Category: Lent

  • Forgiveness is Mercy in Action

    Forgiveness is Mercy in Action

    Tuesday of the Third Week in Lent: Daniel 3:25, 34-43, Matthew18:21-35.

    Today’s readings slide from Azariah’s beautiful placement of his fate in God’s hands to the damning of the unmerciful servant in the gospel. If ever there was a day to consider the term fear of God, this is it.

    The Books of Psalms and Proverbs mention fear of the Lord many times, calling it “the beginning of wisdom” and the “fountain of life” and proclaiming that the person who lives in the fear of the Lord is “blessed.” St. Thomas Aquinas reminds us that fear of God is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and it is best understood not in terms of fearing something evil but fearing being separated from our Father — a filial fear.

    Detail from A Hermit Praying (1663), Gerbrand van den Eeckhout | Image from artsy.net.

    Fear is a blessing? How gauche, how antiquated! We live in a time when liberation and freedom to do as you please holds the highest cultural value. But as we are swept up in this cultural moment, we have to remember that what we think is ours (our body, our thoughts, our actions) is actually a gift, too. It was a biological gift from a mother and a father, but more importantly, that spark of life, intellect, and soul is a gift from God. No biological mechanism can explain that gift of spirit that makes us human.

    Biologically, we are but atoms arranged in certain ways — proteins and fats and water that come together in a certain form. Even these building blocks had to come from somewhere, and we believe that our God is the Creator of all the universe. But more, we owe the divine Maker the fact that we are animated as intelligent, soulful beings, bridging the animal kingdom and the angelic kingdom.

    Here is where fear comes in and why we might call it a blessing. Imagine that source of divine power and goodness for just a second. Imagine how incredible it is that he cares enough to hold us in being, favored among all Creation. “Fear of God” means giving him the respect and love that he is due, but also clinging to him as the source of our being. To help us, the Holy Spirit gives us the gift of fear of God, something that aligns us spiritually, that endows us with the appropriate humble stance in front of our Creator.

    This is the way we should be thinking about the fear of God as we examine today’s readings: a gift to be treasured, one that gives us wisdom and blesses us, a feeling in our gut that we never want to be separated from our Father and the knowledge that our actions and hearts must be in line with God’s will in order to stay united with him and his grace.

    This type of fear of God is evident in Azariah in the first reading. This is part of the much-celebrated episode when the three young Jews Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael are punished by Nebuchadnezzar for refusing to worship the gigantic golden idol he builds on the plain of Dura. They respond to the accusations against them by saying, “we have no need to present a defense to you in this matter. If our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire and out of your hand, O king, let him deliver us.” In a rage, he sentences them to be bound and cast into a fiery furnace so hot that it burns to death the men who throw them in.

    Dancing Hebrew youths, Mishael, Azariah and Hananiah, in a fiery furnace of Nebuchadnezzar (contemporary) Zoriy Fine | Image from fineartamerica.com.

    We read the Prayer of Azariah in today’s readings, which he offers to God when they are inside the furnace. Importantly, Azariah prays not for the three of them, but for the entire nation of Israel, “for the sake of Abraham, your beloved, Isaac your servant, and Israel your holy one.” He notes how depleted Israel is (indeed, they’ve been conquered by the Babylonians and many have been dragged to Babylon). In a clear reference to the psalms, he says he has no offering but his “contrite heart and humble spirit.” (Psalm 51 reads: “For you have no delight in sacrifice; if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased. The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”)

    Having declared his pure intentions, he says, “we fear you and seek your presence.” As we shall see in the gospel reading, this deep respect, this profound obeisance, is key to our request for mercy. The entire prayer reaches its climax with his request: “deal with us in your patience and in your abundant mercy. Deliver us in accordance with your marvelous works, and bring glory to your name, O Lord.” How important that Azariah understands that all must point back to God and his glory! He asks for deliverance not just out of a selfish desire for his own life, but knowing that Nebuchadnezzar would be amazed at the power of God to save his people. Most importantly, he models for us what a gift fear of God is.

    Spoiler alert: the three young men are saved by God and not harmed in the fiery furnace.

    Upon their deliverance, the three young men dance and sing in the furnace a great canticle of thanksgiving, one that we use in our liturgy: Week 1 Sunday Morning Prayer of the Divine Office, and repeated for each solemnity and other high feast days. The canticle is one of my favorites to chant during the Liturgy of the Hours because it starts by blessing God and then goes through all of creation, encouraging everything to bless the Lord. This canticle is important because Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael not only model for us the fear of God and heartfelt pleas for mercy, but also the correct response once you’ve received his mercy: sharing that mercy with all of creation.

    Turning our attention to the gospel reading, the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant starts strong. The servant who owes an impossible amount of money to the king follows the lead of Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael, showing proper respect for and dependence on the king. The original Greek uses the verb προσεκύνει (a form of proskynesis), which is often translated as “worship” elsewhere in the Bible and means to bow on your knees in a display of supplication and reverence. 

    Further examination of the Greek helps us understand the exchange between the servant and the king. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis writes in Volume II of his masterwork Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, “God responded at once to the servant’s plea because the man used one of God’s dearest names in adoration of him: ὁ Μακροθύμος—’the Long-suffering One’. The man’s plea is said to have affected the almighty King’s very viscera (σπλάγχνα), hidden under all his golden robes … ‘the Lord of that servant was viscerally moved to compassion’” (647-648). The king is so moved that he forgives his entire debt! In this way, Jesus is describing God the Father in his overflowing forgiveness and mercy, far beyond our expectations. 

    The parable then turns, however, and reveals that the servant’s display of respect was only skin deep. He finds a fellow servant who owes him a much smaller debt and instead of forgiving this debt in turn, as his king forgave him, he chokes him, refuses to show him mercy, and has him imprisoned. This is a grievous sin.

    Parable of the Wicked Servant (La parabola del servo malvagio), 1620, Domenico Fetti | Wikimedia Commons.

    The king’s action is not merely a good example for the servant. God’s mercy is a thing, alive, needing to course through us into the world. His mercy is the living force of love in the world. Leiva-Merikakis beautifully describes this, “Our vocation is to ignite conflagrations of love and forgiveness all around us. God’s light intends to be refracted through our being: it shines upon us not only for our own benefit, to dispel our own darkness, but also to stream through us and beyond us” (649). 

    Our very “vocation,” our purpose on the earth, is to share God’s mercy in the world. By so doing, we accomplish God’s will. But refusing mercy is the perversion of the Spirit. In the parable, the unmerciful servant shows that he does not have the type of fear of the Lord that is wholesome and transformative. The other servants must react at his perversion of the Spirit: “Now when his fellow servants saw what had happened, they were deeply disturbed, and went to their master and reported the whole affair.” Not sharing mercy with others is a cardinal sin. This leads us to the conclusion of the parable and a glimpse of divine justice.

    Even if it makes us uncomfortable, we must accept that God rightfully expresses anger when his goodness is hoarded and discarded. Divine justice hinges upon how we use the gifts God bestows on us, principally mercy: is it shared and given forth to others in acts of charity and love or is it discarded and replaced by selfishness, greed, and sadism? When we discard the energy of God Himself, we embrace the energy of evil, of the devil. What’s more, we reject ourselves, our purpose, to help bring others to God and into the Kingdom. We become an abomination of everything God has created us to be.

    The Unmerciful Servant (1864), artist: After Sir John Everett Millais, Engraved and printed by Dalziel Brothers | Creative Commons, courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

    So, we read that “in anger his master handed him over to the torturers.” Let’s look closely at the original Greek as we wrap our heads around God’s righteous anger and act of divine justice in this passage.

    The verb for his anger is ὀργισθεὶς (orgistheis), which can be translated as “moved to anger” or “provoked to anger.” Here we see that the king is provoked or moved by the actions of the servant; it is a response to something the servant has done. We must recall that while God is indeed all that is good, he is also the source of moral behavior, moral decision making, and moral valence (that is, what is good vs. what is bad). As such, he stands as the judge of behavior, and a judge is not silent when presented with something. Actions either uphold the good or go against the good. Being “moved to anger” means that he stands in his role as judge and proclaims the evil that he sees.

    Why anger? Why not sadness or emotionless judgment? Well, let’s return to the kind of God we know we have: one who overflows with love for his people and his creation. Is this the sign of impassivity? Should we expect a divinity so pure and full to not react viscerally to both the goodness he finds in us as well as the evil he finds in us? As it appears in today’s reading, God is viscerally moved to compassion — σπλαγχνισθεὶς (splanchnistheis) where the word σπλαγχνα (splanchna) means interior organs or intestines — and we can expect that he can be viscerally moved to something other than compassion when encountering evil. I don’t presume to know what he is moved to, but the scriptures tell us many times that he is moved to anger, so I take divine revelation for what it is.

    In his anger, the king “handed him over”: παρέδωκεν (paredōken), which occurs 18 times in the New Testament, notably when Judas hands over Christ to the chief priests, when Pilate hands over Christ to be crucified, and when Christ gives up his spirit in death. This is an irrevocable step in delivering something. And to whom does the king hand over the servant? The torturers, who will enact pain upon him “until he should pay back the whole debt” (200,000 years, I guess). We can rightfully say that in his goodness God does not take pleasure in this torture and note that he does not inflict it himself. Gehenna/Hell is set up for this purpose, a place for the people who pervert the Spirit and undermine God’s law.

    So as to not end this reflection as a total downer, let’s end with some wise words from Leiva-Merikakis, for whom today’s reading in part gives him the title for his three-volume work on St. Matthew’s gospel.

    The only thing we should be afraid of is not being merciful as our heavenly Father is merciful, for it is from unmercy that the most dire consequences flow, the ones reaching most deeply and devastatingly into both our psyche and our eternal destiny. For the Kingdom of Heaven is a kingdom of mercy, and mercy is never realized in the abstract but only through a concrete exercise of forgiveness. … Therefore, the ability to forgive our brother unceasingly and from the heart should be one of the primary concerns of our prayer, one of the most earnest pleas we make before the Throne of Grace (654).

  • The Unexpectedly Common

    The Unexpectedly Common

    Monday of the Third Week of Lent: 2 Kings 5:1-15ab, Luke 4:24-30.

    You’ve likely heard the adage that God works in mysterious ways. Today’s readings put a finer point on this: God ways are mysterious because they paradoxically appear to be common. Another way to say this is that God uses the things and people we know (or think we know) to enact his will in the world. This is unexpected because we expect something more flashy, more glorious.

    Oddly, we see people in both the Old and New Testaments reacting with anger when they are faced with this unexpectedly common appearance of divine will in the world. Isn’t that a bit odd? To get angry? I’d like to explore the significance of this instance of God’s plan and our reactions to it.

    God the Father with Angels, medallion, ceiling of the Stanza dell’Incendio di Borgo, Vatican City (c. 1510),
    Pietro Perugino | Wikimedia Commons.

