Tag: Isaiah

  • Why Should We Do Good Works?

    Why Should We Do Good Works?

    5th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Isaiah 58:7-10, 1 Corinthians 2:1-5, Matthew 5:13-16.

    Doing good works, especially for those who are in great need, is at the core of the Christian life. Jesus not only preaches this (Parable of the Good Samaritan, Parable of the Sheep and Goats, etc.), but he also demonstrates it by doing the greatest work of all — providing salvation for the entire human race.

    The Good Samaritan, Eugène Delacroix (1849) | Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia.

    This is not to say that Christianity as a religion is only about doing good works. It is clearly about much more, most especially God’s revelation of himself to us in the form of the Word of God incarnate, through whom, in whom and for whom, all Creation is made. The centrality of Jesus Christ’s Incarnation, ministry, suffering, Crucifixion, Resurrection and Ascension (all of which we could call the “Christ Event”) to all of humanity and to each of us individually is truly the core of Christianity.

    But the scriptures tell us that the Christian life — that is, how we go about living in this world while we await the infinitely greater one we hope to inhabit with God — is one that should be lived in service to others.

    Today’s readings afford us the opportunity to ask why. Why does God want us to do good works?

    The question might seem like a no-brainer — we do good works in order to get to Heaven, right? But Christians have been arguing over this particular issue for centuries.

    The Theological Fuss Over Salvation and Justification

    “Getting to Heaven” is an informal way to refer to salvation. There is another term, justification, that is related to the larger concept of salvation, but refers to that moment when God declares a person to be “not guilty” or “acquitted of guilt.” The reason we pay attention to these two terms is that St. Paul uses them, especially in his Epistle to the Romans. In one passage, for example, he writes, “… now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God” (Romans 5:9). I want to take a moment to examine good works in relation to salvation (“getting to Heaven”) and justification because this is one of the big debates that was brought up in the Protestant Reformation.

    In his Epistle to the Romans, Paul is not terribly precise in describing justification, despite the fact that he spends a lot of time discussing it. In the passage above, he states that Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross is the thing that justifies us: “we have been justified by his blood.” Yet a few verses earlier, Paul writes that Jesus “was handed over to death for our trespasses and was raised for our justification” (Romans 4:25). Here, it seems that the Resurrection was the vehicle for our justification, not the sacrifice on the Cross. More fundamentally, he writes that “since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:23-24). This is a more comprehensive statement and the one he really cares about, that we are justified by God’s grace, and this grace manifested itself through all the divine works of Jesus Christ (including his sacrifice on the Cross and his Resurrection).

    This point is not debated between Catholics and Protestants, despite some confusion. Both profess the same belief that the moment of being pronounced “acquitted” by God (aka, justified) is accomplished solely through God’s grace and no effort of our own. It’s beyond our ability to acquit ourselves before God — it took the divine Son of God to take on our humanity and accomplish this for us.

    Of course the issue is that we continue to sin, so despite this initial divine help in justifying us, the question remains: could we lose our salvation by turning away from God? Is there a way for us to secure our salvation?

    In the early 1500s, a German priest and theology teacher at the University of Wittenburg named Martin Luther made waves in the Church, preaching about this technical term, justification, and offering his opinion on this matter. Luther had become obsessed with the letter to the Romans, writing, “This epistle is in truth the chief part of the New Testament and the purest Gospel.” This should strike us as a bit of a red flag, in that none of the epistles are the actual Gospel, but inspired instruction to the faithful — certainly not “the chief part of the New Testament”! Yet Luther latches onto some of St. Paul’s statements in the epistle and doesn’t let go, unable to weigh them in the balance of all of scripture and achieve the appropriate perspective for orthodox theological teaching.

    One of Luther’s main objectives in his Preface to the Epistle of the Romans is to argue that our righteousness before God comes through faith alone, not through works. To accomplish this, he puts forth an imbalanced definition of faith, not in line with Catholic teaching then or now. He writes, “faith is a divine work in us, which transforms us, gives us a new birth out of God … Oh, it is a living, energetic, active, mighty thing, this faith. It cannot but do good unceasingly” (16). Luther overemphasizes the divine origin of the theological virtue of faith, to the point where it becomes an “active, mighty thing” all on its own, doing good seemingly without any tether to the person. He writes scathingly about people who doubt if faith is enough and go about doing good works as a way to “become godly.” He says their notions of faith are erroneous and a “human figment” (15).

    Contrast this with the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which teaches that faith is both a grace and a human act: “In faith, the human intellect and will co-operate with divine grace”; at this point, the Catechism quotes St. Thomas Aquinas, whose writings already heavily influenced the Church by Luther’s time: “Believing is an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth by command of the will moved by God through grace” (155).

    Luther is having none of this.1 He imagines faith as a type of superpower: “Faith is a living, daring confidence in the grace of God … [which] makes a person happy, bold, and full of gladness in his relation to God and all creatures.” He adds that faith makes a person “willing and enthusiastic to do good to everybody, to serve everybody.” His conception of faith prompts him to make the claim that “it is impossible to separate works from faith, just as impossible as it is to separate the power to burn and shine from fire” (18). Not only does this fly in the face of human experience (clearly, it’s possible to have great faith but not have the physical ability or opportunity to do works, and just as clearly you can do good works but have zero faith in God), it also disagrees with how the Apostles, Church Fathers, saints and popes have talked about faith and works.

    St. Gregory of Nyssa puts it plainly: “Faith without works of justice is not sufficient for salvation; neither is righteous living secure in itself of salvation, if it is disjoined from faith” (Homilies on Ecclesiastes, 8 [ca. A.D. 335- 394]). Why Luther chose to disagree with so many Fathers of the Church and the teaching of the Magisterium is beyond me. But, to this day, Protestants continue to choose this hill to die on.

    In short, Luther elevates faith to the level of a divine force (as opposed to simply having a divine origin) in order to make it easier to swallow the claim that justification and salvation come from faith alone. The implications of his definition of faith enable him to write, “all good works are merely external signs flowing from faith and, as good fruits, attesting that a person is already inwardly righteous in the sight of God” (26). While good works can be a sign of strong faith and good fruits of faith, not all good works find their source in faith. His diminishment and disdain for good works find their punctuation in the word merely.

    The implications of this philosophy is that our lives and actions are divorced from divine, supernatural realities. Our works are just external signs of this supernatural faith that seems to leave out any potential for free will, concupiscence or any number of things that make us human. And, it has more than a little of the old gnostic heresy that calls the body bad and the spirit the only good.

    OK, enough of Luther and this foray into “faith alone.” As the Church reminds us, God invites us, urges us, enchants us, fills us with awe — all so that we respond. We are called to respond with our will, our intellect, and our acts.

    Do Good Works Earn You Anything?

    Luther’s legacy has given Protestants a firm belief that good works can earn you nothing. Yet the Church Fathers like Gregory of Nyssa are clear: faith and works contribute to God’s decision over the fate of our souls. This is the orthodox teaching of the Church.

    But that doesn’t mean that the point of good works is to earn salvation. Perhaps they do help us achieve ultimate union with God; but maybe they do more.

    Turning to today’s readings, we encounter some intriguing suggestions. God shares his wisdom through the mouth of Isaiah, encouraging us to do good works like feeding the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and homeless, clothing the naked and not turning our backs on our family and neighbors. What does God do in response?

    Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
    and your wound shall quickly be healed;
    your vindication shall go before you,
    and the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.
    Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer,
    you shall cry for help, and he will say: Here I am!

    We are given a key image here: light. Jesus speaks to this in the gospel reading, and we’ll return to this below. Other things are happening — things that impact us here and now in this life. When I hear “your wound shall quickly be healed,” I think of emotional and psychological wounds. There is something about charitable works that heals the doer as much as the recipient.

    More importantly, we are told that good works bolster our relationship with God. As God stands by our side and acts as our rear guard, our faith can strengthen. As our faith and reliance on him grows, he answers when we call.

    The Lord adds one more thing at the end of this reading: “then light shall rise for you in the darkness, and the gloom shall become for you like midday.” How important this light is! The scene is spectacular if we picture it: the person doing good deeds has an internal light that flows forth like the dawn, and at the same time another spiritual light rises within that person’s life, enlightening them in their spiritual darkness.

    How else to describe the influence of God, other than light? It’s hard to pinpoint, but overwhelming in its impact, it’s warmth, it’s omnipresence. Note that this does not deny the fact that the fallen world holds “gloom” for us; doing good deeds, however, makes that gloom seem like midday, because we have brought God into the world. It enables us to not just endure the gloom of a fallen world, but to encounter it differently. By living in the light, the world no longer holds its terror.

    So, the point of good works might be more immediate than earning eternal salvation. This reminds me of a discussion I had recently with my brother that involved the distinction between Heaven and the Kingdom of God. Heaven — that ultimate resting place where we hope to dwell in the eternal Father’s presence — is different from the Kingdom, it can be argued. Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God movingly in his parables, and it is something more immediate to which we have access. The Kingdom is “happening now,” in our midst, while Heaven is that long-sought-after final home. Jesus’s description of the Kingdom of God is not that of a physical place or jurisdiction (like the Kingdom of Thailand, or the United Kingdom) but that of an active presence of a King, almost like an existential state of living under the power and rule of a king.

    The Kingdom, we might consider, is this spiritual light that God tells us about. This light is the presence of the king. Remarkably, here in the passage from Isaiah, He even tells us that doing good works helps to manifest the Kingdom!

    Thus, another way of considering good works, when done with faith in God and out of love for him, is that it enables us to share in his Kingdom. He has implanted in humanity a way to channel his transcendent love by using our will, intellect and very bodies — and this seems to enable the divine light to grow in us and illuminate us from without.

    Today’s psalm echoes this important lesson, with the refrain, “The just man is a light in darkness to the upright.” This light in the darkness is clearly more than just a helpful physical thing: it’s a spiritual light. In the same way, the good deeds done by this just man are about more than just clothing, food, and physical aid. The good deeds are ultimately (perhaps primarily) about spiritual aid in a fallen world.

    The light we read about in these passages is a little peek into the dynamic love that flows between the persons of the Trinity. This divine love, this divine light, might seem impossible to experience in this life, but Jesus dispels this doubt in today’s gospel reading.

    We are told that Jesus tells his disciples, “You are the light of the world.” Let’s return with fresh ears to this familiar saying from Jesus. He and his disciples knew the prophecy of Isaiah quite well. They would have known that good works, in particular, make “your light break forth like the dawn.” During his ministry, he gave them even more wisdom and spiritual power to bring forth light in his name. So, when we reach the final teaching he provides in this episode, we can see how doing good works continues to be at the heart of living a Christian life: “your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.”

    He gives us an answer here to that question, why should we do good works? The answer is that these works bring God’s transcendent, divine light into the world, and this light dispels darkness, turning gloom into midday, spreading spiritual encouragement, and — ultimately — bringing people into right relationship with the Father, glorifying him. In short, the reason is the salvation of souls. Doing good works brings salvation to others by bringing them into contact with God’s light.

