Tag: Isaiah

  • Yoked to the Lord

    Wednesday in the 2nd Week of Advent: Isaiah 40:25-31, Matthew 11:28-30.

    Today’s readings strike me as a sort of Catholic Labor Day. Rather than celebrating all those who labor, today (my make-believe Catholic Labor Day) celebrates our being yoked to the Lord in spiritual work — something that eclipses whatever earthly labor we do and lightens our beings. I think it is worthwhile to explore our ideas of labor in light of today’s gospel reading; perhaps we’ll be able to gain insight into how Christ’s teaching resonates through the centuries to today.

    A little historical perspective: Labor Day arose in the USA in the late 1800s as a way to recognize the contributions of workers in our newly industrialized nation. Factories in America’s cities fueled incredible growth in jobs, and there was a great exodus from agricultural and rural areas to cities. But the work was often hard, dirty, and exploitative. The American labor movement and trade unions focused on safe working conditions and workers’ rights, and grew in power and popularity. Labor Day arose from this cultural mix: believing in the power of humans to create a better world (the rallying cry of industrialization) and the simultaneous urge to not devalue humanity as “cogs in the machine,” an inherent hazard in the race to produce cheap goods for mass consumption. This is what I want to emphasize because today’s gospel has something different to say about labor. Again: Labor Day came about as a reaction against the dehumanizing effect of industrialization, within a cultural milieu of heightened expectation of the Enlightenment ideals of humanism. While the traditional Age of Enlightenment is dated to end at the Age of Revolutions (French, American, Industrial), we can understand that this revolutionary urge was nothing more than people really taking on the Enlightenment ideals of individualism, human progress, scientism, rationalism, and opposition to religious orthodoxy. Arguably, the Age of Enlightenment continues through to this day — many of our unspoken assumptions about who we are, our place in the world, and the destiny of civilization are nothing but products of Enlightenment thinking.

    Detroit Industry, North Wall (1932-1933), frescoes by Diego Rivera | Image from the Detroit Institute of Arts. Rivera (a Mexican immigrant and Communist), created a fascinating set of frescoes in the Detroit Institute of Arts to celebrate workers and progress brought about by the Industrial Revolution. The work is not without its symbolic and literal criticisms of progress, even though it celebrates and comes close to romanticizing the labor of workers.

    Many (myself included) would argue that Labor Day celebrates a noble ideal: that the common working person has dignity. But as a Catholic, I have some issues with the cultural environment that produced this holiday. Workers have forever been devalued in human societies. From the slaves who built the pyramids to the slaves who worked on American plantations, humans have long turned a blind eye to the human dignity that workers inherently have. You just have to watch one of any number of PBS Masterpiece shows from historical England to see that even the most civilized English manors had a rigorous upstairs/downstairs caste system where workers were thoroughly “put in their place.” Why, then, did Labor Day only develop in the late 1800s? Not to go on too long about historical movements, but populism, driven by humanist ideals reaching a crescendo in the French and American Revolutions, was the tipping point for the common person’s interests to begin to be heard on a global scale. Add to this the development of mass communication with newspapers, railroads, cable telecommunications and the like, and suddenly people could be “seen and heard.” But as is so often the case, people in the Industrial Revolution didn’t necessarily look to their past to contextualize their struggles, but instead to the immediate future. This is understandable: hungry people need food, poor people need money, people with dangerous work need safer conditions. So the ideal of upholding common human dignity took a back seat to pressing concerns and political goals.

    All of this is to say that Labor Day is rooted partly in class struggle, more firmly in the bosom of capitalism, and most unmovably in the assumption that humans alone must watch out for themselves, create their own justice, and progress to a better human future on this earth.

    Here we finally get to today’s readings because that last list of assumptions runs contrary to the Word of God. I wonder how construction workers at the turn of the last century would answer Isaiah from today’s reading: “Lift up your eyes on high and see who has created these things”? When all we see are skyscrapers and human “progress,” we must conclude that we are the ones who have created these things. Pride and self-centeredness can be social traits as well as personal ones. Thankfully, Isaiah continues in spreading the Word of God: “Why, O Jacob, do you say, and declare, O Israel, ‘My way is hidden from the LORD, and my right is disregarded by my God’?” These doubts in God’s desire or ability to see and hear us are common throughout history. Isaiah brings them up in order to answer them roundly: “Do you not know or have you not heard? The LORD is the eternal God, creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint nor grow weary, and his knowledge is beyond scrutiny.” This is the first and most essential thing to get straight. We must realize that there is someone so much greater than us. God does not grow weary and He knows everything in the past, present, and future. Without this knowledge (not blind faith without evidence), we are doomed to go about life truly blind, without any of the great attributes we are called to have: wisdom, truthfulness, love.