    I particularly like the reading from the second Book of Kings because it reveals that our God is truly a God of all Creation, blessing people other than the Israelites. We might get a skewed conception of God, given our scriptural lens into God’s actions with his Chosen People. Yes, the story of humanity’s salvation lies in the Jewish people and then Christianity, but we can never allow our understanding to delimit God in any way.

    Jesus tells us that no one knows the Father except the Son, and many Doctors and saints have affirmed that God is unknowable. St. John of Damascus puts it well: “God is infinite and incomprehensible and all that is comprehensible about Him is His infinity and incomprehensibility” (On the Orthodox Faith).

    In my mind, it’s a good little jolt of remembering not to limit God when we read today that he “had brought victory to Aram” through the military commander Naaman. His reach is limitless, his love is limitless, and those outside of the Jewish nation have undoubtedly played a big role in revealing God to all the nations (as Jesus points out in the gospel reading).

    After hearing how the holder of secular power, the king of Israel, is sent into a paranoid fit at the appearance of Naaman from his powerful neighbors, Naaman finds his way to the true spiritual power of the Chosen People: the prophet Elisha. Here is the crux of the meeting: “Naaman came with his horses and chariots and stopped at the door of Elisha’s house. The prophet sent him the message: ‘Go and wash seven times in the Jordan, and your flesh will heal, and you will be clean.’”

    Note the scene: a big entourage of military might arrives at the prophet’s house and Elisha doesn’t even come outside to greet them. Elisha “sent him the message,” likely via a servant, and the message is almost offhand: “go dunk in the local river Jordan.” We can start to understand why Naaman got angry. It’s a problem of appearances.

    Naaman feels disrespected because Elisha doesn’t even appear before him. There is no ceremony, no waving of hands and calling out loudly to the Lord for healing. And the river Jordan isn’t a crystal clear mountain spring or even very big and mighty. All “signs” point to disappointment. Naaman typifies the angry disappointment of humanity facing the lack of a flashy and mighty God-on-earth.

    God is asking Naaman to accept him in humility. This is always an important step in our encounter with God. We are asked to put away our way of knowing in favor of his way of knowing. Humility (and humiliation) are our path to putting aside our own preconceptions and stubborn “knowledge” of how things work.

    Thus, God acts again through humble messengers: Naaman’s servants. They plead with the great military commander to do what was asked. Their logic is interesting. They say, you would have done something much more difficult if the prophet had asked it of you, so why not do the easier task? This reasoning resonates with him; he goes to the Jordan under the logic of a servant, finally ready to do what is asked of him.

    This is the baptismal sign under which God consecrates us to him, the same sign he gives to Noah and the earth and the same by which John the Baptist prepares us for Christ. For Naaman, “His flesh became again like the flesh of a little child, and he was clean.” We can thus understand his leprosy as a sign of his pride and reliance on his own powers of knowing rather than being open to God’s way of knowing.

    Once he humbles himself and does what he is asked, he is clean. The child-like condition of his skin mirrors the child-like openness of his soul, something Jesus asks of us: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 18:3).

    Medieval enamel and bronze altarpiece of Naaman washing in the Jordan (1150-1160), unknown artisan | Creative Commons, courtesy the British Museum.

    The final piece of the account is that Naaman returns to Elisha’s house and praises God, not the prophet. He has been truly converted to God, he has understood his humble relationship to the Creator and rightly praises Him: “Now I know that there is no God in all the earth, except in Israel.” He has changed his entire understanding of this journey — it wasn’t a journey to meet with a prophet and be cured by a human with powers; it was a journey to encounter God himself, who works through the common fabric of humanity that he loves.

    Like Naaman, the Nazarenes in the gospel reading are asked to accept the words of a prophet delivered in an unexpectedly common way. This scene from the Gospel of St. Luke occurs at the very beginning of Jesus’s ministry after he returns from his 40 days in the desert. He comes to his hometown of Nazareth and reads a famous passage from Isaiah in the synagogue: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor …” (Is 61:1). This is the message of deliverance in the Book of Isaiah.

    Jesus then proceeds to proclaim, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Shock of shocks! This son of Joseph, whom they all know since childhood, is claiming to be the Anointed One of God, ushering in a new era for the nation of Israel! They are incredulous; after all, they know him, he is common, and surely the Messiah won’t be the son of a common carpenter, much less that Jesus we’ve seen so many times we forget he’s even around.

    In response, Jesus begins, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum’ (Lk 4:23). The proverb comes from a place of disbelief and contains an implicit “prove it to me first before I believe you” (that is, show that you’re in top shape before trying to heal me).

    Jesus knows that they want to test him, make him prove himself as the Messiah by working miracles in their midst. His answer is the same one that Naaman receives. The prophet won’t be made to perform or do circus tricks for the demanding audience. That’s not how God’s will is accomplished. He works through common, humble humanity — nothing proves this more than this moment when the Son of God acknowledges that he is also just a son of a humble carpenter named Joseph and this does not diminish in any way the power, glory, and majesty of his being the Messiah.

    Jesus sums up his poor reception among his childhood neighbors thus: “Amen, I say to you, no prophet is accepted in his own native place.” Human expectations of the miraculous and divine are too concerned with style and not concerned enough with substance. We, like Naaman and the Nazarenes, want something special, electric, and obvious to appear and wow us. Once we’ve made up our minds about people we know, we cross them off the list of potential sources of God at work in the world. We think of this as wise, worldly and mature, but God again and again tries to show us that the Spirit works through any and all according to God’s will — we can’t predict it with our intelligence, much less categorize things as likely or unlikely based on how well we know someone.

    This why Jesus’s words to “change and become like children” are so important. Children don’t carry the burden of preconceptions fossilized into place after years of experience. They are open to be amazed at the things around them, open to the wonder inherent in their parents, siblings, and friends. This is also why death to self and rebirth in the Spirit is such an important concept in the sacrament of Baptism.

    Christ in the Synagogue (1868), Nikolai Ge | Image from wikiart.org.

     Jesus goes on to give us another level of significance to Naaman and Elisha in the gospel reading. On one hand, the Nazarenes are just like Naaman in their expectations that the prophet will be flashy and commensurate with their expectations of grandeur. But on the other hand, Jesus points out that in the scope of salvation history they are the opposite of Naaman because they are the Jews, stubborn and unconverted in heart, while he is the Gentile outsider who displays a true conversion.

    Jesus sharpens the point of the Gentile miracles found in the scriptures. He says that this is not coincidence but instead God’s plan because human nature is what it is: “there were many lepers in Israel during the time of Elisha the prophet; yet not one of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.” Jesus is saying that these Gentiles were chosen by God, like the Jewish prophets were chosen by God, and together they reveal the greatness of the Lord.

    The Jews take this as a great insult: “When the people in the synagogue heard this, they were all filled with fury.” Luke reminds us that this exchange takes place in the synagogue — the place where the Chosen People set themselves apart in their worship of their God. The weight of thousands of years of Jewish exceptionalism is felt in this moment. They were the Chosen People, special to God, with whom He makes his Covenant. They have crafted for themselves an identity in a hostile world that hinges upon their special relationship with God and here is a common man telling them — in their holy synagogue — that unlikely people and outsiders are in fact chosen by God over them, his People. It’s an outrage to them.

    They have missed Christ’s lesson. They could have reasonably reflected upon his words and allowed humility to enter their hearts like Naaman did at the prompting of his servants. Instead, in their rage, they drive him to the outskirts of town with the intention of killing him. This is not a conversion-to-God scene. Worse than missing his lesson or the opportunity to humble themselves before God, they have missed recognizing the Messiah in their midst. They are proving Jesus’s words to be true, that “no prophet is accepted in his own native place.”

    And in a sentence illustrating the massive significance of how they missed knowing him, “he passed through the midst of them and went away.” They miss recognizing Jesus, his lessons, and his new era of living in the light so profoundly that he can just pass through the midst of them. They are literally blind, groping angrily in spiritual darkness, unable to even remember who it was who they are angry with, why they are angry, or what they are doing with themselves there at the edge. (I reflected on a different aspect of this moment last year, considering the Spirit-like movement of Christ out of their midst. Read that reflection in A Prophet in his Own Land.)

    In Lent, we are called to prayer, fasting, and acts of charity (i.e., caritas or agape love). As we turn our attention to the vulnerable, the poor, and the needy, we should find ourselves reaching out to help them in some form or another. We are taught that we participate in God’s love when we act in charity and love, but let’s consider the mindset with which we approach our acts of charity and how that might impact whether we truly participate in God’s love.

    If we do good deeds with an eye on reaping eternal rewards, then this is self-serving.

    If we do good deeds simply because we are convinced it is morally right, without encountering God in the other, then we are spiritually frozen.

    If we do good deeds in an honest way but harbor a hidden feeling of the uncleanliness or lowliness of those we are serving, we are missing Christ in the same way the Nazarenes did.

    We have to become like children, ready to be filled with wonder as we notice God everywhere in creation. We cannot harbor a feeling of superiority, even if we push it down and don’t let it show. We have to humble ourselves before God, embrace our baptism and rebirth, and see that common, unexpected person as likely even more chosen than we are.

    A Shy Peasant (1877), Ilya Repin | Wikimedia Commons.
  • The Radicality of the New Covenant

    The Radicality of the New Covenant

    Third Sunday of Lent: Exodus 20:1-17, 1 Corinthians 1:22-25, John 2:13-25.

    Today we receive the Word of God in its most accepted and unchallenged form (the Ten Commandments) and then it its most radical and challenging — St. Paul bragging of the humiliation of the Cross and Jesus himself blowing up the concept of the Jewish temple as a sacred meeting place with God.

    The scene of Jesus casting out the moneychangers and animals was so serious that the Jews used this as one of the two main charges against Christ in his trial (that he claimed to be God and he wanted to destroy the temple). We need to ask ourselves why Jesus was so radical in today’s gospel and what it tells us about his New Covenant with us.

    Christ Driving the Traders from the Temple (Kristus uddriver kræmmerne af templet), after 1570, from the workshop of Pieter Brueghel the Elder | Wikimedia Commons.

    St. John’s account of this scene occurs at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, unlike the three synoptic gospels where it occurs at the end. To me, this is interesting because it is another example of how John’s worldview is so transformed by Christ. Every event and detail overflow with his divinity; Christ is in control and in his power and glory throughout the gospel of John.

    The first thing that jumped out at me was the whip of cords (a flail or scourge) being used to drive the moneychangers and the animals out of the Temple. Jesus using a scourge on people? A close translation is needed here and unfortunately the Lectionary isn’t exact on this line. The original Greek specifies that the whip was only used on the animals. Here is the scholar David Bentley Hart’s translation: “And, having fashioned a stockwhip out of cords, he drove all of both the sheep and the oxen out of the Temple; he also spilled out the coins and overturned the tables of the moneychangers.”

