harm them he will certainly be killed in this way. They are able to lock up the sky so that it does not rain as long as they are prophesying; they are able to turn water into blood and strike the whole world with any plague as often as they like. When they have completed their witnessing, the beast that comes out of the Abyss is going to make war on them and overcome them and kill them. Their corpses will lie in the main street of the Great City known by the symbolic names Sodom and Egypt, in which their Lord was crucified. Men out of every people, race, language and nation will stare at their corpses, for three-and-a-half days, not letting them be buried, and the people of the world will be glad about it and celebrate the event by giving presents to each other, because these two prophets have been a plague to the people of the world.’ After the three-and-a-half days, God breathed life into them and they stood up, and everybody who saw it happen was terrified; then they heard a loud voice from heaven say to them, ‘Come up here’, and while their enemies were watching, they went up to heaven in a cloud.
Psalm 143:1-2,9-10
R/ Blessed be the Lord, my rock.
- Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my arms for battle, who prepares my hands for war.
- He is my love, my fortress; he is my stronghold, my savior my shield, my place of refuge. He brings peoples under my rule.
- To you, O God, will I sing a new song; I will play on the ten-stringed lute to you who give kings their victory, who set David your servant free.
Gospel Acclamation : cf.Lk8:15
Alleluia, alleluia! Blessed are those who, with a noble and generous heart, take the word of God to themselves and yield a harvest through their perseverance. Alleluia!
Gospel : Luke 20:27-40
Some Sadducees – those who say that there is no resurrection – approached him and they put this question to him, ‘Master, we have it from Moses in writing, that if a man’s married brother dies childless, the man must marry the widow to raise up children for his brother. Well then, there were seven brothers. The first, having married a wife, died childless. The second and then the third married the widow. And the same with all seven, they died leaving no children. Finally the woman herself died Now, at the resurrection, to which of them will she be wife since she had been married to all seven?’ Jesus replied, ‘The children of this world take wives and husbands, but those who are judged worthy of a place in the other world and in the resurrection from the dead do not marry because they can no longer die, for they are the same as the angels, and being children of the resurrection they are sons of God. And Moses himself implies that the dead rise again, in the passage about the bush where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now he is God, not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all men are in fact alive.’ Some Scribes then spoke up. ‘Well put, Master’ they said – because they would not dare to ask him any more questions.
Prayer over the Offerings
Grant, O Lord, we pray, that what we offer in the sight of your majesty may obtain for us the grace of being devoted to you and gain us the prize of everlasting happiness. Through Christ our Lord.
Communion Antiphon : Ps 72: 28
To be near God is my happiness, to place my hope in God the Lord.
Prayer after Communion
We have partaken of the gifts of this sacred mystery, humbly imploring, O Lord, that what your Son commanded us to do in memory of him may bring us growth in charity. Through Christ our Lord.
Meditation
Resurrection from the dead is a fundamental Judeo-Christian belief. Nonetheless, there are some who do not affirm this belief, like the Sadducees and the materialists who believe that everything including man is mere matter. Jesus in the Gospel affirms that resurrection is not a mere continuity of physical existence, which is a misconception by the Sadducees. Those who have experienced the resurrection are like the angels; there is no giving in marriage or indulging in physical activities. It is the resurrection that gives meaning to our earthly existence.