    Note that these are his beloved disciples he’s talking to. Thus, the component of faith is also present. We have the conditions of faith and good works coming together.

    So perhaps the whole theological fuss was beside the point. It’s not about what good works earn for the doer, but what they do for the world, the watchers, the recipients, the skeptics. Justification is certainly brought about by grace alone, specifically through Jesus Christ, but the fact that our good works do not justify us does not diminish their importance in bringing about the Kingdom of God and doing his will.

    Doing. Not just passively receiving. Not burying in the ground these talents we received.

    1Paul was not writing a theological treatise on the concept of justification, so Luther’s commentary is taking Paul’s words a bit out of context. He was more concerned with the issues gripping early Christian communities, particularly whether non-Jewish converts to the faith needed to be circumcised, according to Old Testament practices. He is adamantly against this prescription and successfully argues so that it was formally upheld in the First Council of Jerusalem, AD 48-50.

    The way he makes his argument in the Epistle to the Romans is by asking whether doing things according to the Law (like circumcision) provided salvation, or if instead it was faith in Jesus Christ that saved people. He notes that Jews who are circumcised are just as likely to be denied Heaven as anyone else. It’s not the physical circumcision — the deed, or “work” of the law — that justifies them. As he writes, “real circumcision is a matter of the heart—it is spiritual and not literal” (Romans 2:29). He asks if it was the stuff that Abraham did that justified him or if it was his faith and fidelity to God that made the difference. He quotes the Old Testament, writing, “Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness” (Romans 4:3). “Reckoned to him as righteousness” is another way to say “he was justified.”

    Paul goes on to discuss how adherence to the law does not justify anyone, but “it depends on faith.” Luther latches onto Paul’s diminishment of “works under the law” (like circumcision) in favor of faith — taking it out of this context of belonging to the community and applying it to the broader question of individual salvation.

  • Feasting and Recognizing God

    Feasting and Recognizing God

    Wednesday in the 1st Week of Advent: Isaiah 25:6-10a, Matthew 15:25-37.

    In today’s readings, we encounter a stunning prophecy of the Christ Event from Isaiah and a passage from the gospel that aligns exactly with this prophecy. I’m going to focus mainly on the Isaiah passage before finishing with a connection to the gospel, so if you haven’t read the Isaiah passage, you might want to check it out now.

    In this short passage from Isaiah, he points out three aspects of the coming Reign of God: He will provide for us rich sustenance, He will remove a “veil that veils all peoples,” and we will recognize and praise Him. Let’s take these in turn.

    First, God’s sustenance might be spiritual, but the image used by Isaiah is very earthly: “A feast of rich food and choice wines, juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines.” I love the repeated sentence here, with an intentional emphasis pointed out by the adjective “juicy” for the rich food and “pure” for the choice wines. What he seems to be pointing out is that God is not just going to provide a basic level of sustenance but instead a feast of the very finest things. Psychologically for Christians, this is a nice counterbalance to the ascetic life that shuns fleshly desires, as insisted upon by St. Paul, the desert Fathers, the saints of the medieval period and so many more of our Doctors and saints in the Church. These holy men and women would certainly agree with Isaiah and his description here, but would likely say that restraining ourselves from desires while on the earth is necessary to forge our spirit in Christ’s image; plus, it will make the great heavenly feast of the kingdom all the more richly appreciated. Yet we must admit that the enjoyment of feasting is something not altogether bad, or else God would not be employing this image to describe His Kingdom. One might argue that a Christian might properly enjoy moments of feasting in this lifetime, especially if a person is living morally under God’s law and focused on God’s providence and grace.

    A Boyar Wedding Feast (1883), Konstantin Makovsky | Wikimedia Commons. There is an interesting recalcitrance in the bride on the right side of the picture, with the groom attempting to coax her into enjoying their wedding feast. Indeed, the attention of all the guests is placed on this interaction. Perhaps she is sad to be married, perhaps she loved that beautiful swan that’s being served as food (ha!), or perhaps she’s terribly shy. In light of the paragraph above, though, perhaps we can read some of this recalcitrance as the pious Christian’s reaction to feast and worldly excess. I, for one, am with the groom on this one, though. If there is a time for feasting and enjoyment, let it be at a wedding feast. There is goodness in this world, and we can celebrate it appropriately.

    The second promise from Isaiah is that God will remove something that ensnares humanity: “he will destroy the veil that veils all peoples, The web that is woven over all nations; he will destroy death forever. The Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces.” In a phrase, Isaiah is talking about the fallenness of the world and our natures. He calls this veil “death,” and indeed it is, but the ancient, scriptural understanding of death is deeper than we usually consider it in our analytical, scientific age. Yes, death has a technical meaning as the loss of life, measured perhaps in the absence of a heartbeat and the lack of measurable brain activity. But death also has a larger metaphysical meaning. When there is nothing ahead of us but death and a hole in the ground, then death reigns in a real psychological and even existential way. As we’ve amply seen with writers from Nietzsche onward, disbelieving in God goes hand-in-hand with the reign of death (one logically flows to the other). The reign of death is more than physical – it is spiritual, the death of the spirit. Any atheist will proclaim that nothing awaits us beyond this world, and the implications of this are diverse, but often include a softening of moral thought (i.e., if there is no larger or eternal repercussion for doing something right vs. something wrong, then why worry about making sure you’re doing things that are right? Even further, in this worldview, moral “right” is completely conceived by people rather than emanating from the source of all goodness, and so it is by definition changing and malleable).

    When moral thought and action are brought low, we Christians are taught that this is the devil at work in the world. Thus, the devil’s influence and the reign of death are tightly linked. This brings us back to our origin as recounted in Genesis: Satan – the serpent – is the cause of our temptation; and he is cursed as is humanity when cast out of the garden into the world where death reigns. Eons of weeping, blood, and sin ensue. We now live apart from God, unable to be in His presence, unable to see the truth and light clearly. St. Paul tells us, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face” (1 Cor 13:12). So, when Isaiah promises that “he will destroy the veil that veils all peoples … he will destroy death forever,” we can understand that this is a full reconciliation with Him, a return to the garden. It is again St. Paul who helps us locate the promise of Isaiah in the Reign of Jesus Christ: “but when one turns to the Lord [Jesus Christ], the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor 3:16-17). The freedom offered by Christ is a freedom from the reign of death, a removal of a veil that has ensnared us, and a reconciliation with God thanks to Christ’s great sacrifice.

    Le Suicidé (1877), Édouard Manet | Wikimedia Commons. For me, nothing proclaims the ascendancy of the reign of death like suicide, especially in our modern era when atheism and disbelief in God compound the sin unimaginably. The great flaw in the thinking that leads to suicide is that there is no redemption, no God who can wipe away stain or guilt. In short: a complete lack of hope, which must be like living with that veil of death drawn so tightly around oneself.

    Finally, today’s prophecy by Isaiah tells that the world will recognize God as the bringer of the feast and conqueror of death. Humanity shall say, “Behold our God, to whom we looked to save us! This is the LORD for whom we looked; let us rejoice and be glad that he has saved us!” This recognition is important because God is calling us to a relationship but also gives us the free will to either refuse or answer the call. Isaiah’s prophetic vision reveals those who are present at the feast, who have the veil lifted as death is defeated. These people give God his due credit and rejoice in Him; they have answered his call to a relationship with him. Importantly, they recognize that His action is a saving action – one that saves them from the reign of death.

    Now, let’s turn to today’s gospel and see each of these three aspects of Isaiah’s prophecy in this single episode of Jesus feeding the four thousand (plus women and children!). First, the feast: this is the famous miracle of the loaves and fishes. Signaling the abundance, the richness of the feast, is the fact that after all were satisfied, “They picked up the fragments left over – seven baskets full.” Such unheard-of largess appearing without delivery carts and many villages’ worth of bakers and fishermen has only one author: God Himself. More: these people knew the writings of Isaiah, “On this mountain the LORD of hosts will provide for all peoples…” Here, with them and for them, the Reign of God was beginning – God in the form of the Messiah was here.

    Miracle of the Bread and Fish (1620-1623), Giovanni Lanfranco | Wikimedia Commons. I appreciate Lanfranco’s Baroque period portrayal of the serene, haloed Christ in the posture of giving in the midst of the writhing masses. Yes, the elaborate body positions were likely done to show off a certain painterly prowess for anatomy and beauty of the human form, but the effect is one that recognizes the fallenness/messiness of the world and portrays with true eyes the Messianic, generous substance of Christ.

    Second is the removal of the veil of death. Remember that the crowd had gathered because they had heard Jesus was a great teacher and healer – they came seeking Him. This is the essential ingredient for those who will be present at the eternal feast: that they answer God’s call. “Great crowds came to him, having with them the lame, the blind, the deformed, the mute, and many others. They placed them at his feet, and he cured them.” These people are in the grip of death in one form or another, not just physical death but spiritual death. Jesus often shows us that healing physical blindness in fact heals a deeper, underlying spiritual blindness. As mentioned earlier, death reigns not just physically, but spiritually. The Christ Event in history is the beginning of the Reign of Christ – death’s reign is clearly defeated in these miracles and the veil of sin, Satan, and death is lifted from these people. 

    Third is the recognition of God as the Savior. This, too, is pointed out by St. Matthew: “The crowds were amazed when they saw the mute speaking, the deformed made whole, the lame walking, and the blind able to see, and they glorified the God of Israel.” But giving thanks to God for being healed is a bit different from looking at the one who healed you and thanking him, personally, as God incarnate. And this is the aspect of Isaiah’s prophecy that is played out throughout the gospels and even to this day. As we investigated yesterday, the fantastic vision of Christ granted to Isaiah 700 years before Jesus was born was truly a glimpse into the time-defying kairos event that is God puncturing human history and coming at the end of time, swirled into one ecstatic vision. If we try to inhabit this vision, we can see that we are living within this prophecy, where the feast is available to us, death’s reign can be lifted from us, and we must strive to recognize God in the person of Christ, just like the people described in the gospels.

    The three touchstones Isaiah shares today, the feast, the removal of the veil of death, and the recognition of God as Savior, are at the heart of the Christ Event and all of our symbols and actions that emanate from it. The feast was celebrated throughout his ministry in every miraculous outpouring of sustenance and richness – wedding at Cana, feeding of the four thousand, and most clearly in the Last Supper – and it is this last example that instituted the ongoing feast of the Holy Eucharist that we continue to celebrate day after day in this contemporary moment within the Reign of Christ. The removal of the veil of death, specifically spiritual death, happens in our sacraments, notably in baptism, and integral to each of the other sacraments as we are drawn deeper and deeper into full communion with God. Over the course of our lifetimes as Catholics, we participate in the removal of this veil of death that ensnares and blinds us – it is our journey of faith. So we can see how the first two touchstones happened in Jesus’s life events and also happen our own. But this last one, our participatory acceptance and recognition of God in the form of Christ our Savior, is the one we must step up and bring to God all on our own. We pray that all are able to do this at some point before their physical bodies die. This great drama of recognizing Christ as God was brought to the forefront by Christ Himself: “Who do you say I am?” (Mat 16:15, Mk 8:29, and Lk 9:20). He asks each of us this same question. The Apostles realized that this was their great duty: to evangelize, that is, bring this good news of the Christ Event to people across the globe. Pope Benedict XVI identifies that this evangelical activity is part of the ongoing lifting of the veil of death: “But the preaching of God’s Kingdom is never just words, never just instruction. It is an event, just as Jesus himself is an event, God’s Word in person … Because the world is ruled by the powers of evil, this preaching is at the same time a struggle with those powers” (Jesus of Nazareth, 173).