    So while Jesus undoubtedly uses forceful methods to get the animals and money interests out of the Temple, it is not a depiction of violence against another human. This passage has been used to justify righteous war and violence, not to mention a “muscular” Christianity, and I think these are misunderstandings and poor applications of Jesus’s example.

    Christ’s point here is that they should “stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.” Having animals and moneychangers in the Temple served a very practical purpose. For those who traveled far to reach the Temple at Jerusalem, it was inconvenient and difficult to bring their required animal sacrifice with them. It was much more convenient to be able to buy an animal for sacrifice there. The doves, in particular, were targeted towards the poor and women/widows who couldn’t afford a lamb or ox but who still needed an animal sacrifice.

    Furthermore, Jewish law forbade foreign or secular coinage to be used in the Temple, hence the proliferation of money changers. Jerusalem was both a holy city and a crossroads for many cultures — caravan routes from Asia and Africa crossed there, as well as Gallic and Roman people from Europe thanks to the Roman Empire. The livestock and money changers, therefore, served a very useful purpose. But Jesus is clearly incensed that they are operating there in the Temple.

    We must not mistake his response as a simple desire for Temple purity. Jesus was not overly concerned with the fetishization of purity, as the Pharisees criticized several times (pointing out that his disciples did not fast like they did, nor did he and his disciples fastidiously wash before meals like they did). Instead, I think his point is that the Jews were placing the doing of deeds ahead of the heart-and-soul encounter with God.

    This is consistent with his critique of the Pharisees and scribes: “They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. They do all their deeds to be seen by others” (Mt 23:4-5a). Yes, the livestock and money changers serve a useful purpose but this purpose is not to deepen the faithful’s experience with God. Instead, it is a marketplace of convenience, serving the needs and desires of humans.

    What’s more, those who sold the livestock and changed money made their living in this fashion — essentially profiting from a person’s journey to worship God. This self-serving practice is certainly not fit to occupy a position within the Temple. Perhaps the difficulty of bringing animals to the Temple was part of God’s plan to help people prepare their hearts for meeting him, much like our Lenten sacrifices. Perhaps the prescriptions on Temple coinage also came about purely as part of a bureaucracy of human convenience and desire. 

    The Temple Sacrifice (1995), Zely Smekhov | Image from zely-smekhov.com/

    In this light, it becomes much more clear why Jesus became so upset as to drive off the livestock and command the money changers to leave. This was no longer a dwelling place for the Lord, a sacred temple unto Him. It was simply a place of ritualized practices developed with convenience and efficiency in mind.

    The Jews had reduced the temple to spiritual rubble all on their own. All that was left was for Christ to show the inadequacy and irrelevance of the Temple as he instituted a new temple in his Body and Blood. This was not understood yet, but what was apparent was the pure shock of Jesus’s actions. Any disruption to Temple workings would be an affront to those in power — the scribes, the elders, the Sanhedrin. They held the authority in this place, and this traveling preacher was worth next to nothing in their book. Such actions were tantamount to terrorism in their eyes. Add to this the fact that he was suggesting an end to commerce and the ability for many people to obtain animals for their ritual sacrifices, and the disruptive nature of this act is apparent.

    Yet let’s not get carried away with this image of Jesus’s forcefulness and a promise of temple destruction. That is the same road the Jewish zealots tread with their expectation of the Messiah. God has his own way that does not correspond to human intelligence or intuition; that way is always love and self-sacrifice. We get the first hint of the underlying divine Way and Truth in the midst of this scene when the Evangelist writes, “His disciples recalled the words of Scripture, Zeal for your house will consume me.” This passage comes from Psalm 69, the Prayer for Deliverance from Persecution. Despite what it sounds like — someone being taken over by righteous anger (zeal) and lifted up to a position of power — this scriptural reference is to someone who is greatly persecuted and at the end of their rope, pleading for God’s deliverance.

    There is a real desperation in Psalm 69, which begins, “Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold.” It continues: “Do not let those who hope in you be put to shame because of me … It is for your sake that I have borne reproach, that shame has covered my face … It is zeal for your house that has consumed me; the insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.” In many ways, St. John’s use of this reference early on in his gospel is a foreshadowing of the Passion and Death of our Savior.

    It also helps us connect the final lines in today’s gospel when John tells us that Jesus understood human nature well. His great empathy with us comes from his Incarnation and living a fully human life; he knows life’s temptations and failings. The desperation of Psalm 69 speaks to the common human experience of trying to be faithful to God amid a culture consumed with earthly things. The reference to this psalm underlines the drastic nature of the Temple’s decline in Jesus’s mind, as well as a people so committed to their rituals instead of the presence of God in their midst that they will persecute and kill him. 

    As our gospel continues, the Jews, likely angered and put out, demand from him: “What signs do you show us, since you do these things?” Now, of course Jesus could have healed someone, raised someone from the dead, or performed some other miracle, but we are validating the mindset of the Jews if we think this way. Jesus only does miracles to bring people closer to God, to take away spiritual blindness, to enkindle hope or teach them about spiritual sustenance. The stakes here are not individual journeys of faith but the very locus of faith for the entire human race. The Temple was God’s dwelling place on earth, the most sacred place for humanity. What sign of this magnitude can Jesus give them other than himself? 

    Christ driving the Traders from the Temple (1600), version located in London, El Greco | Wikimedia Commons.

    And so he says, “Destroy this temple and in three days I shall raise it.” I envision him saying this with a quiet calm, in contrast to his other forceful actions. As John tells us, “he was speaking about the temple of his body.” What greater sign could there possibly be than the Resurrection?

    But the import of this exchange between Jesus and the Jews is that this is not just a sign. As we now know, he establishes his Body and Blood as lasting spiritual food, as part of the New Covenant with humanity. The sign of the Resurrection denotes a new reality: the liturgy bursts upon us, divinification is made possible as we walk his Way faithfully, the mystical Church is born, eternal life is made available to humans, and the old Temple is made irrelevant.

    In some ways, I almost think we can read the first part of Christ’s sentence, “Destroy this temple,” as truly referring to the Temple in Jerusalem, almost like a directive to humanity. Yes, destroy this temple because you will no longer need it and its empty, convenience-driven rituals that have made it no longer fit as a dwelling place for God. And, because He is the dwelling place of God on earth, we can understand the destruction of the Temple and his own death as an equivalency. Thus, he will raise his Body, which is and already has been the only real Temple since the Incarnation.

    Imagine the divine responsibility and patience it took for him to know this reality and to attempt to teach it to the Jews in a way they could start to accept. Not only is it a mystery of faith to understand the starting point of the Incarnation and how it has irrevocably changed the entire Jewish religion, but the ongoing work of Jesus in his ministry and acceptance of his own Sacrifice and Death is simply so counter-intuitive to our human conception of power and glory that it needed to be lived out to be believed.

    Thus, we hear John tell us that while he was in Jerusalem, “Jesus did not entrust himself” to all the people who started flocking to him; and John notes that he “did not need anyone to testify about human nature for he himself understood it well.” Because he is fully human and fully divine, Jesus knows how human hearts are fickle and how people can quickly twist signs and prophets to their own ends. He desperately wants to love humanity and bring them close to himself and the Father, but he must operate in the world in a way where his ultimate end as a loving sacrifice for humanity can be accomplished and not thwarted. Again, St. John presents us with a fully in-control Lord who steers himself and his disciples to the New Covenant with single-minded purpose.

    Artist’s illustration of a supernova, iStock

    As I reach the end of my reflection, I’m struck by the radicality of the New Covenant that is Jesus Christ. So much is centered on him, his Body and Spirit. He is the most dense spiritual supernova around which the universe rotates. He is the new Temple, transforming a type of ritual worship centered on a building into a true communion with God that provides real spiritual food.

    No human could imagine such a transformation of the Jewish covenant. It took God to come in person to make this important transformation happen and, in the process, open up for us the gates of Heaven. I suppose this is why we have such a shocking scene as he upsets the entire Temple economy in today’s gospel. How else can we grapple with the sheer upending of our old way of knowing God?

  • People of the New Fruit

    People of the New Fruit

    Friday in the Second Week of Lent: Genesis 37:3-4, 12-13a, 17B-28a, Matthew: 21:33-43, 45-46.

    Today’s readings are truly riches in storytelling and spiritual teaching. The parallels between Jacob’s son Joseph and Jesus Christ abound in their details: both are the favored son, both are sent to help in the tending of the sheep, both are caught up in the drama of jealousy, misunderstanding, and persecution, both are put in a place of containment (Jacob in the cistern, Jesus in our attempts to limit and demarcate the presence of divinity in our lives), both find adoption by an alien people, and both end up being hugely transformative figures despite these challenges, reigning in peace and forgiveness.

    While Joseph is an early Biblical figure who prefigures the life of Jesus, what we encounter in the gospel is that Jesus is pointing beyond Himself to a Church that will grow with Him and help to unite Heaven and earth. We will see how the killed son becomes the cornerstone of an entirely new reality and the vineyard will be given over to new tenants to produce new fruit.

    Joseph, a favorite Son, Sold into Slavery (from an illustrated French manuscript, known as the Crusader Bible or the Morgan Bible, c.1244-1254) | Creative Commons, courtesy Pierpont Morgan Library. MS M.638.

    Before examining the gospel reading, I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the huge role jealousy plays in the first reading. As we explored in Worm of the Soul two days ago, jealousy is a terrible, foundational sin that twists us into unrecognizable beings. Listen to the brothers: “Here comes that master dreamer! Come on, let us kill him and throw him into one of the cisterns here; we could say that a wild beast devoured him. … just throw him into that cistern there in the desert; but do not kill him outright. … What is to be gained by killing our brother and concealing his blood? Rather, let us sell him to these Ishmaelites.” This spiral of evil conspiracy starts with the seed of jealousy, planted in their hearts by the devil. It festers and manifests by calling him names, degrading him. This trick of twisting their minds against their very brother opens the door to seeing him as something other than fully human (much less their brother). Then we hear a sequence of plots and machinations. They have already given themselves over to sin and evil, and this sequence smacks of the guilty desperately trying to find a way not to be found out. We must recognize this tortured logic because we encounter it in ourselves in many ways. Whenever we find ourselves making certain calculations and rationalizations to avoid a certain end, it is a good time to sit up and examine what exactly we are doing. Are we living in the light or are we obscuring our actions because we’re heading down a path of darkness? This is not to say that all situations are easy and straightforward — indeed, many take careful thought and weighing of moral issues — but it is a good reminder in this Lenten season of what our more quiet soul-searching can do for us in a busy modern world.

    Turning to the gospel, Jesus is all-too-aware of the plots and machinations of the chief priests and elders of the temple who want to arrest him. They, too, are already guilty of having sinned in their hearts and turned away from the light. For them, he presents the Parable of the Wicked Tenants.

