Friday, May 15, 2026
Friday of the Sixth week of Easter
John 16:20-23
Listen to the whole reading — MP3
First reading
Acts 18:9-18
The Lord said to Paul in the night by a vision, “Don’t be afraid, but speak and don’t be silent; for I am with you, and no one will attack you to harm you, for I have many people in this city.” He lived there a year and six months, teaching the word of God among them. But when Gallio was proconsul of Achaia, the Jews with one accord rose up against Paul and brought him before the judgment seat, saying, “This man persuades men to worship God contrary to the law.” But when Paul was about to open his mouth, Gallio said to the Jews, “If indeed it were a matter of wrong or of wicked crime, you Jews, it would be reasonable that I should bear with you; but if they are questions about words and names and your own law, look to it yourselves. For I don’t want to be a judge of these matters.” So he drove them from the judgment seat. Then all the Greeks laid hold on Sosthenes, the ruler of the synagogue, and beat him before the judgment seat. Gallio didn’t care about any of these things. Paul, having stayed after this many more days, took his leave of the brothers, and sailed from there for Syria, together with Priscilla and Aquila. He shaved his head in Cenchreae, for he had a vow.
Responsorial psalm
Psalms 47:2-3,4-5,6-7
For the Lord Most High is awesome. He is a great King over all the earth. He subdues nations under us, and peoples under our feet. He chooses our inheritance for us, the glory of Jacob whom he loved. Selah. God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet. Sing praises to God, sing praises. Sing praises to our King, sing praises. For God is the King of all the earth. Sing praises with understanding.
Gospel
John 16:20-23
Most certainly I tell you, that you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice. You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will be turned into joy. A woman, when she gives birth, has sorrow, because her time has come. But when she has delivered the child, she doesn’t remember the anguish any more, for the joy that a human being is born into the world. Therefore you now have sorrow, but I will see you again, and your heart will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you. “In that day you will ask me no questions. Most certainly I tell you, whatever you may ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you.
Lectio
There is a quiet courage running beneath today's readings, the kind that does not announce itself but simply keeps going. Paul is afraid—we know this because the Lord speaks precisely to that fear: "Do not be afraid, speak and do not be silent." Notice that God does not promise Paul an easy road or the absence of opposition; he promises presence. "I am with you." And so Paul stays a year and a half in a city that will eventually drag him before a judgment seat. The promise was never that nothing would go wrong. The promise was that he would not be alone in it.
Jesus offers his disciples a similar honesty in the Gospel. He does not pretend the sorrow away. He compares it to a woman in labor—real anguish, real pain, nothing minimized—but anguish that bends toward birth. The world will rejoice while you weep, he tells them, and that asymmetry stings. Yet he insists the sorrow is not the final word; it is the passage through which joy arrives, a joy "no one will take from you." This is not cheap comfort. It is the deep Easter logic that the cross is not the end of the story, that something is being born even in the dark.
The Psalm gathers all of this into praise—not naive praise, but the praise of those who have learned that God "chooses our inheritance for us." We do not always get to pick the shape of our own faithfulness. What is asked is that we trust the One who is already there in the city, already with us in the night vision, already laboring with us toward a joy we cannot yet see.
Where in your life right now is God asking you to "speak and not be silent," even though fear is telling you to stay quiet and small?
What is the present sorrow you are carrying that might actually be a kind of labor—and can you let yourself trust that something is being born in you through it?
Saint of the day
St. Isidore the Farmer
Ora reads this aloud, every morning, free. Ora