    The Resurrection (after 1655), Luca Giordano | Wikimedia Commons.

    Don’t let anyone tell you that all major religions are the same; we have a very particular core to our faith, and it is Jesus Christ, the man and God incarnate. Pope Benedict XVI, like Pope Saint John Paul II before him, writes that everything in our faith tradition and practice must be understood through a Christocentric lens. Everything about our salvation as well as the signs, symbols and language of our religion is fundamentally about Christ being God. It’s not about being morally good or doing good deeds or praying a certain way (although those things matter, especially when seen as ways of being united with our Savior). How can the popes insist on this (and not just them – think of so many saints and doctors of the Church, St. Augustine to name just one)? Well, it starts perhaps most plainly with Christ Himself, especially as revealed through the gospel of St. John: “for you will die in your sins unless you believe that I am he” (Jn 8:24). Jesus is adamant that He is the path to the Father, to salvation, to the end of the reign of death. Why might faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and Savior be so important for eternal salvation? I can think of several reasons, but here are two that jump most quickly to mind. First, denying that Christ is the Son of God (when He is one of three Persons of God) is, in fact, denying God (being atheist, that is). Second, the Christ Event – and only the Christ Event – is the exact action of God in the world that ushers in our salvation. This means that only Christ is the vector God provides for us to unite with Him. 

    And perhaps a third, more human reason that this specific faith in Christ as God is necessary: Jesus reveals aspects of God in a way that no one or nothing else in creation can. Jesus Christ reveals to us ways that we are made in the image of God (we are agents of truth and light as He is) and that humanity is precious to God in a special way. As we dwell on the Word of God, as uttered by the Word of God made incarnate, we learn about Him as well as the great potential within all of us. Jesus Christ becomes our “key” to knowing God and to knowing ourselves.

    Today’s gospel reading, for instance, stands out to me not just because of the amazing parallels with Isaiah’s prophecy and these three touchstones of our faith. It stands out because of what Jesus says: “My heart is moved with pity for the crowd, for they have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat. I do not want to send them away hungry, for fear they may collapse on the way.” Matthew takes 5 lines to describe Jesus’s great compassion here, and just 2 to describe the miracle itself. This is where we find the reality of Christ – in His love and compassion. After healing hundreds, if not thousands, of people on the mountain by the Sea of Galilee, surely He would be exhausted by the sheer weight of it all. But, as God, He shows us that God never tires of compassion. He teaches us how to find that compassion in ourselves. Even after delivering them from the grip of death through His healing, His saving acts do not end. He knows their hunger and, more importantly, this hunger moves him to compassion. It never fails to amaze that our God is a God who is moved to compassion for us. This is no distant God! So, He feeds them, as only God can. Here is the same God accomplishing the same act He did for His Chosen People after freeing them from slavery in Egypt and feeding them manna in the desert. Only now our God walks among us, speaks plainly for us, and ultimately sunders the divide between our fallen earth and heaven.

    The Miracle of the Five Loaves and Two Fish (contemporary), Grace Carol Bomer | Image from gracecarolbomer.com.

    Thank God for His compassion! Because this Advent is about anticipating the culmination of the Christ Event, and we will certainly all need compassion, understanding, and forgiveness on the Day of Judgment.

  • New Heavens and a New Earth

    New Heavens and a New Earth

    Monday of the Fourth Week of Lent: Isaiah 65:17-21, John 4:43-54.

    Yesterday we leapt forward, pushing our clocks ahead an hour as we transitioned into Daylight Savings Time. My wife spent her life getting up early to swim (around 5 am!) and so this transition always bothered her because just as the sun would be making its way into her morning workouts, she’d be plunged back into darkness for another month.

    Yesterday, she went walking with a good friend who confided to her that she actually sets her alarm clock back 5 minutes each day for a month leading up to Daylight Savings Time because she has such a hard time adjusting to the change.

    On the other hand, I am more of an evening person, so I am more bothered in the fall when my evenings suddenly go black much sooner than I thought they would. It’s an interesting lesson in how we create little realities for ourselves that are sometimes revealed for what they are: self-made constructions of happiness and comfort.

    The Persistence of Memory (1931), Salvador Dalí | Image from the Museum of Modern Art.

    Sure enough, yesterday I had a moment of elation when I looked out the window after dinner and realized how light it was. I could go for a walk, enjoy the sunshine, maybe putter around in the garden! Suddenly, new possibilities were open to me that haven’t been open for the past I-don’t-know-how-long. Silly, I know, but that was how I felt. And what really changed? Nothing but an arbitrary shift of the clock. 

    This incredible shift in mindset is something we’re asked to experience in today’s readings. And rather than an arbitrary clock change, an actual new reality has opened up between Heaven and earth to cause this change in mindset.

    If we allow ourselves to be complacent in what we think we know of the New Testament, the gospel reading appears like any other healing story. A man asks Jesus to heal his son and Jesus does it without even having to go to the man’s house. But if we allow the new reality of God-come-to-earth as Christ to illuminate our souls — like we allow the newfound post-dinner hour of light to illuminate our outlook on the evening — something altogether different is happening.

    St. John tells us that Jesus is traveling back to Galilee after coming north through Samaria. In the verses just prior to this, Jesus encounters the Samaritan woman at the well and in their conversation he reveals to her, “I am the Christ” (Jn 4:26). Based on his conversation with her, she believes and so does an entire town of Samaritans who get him to spend several days with them. Who he is — the reality of the Messiah come to earth — has dawned upon them and changed their entire outlook on their own lives.

    To signal that a new spiritual reality is making itself known, a reality more important and fundamental than the earthly reality, Jesus rebuffs his disciples’ urgings to eat by responding, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work” (Jn 4:34).

    He goes on to encourage them to help him usher in the new mindset that should accompany this new reality: “look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together” (Jn 4:35b-36). Jesus is trying to get the Apostles to notice this new reality in which they have a part to play.

    Christ Enthroned Over the River of Life (1220), Beatus of Liébana | Creative Commons, courtesy of the Morgan Library & Museum. This is MS M.429 (fol. 141), called the Las Huelgas Apocalypse, the latest dated (1220) and largest surviving manuscript of a Spanish tradition of illuminated commentaries on the Apocalypse by the monk Beatus of Liébana. The series of manuscripts constitutes Spain’s most important contribution to medieval manuscript illumination.

    We are so used to being Christian that we no longer comprehend the massive change of reality that happened at the Incarnation. Perhaps we never fully understood it. Fr. Jean Corbon, OP, writes, “In Jesus the entire energy of love impregnates human energy with an ‘anointing’ that makes this human energy its own and gives it life” (Wellspring of Worship, 40). In other words, the divine love that continually flows between Father, Son and Holy Spirit now descends into humanity to find a new home there, to begin to work within humanity until the end of time.

    Fr. Corbon reminds us that the first creation moment saw everything come from nothingness into being, but “In the new creation that is beginning here, he who is eternally begotten of the Father is fashioned out of living earth, namely, the entire being of his mother” (37). This new creation is something that has never existed before: fully God and fully human, a man to change history and the fabric of spiritual being.

    This is what the Father promises to Isaiah in the first reading today! He proclaims, “Lo, I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; The things of the past shall not be remembered or come to mind. Instead, there shall always be rejoicing and happiness in what I create.” The newness of our beings, when divinity has come to dwell among us, cannot be overemphasized. It is an entirely new creation, creating a new heaven and earth that did not exist before.

    He continues: “For I create Jerusalem to be a joy and its people to be a delight; I will rejoice in Jerusalem and exult in my people.” The Catechism teaches us that the Church herself, the bride of Christ, is the New Jerusalem that God promises. It exists on both Heaven and Earth and is beloved to the Lord.

    What we encounter in Chapter 4 of John’s gospel is the beginning of the New Jerusalem, brought about during the new creation that Jesus Christ has ushered in. This is a new reality filling the world with light — the Samaritans see it like new hours granted by Daylight Savings Time. Can we? Does it affect our mindset as much as the arbitrary change in hours does?

    New Jerusalem Revealed (contemporary), Alexander Sorsher | Image from pixels.com.

    When the royal official in today’s gospel reading asks Jesus to come to his house to heal his son, Jesus responds, “Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will not believe.” Perhaps Jesus is contrasting the man’s state of mind with that of the Samaritans, who believed in him purely by encountering him and speaking with him. No “signs and wonders” were required apart from the truth that he spoke. But the man just plows on as if not hearing: “Sir, come down before my child dies.”

    What is going on here?

    I think this speaking-past-one-another illustrates how this man is oblivious to the reality that the Messiah has ushered in. The man has not come to encounter Christ — he is living in his usual, un-transformed world that is dominated by fear of death. He has come not to encounter a new reality that does away with that fear but instead to find something that will, in fact, confirm his fears of the ultimate domination of death by keeping it at bay for a while.

    Notably, though, he does not come to “test” Jesus — it seems that he already has placed a good deal of hope in him. Thus, when Jesus says that they need signs and wonders “to believe,” it seems that he is referring to a deeper “belief” than the more surface belief that he is a type of healer. He seems to be just stating a fact of human nature.

    He may be gently lamenting that this man isn’t of the right mindset, but he nonetheless performs this wondrous act of healing. He heals the man’s son not to prove that he’s a wonder-worker, but to affect the man’s entire mindset on the reality that walks among them. He performs this miracle so that the man might be shocked out of his usual, un-transformed world and believe in something greater: the new creation and the New Jerusalem being built around him. This is why Jesus always points back to the Father — it is the Creator who is accomplishing this new creation by incarnating His Word in humanity. Belief in Jesus is belief in the Father, belief in salvation, belief in a new spiritual reality.

    How curious that we can be more affected by our clock changes than changes in the fabric of our spiritual reality! As Christians, we’re called to become more attentive to our spiritual selves (by dying to our worldly senses and desires) so that we can be awestruck by the Christ Event dumping immense light into our lives.

    That’s what Lent is here for: to help us become aware once again, appreciative once again, transformed once again.

     

  • 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.”

     

  • Embracing God’s Offer

    Embracing God’s Offer

    Saturday after Ash Wednesday: Isaiah 58:9b-14, Luke 5:27-32.