    Central to the parable is the setting: a vineyard. His listeners would immediately identify the vineyard with Israel since one of the more famous and eloquent passages in Isaiah is “The Song of the Vineyard”:

    Let me sing for my beloved
        my love-song concerning his vineyard:
    My beloved had a vineyard
        on a very fertile hill.
    He dug it and cleared it of stones,
        and planted it with choice vines;
    he built a watchtower in the midst of it,
        and hewed out a wine vat in it;
    he expected it to yield grapes,
        but it yielded wild grapes. …
    For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts
        is the house of Israel,
    and the people of Judah
        are his pleasant planting;   (Is 5:1-2, 7a).

    Isaiah’s verses question why wild grapes have grown rather than choice grapes, and Jesus answers: it is the evil in the tenants who were entrusted to care for the vineyard.

    Against the important backdrop of a vineyard, Jesus weaves a parable that presents the scope of salvation history. First, we see creation: the landlord planted a vineyard, put a hedge, dug a wine press, and built a tower. Next, the election of the nation of Israel as a hope for the world: “Then he leased it to tenants and went on a journey.” Then, we see the long line of prophets who were sent to the people as well as their brutal rejection: “the tenants seized the servants and one they beat, another they killed, and a third they stoned.” Next, we see the time of Christ, when the son comes to “obtain the produce,” but he, too, is killed. Finally, we are given the question about the final judgment: “What will the owner of the vineyard do to those tenants when he comes?” Because it presents the history of God’s work of salvation in a concise allegory, this parable should be precious to us.

    The Wicked Husbandmen (1864), Artist: After Sir John Everett Millais, Engraver: Dalziel Brothers | Creative Commons, courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

    In his masterwork volumes on the gospel of St. Matthew, Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis points out how central to the story (both the allegory and our reality) is the absence of the landowner. God’s physical absence is what makes the life of faith so important and what makes his return so anticipated. In Volume III, Leiva-Merikakis states, “The master’s physical absence is a kind of mystical vacuum that generates a tremendous moral crisis exposing the innermost heart of the tenants, revealing it in all its perversity” (468). Why, in fact, does God leave us to begin with? Leiva-Merikakis points out that the Hassidic answer “is that God must be absent for man’s sake, that is, if man is ever to grow fully into his divine vocation of becoming the eyes and hands and Heart of God in this word, the very dwelling place of God’s glory and truth” (468).

    God’s absence presents us with the choice: either trust in Him, His wishes, and His eventual return, or choose to forget that He was ever here and act like it’s all in our hands to do what we want. Clearly, the wicked tenants in the parable, who Jesus points out are the chief priests and Pharisees, have chosen the second option. 

    But let’s not forget that God cares deeply about his beloved vineyard, the tenants, and the precious fruit he waits for it to bear. That’s why he sends his servants (the prophets) time and again, as well as his son. When Jesus asks the priests and elders what the landlord will do to the tenants, they rightly answer, “He will put those wretched men to a wretched death and lease his vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the proper times.” But God is not focused on the retribution for the wrongdoing. Instead, Jesus replies to their answer unexpectedly. In a gentle redirection, he asks, “Did you never read in the Scriptures: The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; by the Lord has this been done, and it is wonderful in our eyes.” His Good News is that God doesn’t give up on His Son or His vineyard. The “stone that the builders rejected” is presumably the son who is seized, thrown out, and killed (a clear reference to His Passion to come). Jesus puts aside the response of retribution that the elders give Him in order to point out something truly remarkable: the killed son has become the cornerstone. It is also instructive that His scriptural reference continues with by the Lord has this been done, and it is wonderful in our eyes. This is an acknowledgement that something spiritually extraordinary is going on, the good work of the Lord. Thus, the killed son doesn’t just become a martyr who lives on in the people’s memory; no, Jesus is talking about something much more extraordinary: the Resurrection and the bursting of divinity into human history, giving birth to the liturgy and creating the Church.

    The Heir Cast Out of the Vineyard (1855-1856), William Cave Thomas | Creative Commons, courtesy The World of Glass/ArtUK.

    This new reality of salvation happens in the presence, not the absence, of the Spirit of Christ, alive in the world after the Resurrection. This makes us the new tenants in as much as we share Christ with the world. In his high-priestly prayer at the Last Supper, Jesus affirms this aspect of the Church: “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (Jn 17:22-23).

    Leiva-Merikakis elaborates: “When people look for God in a visible form, they will see only each other. When they look for Christ, they will see only Christians. By giving us his own animating and sanctifying Spirit, Christ has entrusted us with everything that is his. No, ‘entrusted’ is not to say enough. Through his death and Resurrection, he has implanted in us a wholly new life, with all the same energies and principles of life that give thrust to his own life” (469).

    If we are in part the new tenants, are we (or our deeds) not also the fruit that the landlord will find? This is the question of all of salvation history: what kind of fruit will the landlord find? God has given us the ability to tend the vineyard through Christ’s Spirit active in our lives, but our deeds and charity, indeed all that we do here on earth are our fruits.

    Can we wisely accept the Spirit of Christ in our lives as a landlord who is present? Or will we continue to act as the Israelites did and conform to the law externally while having no internal relationship to the truth? Each of us this Lent has the opportunity to re-dedicate ourselves to tending the vineyard with Christ and bringing forth the fruits pleasing to the Lord.

    Red Vineyards at Arles (1888), Vincent van Gogh | Creative Commons, WikiArt.org.
  • Tree Beside Running Waters

    Tree Beside Running Waters

    Thursday in the Second Week of Lent: Jeremiah 17:5-10, Luke 16:19-31.

    (Note: this is a lightly edited version of the reflection I originally wrote in 2020 for the Second Thursday of Lent: Beware the Enchantments of the World.) 

    Today, we hear the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus from the gospel of St. Luke. On its surface, this parable seems to warn us of too much enjoyment in this world because we will pay for it later (in Hell). As we dig into the parable, however, we see a deeper problem with the rich man. The connection to the reading from Jeremiah becomes more apparent: the enchantments of this world distract us from God, who is busy giving us plenty of opportunities for redemption by our faith and actions.

    The opening of Jesus’s parable almost sounds like a fairy tale: “There was a rich man who dressed in purple garments and fine linen and dined sumptuously each day.” This opening may tempt us to read it as a simple morality play. But the Truth spoken by the Word of God is not just a self-improvement class. It draws our spirit to dwell with Him, even if it does so via a warning.

    Our gospel passage opens: “Jesus said to the Pharisees…” and in Luke, Chapter 15, He is, in fact, in the middle of talking to them. Let’s back up a few verses to get the full context. “The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all this [his last parable that “You cannot serve God and wealth”], and they ridiculed him. So he said to them, ‘You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of others; but God knows your hearts; for what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God’” (Lk 16:14-15). These parables are specifically for them. We shall see that His criticism of loving money holds true for loving other human desires.

    The Userer, ca. 1766-1774, after George van der Mijn (1721-1763) | Creative Commons, courtesy the British Museum.

    What does today’s parable tell us about the rich man other than his expensive tastes and gluttony? We can glean that he did not seem to give alms of any sort to Lazarus, who would have been glad to have “scraps that fell” from his table. Just two days ago, we heard Jesus saying of the Pharisees: “For they preach but they do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens hard to carry and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them. All their works are performed to be seen.” In the rich man we see the same lack of helping as we do in the Pharisees: he does “not lift a finger” to relieve Lazarus’s suffering.

    He displays his true colors when he finds himself in Hell. Unbelievably, he retains an arrogant sense of self-worth greater than Lazarus when he says, “Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue.” Here the rich man is “in torment,” asking for pity, and he’s still treating Lazarus as a servant or slave! 

    Abraham explains that they are reaping their rewards based on their experiences and actions on earth, and that “a great chasm” separates them. And still the rich man asks, “send him to my father’s house” to warn his family to mend their ways, betraying his continued dismissal of Lazarus as a person with dignity. He sees Lazarus as a tool to be employed for his family’s benefit, arguing with Abraham, “if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.” His sense of superiority and belief that everyone (even Abraham!) should listen to him is astounding, and certainly a pointed example for the Pharisees who were listening.

    The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (1677), Jan Steen | Wikimedia Commons. I particularly like the self-important, dismissive expression of the man holding the goblet in the foreground, which captures the failings of the rich man archetype. Note that the actual rich man from the parable, however, seems to be in the upper right corner, even more removed from humanity in his gluttony. Overall, I appreciate Jan Steen’s painting for focusing on the enchantments of the world, raising a glass to toast today’s enjoyments, oblivious to the judgment that is coming.

     For his part, Abraham at first replies with a certain pity for the rich man, saying, “My child, remember that you received what was good during your lifetime …” This turns eerily neutral after the rich man displays his unrepentant attitude: “They have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them.” And finally he utters some baleful words indeed at the end: “If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead.” This last proclamation can clearly be applied to Christ, who will rise from the dead, and those who refuse to listen are, of course, the Pharisees themselves.

    If we return to the verse that set the context for the parable of the rich man, we can see how the parable illustrates Jesus’s point: “God knows your hearts; for what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God.” Money, gluttony, and other things “of the flesh” take the brunt of the blame, but let’s not overlook that Christ is talking about God knowing our hearts. Love of wealth and being noticed are the “bad fruit” from a diseased tree — “every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit” (Mt 7:15). The tree itself is what concerns God — He wants us to grow strong and beautiful and bear good fruit (i.e., love one another, good deeds), which require nourishment from Him and His precepts. 

    The Rich Man in Hell, Seeing Lazarus Embraced by Abraham, from The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (1554), Heinrich Aldegrever | Creative Commons, courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

    This is where the first reading from Jeremiah is helpful. He employs this same imagery of a tree that is either healthy or diseased, depending on a person’s attachment to God or to the world. He says that he “who seeks his strength in flesh … is like a barren bush in the desert … [that] stands in a lava waste, a salt and empty earth.” Conversely, “the man who trusts in the LORD … is like a tree planted beside the waters that stretches out its roots to the stream … In the year of drought it shows no distress, but still bears fruit.” I love the image of a person strong in the Lord being a plant growing by running waters (also used in the first Psalm), probably because it simplifies life: all you need to make you thrive is the Word of God. What a refreshing thought when compared to all of the other “things” we think we need to do and accumulate in this life. Applying Jeremiah’s imagery to the gospel reading, the Pharisees are the “barren bush in the desert,” removed from the life-giving spring because they reflect everything back on themselves. While they seem rich (in this life), they will find that they are barren spiritually and destitute in the next life. 

    But, look! God gives us endless chances to return to the stream of living water. What was Lazarus but a chance for the rich man to turn his heart to God and practice charity? And what was Lazarus’s suffering but his cross to bear for the salvation of another (even if that other person did not accept the salvation offered to him)? This is God’s prerogative as our Master and Creator. The Word tells us through Jeremiah at the end of today’s reading:

    I, the LORD, alone probe the mind
    and test the heart,
    To reward everyone according to his ways,
    according to the merit of his deeds. 

