January 25, 2022; class #16 (Luke 1:4; 4:14-21)
Textbook lesson # 1: How do we know God? (page 19)
CLICK for full audio recording of this lesson

Let’s begin with the Sign of the Cross:

We are in Ordinary Time now, remember? After the Christmas season ended, we moved into Ordinary time. So what color was the priest's chasuble on Sunday? Green! The color of the priest's chasuble can remind us where we are on the church calendar.

At Mass this weekend, the Gospel reading was from the Gospel of Luke. We'll read the story that the priest read from the Gospel on Sunday. It is in the children's bulletin. Before we read the story, let's remember what had happened before the events in this story:

When Jesus was about 30 years old, he was baptized in the Jordan River by John the Baptist, the man who kept telling people, "Repent! Prepare the way of the Lord." We looked at paintings that showed Jesus being baptized:


Then, we learned that, after Jesus was baptized, he performed his first miracle: He turned water into wine at the wedding in Cana, after his mother asked him to help. Jesus had not planned to perform a miracle, but his mother, Mary, asked for his help:


After that, he began preaching around the countryside, to people who would listen. Then he returned to Nazareth, the village where he had grown up. He was 30 years old. He was a Jewish man. Jewish people go to synagogue on the Sabbath day. (Catholics go to church on the Sabbath day.) Every week, Jewish people have certain readings that they read, from the Hebrew Bible, what we call the "Old Testament," the Bible before the time of Jesus. On that day, one of the readings was from the Book of Isaiah. It was written by a prophet, about 700 years before Jesus was born.

In that time, the written word was saved on scrolls, not in books. Scrolls would be like this:

A scroll was a long, long piece of paper that would be written on. Then, the two ends of the long strip of paper would be rolled together, towards each other. The scrolls would be saved in special places to be protected and preserved. Most people in that time could NOT read, not even grownups, but Jesus could read. So there he was in the synagogue in Nazareth on that day, back in the town where he had grown up, and he read from the religious scroll.

Now, we're going to read the Gospel story, from the children's bulletin. There are some little puzzles, along the way:




Instead of leaving you wondering about the next part of the story, waiting until next week, we'll watch a short video that tells the story, and it tells you what happened next -- maybe not quite what you would expect:



Jesus said something that angered the people in his old hometown. They chased him to a cliff to push him off the cliff and kill him. He managed to get away. He did not return to Nazareth.

Art:
There are not as many paintings about the time Jesus preached in the synagogue in Nazareth as there are about the time when Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River or the time when Jesus turned water into wine at the wedding in Cana. But here are three paintings about Jesus' preaching in Nazareth.



The 1st painting is a fresco, painted on the wall at a monastery in the country of Kosovo. The monastery was built in 1335, almost 700 years ago. That was so long ago that it was before Europeans even knew about North America and South America! When a painting is a "fresco," it means that the painter painted directly on the wall, while the wall had wet plaster on it. The artist painted right on the wet plaster.

The 2nd painting was painted by a student of the artist Rembrandt, and it was painted about 370 years ago -- before the United States of American even existed.

The 3rd was painted about 150 years ago, by an artist who lived in Russia. His name was Nikolai Ge.

To see bigger versions of the paintings, click on the pictures below:

# 1 Visoki Decani Monastery

# 2 Gerbrand van den Eeckhout

# 3 Nikolai Ge

Textbook lesson:

This week we’ll do Lesson # 1. It begins on page 19. The lesson is called, "How do we know God?" So, let's turn to page 19.

"Do you know why you are learning about your Catholic faith? Your family wants you to know God. ..."
[Do activities on pages 21, 24, 25, 26.]

Your textbook has a little paragraph about Saint Francis of Assisi. He is mentioned in this lesson because he loved all of God's creation. There is more to St. Francis' story than that little paragraph tells you.
There is a coloring page for St. Francis included in the stack of saints pages you have.

Francis was born about nine-hundred and forty years ago. He was born into a wealthy family. When he was about 25 years old, he believed he heard a message from God, telling him to repair the church. Francis thought that meant to repair the church building that he was then standing inside. So he rebuilt that church. Then, he finally understood that he should work to rebuild the whole Catholic Church, not just a building, but the Church itself. Francis began preaching and began going directly to any priest who was doing bad things. Francis chose to live in poverty, and he would preach to anyone — even animals and birds. Francis was a deacon, but he was never a priest. He tried to imitate Jesus and to carry out Jesus’ work.

Time to say good bye.  

We'll begin with the Our Father. You know the words. And you can read them as we all say them:

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