    God shows us in todays’ readings his great desire to redeem us. Consider how different our God is from the gods in classical Greek culture or the nature-oriented gods of other pagan cultures. These deities have either complex personal, selfish desires that conflict with humanity or they are seemingly indifferent, only responding to humans when they implore them with sacrifices and occult rituals. Our God shows Himself to be the only and true God, above these “principalities and powers” that our Judeo-Christian tradition allows space for in a lower echelon of being. Our God is true to his own principle of creative love; he loves his creation and endlessly reaches out to it with a Father’s care.

    In the first reading from Isaiah, a continuation of yesterday’s reading about false worship, God entreats his people to act in the way of goodness he has given them. He promises them that all will be well if they do so: “If you remove from your midst oppression, false accusation and malicious speech; If you bestow your bread on the hungry and satisfy the afflicted; Then light shall rise for you in the darkness, and the gloom shall become for you like midday.” These are the Father’s words of teaching and advice for the children he loves so much. We can relate to this in our own parent-child relationships. I think I’ve said some form of his words to my own children: “Then the LORD will guide you always and give you plenty even on the parched land. He will renew your strength.” The truth of our God being the one true God is so evident here — all of our instincts for love and family flow from him as our Creator. 

    The Kiss (1845-1848), Honoré Daumier | Image from Art.com.

    We must be careful to orient ourselves to him as the source of truth and goodness, rather than the other way around. We think we know what love is and tend to project this onto our maxim “God is love.” Thus, we might imagine that God agrees with a first-world, 21st-century impulse to give your children all of the freedom of choice and autonomy possible (thinking that this equals love). Likewise, a century or so ago, a father would likely imagine that lessons to children are best reinforced with a beating, and would project this same “rough love” onto God.

    We have to let the scriptures and the Holy Spirit guide us in understanding what love and fatherhood are all about. If not, we risk thinking we know God’s love but are really just projecting our own notions, which arise partly as a result of our cultural circumstances. 

    What we discover in the scriptures is that God provides a moral framework (the Law) and boundaries for his People to guide them back to his Kingdom for eternity. At the same time, he grants us free will, and this freedom is also an aspect of his love. That being said, he knows that an unguided free will is apt to make bad decisions, so he provides us with a clear way to live a life of love that leads back to him. We hear this guidance in today’s first reading. It ends with a promise for those who respect this way of love, which reaches its pinnacle in him:

    If you hold back your foot on the sabbath
        from following your own pursuits on my holy day;
    If you call the sabbath a delight,
        and the LORD’s holy day honorable;
    If you honor it by not following your ways,
        seeking your own interests, or speaking with malice
    Then you shall delight in the LORD,
        and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth;

    We see the Lenten theme of fasting, where we avoid our own interests while honoring him. But note the timbre of his words — we shall delight in the Lord and the sabbath. This whole-hearted embrace of our Father is a delight, not a task or trial. Only God can turn our denial of self into something delightful.

    He created us with desires, passions, and ambitions; these things help us thrive in the world, but perhaps he also gave us these things so that we can subdue and master them for a greater purpose, namely him. When we deny desire and passion, we are exercising a different type of muscle, a spiritual muscle. It’s not emotion, which would drive us to give in to the desires. It’s not intelligence, which would logically dictate that if you’re hungry you should eat. It’s not physical and it’s not emotional; it’s a spiritual impulse done solely because our spiritual Father and source of life has requested that we do it.

    It’s important to recognize this: God is helping us to grow strong spiritually because our spiritual nature connects us to him and everlasting life. His promise is not bound to our time on this earth, but to eternity. This makes his guidance, boundaries, and advice of ultimate importance and also stealthily effective as a way to salvation.

    Turning to the gospel reading, we hear the famous calling of Matthew (Levi), the tax collector. The force of the excerpt is on Christ’s simple yet powerful “Follow me” and his interaction with the Pharisees at dinner. But let’s not overlook Levi here, who like Peter, James and John dropping their nets, responds with equivalent certitude: “And leaving everything behind, he got up and followed him. Then Levi gave a great banquet for him in his house.”

    We can speculate in many directions about Levi’s motives (perhaps he saw a way out of his hateful profession?) or about his emotional state (perhaps he wanted to rise in status as a close follower of this new cult figure?) but I think all of this misses the point. A more profitable reflection might be upon that moment of connection, when God and man see each other, God holds out his hand, and man takes it without hesitation.

    Did Jesus choose Levi because he knew that something in him was ready to say yes? Or is it simply impossible for those directly approached by Christ to say no — the pull of the divine being so irresistible? Maybe the call and response is so amazing because that moment is always unique for every human being; free will is a potential monkey wrench, and receptivity to God is variable with time of life, even time of day.

    Perhaps the gospel writers describe the details of the call and response of the Apostles so plainly because the sheer fact of following Christ — the Way — is perfect and true on its own. It must be recorded and repeated. Whether fisherman, prostitute, tax collector, or rabbi, this is the very call and response that God speaks of through Isaiah. Deny yourself and delight in the Lord.

    Jesus calls Levi. From the book The Life of Jesus of Nazareth. Eighty Pictures (1906), William Hole | Wikimedia Commons.

    And in the same way that Christ speaks of the relationship between God and man in yesterday’s gospel reading — “Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them?” — he answers the peevish question from the Pharisees with a truth about who God is. He responds, “Those who are healthy do not need a physician, but the sick do. I have not come to call the righteous to repentance but sinners.”

    We will hear him expand on this truth in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. If you are a righteous person, a son who has obeyed his father, then you already have the kingdom at your fingertips. You are with God and if you realize this and delight in it (instead of being there only out of moral obedience), then you are fulfilled. In fact, you will be so filled with the Father’s love that you, too, want to rescue the sinners.

    The Pharisees’ question is ultimately one about justice: isn’t it unjust that we who have obeyed God should eat on our own while the Messiah feasts with sinners? Jesus’s response is the re-orientation of our concept of justice that we desperately need as humans. It starts with realizing who God is: the Alpha and Omega with whom all creation reaches its fullness. Being on the Way to God or in his presence means sharing in that fullness of being. As one’s outlook becomes infused with God’s being, questions of justice like the Pharisees’ become very small minded. The only justice is that everyone has a chance to join God and the fullness of being in the Kingdom. If any of us poor, sinning people is given access to God, then let us all have access! God’s love is all about this: it is all-encompassing, ever forgiving. This love is the real principle for justice.

    May we all exercise our spiritual muscle in denying ourselves this Lent so we can delight in the Lord.

  • The Spirit of Fasting

    The Spirit of Fasting

    Friday after Ash Wednesday: Isaiah 58:1-9a, Matthew 9:14-15.

    Today’s readings cast some doubt on fasting, and it’s worth digging into them to understand the teaching God delivers to us.

    The verses from Isaiah are some of the longest in the Old Testament dealing with fasting. This chapter in Isaiah tackles false vs. true worship; God is chastising the Jews for presenting themselves as holy people but acting completely differently. In short, it’s a warning against hypocrisy.

    Let’s consider the first words attributed to the Jews: “Why do we fast, and you do not see it? afflict ourselves, and you take no note of it?” God’s reply is, “you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist” (NRSV translation).

    There are several things going on here. First, doesn’t it seem a bit pushy and presumptuous of the people to challenge God and his non-response to their penitential acts? This should clue us into their lack of true humility before God, a true fear of God. And God’s response is that they serve their own interests on the fast day rather than obeying the great commandment to love God before all else (i.e., themselves) and then their neighbor as themselves.

    They also seem to be devolving into quarrelling and fighting with one another. This sounds pretty bad, but are we much better? Fasting makes us hungry, grumpy, and snippy. That’s part of the point, really: it forces us into a position to master not just our physical hunger but our emotional state and way we react to things around us. Pile onto this our cultural pressures of politics, people at work or home who habitually bother us, and unknowns like road rage moments, and it’s a recipe for disaster.

    The War (The First Discord), 1864, William Adolphe Bouguereau | Image from arthive.com. I’m not a huge fan of cherub pictures in general, but this seems too perfect to pass up. Here we have innocence (our desire to fast) being turned ugly by the desire to possess – specifically food. 

    God details something different: “This, rather, is the fasting that I wish: releasing those bound unjustly, untying the thongs of the yoke … Sharing your bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and the homeless; Clothing the naked when you see them, and not turning your back on your own.” This is the Word of God, later to be incarnated as Jesus Christ, speaking to be sure! We hear Jesus say these same things in the gospels. But does this sound like fasting to you?

    I generally think of fasting as if I am going into a desert cave and struggling with my hunger and emotional state in an environment where I can just focus on prayer without the realities of life messing things up (I’d be too tempted to say something stupid or lash out). It’s like a taking a retreat with the Lord. And yet God plainly tells the Jews that the type of fasting he wishes is one immersed in the world and in helping others. Oy! I can’t escape it! How is it possible? It’s hard enough keeping myself level without having to worry about helping others.

    The answer, it seems, is that I probably haven’t been giving myself over to God wholly or trusting in his help. His words in the verses directly following today’s reading point us in this direction: “If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday” (Is 58:9b-10). We might say he’s speaking of the virtuous cycle here: if you start doing good, that good reproduces itself in others and rejuvenates you. It’s the work of the Holy Spirit in the world.

    I particularly like how God addresses the emotional hurdles associated with fasting: “your gloom will be like the noonday.” Thank you for understanding me! And giving us the Holy Spirit to aid us in our devotion. That thing that I most feared — putting my grumpy self into contact with others where I might become that very hypocrite Isaiah addresses — is the very thing that offers me an opportunity to lighten my load. I just have to fill myself with your commands to help others and remove the temptations to be grumpy and edgy. This would likely be impossible without help, and we are in a position to be more successful than the ancient Jews. Christ has promised to lash himself to us on the yoke: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matt 11:28-30).

    Icon of Jesus walking on the water and helping Peter, provenance unknown | Image from www.pemptousia.gr.

    If it’s just a matter of self-discipline and mastering oneself, then it’s bound to be a hollow victory in the end, and certainly not a participation in our faith, our life in the liturgy. But if we fast with Christ at our side, we actively participate in the work of His Spirit in the world. What sounded like a burden is revealed to be an amazing spiritual activity. In his book Liturgical Asceticism, the University of Notre Dame professor of theology David Fagerberg acknowledges that fasting, solitude, and other forms of renunciation existed before Christianity and continue exist outside of it. What makes our Christian fasting different is “the degree that its source is sacramental immersion into Jesus’ life, and to the degree that this discipline frees the baptized for participation in the Mystical Body of Christ” (83). In other words, our fasting becomes a spiritual celebration of Christian liturgy the more we invite Christ to participate with us, to hold us up, and ask the Spirit to move within us and the Father to bless us in our effort.

    Fagerberg continues to distinguish our fasting from other faiths and types of fasting by showing that it is a specific response to the Christ Event in history — it is our recognition that we wait in patience for the final coming of Christ and we wait in the way Christ lived in us: allowing himself to be pierced by nails to uproot the passions and sin that ensnare us.