    This is the work of God to bring us back to unity with Him: probing our minds, providing opportunities to exercise our spiritual muscle, and ultimately rewarding us according to our ways and deeds. As fruit shows us the type of tree, our deeds reveal the heart of the person. Charity comes from a good heart that finds its refreshment in the Lord. Selfishness comes from a heart focused on this world’s enchantments and the self alone. This is why we Catholics insist that our justification (i.e., place in heaven) comes from faith and works, not just faith alone. This teaching is found throughout scripture, no more clearly than today’s readings.

    At the risk of slightly repeating myself, let’s tackle one of the common complaints humans have voiced throughout our history, “why is there suffering in the world?” The parable of the rich man is a great reply to this. For the rich man, God is probing his heart and giving him opportunities to return to the sheepfold. For Lazarus, he must remember that he will be comforted in heaven if he bears his suffering with dignity and a focus on God. What’s more, all of us must remember that God works in ways beyond our immediate knowledge to bring us closer to him. Lazarus is God’s way to reach out to the rich man’s heart. Which of us can truly bemoan the honor of being used by God for a holy purpose, even if it involves our suffering? Was this not the exact example Christ set for us? 

    The Rich Man and Lazarus (The Parables of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ), 1864, Sir John Everett Millais | Creative Commons, courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art. I love this more tender artistic look at Lazarus, who is often sidelined in the story.

    In this vein, let’s finish this reflection with the words of St. Therèse of Lisieux. One of only three female Doctors of the Church, St. Therèse led an incredibly short life, dying at the age of 24 from tuberculosis. She suffered much (even as a child she suffered from mysterious illnesses that left her bed-bound) but bore it with incredible kindness towards others. “As Jesus had made me realize that the Cross was the means by which He would give me souls,” she said, “the more often it came my way, the more suffering attracted me.” What a fantastic attitude towards suffering!

    Since suffering was “attractive” to her as a way of doing God’s will, she saw small sacrifices less as burdens and more like acts of love. She writes, “Miss no single opportunity of making some small sacrifice, here by a smiling look, there by a kindly word; always doing the smallest right and doing it all for love.”

    And, finally, almost as a nod to Lazarus in today’s reading, she writes, “Our Lord’s love shines out just as much through a little soul who yields completely to His Grace as it does through the greatest.” Talk about a tree growing next to life-giving waters! She is a true inspiration.

    Thank you, St. Therèse for giving us such a positive way to understand turning our hearts to God and making suffering a joy to bear for the Lord.

  • Worm of the Soul

    Worm of the Soul

    Wednesday of the Second Week in Lent: Jeremiah 18:18-20, Matthew 20:17-28.

    Today’s readings show the ugliness of jealousy, which St. Cyprian of Carthage calls “the root of all evil.” After examining the readings, I’d like to reflect on St. Cyprian’s Treatise on Jealousy and Envy, which offers some sharp insights.

    The Jews in Jeremiah’s time were tired of hearing his gloom-and-doom prophecies. In the Book of Jeremiah, we read of how his no-holds-barred warnings and criticisms land him in prison, get him beaten, and make him an outcast. Today’s reading shows the inner mindset of the Jews who wanted to discredit and destroy him: “Come, let us contrive a plot against Jeremiah … let us destroy him by his own tongue; let us carefully note his every word.”

    What provokes such evil in the hearts of his countrymen? Jeremiah wonders as much himself: “Must good be repaid with evil that they should dig a pit to take my life?”

    Jealousy (contemporary), Yvonne Wright | Image from pixels.com.

    There are many ways to react to a person who proclaims something upsetting. We can ignore them. We can disagree, perhaps loudly. We can silently listen to their harangue and think about it over time, seeing if there is any truth to it. Or, we can allow our passions to grip us and lash out. If we allow negative passions like anger to build, we begin to desire retribution in a more lasting way. This is the work of evil.

    But another sin may be in play in Jeremiah’s case, specifically jealousy. He is getting attention with his troubling prophecies, and the other priests and Jews are not liking the power and attention he is garnering. If jealousy is in the heart of Jeremiah’s adversaries, we can begin to understand how elaborate plots might develop.

    Jealousy is such an ugly sin that we never want to admit that it grips us. It’s embarrassing because it is such a strong sin, stripping us of everything elevated and good in character. Because it is ugly and embarrassing, we keep it hidden; we plot and the festering evil builds.

    In the gospel, Jesus quickly identifies this sin erupting among the Apostles and stamps it out before it can grow. When the Apostles learn of James and John’s desire to sit at Jesus’s right in Heaven, they “became indignant” and undoubtedly jealous. Jesus’s response is that while leaders in the Gentile world operate by having authority lorded over others, “it shall not be so among you. Rather, whoever wishes to be great among you shall be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave.” Jesus must re-orient them to the goal of the Christian life: to serve and thereby inhabit and spread the love of the Father.

    The entire discussion of greatness and deservedness to sit at the Lord’s right hand is upended. If greatness is defined by being the best slave, then that’s a silly thing to be jealous over. In fact, as soon as you start serving people out of love, the idea of being regarded for one’s own greatness is absurd.

    And so we must ask ourselves what came over the mother of James and John (and them) when the request was made. The three of them are operating under a different mindset than Jesus’s teaching. She wants her sons to be great (and by extension, herself). As Christ points out, in the secular world this greatness comes at the cost of others — one is exalted above others, in fact the only way to know that one is exalted is by seeing others lower than you in status. This entire worldview relies on envy of that exalted status. People are motivated by jealousy over that position, even if it is currently unoccupied. This type of “greatness” will never be aligned with God’s self-giving love because at its heart is inequality and envy.

    This is precisely why Jesus must die in a mode of sacrifice, showing that glory resides not in earthly exaltation above others. He shows that glory can reside in the most detested and shunned of places: the Cross. This is the only world where greatness and God’s love can coexist: where greatness finds itself residing in servitude and sacrifice.

    So as we peel back the layers of motivation behind the persecution of Jeremiah and the yearned-for elevation of James and John, we find the ugly sin of jealousy. We also find this squarely at the heart of the Sanhedrin during the arrest, trial, and Crucifixion of Jesus. Today’s readings are a warning, pointing to the dangers of jealousy, which hides in the motivations by which we live out our lives. Lent is our time to root it out and stop it.

    Modern icon of Saint Cyprian, provenance unknown | Image from pilgrimcenterofhope.org.

    Saint Cyprian, Doctor of the Church, Bishop of Carthage and Martyr, was an African born of noble birth around the year 200 AD. Son of a Roman senator, he was a dissolute pagan in his youth, although well trained in rhetoric, philosophy and law. He converted to Christianity in his middle years. He went to his own beheading willingly in 258 AD after refusing to recant his Christianity during the persecutions of the Emperor Valerian.

    In his Treatise on Jealousy and Envy, St. Cyprian traces jealousy to Satan, “when he beheld man made in the image of God, broke forth into jealousy with malevolent envy— not hurling down another by the instinct of his jealousy before he himself was first hurled down by jealousy, captive before he takes captive, ruined before he ruins others” (4). This sin, therefore, is so powerful that it overcame the devil himself and is associated with the core of his own evil. “Thenceforth envy rages on the earth, in that he who is about to perish by jealousy obeys the author of his ruin, imitating the devil in his jealousy” (4).

    St. Cyprian traces how jealousy is at the heart of tragedies and figures throughout scripture: Cain and Abel, Esau and Jacob, Joseph and his brothers, King Saul and King David, and finally Christ and the Jews. Then, he proclaims that jealousy is, in fact, the source of all the other evils:

    It is the root of all evils, the fountain of disasters, the nursery of crimes, the material of transgressions. Thence arises hatred, thence proceeds animosity. Jealousy inflames avarice, in that one cannot be content with what is his own, while he sees another more wealthy. Jealousy stirs up ambition, when one sees another more exalted in honors. When jealousy darkens our perceptions, and reduces the secret agencies of the mind under its command, the fear of God is despised, the teaching of Christ is neglected, the day of judgment is not anticipated. Pride inflates, cruelty embitters, faithlessness prevaricates, impatience agitates, discord rages, anger grows hot; nor can he who has become the subject of a foreign authority any longer restrain or govern himself. By this the bond of the Lord’s peace is broken; by this is violated brotherly charity; by this truth is adulterated, unity is divided; men plunge into heresies and schisms when priests are disparaged, when bishops are envied … (6).

    We have heard the more memorable, “money is the root of all evil,” but is not money just a vector for envy? Cyprian has some memorable phrases of his own; I particularly like “nursery of crimes” and how jealousy removes our ability to “restrain or govern” ourselves. He has several great phrases at the start of the next section: “what a gnawing worm of the soul is it, what a plague-spot of our thoughts, what a rust of the heart, to be jealous of another, either in respect of his virtue or of his happiness … to make other people’s glory one’s own penalty” (7). Cyprian really brings home how jealousy is primarily a harm to our own selves, our own humanity.

    He says this even more forcefully: “Yet you are the enemy of no one’s well-being more than your own … Wherever you may be, your adversary is with you; your enemy is always in your own breast; your mischief is shut up within; you are tied and bound with the links of chains from which you cannot extricate yourself; you are captive under the tyranny of jealousy” (9). 

    Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time (detail), 1545, Angelo Bronzino | Wikimedia Commons. This figure in the background of the painting is often thought to be Jealousy.

    This does resonate, at least with me. Even just from my adolescent jealousies over love interests, jealousy threatened to be overwhelming. It definitely seemed to act like a tyrant; and a tyrant harming me and my character more than anything else. With this in mind, I think about contemporary secular credos I hear from friends, “as long as I’m not harming anyone else, then it shouldn’t be anyone’s concern.” Do we really want to ascribe to this thinking? Don’t we want to help people who are being ruled by the gnawing worm of the soul, the tyrant of jealousy?

    We are called to bring others to God, and there is no room for someone to move toward God if they are ruled by jealousy. Our love of others and charity should move us to help people overcome their jealousies and envy. So, even if they are harming themselves and not others, it really might be our business and mission as Christians to bring the light of Christ into their lives.

    But, it’s certainly enough for us during this time of Lent to try to identify the sneaky, hiding currents of jealousy in ourselves. Christ gives us many teachings like that in today’s gospel reading to help us overcome jealousy specifically by making it irrelevant. I think that in most cases, jealousy thrives in a worldview that is secular and driven by desires of this world.

    Let’s close with some words of encouragement from St. Cyprian: “Tear out from your breast thorns and thistles, that the Lord’s seed may enrich you with a fertile produce, that the divine and spiritual cornfield may abound to the plentifulness of a fruitful harvest … let all bitterness which had settled within be softened by the sweetness of Christ” (17).

  • Set Things Right

    Set Things Right

    Tuesday of the Second Week in Lent: Isaiah 1:10, 16-20, Matthew 23:1-12.

