Hello and welcome to Form Now. We're in part three of a five-part Bible study on the luminous mysteries.

My name is Ben Acres. I'm the executive director of Formed. And joining me today is Dr. Jim Prothrow,

who is a professor at our graduate school here at the Augustine Institute. And we're part of a five-part series.

We're going to go through each of the luminous mysteries. And the luminous mysteries were given to us by Pope St. John Paul II. In 2002, he wrote an apostolic letter on the Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary. And in that letter, he has such a great devotion to Mary and to the rosary. And he said, you know, we have mysteries of our faith that are, we pray on the rosary that are related to the infancy of Christ,

we call the joyful mysteries. We have mysteries that are related to the passion of Christ,

the sorrowful mysteries, and then the glorification and resurrection of Christ and his mother

in the glorious mysteries, but we don't have any mysteries related to the life of Christ

in his public ministry. And to remedy that, he said, let's look at these mysteries

of light because Christ is the light of the world. And of course, every part of Christ's life is a

mystery. And he zeroes on on five significant events. The first is the baptism. We talked about that in

episode one, the baptism of Christ in the Jordan River by his cousin, John the Baptist. We talked with the wedding of Cana in the second episode in John Chapter 2. When we get to the third luminous mystery, what John Paul II says is the proclamation of the kingdom of God with his call to conversion. So I look at that and like, wait, wait, how do I do that do that do that I do that? What does that mean? That of public ministry. You have to kind of cram into 10 Hail Mary's? What do I do with that, Jim? Well, it's, honestly, it's one of my absolute favorite mysteries to pray and one of my least favorite at the same time, because it makes me think. Because just to think, Jesus proclaims the kingdom of heaven and calls us to conversion,

on the one hand, I can, if I don't have anything in my mind, right, I can pray that quite simply

and just say, God convert the sinners, especially me, right, and can meditate on that

through all of the Ten Hail Mary's. On the other hand, right, Jesus preaches so much

to give specifics, right, about how our life ought to be converted. And so there's a lot of things

that I don't like to normally think about or that I, you know, sort of conveniently forget about

in my daily conversion if I'm not paying attention. And so this is a mystery

that prays really well along with your reading of scripture or recollecting the readings

from the past week where Jesus usually has been teaching something. Because when Jesus teaches

us the way in which we live in God's kingdom,

it relates to everything from the way we act toward each other, toward the way we treat our

money, toward the way that we pray, toward all of these different kinds of things. And these are

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