    Fagerberg also writes, “This liturgical asceticism initiates us into something higher than mere morality” (84). His point is that when we properly fast, with Christ at our side and love in our hearts, we are elevated beyond simply “doing the right thing.” Morality flows naturally from God, the ultimate Good; and the closer we become to God, the more we act and think in our lives in a morally correct way. But some acts of renunciation — fasting, for instance — are voluntary acts that can and should be done outside of the strict moral sense. Another way of saying this is that fasting is neither good nor bad (it is amoral) until it is united with a specific intent (see Ash Wednesday’s reflection where St. Thomas Aquinas defines fasting as virtuous only if directed to some virtuous good).

    There are many virtuous things we can direct our fast towards, and these are undoubtedly “morally good.” Fagerberg’s point is that the deepest Christian fasting is beyond just “morally good” because we participate in the actual life of Christ, fulfilling in action what we sacramentally join via Baptism and the Eucharist, bodily and mentally joining in the scope of salvation history and the awaiting of Christ’s coming in glory. We don’t fast because it’s the “right” thing to do or because the bishops declare that we have to on specific days; no, we fast in this way because we are fulfilling our purpose within the Mystical Body of Christ and becoming better spiritual beings.

    Sounds to me like I should be fasting all the time! What a fantastic and deep way to think about acts of renunciation. So, are we called to fast without ceasing as we wait for Christ’s return? After all, St. Catherine of Siena and some other saints lived this way.

    Let’s look at this question through the lens of the gospel reading. When John the Baptist’s disciples ask why they and the Pharisees fast often but his disciples do not, Jesus answers, “Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.” We notice a few things. First, Jesus connects fasting with mourning. In the Old Testament, the prophets advised that the people mourn their loss of God’s favor, which was brought about by their own infidelity to his law. In other words, their unfaithfulness to God resulted in his withholding his favor — this situation demanded fasting, a type of mourning, repentance and pleas for mercy. But Jesus’s use of the word mourning clearly has another edge to it as he foreshadows his own death. The second thing to notice is the content of what he’s saying: that when God is with us, there is no need or use for fasting and mourning; there is nothing missing when one is in God’s presence.

    This idea of putting fasting in its rightful place — that we might not be called to a state of constant fasting — is illustrated clearly by the Desert Fathers. In the Collected Sayings of the Desert Fathers, there is one episode shared by Abba John Cassian (360 – c.435) that reads,

    [Coming] from Palestine to Egypt, we visited one of the fathers. He entertained us and was asked by us, “Why is it that when you are entertaining brothers from elsewhere, you do not observe the rule of your fasting the way we observe it in Palestine?” “Fasting is always with me,” he replied, “but I cannot detain you with me forever. And although fasting is a useful and necessary practice, we do it because we choose to, whereas the law of God enjoins the practice of charity as a necessity. When I entertain one of you, I am serving Christ (as I am obliged to do) with full attention; and when I send you on your way, I can resume the rule of fasting, for ‘the companions of the bridegroom cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them; but when he is taken away from them, then will they fast’ [Matt 9:15] to their hearts’ content.”
    (The Book of Elders, 13.2)

    Let’s remember that the Desert Fathers were absolutely committed to physical poverty, fasting, and acts of penitence. Abba Isaiah says, “Hate everything in the world and repose of the body, for these made you an enemy of God. As a person who has an enemy fights with him, so we ought also to fight against the body to allow it no repose” (1.10). Not that these hermits’ sayings were completely uniform, but this general code of physical existence was fairly standard. This is why John Cassian’s story about the Egyptian father is worth pondering. The Egyptian ascetic notes that fasting is voluntary while charity is a commandment. His explanation that by welcoming his guest he is serving Christ is a lovely way to be looking at our interactions with each other. He even quotes today’s gospel to support his argument, suggesting that the Christ who is present in the other person is just as real and alive as Jesus was when addressing his disciples. 

    Christ and Abbot Mena, from the monastery of Bawit in Middle Egypt. Dated to the 8th century, it represents Christ on the right (his halo has a cross) and Abbot Mena, the superior of the monastery at the time. The abbot holds a scroll in his left hand; this may have contained the rules of his monastery. | Image from the Louvre Museum.

    At the end of this reflection, it is clear that God is much more delighted when we choose to fast with the Spirit guiding us to deep, eschatologically-centered communion with God rather than when we choose to fast because it is a rule or something we “should” do. The Jews who fasted but acted poorly in Isaiah’s time as well as those who forget Christ’s presence when self-focused on fasting are examples of the wrong way to approach fasting. Even just a quick look at the saints and Desert Fathers can show us that fasting and other penitential renunciations are more of an alignment of one’s heart and spirit than a hard-and-fast set of practices.

    Each of us is called in a different way to follow Christ to the Father. We can use fasting and other renunciations of the passions and the flesh to better discern what exactly that call entails. We might find that, like St. Catherine, we are called to fast often while serving Christ in others. We might find that we are called to fast a bit less often while serving Christ in a different way. One thing is clear, however: we cannot shirk our responsibility to align our hearts in a “spirit of fasting,” for Christ tells us to deny ourselves and pick up our cross daily to follow him.

  • Justice Like Gentle Rain

    Wednesday in the 3rd Week of Advent: Isaiah 45:6c-8, 18, 21c-25, Luke 7:18b-23.

    Justice is something I’ve been considering a lot in the face of crooked politicians making themselves rich while being morally abhorrent in behavior and policy. Of course it’s important to remember that this is nothing new — every generation has human greed and sin, dating back before the days of King Herod in Israel. But certainly there are times all of us want justice not to descend on the earth “like gentle rain,” but instead like a cracking, vindicating lightning bolt. God, in His mercy, has a different plan; if justice were so severe, there would be very few of us left to marvel at it!

    Today’s readings tackle God’s promise of justice, and contemplating them has helped me start to reconsider what justice on earth might look like. Undoubtedly, we are faced with two types of justice: the justice that happens on Judgment Day, when souls are weighed and either accepted into heaven or sent to hell, and the secular justice that we experience while alive on the earth. I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t also a third — one that straddles these two — the loving, forgiving justice of God working through humanity here on earth. This is perhaps the most tenuous and paradoxical of all; it might be uncommon or it might be the most common thing ever, a testament to God’s grace at work in the world; it might seem fleeting in its smallness but likely looms as the most eventful thing in a person’s life, configuring them to the light until death. It seems to be the stuff of novels, a wispy but significant thread in the human experience that turns out to be stronger than steel. How can we truly explore this justice without living it? Let’s turn to scripture.

    Saint Michael Vanquishing Satan (early 1500s), attributed to Pedro Romana | Image from pinterest.com. This divine justice, meted out by Christ and the angels, is not something we can expect to apply to common, legal justice we hope to see enacted in this lifetime.

    God, speaking through Isaiah, says, “Let justice descend, O heavens, like dew from above, like gentle rain let the skies drop it down.” He speaks of justice like dew, like a gentle rain — I’m reminded of manna in the Exodus, feeding the Jews who were following God’s commands. This is definitely not a fire-and-brimstone justice but more like a blessing. He then says, “Let the earth open and salvation bud forth; let justice also spring up!” We read earlier this week how Isaiah prophesies that salvation budding forth on the earth will be in the form of the Christ, the Anointed One. Thus, the “earth opening” to bring forth salvation we can understand as Mary bringing forth divinity, the mystery of the Incarnation. The corollary statement is “let justice also spring up,” which means that a second way God is giving the world justice is through His Son on earth. Thus, we have two forms of earthly justice given to us by God: His blessing/grace from above and His Son, the Way, the Truth and the Light made incarnate here on earth.

    For the past few years, I’ve nearly given up on the idea of earthly justice, probably because I’m always putting it in secular terms. In other words, “why can’t that person go to jail or be found guilty and punished accordingly?” In the face of what seems like injustice all around and an increasing culture of hate and self-centeredness, I have turned my eyes to the heavenly kingdom to come. My past year of lectio divina, however, has made it apparent that God means for us to experience the Kingdom here and now if we can only meet Him, fully open to do His will. Nothing speaks more clearly to this desire for us to experience a kind of heavenly justice while alive on earth like these lines from Isaiah today: “The creator of the heavens, who is God, The designer and maker of the earth who established it, Not creating it to be a waste, but designing it be lived in: I am the LORD, and there is no other.” The culmination of the sentence is an confirmation of the first part of the Jewish profession of faith, the shema: Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. The force of the sentence is that our God is the only God in the heavens, in fact he created the heavens and the earth, and nothing is impossible for Him to decree or to do. Yet placed in this sentence is an affirmation that earth was created for real, true, full living: “not creating it to be a waste, but designing it to be lived in.” For me, this means I can’t just scorn this world as a testament to the fallenness of humanity (no matter how much I want to at times). God wants us to live fully in the world, not to have it be a waste.

    But how can we trust that God’s great plan for this world he created is not going to be wasted anyway, given the freewill granted to humanity to mess things up if they so choose? Well, here’s where faithfulness to God and trust in Him come to roost. Isaiah continues: “Turn to me and be safe, all you ends of the earth, for I am God; there is no other!” The answer is really quite simple: if you truly believe in your singular, all powerful creator God, then from what you know of His benevolence and scope of salvation history, you can’t doubt. In Isaiah’s words is comfort for anxiety: “Turn to me and be safe.” There is safety in the turning to Him, in the posture: physical, mental, and spiritual. 

    Mother Teresa (contemporary), Br. Michael Valdes, CFC | Image from the Edmund Rice Christian Brothers Art Foundation. I can’t think of a better contemporary portrait of real justice and power in the world than the life of St. Mother Teresa.

    After these words of comfort, Isaiah then brings us back to justice: “Only in the LORD are just deeds and power. Before him in shame shall come all who vent their anger against him.” What does it mean that only in the Lord are just deeds and power? Does the preposition here mean that justice and power are relegated to heaven only and are only wielded by God from on high? Or does it leave room that those who live in the Lord may also accomplish just deeds and wield power (a power and justice that rightly come from God and belong to Him)? We have to be careful with our definitions; remember that Christ’s great lesson is that power resides in taking up the cross, a very contrary understanding to temporal power. Power flows from a love that conquers and purifies everything. It is reasonable to surmise that justice, too, is subject to love as its guiding principle.

    God is known by His transformative love. What does His love transform other than beings in the sphere of creation? Revelation teaches us that this happens specifically in human hearts. Thus, as God’s love becomes active in the world in human hearts, so “just deeds and power” are present. The logic that flows from our scriptures teaches us about this third type of justice and power: while God may wield justice and power from on high, He also chooses to have them present in the world through us because He transforms us and conforms our hearts to Him.