    Isaiah then pivots to share with us the great promise of the Lord for those who suffer on the earth: “He gives strength to the fainting; for the weak he makes vigor abound. Though young men faint and grow weary, and youths stagger and fall, They that hope in the LORD will renew their strength, they will soar as with eagles’ wings; They will run and not grow weary, walk and not grow faint.” This promise is that God will share some of His great strength and endurance with us. It is promised to “they that hope in the Lord” — that is, those who can look up and see the works of God in creation, not just the works of mankind. This promise carries a specific message to workers, slaves, and the suffering. They are historically demeaned and dehumanized by human societies. God is the one who gives them dignity, especially when humans fail to. Of course, this message carries weight for anyone who grows weary (perhaps just weary of life) or who staggers and falls (perhaps in sin).

    Jesus repeats His promise in today’s gospel: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” Here we have the original Labor Day ideal, but perfect, without human conditions, caveats, or cultural baggage. Jesus calls “all you who labor and are burdened,” regardless of who they are or the burden they undertake. It is universal. And his promise of rest is absolute, not relegated to one day or an improved number of hours off. This promise is clearly above and beyond what humans can offer to one another. It can only come from God Himself.

    Oxen, Boat and Fishermen, Valencia (1912), Mathias J. Alten | Image from alten.gvsuartgallery.org. I love the impressionistic strokes lighting and darkening the oxen. I also love the image of the oxen pulling the fishermen’s boat ashore in light of today’s reading and the Apostles being appointed “fishers of men.” We and Christ are teamed up to help with the work of the Apostles.

    The image of the yoke He employs is especially significant. “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart,” He says. First, let us recognize that yokes were traditionally used to join two animals in labor together. What’s more, young and inexperienced animals were (and still are) often joined with a more experienced animal to help them learn more quickly how to behave when working. Jesus’s metaphor here is deliberate: He is asking us to become yoked to Him! He will carry the burden alongside us; He will, in fact, help us to learn how to work. This is the action of God’s love come down to earth. Consider that God has already “yoked” Himself to humanity by taking on our human form, and Christ’s invitation to us has implications beyond our individual endeavors in the world. Fr. Simeon Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis writes, “He who was divine yoked himself to us through his humanity, and now he is inviting us to yoke ourselves to him and his divinity. When the Son’s yoke becomes ours as well, his Incarnation becomes our divinization. To become yoked to the divinity and glory of the Son!” (Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, 722-723). 

    In the second part of his statement, “and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart,” provides us with an understanding of what He will teach us. He points out His own meekness and humbleness of heart because this is what He wants to teach us as we go about our work in the world. Jesus’s humbleness is evident in many ways, but especially through His relationship to the Father. He is the perfection of the law, and obedience is the trait that reveals how he is humble of heart. He wants to yoke us to Him, to train us in how to be obedient to the Father alongside Him. What a revelation of what is in the core of the Divine Being: a gentleness and obedience that we are invited to share.

    Finally, we receive the same promise that the Word of God spoke to Isaiah: Jesus says, “and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.” The great lesson is that submissiveness of heart to God in fact frees us, allows us to feel rested, rejuvenates us. What a revelation for those who labor! By nature, work means that we exert ourselves, we strain; and it is anti-strain, anti-exertion, that we should do instead. This lifting of burdens is one in the heart, and it immediately impacts us psychologically and physically. We have many folk sayings about how a light heart makes for easy work, and these emanate from this same truth revealed through Christ. This is not mere mind over matter, however, let’s be clear. This is the grace of God that is promised to us as we “hope in the Lord” and show our obedience to Him.

    The last question I ask myself is “why does the Lectionary present these readings now, during Advent?” For me, there is a clear relationship to the question with which I opened these Advent reflections: For What are we Waiting? Likewise, for whom are we preparing the way? The answer to both is, of course, Christ, but we must not fall back on vagueness and trite remembrances of who Christ is and what He means for humanity’s salvation. This reading reminds us that we are marking the time of humanity’s waiting for this great yoke-mate, this selfless, humble-of-heart teacher who brings with Him the promise of lightening our loads.

    Milk Maid (1902), Rose Emily Stanton | Creative Commons, courtesy ArtUK/The Museum in the Park.