    The prophet Isaiah utters a simple phrase in today’s reading that might serve as a saying for all of Lent: “Come now, let us set things right, says the LORD.” I love God’s gentleness here, like someone seeking to calm you, reassure you, and just move forward on a new path without dwelling anymore on the past. All the more striking is the fact that it comes in the midst of serious charges of having fallen away from him.

    The ugly truth of our sin and unworthiness does not diminish God’s desire to have us convert back to Him. We shall see that Jesus, too, presents us with this same invitation: “whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” That is, the door to your exultation is open, let’s go.

    The Prophet Isaiah (early 1700s), Antonio Balestra | Wikimedia Commons.

    The “Vision of Isaiah” concerning Judah and Jerusalem was taken down in the early 700s BC, during a low point for Judah. King Ahaz (r. 732-715 BC) had cozied up to the Assyrians, brought their tastes and religious idolatry not just into the country but into the Temple itself. How wicked was he? He also offered his son by fire to Moloch, the Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice. His wickedness did not stop despite many trials, and he even closed schools and houses of worship so religious instruction had to go underground.

    Given the king’s significant turning away from God, we can start to understand the dire warnings in Isaiah. Interestingly, these warnings are not focused on intensifying their forms of worship, which the Jewish priests may have been concerned with, and to this day characterizes the ultra-Orthodox strain of Judaism. In verses 11-14 (omitted from today’s reading), he is clear that these are no longer pleasing to the Lord: 

    I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams
        and the fat of fed beasts;
    I do not delight in the blood of bulls,
        or of lambs, or of goats. …

        Trample my courts no more;
    bringing offerings is futile;
        incense is an abomination to me. …

    Your new moons and your appointed festivals
        my soul hates;
    they have become a burden to me,
        I am weary of bearing them.

    You could imagine that the priestly class would be calling for more sacrifices, more incense, more religious festivals. But Isaiah points out that the problem is the people themselves. His encouragement is for them to “Wash yourselves clean! Put away your misdeeds from before my eyes; cease doing evil; learn to do good.” And in a verse that could come from the mouth of Jesus some 700 years later, he urges them to establish their goodness through works of mercy: “Make justice your aim: redress the wronged, hear the orphan’s plea, defend the widow.”

    The force of today’s first reading, though, is focused on the gentle promise of salvation if the people change their ways and return to God’s commandments and precepts in their hearts. Thinking of yesterday’s reflection about sin and forgiveness, this is another stunning look at God’s economy of love that wipes out debt in sheer mercy and abundance:

    Come now, let us set things right,
        says the LORD:
    Though your sins be like scarlet,
        they may become white as snow;
    Though they be crimson red,
        they may become white as wool.
    If you are willing, and obey,
        you shall eat the good things of the land;

    God is ready to forgive all, to turn our bright red sins into pure whiteness. All that is needed is our willingness and obedience.

    Turning to the gospel reading, we encounter a solid condemnation of the scribes and Pharisees by Jesus. This is interesting, to be sure, but we should avoid interpretations of the type I’ve heard where Jesus is compared to a subversive counter-culture figure. He is not an authority-toppling hippy, despite bad late-20th century interpretations.

    Separated from the reality on the ground by 2,000 years, we tend to simplify the Israel in the time of Christ. We must turn to some true Church scholarship to orient ourselves. Here is a short excerpt from The Christian Centuries, A New History of the Catholic Church, Vol One: The First Six Hundred Years (Part One by Jean Danielou):

    “The study of the primitive Church of Jerusalem has shown the complexity of the Jewish world in which the Church was growing, and the different elements which that framework introduced to it. We have mentioned the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, the Hellenists, but there were also the Herodians and the Zealots, and Justin also names the ‘Gentists, the Merists, the Galileans, the Hellenians, the Baptists.’ The Samaritans are also mentioned” (17).

    The list actually goes on. From this glimpse of complexity, we can learn a few things, primarily that there were many power structures and communities throughout the Jewish world, and the scribes and Pharisees in Jerusalem represent a specific kind. Thus, Jesus’s criticisms must be understood not as a dig at authority in general, but at a specific type of authority that had emerged around the Holy Temple at Jerusalem.

    In fact, while Jews throughout Israel acknowledged the main temple in Jerusalem as the seat of the Holy of Holies, the Ark of the Covenant had long ago been lost, ever since the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in 587 BC. So, while Jerusalem continued to be regarded as the capital of Jewish priestly culture and law, Jews all over the Levant (Holy Land) had their own synagogues and self-sustaining communities. Some only made it to the temple in Jerusalem once in their lives. Meanwhile, Jews in Jerusalem developed a sense of superiority over other Jews. This was particularly evident in the scribes and Pharisees, who were the experts in the law.

    Jesus acknowledges that the scribes and Pharisees “have taken their seat on the chair of Moses. Therefore, do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you.” Let’s remind ourselves that Jesus did not come to abolish the law but to uphold every iota and perfect it (cf. Mt 5:17). But he adds that while they can speak the truth from scriptures while teaching the law, they should not be emulated as people who actually uphold that truth: “do not follow their example. For they preach but they do not practice.” What follows is a sharp critique of how they comport themselves. They tell everyone what they must do but do not help them do it. They embellish their physical appearance, specifically by widening their phylacteries and lengthening their fringes.

    These two examples are important because those things were meant to be a way to keep God’s law close to one’s heart and mind. Phylacteries are boxes affixed to the head and left arm that contain slips of paper with scriptural passages. The tassels on their clothing were commanded in the Book of Numbers by God to be worn as a reminder to keep his commandments. These devices, meant to remind a person to turn inwardly to God, were effectively showed off by the scribes and Pharisees. They were outwardly boasting using the very items meant to turn oneself inward. And then there is the problem of them wanting places of honor at tables and to be called “Rabbi.” We are presented with a picture of insufferable, arrogant, and self-absorbed teachers. 

    Portrait of an Old Man (Possibly a Rabbi), 1645, Rembrandt van Rijn | Creative Commons, courtesy The Leiden Collection

    What is this superiority complex but obsession with power? And this public preening is nothing but pride. Jesus wants to remind us that we are called to the exact opposite. The gospel ends with his words, “you have but one master, the Christ. The greatest among you must be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled; but whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”

    This injunction was admirably lived by the Desert Fathers (and Desert Mothers) who strove to be the best Christians they could a few centuries after Christ. We hear them echo His teachings clearly: “Be always mindful of your sins and do not judge others; rather become inferior to all … If somebody speaks to you about any matter whatsoever, do not argue with him; but [if he speaks well] say ‘yes’ and if he speaks badly, say: ‘You know what you are talking about’ and do not contend with him about how he spoke” (Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Matoes 11). At its heart, this humble way of acting is uncritical of others and generous. It participates in the Way of love given to us by Christ.

    Once you have turned back to the Lord, swept up in his surging wave of love, the soft but insistent voice that you take on needs only to provide a little motivation: “Come now, let us set things right.”

     

  • A Glimpse of Heaven

    A Glimpse of Heaven

    Second Sunday in Lent: Genesis 22:1-2, 9a, 10-13, 15-18; Romans 8:31b-34, Mark 9:2-10.

    Today’s readings demand that we stretch ourselves beyond our comfort zone. Parts of our faith are easy to accept — the Beatitudes, for example — they mirror moral truths we find in other religions and civic systems. But when it comes to actual encounters with God, which are the endgame to which we’re all drawn, I might add, we find some frankly difficult episodes.

    Sure, God is love, but is he also the one who tells a man to sacrifice his own child, and tests him up to the point of the knife going in? That sounds extreme, almost unhinged, to our rational minds. And the Transfiguration includes what some would call ghosts, voices from the clouds, and secrecy pacts. This would be the description of a skeptic, of course. As believers, we have to come face-to-face with the Transfiguration as reality, not make believe; the truth, not a story.

    Sacrifice of Isaac (1635), Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn | Creative Commons, courtesy the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. There are several famous paintings of this moment, but the action captured in this one really strikes me – not just the hand of the angel on Abraham’s arm and the falling knife, but also Abraham’s hand completely covering Isaac’s face, pushing back his head and bearing his neck for the sacrifice. Isaac is clearly depicted as a lamb about to be slaughtered, and the vulnerability is moving.

    Lest we think we have to leave reason by the door as we enter into these moments of faith, there are rational underpinnings to God’s actions with Abraham, the father of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The covenant God makes with him is fundamental for the preparation of humanity for his Son’s entry into history. It’s appropriate, then, that the patriarch understand and commit to the type of love God has in store for his progeny, God’s Chosen People.

    In poker terms, this love is all-in. No chips are set aside, nothing reserved. Today, we read that “God put Abraham to the test,” and not to belabor the comparison, but he needed to see if Abraham would go all-in. Why, we might ask, is this necessary?

    We can’t forget that God’s love allows for our own assent and free will to meet his. He never wants to take away our sovereignty over our own will; if he did, this would be a lesser love that does not respect us as complete beings. Not only that, we would be incapable of truly loving him back. We would be automatons, doing everything he willed like marionettes.

    As God is establishing his People, he needs to have these moments where his leaders, prophets, and other figures exercise their free will in the direction of faith otherwise this spiritual muscle and determination can wither and become weak. I think this is a good way of looking at what the scriptures call “testing” — it is, in fact, a loving act by God to help his chosen ones to grow in faith, to enact and uphold their end of the covenant (this is the definition of “being faithful”). They gain spiritual determination, but perhaps even more importantly they serve as a lasting example and teaching for all of us who follow.

    Who is this God? A God who wants us to come to him, not a God who cackles with sadistic glee by making us march around doing ridiculous and dangerous tasks. Every moment of salvation history is infused with God’s superabundant love. In order to truly understand our scriptures and the Word of God, this must be our starting point.

    This is why all the details are so important in our recorded scriptures. God acts with great purpose in the world and the Holy Spirit guides the pen of the authors of scriptures in order to capture these details faithfully. Two details from the first reading jump out at me today. First, it is what God’s messenger tells him: “Do not do the least thing to him. I know now how devoted you are to God, since you did not withhold from me your own beloved son.” I love how absolute the command is not to “do the least thing” to Isaac, displaying God’s absolute love for His creation. The angel acknowledges Abraham’s devotion to God (most translations write “that you fear God,” meaning you have great reverence, respect, awe, fear, and devotion), specifically because “you did not withhold from me your own beloved son.” As Christians, we see the significance of this episode because God, too, will be sacrificing his own Son (and not stopping it). God is not asking of us anything he is not willing to accomplish himself.

    The second detail that jumps out for me today is the ram. In a verse skipped over in today’s reading, Isaac asks Abraham where the lamb is for the sacrifice. Abraham replies, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son” (Gen 22:8a). This is a sad-but-lovely double meaning for Abraham because in his mind Isaac is himself this lamb led to the slaughter. What prompted him to say it this way? Perhaps it was the Word of God placing this phrasing in his mouth.