    Note how Isaiah’s second sentence paired to this declaration characterizes base, worldly actions as “venting anger against him.” I don’t think that all actions outside of those done in the Lord are a type of “vented anger” (some may be simply indifferent), but this category might be more expansive than we imagine. Any act that inherently works against love is contrary to God. Even the smallest thing that is done out of self-interest instead of love for another belies a type of vented anger, frustration, or brushing off of God’s law and God’s always-outwardly-focused love. I am reminded of the past few days’ worth of reflections on sin, even venial sin, and how it is the “blackest ingratitude, the greatest injustice, and the gravest outrage” to God, our rightful master. Thus, of course “before him in shame shall come all who vent their anger against him!”

    The message I hear as I contemplate Isaiah’s words is that in order to have justice, we must trust in and channel the God who is love — love that is beyond Platonic, erotic, fraternal, and even agape; the unselfish, always forgiving, always wanting the best for the other, desiring to sow the seeds that will bear fruit in the other love of God that we cannot describe, understand, or even feel. We are poor vessels to carry His love and spread it, but it is His plan, nonetheless. It prepares us for eventual unity with Him. We are bound to fail, but how we deal with our failures is also of the essence (can we accept His forgiveness as His created creatures?).

    At issue here is the fact that instead of embracing this charge to channel God’s love, we want to skip straight to the justice and the power. It’s convenient for us to think that justice can be implemented without that difficult, slow process of loving (which often changes the whole scenario and outcome), or that what we think is “power” can simply be enacted/enforced (even if, deep down, it’s just venting anger at God). Perhaps this is because our prophets and Lord have given us such great visions of justice and power that we want to just make it so. But this is impossible — “Only in the LORD are just deeds and power” — that is, justice and power must flow from Him and His transformative love. We can’t even conceive of what justice in any given circumstance will look like until we enter into this love. We can’t conceive of what power looks like either.

    That’s not entirely true. Christ shows us the power of God here on earth. In today’s gospel reading, John the Baptist sends his disciples to Christ to see for themselves if He is the Messiah. “At that time Jesus cured many of their diseases, sufferings, and evil spirits; he also granted sight to many who were blind.” He manifests God’s love here on earth, pouring out blessings, healings (spiritual and physical), and above all, forgiveness and mercy. Jesus tells John’s disciples, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the good news proclaimed to them. And blessed is the one who takes no offense at me.” Jesus calls us to testify to Him and His works. This none other than the same refrain He spoke to Isaiah 800 years earlier: “Turn to me and be safe, all you ends of the earth, for I am God; there is no other!” He is here to prove to us that we can trust in Him. We must share that essential message around the world because trust in God combats our propensity to define for ourselves justice and power without having His love as the essential part of the equation.

    Christ Healing the Blind Man (1645), Eustache Le Sueur | Wikimedia Commons.

    But why might he say, “And blessed is the one who takes no offense at me”? Who would take offense at healings and raising from the dead? Well, yesterday’s gospel shows us: the chief priests and elders who are shocked to hear that tax collectors and prostitutes are getting into the Kingdom of Heaven ahead of them. Those who embrace being transformed by God’s love are accessing the Kingdom being given to them here and now by Christ. This offends those who have practiced piety for so long but whose hearts are frozen in judgement against their “lesser” fellow humans. They think they know what justice looks like: this person who worked on the Sabbath or who consorts with prostitutes should not enter the Kingdom, much less be God Himself! These same people supposedly have power that they wield with their earthly positions in the synagogue. But that sense of justice and power is totally perverted. It means nothing if it does not emanate from God’s love. 

    This, of course, applies today. I know many a pious Catholic who prays longer, harder, and more frequently than 99% of us, but their hearts are frozen in judgement against those who are “polluting” the Church. What a sad state! Not just them; really any of us who gain our bearings in the world by defining “justice” as we see it are guilty of the same offense. I’m starting to realize that “justice” as a social and legal concept needs to be taken down from its secular pedestal lest it defile our understanding of divine justice, which is never ours to define or even completely comprehend. We might have to be jury members or judges in our work and civic life, but this should in some ways fill us with dread and unease. We are called to something much greater, and the more we can turn to that greater being, the more we can enact real justice in the world. 

  • A Day of Vindication by our God

    Third Sunday of Advent: Isaiah 61:1-2a, 10-11, 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24, John 1:6-8, 19-28.

    One of my favorite passages from Isaiah occurs in today’s readings. It seems to have been especially significant for Christ as well since we see Him read it to His hometown synagogue in Luke’s gospel. (I have to admit that another reason I like this passage is that I fondly recall playing what I think is Matt Maher’s best composition, Isaiah 61.) Today, the voice of the Anointed One is spoken (announced, as it were) by Isaiah while John the Baptist likewise cries out in the desert, also announcing Christ, and also quoting Isaiah. This third Sunday in Advent marks a great intersection of prophecy, the fulfillment of the Time of Promises, and the announcement of the Incarnation in our midst.

    Isaiah 61 (ccontemporary), Br. Michael Valdes, CFC | Image from the Edmund Rice Christian Brothers Art Foundation.

    The Messiah’s words of self-announcement through the mouth of Isaiah are so poetic. For me, perhaps their most lovely attribute is that they give glory to God the Father with every line, while still revealing the role and personhood of the Messiah. He begins with “The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me,” and we see the Blessed Trinity in full display. He speaks of the action of the Holy Spirit, resting upon him, sent by the Father as a way to anoint the Son. This is the fundamental relationship of the Three Persons as we understand it. The Father is the creative force, the genius of Creation, who sends the Spirit to grace, bless, and anoint in the created universe. The Son is the full recipient of the Father’s Spirit and Love, the promised Anointed One sent to do His will as none other in history can. As we read the rest of the opening sentence, we receive a condensed nugget of the Christian mystery of faith: “he has sent me to bring glad tidings to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners, to announce a year of favor from the LORD and a day of vindication by our God.” Christ’s redemptive power, the Good News, the healing, the freeing from enslavement to sin, and the victory over death are all here prophesied. Amazing!

    This is the sentence that Jesus reads in the synagogue at Nazareth when He starts his ministry, just after resisting the Devil’s temptations in the desert (Luke 4:16-19). We can marvel at the layers of revelation in the Word of God speaking through Isaiah nearly 800 years before Christ will quote his prophecy in the Nazorean synagogue. The Word, now incarnate, speaks the very words He delivered to Isaiah so long before. Why does He reveal Himself in this way? One reason is that God sows in the heart of humanity a longing for deliverance, a desire to know Him that grows over time and is not only appropriate for the dignity of the Son of God but makes humanity more receptive to His message. Another reason that becomes apparent is that there is an inherent humility to the coming of the Lord — first as a fragile baby born in an animal stall, and even in his revelation of Himself in this way. Let’s remind ourselves of what St. Luke writes after Jesus reads this verse from Isaiah: “And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth” (Lk 4:20-22a). Jesus sits! And instead of proclaiming “It’s me! I am the Anointed One!” He says that this illustrious prophecy has been fulfilled in their presence. There’s no doubt about what He’s saying, but He couldn’t have chosen a more meek and humble way to say it. It’s important to note that Christ is not only lending legitimacy to Himself here — He is blessing the entire past tradition and Time of Prophecies. His divine majesty radiates in all directions, past, present, and future, from this moment of His Reign beginning on earth. Imagine if the prophecy was never fulfilled: it would cast doubt on not only the beloved prophets but God’s fidelity to his people; perhaps even God’s existence. Christ’s coming attests to God in every way, blessing the entire stream of salvation history. He truly is — by His very existence — a day of vindication by our God. And for one brief moment, before they recall that He is Joseph’s son and their human instinct of skepticism takes over, the entire synagogue recognizes Him as the Anointed One: “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” Even here, in the episode that teaches us much about humanity’s inability to discern truth in front of them, we see that creation cannot help but recognize the incredible, humble and gracious majesty in front of them.

    Christ in Majesty, historiated initial ‘A’ on a bifolium from an Antiphonal (c.1400), unknown artist | Image from christies.com. From the description at Christies: “This bifolium comes from a magnificent Antiphonal made for an unidentified Benedictine monastery. The initial opens the responsory for the first Sunday of Advent, ‘Aspiciens a longe ecce video dei potentiam’. Carrying the opening of the first feast of the Antiphonal, this page is illuminated more extensively and more splendidly than any other and it is certainly the work of the principal illuminator. The exquisite monochrome figures in the initial staves and the full-page border inhabited with birds, beasts and figures are unique features. This artist is not precisely identifiable but he was clearly within the circle and influence of the illuminators responsible for two of the greatest manuscripts produced for the court of Wenceslas IV: the Master of the Golden Bull and the Master of the Bible of Konrad of Vechta. This leaf can be placed alongside them as being one of the highest achievements of Bohemian court illumination and thus of European art of around 1400.

    Jesus Christ Himself, fully human and part of creation, also rejoices in the Incarnation: 

    I rejoice heartily in the LORD,
    in my God is the joy of my soul;
    for he has clothed me with a robe of salvation
    and wrapped me in a mantle of justice,
    like a bridegroom adorned with a diadem,
    like a bride bedecked with her jewels.
    As the earth brings forth its plants,
    and a garden makes its growth spring up,
    so will the Lord GOD make justice and praise
    spring up before all the nations.

    This gracious way of rejoicing is simply a pleasure to read and contemplate. May we all say the words, “in my God is the joy of my soul”! The image of the Father clothing His Son in a “robe of salvation” is beautiful on its own, and takes on a heart-wrenching quality when we recall the robe and crown of thorns the soldiers put on Him during His Passion. The other lines evoke the pure beauty of a bride and groom on their wedding day and the life-affirming nature of an abundant garden as they contemplate the Kingdom of Heaven that is here. For what else is the promise of ultimate justice for humanity and never-ending praise for God but the Kingdom of Heaven? All of this spoken without boasting and with continual deference to the Father, from whom all these blessings flow.

    When we study the gospels, we discover that Christ’s entire ministry is a deliberate and methodical revelation of His prophesied divinity and Incarnation to His followers. This simple point is so important for Jesus to make because 1) it shows the overabundant generosity of the Father, 2) it must be insisted upon because of its sheer uniqueness and miraculous nature in the history of the universe, and 3) it’s impossible to understand the redemptive quality of Christ’s sacrifice and Resurrection unless we recognize that He is, in fact, God’s Son, the promised Anointed One who perfects the Old Covenant and offers saving grace from the nation of Israel to the rest of humanity. 