    This reading, in the light of the opening thoughts regarding Labor Day, also points to the fact that we must expand our ideas about laboring and who is a worker beyond those tied to our cultural memory. Do we not all labor with the burden of something in this life? If not physical labor, there is the mental labor of meeting expectations, of righting wrongs we’ve done, of laboring to be more loving. The universality of Christ’s message regarding labor is important.

    Everyone, at all times, is invited by Christ to take up His yoke of obedience to the Father and learn that humbleness of heart like His will give us the rest and rejuvenation we crave.

  • The Parched Land Will Exult

    Monday in the 2nd Week of Advent: Isaiah 35:1-10, Luke 5:17-26.

    Yesterday, we reflected that part of Advent’s preparing the way for the Lord is to keep a burning vision of the heavenly Kingdom at the forefront of our minds and desires. I noted that there is a bit of a failure of the Christian imagination on this front, perhaps linked to our relatively comfortable lifestyles, at least in the USA. In today’s readings, Isaiah presents us with a fantastic vision of the Kingdom, and the gospel reading shows us how that Kingdom came to earth with Christ, a blessing on all creation.

    If we have trouble conjuring for ourselves what the Kingdom might be like, Isaiah provides the image. I love the opening to today’s reading: “The desert and the parched land will exult; the steppe will rejoice and bloom. They will bloom with abundant flowers, and rejoice with joyful song.” Here is God’s creation, meeting the glory of its Creator as He descends to greet it. For those of us who live in desert climates, we know that what looks barren and dead is actually full of life — from tiny flowers to lizards under rocks — and certain times of year give us a glimpse into what the final Kingdom might bring. The desert in bloom is beautiful. Isaiah is granted a vision that eclipses normal seasonal change, however. The steppe “rejoices” in bloom, the steppe and desert “rejoice with joyful song.” Lest we think this simple hyperbole, remember what Jesus told the Pharisees who wanted to silence the crowds singing for Him upon His entrance into Jerusalem (Palm Sunday): “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out” (Lk 19:40). All of creation rejoices to see its Creator!

    Zion Dreams (contemporary), Johnathan Harris | Image from fineartamerica.com.

    As we explored last week, the love we invite into our hearts as Christians is transformative. Isaiah’s passage today is all about God’s transformative love. We are accustomed to thinking of this love transforming human hearts, but what about non-human nature? Isaiah says, “Streams will burst forth in the desert, and rivers in the steppe. The burning sands will become pools, and the thirsty ground, springs of water.” We see all that is good bursting forth, specifically water in many forms. Water is synonymous with life — the land is returning to the state of the Garden of Eden. The dangerous aspects of nature are subsumed in order for the righteous to walk unhindered: “No lion will be there, nor beast of prey go up to be met upon it. It is for those with a journey to make, and on it the redeemed will walk.”

    As for humanity, God’s presence will “Strengthen the hands that are feeble, make firm the knees that are weak, Say to those whose hearts are frightened: Be strong, fear not!” Isaiah sees Christ coming into the world, and he relates, “he comes to save you. Then will the eyes of the blind be opened, the ears of the deaf be cleared; Then will the lame leap like a stag, then the tongue of the mute will sing.”

    This is exactly what happens in the gospel. We cannot mistake the fact of Christ on the earth: it is the beginning of the Reign of God. These things that are prophesied actually take place; they cannot help but take place in the presence of God! Luke’s gospel reading tells of the paralytic who was lowered through the roof in the house to be in the presence of the Messiah and be healed. Let’s recall that Jesus was teaching “Pharisees and teachers of the law, who had come from every village of Galilee and Judea and Jerusalem.” This was not a small, intimate room but more like a court of the learned surrounding their resplendent King. And into this distinguished court, a poor paralytic is lowered through the roof. Talk about crashing a party!

    And does this upset the Heavenly King? Of course not — the paralytic and those with him are exactly the subjects whom the King has come to welcome into his Kingdom. In a typical gospel social class reversal, Jesus shows love for the least of his people, over and above the more distinguished in His company. But this episode has a greater depth of meaning because Christ does not heal the man’s physical infirmity; instead “When Jesus saw their faith, he said, “As for you, your sins are forgiven.’” Jesus has ordered for us what is important: spiritual health far surpasses physical health. We see His true self and true mission. At this point, I almost become uncomfortable referring to Jesus Christ as having a “mission;” As God, He IS. His being needs no mission, it is the ongoing outpouring of creative, salvific love into the world. Like Isaiah tells us, creation rejoices and is transformed in His Presence. So, rather than seeing His true mission, let’s rephrase: we see Him.