    While some scholars see no significance to the fact that a ram was what God provided instead of a lamb, others see a great significance here. I tend to see significance in scriptural details as the Doctors of the Church teach us to. A ram is just an adult sheep while a lamb is a young one, and a ram’s horns make it easier to be caught in a thicket and so be delivered to Abraham. More significantly, we know that ultimately an unblemished lamb will be sacrificed once and for all; John the Baptist tells us, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). The ram can be used for Abraham to sacrifice and save his son from physical death while Jesus, the Lamb of God, will be sacrificed to save us all from spiritual death.

    Agnus Dei (1635-1640), Fracisco de Zurbarán | Creative Commons, courtesy the Museo del Prado, Madrid.

    In the gospel reading, St. Mark’s account of the Transfiguration, Peter, James and John behold this spotless lamb: “he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no fuller on earth could bleach them.” The Transfiguration starts where Abraham finished — they have climbed the mountain with the Son and have found the lamb acceptable to God as a sacrifice. 

    But here God more fully reveals his Truth to humanity. “Then Elijah appeared to them along with Moses, and they were conversing with Jesus.” We are invited, like Peter, James and John, to ask what this could possibly mean. On the mountain — the place of encounter with God since time immemorial — our teacher is transfigured into a vision of purity so dazzling white it hurts the eyes. Clearly he is someone special and this is a great confirmation of our decision to follow him. But now he stands in the company of the greatest law-giver and the prophet who was to return to us, talking with them as an equal would!

    To be on the same level as Moses and Elijah, well, we perhaps didn’t expect such an exalted teacher. Not to mention, these great men are dead and yet here they are, seemingly in the flesh once again and holding a conversation with him. Are they apparitions or spirits? Are we to think that they are there in some sort of resurrected body? Whatever the case, this encounter is miraculous and great. Praise be to God, and how exalted this spiritual encounter must feel to be in the presence of these three great men!

    Thus, Peter says, let’s build a tent for everyone and stay here. This is how Moses welcomed the divine presence of God to stay with them in the desert, obscured by the cloud. The tent has a sacred significance for the temporary dwelling of the divine here on earth. I can relate to Peter here. Have you ever been on a retreat or encountered the sacraments in a way that was extraordinary, when you felt the Spirit of God more palpably than you ever had before? I’ve felt that — like my soul was soaring. And above any other reaction (fear, confusion, uncertainty, nervousness) was the desire to have it continue, to keep that feeling going. Let’s build a tent and stay awhile!

    But this is not the Christian path, always on the move, always in the world. 

    And in response to Peter’s naïve declaration, the Father arrives: “from the cloud came a voice, ‘This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.’” Peter, James and John must have been thunderstruck. Their teacher’s specialness was confirmed in a way that far surpassed any expectation. Moses and Elijah now appear as minor players in the drama where the Father reveals his Son as the unblemished lamb, the Savior. And just as abruptly as Jesus was transfigured before them, it all disappears. Mark writes, “Suddenly, looking around, they no longer saw anyone but Jesus alone with them.” What was the point of having this revelation of the Son in all his Glory only visible to these three men for a few moments on a secluded mountain?

    Today’s Office of Readings gives us an explanation from Pope St. Leo the Great: 

    The great reason for this transfiguration was to remove the scandal of the cross from the hearts of his disciples, and to prevent the humiliation of his voluntary suffering from disturbing the faith of those who had witnessed the surpassing glory that lay concealed. With no less forethought he was also providing a firm foundation for the hope of holy Church. The whole body of Christ was to understand the kind of transformation that it would receive as his gift. The members of that body were to look forward to a share in that glory which first blazed out in Christ their head.

    This is a sharp insight. The Transfiguration occurs towards the end of Jesus’s ministry, shortly after he first shares with his Apostles “that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again” (Mk 8:31). Peter’s response is to vigorously tell Christ not to say such things (and Jesus famously responds, “get behind me, Satan,” pointing out that it is a temptation of course to deny the bitter cup he is asked to drink and he must not be tempted away from the Father’s will). This shows us that there was likely some emotional upheaval going on with the Apostles.

    They had given up everything to follow this man they believed to be the Messiah and he tells them the endgame is great suffering and being killed. Pope St. Leo the Great recognizes the despair that must have gripped the Apostles and the fact that the Transfiguration is God’s way of showing them the truth and glory behind the sacrifice before it was made. It is a glimpse of Heaven. This vision, imprinted on the very hearts of Peter, James and John, gives them the image of their faith to share with everyone else in their time of darkest despair after the Crucifixion. Christ always is this immaculate lamb, even when pierced and covered with blood and hanging from the cross. It is his core being, the Truth. To this day, this gives us our undimmable Christian hope for our reunion with our undefeatable Savior.

    The Transfiguration of the Lord (mosaic, Church of the Transfiguration, Mount Tabor, Israel), 1924, Umberto Noni | Wikimedia Commons. The caption is Latin for “And he was transfigured before them.”

    When we recognize the great purpose and significance of the Transfiguration, it helps us start to digest and accept the wondrous event as it took place. But no less than the Resurrection itself, we are called to believe this without seeing it with our own eyes. Doubting Thomas would (without a doubt) doubt the Transfiguration as much as the bodily Resurrection of our Savior. God’s question to us is the same as it was to Abraham: are you all-in?

    Our faith demands ever fiber of our minds, bodies, and souls. We must give ourselves back to our Creator, in love, in order to enter the Kingdom. This is the same action of Christ, giving himself wholly back to his Father in love. If we are called to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, we are also called to believe in his bodily Resurrection, his Ascension into Heaven, and his Transfiguration on the Mountain that revealed his Glory to the apostles to plant the seed of faith, hope, and love in the Church.

  • Asking for God’s Help

    Asking for God’s Help

    Thursday in the First Week of Lent: Esther C: 12, 14-16, 23-25, Matthew 7:7-12.

    Today, we hear Jesus tell us “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” Christians have reflected on these words since the earliest days of the Church, and our perspectives have ranged from awe over a responsive God to expectations of a vending-machine deity. God is decidedly not a vending machine or djinn in a lamp, granting wishes. The key to understanding Jesus’s words is to put today’s gospel reading in context.

    This reading is a small excerpt from the magnificent Sermon on the Mount, which stretches from Matthew 5:1 to 7:29, three full gospel chapters. It opens with the Beatitudes, includes the Lord’s Prayer, and ends with dire warnings over not aligning oneself interiorly to God. This is one great teaching, and cherry picking a saying here and there, while easy to do, greatly misrepresents the complex threads of his teaching.

    Old Man Praying (1665-1670), Gerrit Dou | Creative Commons, courtesy The Leiden Collection.

    There are several passages that specifically warn against a flippant, easy way of asking God for what you want. The most direct might be: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?’ Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.’” (Mt 7:21-23). This is a person calling out — asking, seeking, knocking — but the answer is unimaginably awful. Christ tells this person, “go away from me, you evildoers.”

    Doesn’t this contradict the excerpt from today’s gospel? Jesus explains the crucial qualifier: only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven will enter the kingdom. Another aspect of this passage that jumps out at me is when he says, “I never knew you,” to the person clamoring to enter the kingdom. Getting to know Christ is an absolutely essential part of our Christian journey. There simply is no salvation unless we acknowledge him as God, walk alongside him, and ask him to intercede for us to receive God’s mercy.

    This Christian journey happens as we live the liturgy, both sacramentally in our sacred spaces and practically in our secular spaces. And at the heart of today’s reading is a particular aspect of the journey: prayer. Our asking, seeking and knocking are ways we appeal to God through prayer.

    But let’s not get this backwards — anything we ask God in prayer is already a response to Him having first reached out to us. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “God calls man first. Man may forget his Creator or hide far from his face; he may run after idols or accuse the deity of having abandoned him; yet the living and true God tirelessly calls each person to that mysterious encounter known as prayer” (2567). He gave us prophets, he gave us revelation, he gave us his Son, he gives us miracles; in short, he has provided the reason to believe in him and a reason to call out to him for help.

    The question is, are we coming from a place where we are his humble servants, begging to know his will? Or are we instead coming from a place where we’ve already identified an outcome we want and are asking him to fulfill it? I want a good grade, a healthy dog, a politician to change his views, etc. In these scenarios, we have supplanted his will with our will. It’s easy to do — something, in fact, we’re much more likely to do than not because patiently, quietly, humbly discerning God’s will takes lots of prayer and lots of practice.

    Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that asking for a good grade or a healthy dog is a bad thing. In fact, it is a sign that we want to bring God into our daily travails, to live with him and his help in everything. My gripe (to be honest – that’s what it is) is the all-too-common contemporary response we hear when people don’t get what they want. “How could God do that to me?” is the gist of this response.

    And sometimes it’s such a violent response when dealing with things like life, death, and suffering, that people decide to push God out of their lives, stop “being Catholic” (which is impossible, BTW, once you’ve been baptized into the Church), or even deny His existence. This is as transparently the work of Satan as it gets; we can practically see him sitting on the shoulder of these people prompting them to put their will ahead of God’s, to react with anger over outcomes they set for themselves, to blame God, and to ultimately decide to deny Him. We must avoid these things at all costs.

    And Jesus teaches us how to orient ourselves appropriately right here in the Sermon on the Mount. The Lord’s Prayer is the pinnacle of how to pray to our Father and the way to orient ourselves. Let’s recall our first two petitions at the beginning of the prayer, after acknowledging his holiness: “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done …” We are asking, before all else, to hasten to the Kingdom of God. This does not mean that we are asking for death or for the end of the world, but for unification with God, which can happen while in this world as the saints show us.

    Do we believe this when we say it? Is this the thrust of our lives — to hasten to the Kingdom above all else? If it is, then earthly concerns take on a decidedly lower importance.

    The second request to God is that his will is done here on earth like we know it is in heaven. Christ repeats this many times throughout his ministry and lives it by willingly going through his Passion and Death according to the will of his Father. Jesus can’t stress enough for us how important this aspect of prayer and faith life is for us. God’s will — often unknowable and veiled — is something we hope to discern; but regardless of fully knowing, it is something we desire to be realized in the world.

    That’s real trust, you might say, and yes, it is! But there is nothing better to want than the will of Goodness itself, of Love itself, of Wisdom and Justice itself. The Lord’s Prayer teaches us to align ourselves with his will, feed ourselves on the spiritual food of his Word and worry less about this world and more about our spiritual well-being.

    Jesus reiterates this a few verses later: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? … But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Mt 6:25, 33). Ahh, what a salve for our constant worry! Our Lord tells us not to worry about our lives and earthly things but to “strive first” for the Kingdom and God’s righteousness, then everything else will fall into place.

    Woman in Prayer (contemporary), by Maria Magdalena Oosthuizen | Image from pinterest.com.