    And thus John the Baptist occupies this seminal pivot point between the Old Covenant and the New, proclaiming that the Son of God has finally come to earth. We’ve grown up knowing that this was his message, and he sort-of disappears in the wake of Christ’s great ascendency. I think he might be slightly dismissed as an interesting side note in our contemplation of our faith. But let’s consider how important this final prophet is (and recall our reflection on Thursday when Jesus said John is, in fact, the greatest of Jewish prophets, Elijah, come back as promised). The evangelists give him pride of place at the beginning of the gospels; St. John in today’s gospel states, “A man named John was sent from God. He came for testimony, to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him.” John the evangelist is matter-of-fact here: John the Baptist was sent from God to testify to the light, that is, to testify that the Christ has actually come and graced the earth with His Presence. Note that the evangelist states that the reason the Baptist does this is “so that all might believe through him.” This statement carries many layers of meaning. We begin to appreciate the importance the Jewish faith placed on prophets and their role in speaking the truth — prophets ratify, in a way, the will of God on earth. We see this throughout the old testament when the kings and judges would summon the great prophets of the age to help them interpret God’s will in events as they unfold. God Himself establishes this co-leadership of prophets among the Chosen People as He appoints Aaron, Moses’ brother, as his prophet (Exodus 7:1). Also present in the evangelist’s words is the knowledge that as the one announcing the arrival of the Messiah, the Baptist is the last of the prophets, the fulfillment of what they had promised, and this is another way people can believe in Christ “through him.”

    St. John the Baptist (1878), Auguste Rodin | Creative Commons, courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

    Properly stated, a prophet is someone who speaks for God to His People (cf. Amos 3:8; Jer. 1:7,17; Ezek. 3:4). The original Hebrew נָבִיא (nabi) is a cognate of Akkadian verb nabu = “to call” and Arabic naba’a = “to announce.” We see this shared meaning of “calling out” very clearly in John the Baptist. He defines his entire existence as simply that: crying out in the wilderness. He is nothing but a voice, God’s mouthpiece in the world, with a simple message. The way he proclaims this to the priests sent to question him again sheds light on the layered mystery of revelation in God’s plan: “I am the voice of one crying out in the desert,
    ‘make straight the way of the Lord,’     as Isaiah the prophet said.” Like Jesus, John identifies himself through the words of Isaiah. Unlike Jesus’s meek appearance when He sits in the synagogue to share this revelation, John is wild in appearance, unabashedly baptizing all who will come, loud in his proclamations. He is the living voice of God’s Word in a different way than Christ (who is actually God). The grammar of his statement to the priests attests to this, the small “I am” before Isaiah’s prophesy echoes the great I AM of God Himself to Moses. Rather than “I AM who I AM,” John places his entire being, his “I am,” in Isaiah’s prophecy to be the voice crying out in the wilderness. This matches the wildness of his character; his entire being is truly a voice crying out in the wilderness. We can appreciate his abandonment to his prophetic appointment from God as we consider the readings of the past week that remind us to encounter the passionate love of God with an equally passionate seizing of God into our beings, violently pushing aside our worldly attachments and roadblocks. John refuses any other definition for himself. He tells them that he is not the Christ, not the Prophet, not Elijah — he refuses to be distracted by considerations of his own personhood because he has given himself completely to the task before him, to be the voice crying out in the desert, “make straight the way of the Lord!”

    So, let us thank St. John the Baptist for his indefatigable demonstration of faith in God and his reminder that we must always be in the process of making straight the way for the Lord. As much as Jesus’s teachings perfect us, this remains the initial Christian call: prepare your heart, level the mountains and valleys it contains to make a straight path for Christ to come in and transform it. We must not only recall and thank St. John the Baptist, but we must imagine him here before us in his camel hair shirt, up to his calves in the Jordan, offering us a handful of blessing water as he repeats, make straight the way of the Lord. We can never tire of hearing it, never think we’re above the raw wildness of his character and call, because if there’s one thing we’re good at, it’s obscuring that way for the Lord with our own desires and thoughts of ourselves.

  • The Lukewarm and the Cynical

    Friday in the 2nd Week of Advent: Isaiah 48:17-19, Matthew 11:16-19.

    Today’s readings put an exclamation mark on yesterday’s message about being enflamed with the passion of God’s transformative love and seizing the Kingdom of Heaven offered to us. God promises much to us if we listen to His Redeemer, His Son. Yet we find Jesus in the gospel reading lamenting over the fact that the people of that generation are lukewarm, cynical, and do not listen to His teaching.

    The first thing we hear from Isaiah is a recognition that Jesus Christ, who he calls “the Redeemer” and “the Holy One of Israel,” is the very same “I, the LORD, your God,” who speaks to His People. This is remarkable, affirming the divinity of Christ some 750 years before His birth unto Mary. What’s more, Isaiah foresees that He will be present on earth to guide and teach His People. He will “teach you what is for your good, and lead you on the way you should go.” Again, as we’ve seen throughout Advent, Isaiah affirms that God’s promise for overabundant life, grace, and the escape of death is tied to the Redeemer’s coming: “If you would hearken to my commandments, your prosperity would be like a river, and your vindication like the waves of the sea.” In this way, the New Covenant of Christ is a clear extension and perfection of the Old Covenant under which Isaiah and the Jewish people were tied to God.

    Rivers of Living Water (contemporary), Dyed4You Art | Image from dyed4youart.com.

    It’s no secret that the Jews in power did not listen to Christ and follow His teachings, as the Passion and Crucifixion attest. But Jesus laments a more general inattention to His teaching from the entire generation: “To what shall I compare this generation? It is like children who sit in marketplaces and call to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, but you did not dance, we sang a dirge but you did not mourn.’” Jesus seems to be referencing the refrain from a children’s game. This is an ingenious analogy. In one sense, the “we” of the refrain could be Jesus and John, who called to one another through their mothers’ wombs, John singing the dirge of repentance and Jesus playing the flute of salvation. In another, more overt sense, the children are the people who hear these calls and do not respond. Further, they are the ones who sit and pantomime the whole scene, calling it out to one another as if bystanders who just observe from afar. This is the ultimate picture of indifference, of being lukewarm. And as we explored yesterday, the transformative love of God inherently calls us to be passionate, to violently break through our indifference and sin to seize the Kingdom being offered to us.

    Jesus then points out a deep cynicism and skepticism at the heart of the people who do not respond to these divine calls. “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they said, ‘He is possessed by a demon.’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking and they said, ‘Look, he is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’” These are the words of people who are comfortable with a type of restrained piety (how many of these have we all seen in our lifetimes!). They like a certain amount of propriety with their piety. John’s wild appearance and extreme fasting was too much for them — they accused him of being possessed. Jesus’s overflowing majesty and generosity, on the other hand, causes them to brand him a glutton and drunkard (not to mention impure by association with tax collectors and sinners). Jesus has little patience for this type of piety, which betrays that a person has not accepted God’s transformative love into their hearts. They are not filled with the passionate love of God. And the deep sin here is that they hold onto their own sense of “knowing” what’s real, what’s worthwhile, how the world should work. They choose their own comfort zone over God. This is what I mean by skepticism. It is their own sense of how they want to see the world that makes them disparage John and Jesus. They are skeptical of John and Jesus’s claims because they haven’t opened themselves up to be transformed by god’s love.

    Yesterday’s second reading in the Office of the Readings does a lovely job of portraying the love that Jesus sees is absent from “this generation.” Saint Peter Chrysologus, the bishop of Ravenna from 433-450AD was known for his short, simple, but inspired sermons. He says:

    But in all the events we have recalled, the flame of God’s love set human hearts on fire and intoxicated human senses. Wounded by love, men longed to see God with their bodily eyes. How could our narrow human vision perceive one whom the whole world cannot contain? What will be, what ought to be, what can be – the law of love does not care about these things. Love does not have judgement, reason, strategy. Love refuses to be consoled when its goal proves impossible, refuses to be cured if its goal is difficult to achieve. Love destroys the lover if he cannot obtain what he loves. It goes where it is led, not where it ought to go. Love gives birth to desire, it bursts into flame and that fire draws it to seek forbidden things. What more is there to say? Love cannot accept not seeing the thing that it loves.

    We can see how Jesus laments for these people — they show none of the signs of loving God. Are we any better? Are we “wounded by love” so that we long to see God? Do we allow love to transform us so that we do not have judgement, reason, or strategy? This is true abandonment of ourselves to God!

    Icon of the Sacred Heart of Jesus | Image from Immaculata Helvetia on flickriver.com.

    But I’m making this all seem like it’s a fair and open choice to make when in fact it’s not. We owe ourselves to God. Let’s take some instruction from Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, OP, a French Dominican priest who lived from 1877-1964. Karol Wojtyla (later Pope St. John Paul II) specifically traveled to Rome to seek out the personal instruction of the faculty’s most famous professor, none other than Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange. He has been called “one of the greatest philosophers and theologians of the 20th century” (by Fr. Timothy Draper in the foreword to the book cited below). In the short book Knowing the Love of God, a collection of his retreat talks, Garrigou reminds us that as our Creator God “has the right of possession over our mind and our heart, and this right, more absolute than any of our property rights, remains binding even if we forget it” (21).

    Rightly, this entire discussion of being indifferent and not inflaming our hearts in longing for God belongs in the realm of sin. As I stated above, the sins of pride and self-centeredness are what lead us to disparage others (John and Jesus, nonetheless!) and not follow God’s commandments, not give Him our hearts. Of course, talking about sin is about as out-of-fashion as offering someone a ride in a horse-drawn carriage. Garrigou-Lagrange doesn’t hesitate to go there, however. And I find him compelling. He starts by reminding us how we got here: “For the world the true evils are diseases, tuberculosis, paralysis, infirmities of every kind, poverty, and ruin. Pride, on the contrary, is not an evil in the eyes of the world; rather, it is even necessary for attaining success. A life given over to pleasure or laziness is not an evil for those rich enough to lead this type of existence” (16). He reminds us just how reasonable pride, pleasure, and laziness seem to us. But he shows how this cascades into something more serious: “We place our childish whim in opposition to the will of God and it conquers. Is this not without doubt foolishness? It is the foolishness of an instant but it can become habitual and then produce a darkening or complete blinding of the spirit” (18).

    Given God’s proper sovereignty over our mind and heart, consider well what he then says about sin: “Sin is not only a foolishness and vileness, but considered in relation to God it is also the blackest ingratitude, the greatest injustice, and the gravest outrage” (21). These are serious statements, and it might shock you to learn that he’s talking about venial sins! I, for one, try not to berate myself for small sins, but reading this in the light of the past two days’ readings, I wonder if I’ve been letting myself off a little too easy. If I was inflamed with the passionate, transformative love of God, then I would shun even small sins with passion because they take me away from God.

    Garrigou-Lagrange speaks to the seriousness of even small moments of venial sin: “It does not kill the soul, but it leaves it without force and energy for the good. It diminishes the fervor of divine love, darkens the eyes of the soul and obscures the vision of God” (23). Not only does this remind me of my own life, it reminds me of today’s gospel reading. Here we have venial sinners, like kids calling out to one another in a certain callous sing-song of inactivity. They are diminished people, “without force and energy for the good.”

    Let us keep this in mind this Advent as we prepare the way for the Lord and await our Savior to be born (and come again). Can we overcome the diversions of sin, clear out the roadblocks of laziness and indifference? Let’s end with this thought from Garrigou-Lagrange:

    What diverts us from our ultimate end is sin. Fittingly we ask ourselves: do we have the divine hatred of sin? Do we try our utmost to understand that such a hatred, which has created hell, proceeds necessarily from the love owed God, and that such a hatred must be profound, intense, and without limits as is this love itself?
    (15)

     

  • The Violent Transformation of Love

    The Violent Transformation of Love

    Thursday in the 2nd Week of Advent: Isaiah 41:13-20, Matthew 11:11-15.