    Healing of the Paralytic (c.1100), unknown artist, from the Museo diocesano in Salerno, Italy | Image from flickr.com.

    He invites us to be faithful and, in return, He will perfect us. Last week, we reflected several times upon the concept of faith that is discussed in scripture and how it is more akin to “fidelity to my promise to you, Lord” rather than “belief in something unproven.” Faith — in our traditional Judeo-Christian sense — is a demonstrable response to something outside of us that is real, not a shaky internal belief system. So when the paralytic and his friends demonstrate their fidelity to God’s promise to send a Savior who will make “the lame leap like a stag” by coming with hope, love, and devotion into His Presence, then the Savior forgives their sins. This purification of their souls (the baptism in the Holy Spirit promised by John the Baptist) makes them suitable to inhabit the Kingdom of God for eternity.

    As we might expect, the Pharisees and scribes ask themselves, “Who is this who speaks blasphemies? Who but God alone can forgive sins?” An interesting question arises: do they lack faith? One can imagine that their insistence that God alone can forgive sins demonstrates faith in God. So maybe a lack of faith is not what’s going on with them, but a spiritual blindness. They cannot recognize God’s own Son in front of them whereas others (so often the less fortunate ones) see Him clearly. Perhaps they’re not looking for a Savior at this moment. Perhaps they’re too comfortable in their stations in life to yearn for a Savior; in fact, a Savior might spoil their career plans. We begin to see the importance of Christ’s question to Peter: “But who do you say I am?” (Mt 16:15) and more forcefully to the Jews, “you will die in your sins unless you believe that I am he” (Jn 8:24b). Denying that He is the Son of God reveals our own self-centeredness, our spiritual blindness, our inability to have prepared the way for the Lord.

    Jesus, in His love and desire to save all with Him, responds to their unspoken doubts and questioning and heals the paralyzed man, explaining why: “that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” This is a very specific reason, let’s consider this. A self-aggrandizing healer would not bother with the whole sins forgiven quagmire and would just heal so that people would think he’s great. A pretender Messiah would likely just stick with the sins forgiven line and avoid the work of healing a paralytic because forgiving sins is the more religiously important act. But Christ deigns to accomplish both spiritual and physical healing, not to show off His power, but specifically to accomplish another healing: healing the spiritual blindness in the scribes and Pharisees. They are blind to the Son of God in their midst for whatever reason, and the physical healing of the paralyzed man, despite being a lesser miracle, is done for them more than it’s done for the paralytic. 

    When he picks up his mat and leaves, the final lines show us that the third healing has been accomplished: “Then astonishment seized them all and they glorified God, and, struck with awe, they said, ‘We have seen incredible things today.’” What they say might on the surface sound a little underwhelming (couldn’t they say, “you are God”?) but it clues us into the problem of blindness and the healing — they now acknowledge that they have seen incredible things.

    The Palsied Man Let Down through the Roof (Le paralytique descendu du toit), c.1886-1896, James Tissot | Creative Commons, courtesy the Brooklyn Museum.

    I think this spiritual blindness continues to be a problem for us. Our imagination is not dominated by visions of the Heavenly Kingdom; we cannot see it clearly. But this is why we study scripture, why we revel in the ecstatic vision of the Kingdom that Isaiah gives us, and why we gasp with astonishment like the scribes at Jesus’s miracles. When I’ve been asked if I could go back in time to any point in history, I answer that it would absolutely be during Christ’s ministry to see and hear God walk upon the earth. But I need not be wistful for this impossible dream. What we must keep in mind during Advent is that Jesus’s life on earth is a foretaste of the eternal Kingdom promised to us. This is great news! We are all invited to experience Him for eternity — something that was only foreshadowed and begun when Jesus Christ walked in human form on the earth. It seems almost too good to be true. If you’re like me, you earnestly ask, what must we do to reach this Kingdom? 

    Christ, the Way, answers us over and over again during His ministry. In this episode, in particular, I think we are being shown an interesting perspective on salvation. We must truly be the paralytic, unable to move on our own, suffering, but filled with the vision of something incomparably better. We can only put ourselves as close to Christ as possible as a demonstration of our faith in Him.

    He does the rest.  

  • Leveling Mountains and Valleys

    Sunday in the 2nd Week of Advent: Isaiah 40:1-5, 9-11, 2 Peter 3:8-14, Mark 1:1-8.