    So, let’s return to today’s gospel reading with the broader context of the Sermon on the Mount in mind. When Jesus says, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you,” I have to believe that he has something specific in mind. He has already told us to be humble petitioners yearning for the Kingdom, so what we are asking for is ultimately for God’s will to be done, if not understood. What we are seeking is his guidance in our lives. And we are knocking on his door in that response to his invitation to know him — we are knocking because we want his grace and love to overwhelm us in our lives.

    And just like we know how to give good gifts to our children, “how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him.” Let’s just not imagine that we know what those good things are or when we’ll receive them, if ever in this world. Our humbleness dictates that we to not presume to put our desires or will ahead of the supreme will.

    Does Jesus direct us only to ask for God’s will to be done and nothing else? Not exactly, although I think he emphasizes that this should be first in our order of operations. Once we start to know God and love him, we can become instruments of his love in this world and that’s where charity comes in. We can bring our petitions on behalf of others, which come about because of God’s love working through us and manifesting as charity, thanks to “that mysterious encounter known as prayer.”

    And so in the Beatitudes, Jesus says, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Mourning is an act of charity for the souls of the departed. Also: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” This hunger and thirst for righteousness is not just one’s own perfection but a desire for God’s justice for others in the world. And, of course, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.” The mercy that we pour out for our fellow humans is absolutely an act of charity, and God rewards us in the Kingdom for this.

    But let’s remember the order of operations here: 1. Love God first; ask for His will to be done, seek for His guidance, knock on His door for grace; and then: 2. Love your neighbor; ask for God’s love to pour through you to them, seek for their good, knock on His door to grace them. All of our Christian attitude and prayer is outwardly focused, not inwardly. May we remember this!

    I don’t want to miss saying a few words about the lovely reading from Esther. Here are my thoughts as recounted from last year’s reflection. For me, the Book of Esther is a bit of an odd duck in the Old Testament. It’s a great story explaining the establishment of the Jewish holiday of Purim, but the colorful narrative of ironic reversals and high-stakes changes of fortune remind me of a Shakespearean play. The setting is Babylon, and while many Jews have started to return to Israel after the Babylonian Captivity officially ends, Esther and her uncle Mordecai are some of those who remain. She’s not presented as particularly devout, and her most striking asset is her beauty, which gets her chosen as Queen after “trying out” with many other young virgins in the harem.

    But her secularism changes when the king is convinced to pass an edict that all Jews in the kingdom “shall all—wives and children included—be utterly destroyed by the swords of their enemies, without pity or restraint, on the fourteenth day of the twelfth month, Adar, of this present year.” Mordecai asks Esther to intercede with the king. In a passage before the one read today, Mordecai implores her not to “keep silence at such a time as this,” and says, “Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.” 

    The rub is that no one can come into the king’s presence without being summoned or they are killed. So in order to ask for him to change the edict, Esther must take her life in her hands. But, Esther is convinced that action is needed. And — praise the Lord — the action she takes begins with God. She responds to Mordecai: “Go, gather all the Jews to be found in Susa, and hold a fast on my behalf, and neither eat nor drink for three days, night or day. I and my maids will also fast as you do.”

    Queen Esther (1878), Edwin Long | Wikimedia Commons.

    This is where we join today’s reading. Esther, alone and “seized with mortal anguish,” falls back on the faith of her people. She covers her head with ashes and dung and utterly humbles every part of her body. Clearly, her prayer is fervent and sincere. It takes the form of both petition to help her find the right words and intercession, to save all of the Jews from slaughter. It seems to me that this reading is included in our Lectionary as a reminder of the sincerity with which we should pray to our God when we ask for his help. Also, it shows us that she is moved by charity, not selfish concerns, something that prefigures what Christ will eventually set up as the paradigm for His Church.

     

  • Something Greater Is Here

    Something Greater Is Here

    Wednesday of the First Week of Lent: Jonah 3:1-10, Luke 11:29-32.

    We are steeped in the importance of Christology with today’s readings. In his 1998 Encyclical Letter, Fides et Ratio, Pope Saint John Paul II writes, “The word of God reveals the final destiny of men and women and provides a unifying explanation of all that they do in the world” (81). Do we really understand that the incarnate Word of God is this important?

    Do we interpret all of history through Christ or do we think that he’s just one voice among many holy voices?

    Today’s readings lead us to reflect on Christ, the “Something Greater,” who came to earth. Note that the reflection below is a lightly edited and revised version of the one I posted last year on this day in Lent.

    Today’s readings trace the Word’s presence among several faithless generations as an agent of conversion to God. The first reading tells us of Jonah and the Ninevites. The short Book of Jonah is as rich a study of human error as it is brief in length. The reading we receive today is the entirety of Chapter 3, one quarter of the whole Book of Jonah. It occurs after Jonah has already tried to flee God’s command to warn the people of Nineveh, after he is swallowed by the giant fish for three days and then spit back up on land after his prayer of distress from the belly of the fish. In other words, we encounter a man who believes in God but is unwilling to do His work. God puts him through trials to purify his heart, and Jonah finally realizes his indebtedness to God and converts to do the work he is asked. Many of us live a parallel relationship with God.

    Jonah and the Whale (Jonas uitgespuwd door de walvis), 1621, Pieter Lastman | Wikimedia Commons.

    Note that the beginning of today’s reading is specific about who speaks to Jonah: “the word of the LORD,” that is, the Son of God. The Word of God is patient with Jonah, willing to put up with Jonah’s reluctance to show us how we can be His instruments in the world. While Nineveh would have taken three days to walk through, the people listen to Jonah on just his first day, much to his surprise. In fact, everyone, king included, puts on sackcloth, fasts, repents, and asks God to be spared. Jonah, unwilling and unwitting as he is, has done the Lord’s work and brings about a miraculous change in the people that saves them.

    (As an aside, Chapter 4 of Jonah is worth revisiting if you haven’t read it lately. We see a pouting Jonah get angry with God because he was made to look like a fool since his warning did not come true. He just doesn’t understand that he should rejoice over the success of his warning and God’s resulting mercy. God gives him one last lesson in the matter. Jonah is so relatable!)

    In the gospel reading, Jesus recalls Jonah’s work as well as the Jewish King Solomon as a way to show his contemporaries that they are completely missing God in front of them. Christ says,

    At the judgment
    the queen of the south will rise with the men of this generation
    and she will condemn them,
    because she came from the ends of the earth
    to hear the wisdom of Solomon,
    and there is something greater than Solomon here.

    Let’s take a moment to recall this piece of Jewish history as related in the 1st Book of Kings, Chapter 10 .  After he takes the throne, King Solomon displays that he truly loves God and makes many sacrifices to Him. He is then visited by God in a dream and told: “Ask what I should give you.” Solomon asks for wisdom to best govern God’s people. It pleases God greatly that Solomon’s petition was not selfish but for the benefit of the nation. The Word of God replies, “Indeed I give you a wise and discerning mind; no one like you has been before you and no one like you shall arise after you.” (Note that the Book of Wisdom in the Bible is also known as the Wisdom of Solomon).

    What is the Wisdom of God? St. Thomas Aquinas tells us (and the Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes this), “In God, power, essence, will, intellect, wisdom, and justice are all identical. Nothing therefore can be in God’s power which could not be in his just will or his wise intellect” (CCC 271). Wisdom is part and parcel of God’s intellect and power. And God shares his Wisdom through his Word, which is Truth. Therefore, the Word of God, who is Christ, is the expression of Wisdom, and was a constant companion of Solomon.

    Back to our passage, “the queen of the south” is the Queen of Sheba (Sheba is thought to be either modern-day Yemen or Ethiopia). She hears of Solomon’s fame and “came to test him with hard questions.” She brings a huge retinue with loads of treasures and precious spices. She’s very skeptical, but after speaking with him and seeing firsthand how he rules, she exclaims, “The report was true that I heard in my own land of your accomplishments and of your wisdom, but I did not believe the reports until I came and my own eyes had seen it. Not even half had been told me; your wisdom and prosperity far surpass the report that I had heard.” She bestows great treasures upon him.

    To recap: the Ninevites and the Queen of Sheba are Gentiles (non-Jews) who come to believe thanks to a Jewish figure who walks with the Word of God and does God’s will. Is this not exactly Jesus’s mission as He establishes the Church? First, he starts with the Chosen People but then opens the gates of the Kingdom to all humanity. The point in today’s passage is that if Gentiles can be converted — those who don’t even know the rich history of the Chosen People’s walk with God over the centuries — then how bad is it that Jews themselves can’t listen to the Word of God right in front of them? To be condemned by the Queen of Sheba and the Ninevites is ignominious indeed!

    The Queen of Sheba (1911), Edmund Dulac | Image from The Cleveland Museum of Art.

    Jesus does not call them an evil generation because of a general lack of faith in God or a betrayal of his commandments, but because of their lack of faith in Him. He says, “At the judgment the men of Nineveh will arise with this generation and condemn it, because at the preaching of Jonah they repented, and there is something greater than Jonah here.” Yes, that something greater is the Word of God in the flesh. Unlike the warnings of the prophets in the Old Testament, who were mainly concerned with those disobeying God’s laws, Jesus has a very specific condemnation related to not believing in his divinity.

    Why is this so important? Because the New Covenant given to us — our new Baptism — relies on the faith that God himself has made a sacrifice in the form of a human in order to open up a new reality of communion with Him. If we don’t believe that Jesus is God, then we are closing the door to our own salvation. 

    But Christ proclaims, “no sign will be given it [this generation], except the sign of Jonah.” This has at least two levels of meaning. First, the sign of Jonah is a call to repentance. Jonah’s words that scared an entire city and its king into wearing sackcloth and begging for mercy were, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” Christ gives this same sign to the Jews, and the earthquake that shakes the temple and the curtain of the Holy of Holies being torn in half do indeed overthrow the Old Covenant. The new Jerusalem is born: it is the resurrected body of Christ.

    Second, we have to understand that the “sign of Jonah” was also understood as a positive thing. God goes out of his way to cure Jonah of his bitterness and vengeful nature at the end of the Book of Jonah. In the gospel reading, Jesus makes a distinction between Jonah’s words and the overall sign that he became: “Just as Jonah became a sign to the Ninevites, so will the Son of Man be to this generation.” The good news here is that the Ninevites listened to Jonah. He did, in fact, save them from destruction. His words were those of condemnation, but the result was repentance. Thus, the overall “sign” Jonah represents is conversion. Christ is letting them know that He is a sign from the Father, who wants them to repent and see His Son. That sign is a hopeful one of conversion and deliverance.

    The third level of meaning in the “sign of Jonah” is the one least expected by the Jews. What do we usually associate with Jonah? The whale! He spends three days in the belly of the whale and then is miraculously spit up on the beach. This is the sign of resurrection. What a sign to receive! And, truly, that sign of Jonah launched the Church as the Body of Christ that exists to this day and will exist forever.