    Today’s readings appear to be head-scratchers. The gospel, in particular, quotes Jesus speaking in an ominous-sounding tone about the violent taking the Kingdom of Heaven by force. But as we dig into them, the readings reveal a consistent truth about the sometimes violent nature of love as it transforms something lukewarm into something passionate. We also can realize that Jesus is applying this understanding to the change of epochs from the Time of Promises to the End Times in which we live in love as the Church.

    Isaiah provides a startlingly Christ-like promise to the Chosen People 750 years before Christ — well, startling until you recall that it is the Word, Jesus Christ Himself, who is speaking through Isaiah, and then we recognize in yet another way the proof of God in the world. Isaiah says, “Fear not, O worm Jacob, O maggot Israel; I will help you, says the LORD; your redeemer is the Holy One of Israel.” Sounds harsh, doesn’t it? Is Isaiah just name-calling? He does ridicule the Chosen People soundly throughout his prophecies for how they have turned from God and stopped living according to his law. But there’s more here.

    What are worms and maggots but the lowliest of things, creatures who live off of death and decay? Isaiah is simply stating a fact that they are caught in the world ruled by death, something that Jesus will finally dispel for humanity. Isaiah actually gives them great hope here because God promises to help them, and not only that: their redeemer will be one of them, in the line of Israel. 

    And then we encounter our first visions of violence: “I will make of you a threshing sledge,
    sharp, new, and double-edged, To thresh the mountains and crush them, to make the hills like chaff.” God is speaking in terms of a violent transformation, that Israel will be a tool for the nations, sharp enough to crush them. He does not mention pagan “nations” being crushed like chaff, but instead the mountains and hills. Could these be the obstacles in life that loom before us?

    He continues: “When you winnow them, the wind shall carry them off and the storm shall scatter them.” In this image, Israel is doing the important work of threshing and winnowing grain, removing the useless and non-nutritious bits of the world and keeping that which gives life. This does not seem to be a blind violence intent on destruction.

    Threshing sledge. Illustration from Earthly Footsteps of the Man of Galilee (1884), Bishop John H. Vincent | Wikimedia Commons. The threshing sledge had sharp rocks or bits of metal studded into the bottom of the board. The driver would stand on it to put weight on the scythed grain and an animal would haul him around a large area called the threshing floor. This breaks up the usable bits of grain from the chaff. These are further refined by putting them in large baskets and tossing into the air to catch the batch again, with the wind carrying away the lighter bits of chaff.

    The next verses help to explain that something of a different order is going on. “The afflicted and the needy seek water in vain, their tongues are parched with thirst. I, the LORD, will answer them; I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.” The passage resumes the refrain of God’s help and love for Israel and other poor “worms” in need. The sharp threshing sledge — a tool for the harvest (see The Generous Harvest without Cost for more thoughts on the importance of harvesting in God’s plan) — seems to be more of a refinement than a destruction. Water is synonymous with life in sacred scripture, and God paints his promise with the imagery of overwhelming, death-defying life sprouting everywhere: “I will open up rivers on the bare heights, and fountains in the broad valleys; I will turn the desert into a marshland, and the dry ground into springs of water.” The land itself is transformed by God’s love, in order to support life and help humanity thrive. Thus, Isaiah presents an undeniable image of violence on the earth paired with God’s saving, life-giving, transformative love.

    But how can love be violent? We think of love as comfort, protection, and peace. Without the correct lens to understand God’s Word, we end up like the Messianic Jews in Jesus’s time, awaiting a King who will enact the violence of destruction to create an earthly kingdom for the Jews. They might have even referenced Isaiah’s passage to support their arguments (they are “thirsty” for their own nation and God promises that they will crush and scatter).

    Of course, Jesus Christ is our lens to understand this seeming paradox, not to mention the Redeemer who is promised. An important explanation of this joining of violence and love comes today, although it seems even weirder at first glance. Jesus is doing a number of things in the gospel reading: testifying to John the Baptist’s greatness, marking the transition from the Old Covenant and Time of Promises to the New Covenant and the End Times, and pairing a type of violence with his new reign of love.

    The Baptism of Christ (1580-1582), Jacopo Tintoretto | Image from savevenice.org.

    Overtly, today’s gospel is about John the Baptist. He opens with, “among those born of women there has been none greater than John the Baptist.” Note that Jesus qualifies his statement with “born of women” — the contrast being “born of God” or “born of the Spirit,” which applies to Him and also all Christians who are baptized in His Name and become a part of His Bride, the Church. So, Jesus is saying that John is the greatest person ever to have been born to date. Indeed, we call him the greatest of the prophets. This is because he prepares the way for the Lord, always points away from himself and to the Son of God, demonstrating for us the appropriate posture of all humanity.

    Then Jesus quickly qualifies His statement: “yet the least in the Kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” This does not detract from John’s greatness, but simply states the fact that those who are united with God in the Kingdom are on a completely different level of greatness, simply by their proximity to and joining with the Creator. Nothing on earth can compare with the glory and splendor of the Kingdom of heaven. Jesus is drawing some distinctions for the crowd who has gathered to be with Him.

    And the next distinction is inscrutable upon first hearing it: “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent are taking it by force.” Jesus is marking a distinction of times: the time before John versus the time “of” John, when Christ has been walking the earth as his contemporary. Jesus says that the Kingdom suffers violence, and those violent people are forcefully taking it. What’s going on here? We must ponder this.

    Recall that in the Gospel of St. Matthew, John’s disciples had just come to join the crowds around Jesus and asked him if he was the Messiah. Jesus told them to report back to John truthfully about what they see (the proof is in the pudding!). John’s disciples, who in truth are Jesus’s disciples just like the crowds gathered there, are what is different about this time of “John the Baptist until now.” People are earnestly seeking God, dropping everything else in their lives, living anew in a Spirit-fueled way. Are these the “violent” whom Jesus says are taking the Kingdom by force?

    We certainly can’t think that He means the Romans, the Herodians, and others who cause violence to the people. He preaches many times against this type of worldly power; we need simply scan the Beatitudes to know that these people are not “taking the Kingdom.” Plus, such a reading implies that somehow the Kingdom of Heaven is vulnerable and that the Son of God has anxiety over its unlawful seizure. No, this is untenable — God’s reign is absolute and God does not feel anxiety over injustice; instead He destroys evil with an unyielding, purifying fire.

    So if Jesus is not anxious about an unlawful violence, we must conclude that He is saying these things with a certain recognition of the righteousness of “the violent taking it by force.” This must be God’s plan.

    Thankfully, Fr. Simeon Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis helped to make sense of this passage for me. He translates the original Greek as “the Kingdom of Heaven is irrupting forcefully, and the forceful are seizing it.” I will quote at length his masterful interpretation:

    The Lord’s saying here possesses a resonance of deep mystery: Is violence being done to the Kingdom or by the Kingdom? The Greek middle voice here admits either the rendering given above or the more traditional “the Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence.” However, any number of signs from the context prompt us to understand the passage in terms of the forceful initiative undertaken by the Kingdom of Heaven to establish itself on earth as a new reality. We have been prepared for such an understanding by Jesus’ declaration, “I have come to bring not peace but the sword upon the earth” (10:34). … His followers must be persons of deep convictions, whose faith is more powerful than the natural human fear of “those who can kill the body” (10:28). Above all, the Christian must be a person who loves Jesus more than father and mother, son or daughter (10:37). All of these are particular aspects of the salutary interior violence a person must do to himself in order to be “worthy of Jesus”, an heir of the Kingdom, and a child of the Father of the Word. The mysterious formulation, then, appears to mean that the “violence” or “forcefulness” that God himself is using so as to tear down the barriers that the human heart has erected against the approach of grace must be matched by the decision on the part of individuals to respond just as violently and forcefully in embracing that grace. … The Kingdom does not fall on us like the rain: we must repent, change our way of life, catch the fire of the love of God in Jesus, cling to God just as passionately as we previously clung to our wayward desires.
    (Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. I, 659-660)

    I particularly like how Leiva-Merikakis identifies the violence as of the type God Himself uses to tear down barriers in the human heart. How does God do this other than love? We begin to see how God’s love has an inherent violence against sloth and against evil. We, as Christians, are called to respond to this internal violence caused by love and just as forcefully “embrace the grace.”

    I am reminded of this passage from the Book of Revelation: “I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth” (Rev 3:15-16). We are not called to be lukewarm Christians, nodding at what we hear, kneeling at the right time, learning the prayers by rote but without a conversion of heart that translates into charity. We are called to grasp Christ and hold Him close, to change our lives from the base temptations and evil in the world so that we can yoke ourselves to Christ, allow Him to perfect us, and be worthy of the Kingdom.

    St. Francis Embraces Christ on the Cross (Abrazo de San Francisco al crucificado), 1620, Francisco Ribalta | Wikimedia Commons.

    This speaks to the violence inherent in any kind of change or passion. Change is a movement from one state of being to another. It is inherently and unavoidably disruptive. And as we’ve identified throughout Advent, God’s love is transformative. This means there is a certain awesome violence in this love that dislodges us from self-centeredness and inactivity. Remember Isaiah’s words from God today: “I will open up rivers on the bare heights, and fountains in the broad valleys; I will turn the desert into a marshland, and the dry ground into springs of water.” This transformation is life-giving, not destructive. This is a force to rejoice in, not to fear. This is an internal violence that may upend our lives, but only for the better!

    So Jesus is marking the time of His coming — the time of John the Baptist helping his disciples prepare the way for the Lord — as one of an internal violence, fueled by the Spirit, where those who are “moved” are seizing the Kingdom of Heaven within this sphere of transformative love.

    The final bit of today’s gospel finds Jesus emphatically marking the end of the age of the prophets. He says, “All the prophets and the law prophesied up to the time of John. And if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah, the one who is to come.” Jesus is saying that the time of the prophets (also called the Age of Promises) ends with John. All of the prophets until John prepared the people with prophecies of what was to come, but John actually announced that the Son of God has arrived. The last sentence shows that John is the fulfillment of the time of prophecy; Jesus is referring to the Book of Malachi: “Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes” (Mal 4:5). Jesus tells the crowds that John closes the cycle of prophecy, fulfilling the promise of Elijah’s coming. John has inaugurated the era of Christ’s Reign, the Kingdom of Heaven come down to earth.

    So, let us not be too meek and mild in our hearts this Advent. Today’s readings remind us that God’s transformative love is violent, in a good way, and we are called to seize the Kingdom by throwing ourselves into it wholeheartedly, opening ourselves completely.

    Hope (La Speranza), 2018, Carolin Goedeke | Image from Etsy.com where the original painting is on sale.