    The second week of Advent is marked by this phrase: Prepare the Way of the Lord! We hear it from Isaiah, and 800 years later from St. John the Baptist, and 50 years later from St. Mark in his gospel, and 2,000 years later we hear it in our churches. This is our Christian clarion — the loud, clear, brassy call that something of ultimate importance comes this way. It is our King, our Lord and Savior. We must make way for Him, prepare for Him; but how exactly do we do this?

    Christ Glorified in the Court of Heaven (1423-1424), Fra Angelico | Image from fineartamerica.com. Note the clarions (long medieval-style horn) being played by the angels and the wide, straight path that is made for Him.

    Today’s readings provide the answer: we are to make way for Him in our hearts and in our minds by leveling mountains and valleys, by acknowledging our sins, and by living in holiness and devotion. But we should not get too wrapped up in what we are doing because all of this is a job of scouring of ourselves in order to let the Lord come into our beings and reign there. It is only the Lord who can do the work of sanctifying, of saving, of pouring out saving grace. We must simply scrub the house and make it as pristine as possible for the Lord to inhabit.

    Isaiah uses imagery of the land to emphasize the level of preparation that must be made: “Make straight in the wasteland a highway for our God! Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill shall be made low; the rugged land shall be made a plain, the rough country, a broad valley.” Remember, this is Isaiah’s vision of what John the Baptist will be saying. We know that John’s message was a spiritual one: “I have baptized you with water; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” Thus, let’s understand that Isaiah is speaking of a spiritual landscape. So, speaking of one’s soul, what vision does Isaiah provide? One of a great leveling — mountains lowered and valleys raised to create a wide plain, rough country tamed and made into a broad valley. This is a type of domestication, an ordering. What might loom in our hearts as a mountain? Perhaps unfilled ambitions. What stretches out before us like a deep valley? Our fears. What is rough country, hard to traverse? Perhaps distractions, little events in the grand scheme that we make into large things. Isaiah sees that John will ask us to perform an internal ordering, to wipe out the worldly ambitions, fears, distractions, and sins.

    In return, John baptizes people in the Jordan River. Jews had long practiced mikveh, a ritual cleaning in “living water” (a natural, running water source). Mikveh is practiced so that the person can be considered ritually pure and resume religious rites. It is used for men after normal emissions of semen and for women after childbirth or menstruation (among several other reasons). But something else is going on with John. As St. Mark relates, the Jews “were being baptized by him in the Jordan River as they acknowledged their sins.” Could these sins have been the same as those for mikveh? Perhaps, but the verse seems to encompass more than these physical impurities. Especially as it is linked to Isaiah’s prophecy and the spiritual leveling as part of the anticipation of the coming of the Lord, John’s baptism is a ritual that signifies the cleaning of their souls, not their bodies. John is clearly outside of the religious establishment, living apart in the desert, eating locusts and honey, clothed in camel hair. Something new and different is happening. And John’s message is loud and clear: “One mightier than I is coming after me. I am not worthy to stoop and loosen the thongs of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” The people coming to John are not there for themselves, they’re there for the Messiah. They aren’t being ritually cleaned to resume normal religious worship, they’re being spiritually cleansed in order to properly await one who will truly give them a new birth in the Spirit. 

    Icon of St. John the Baptist (c.1300, Constantinople) | Creative Commons, courtesy the British Museum. Their notes: “He is identified by a Greek inscription in red on either side of the halo: ‘St John’ to the left and O Prodromos (`the Forerunner’) to the right.” He is usually depicted in icons with wild hair.

    So John’s message in the second week of Advent is that we must prepare ourselves for the one coming after him, the Christ. Jews in his time understood this to mean that they should confess their sins and undergo a ritual spiritual cleansing in the Jordan River. The second reading from St. Peter connects this same awaiting for Christ that they experienced before his ministry to the waiting we are doing now in the End Times, awaiting His return in glory. Peter tells us how and why we should be preparing ourselves: “what sort of persons ought you to be, conducting yourselves in holiness and devotion, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God.” He recommends conducting ourselves in holiness and devotion and hoping for (hastening) the “day of God.” Thanks to Christ, we have a perfected understanding of holy conduct and godliness; He has given us a Way to follow. But are we doing these things just to be upright and moral? Are we hoping to be patted on the head for our goody-two-shoes ways?

    Both John the Baptist and Peter speak of readying ourselves for Christ’s coming (the kairos moment that occupies at least two major historical moments). He is the reason; we want to be ready and acceptable for Christ to reign. But let’s think this through. If God is all goodness, love, and purity, then His reign is one where those qualities dominate the heavens and the earth. What room is there for hate, sin, greed, or evil? None! Do we really understand why we’re preparing in the way we are? We are awaiting the end of the world, which Jesus tells us could happen at any moment. What do we imagine comes next? Peter tells us: “we await new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. Therefore, beloved, since you await these things, be eager to be found without spot or blemish before him, at peace.” And there it is: since we await a new world where righteousness dwells, we should be eager to be found without blemish and at peace so that we can inhabit this world. I’m beginning to understand that my spiritual preparation must also include a deep contemplation (and yearning for) a world where righteousness reigns without challenge. If I don’t understand and yearn for this, then my preparations, confessions, and penances are just window dressing. There is no substance to these preparations unless I am doing them with the right goal and person in mind: Christ’s Reign of righteousness. It must be for Him and His Kingdom, not for me and my desire to “be good.”

    Christ in Glory between the angels and archangels (1621), Guido Reni | Creative Commons, courtesy wikiart.org.

    But let’s be honest, we are much better at dreaming of conflict and sin than we are of goodness alone. From Dante’s Inferno to pornography (one a great and thoughtful piece of literature and the other sheer sin), we are fascinated by the fallenness of the world. Whether it’s a sick addiction to watching evil as a voyeur or a moral lesson for ourselves or a mirror where we recognize our own failings, we are drawn to stories that contain evil. Consider horror movies. Consider detective shows that delve into the worst of crimes. We entertain ourselves with these depictions. The adage behind good novel writing and good screenplays is that there must be a conflict. Without a conflict, there’s no story. We would get bored. Is this why we barely put effort into imagining “new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells”? Since there’s no story here but the end of time, is there anything to imagine?

    If so, I think this is a real failure of the Catholic imagination. Some philosophers have gone so far as to call God a tyrant who imposes His magisterial will on everyone and everything in heaven; they impose a sinister heaviness on heaven and cast God as an authoritarian. What on earth is going on here? How far this is from the scriptural “fear of God” that reveres Him as the merciful and just Creator of the universe who loves His people above all else!

    Why can’t we imagine and long for “new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells”? I have a theory that it has something to do with lives of comfort. It’s hard to long for something so much greater when what you’ve got is pretty good to begin with. On the other hand, for Eritrean or Syrian refugees fleeing war in their home countries, the desire for a better future is all-consuming. The poor, the hungry, those who have been humbled — they are the ones graced with a true Christian imagination and longing for God’s Kingdom. This is why Christ teaches us, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 5:3). This is why it is so important to be humble (or humbled), to eschew riches and worldly desires: these things keep us from focusing our hopes and desires squarely upon “new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.” If we are too comfortable, we have no desire or need for a greater eschatological vision. This is why Jesus proclaims, “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Mt 19:24).

    In closing, let’s consider that today’s gospel is the very first passage from St. Mark. How would you start if you had to explain something that most people would be primed to disbelieve? The great claim is there in the title: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God.“ One way to begin is to trace the historical prophecies of the Jewish nation through bold figures like Isaiah and John the Baptist. The connection is undeniable between God’s promise to Isaiah, “I am sending my messenger ahead of you; he will prepare your way. A voice of one crying out in the desert” and the figure of John the Baptist, who “appeared in the desert proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” But there’s more than just a play for legitimacy here. St. Mark shows us that crowds listened to the clarion call from John: “People of the whole Judean countryside and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the Jordan River as they acknowledged their sins.” What’s important is not just that the clarion is blown, but that people respond. This testifies to the power of the call and the truth that the messenger delivers. This is the journey of faith to which we are called: to respond to God’s call in our lives. St. Mark illustrates for us in the very opening scene of his gospel what Christianity is all about.

    May we all be people with eyes on the horizon, awaiting the coming of Christ and His Kingdom. May that vision inspire us to prepare our souls to meet Him in this glorious Kingdom.

  • The Generous Harvest Without Cost

    The Generous Harvest Without Cost

    Saturday in the 1st Week of Advent: Isaiah 30:19-21, 23-26, Matthew 9:35-10:1, 5a, 6-8.

    In today’s readings, there are many themes to explore, from the richness of God’s promise to the use of agricultural imagery. In order to keep this reflection from ranging all over the place, I’d like to focus on how God’s compassion is the moving force behind all of salvation, from His promises to the prophets to Christ’s coming to our ongoing work as the Church.

    Isaiah proclaims, “He will be gracious to you when you cry out, as soon as he hears he will answer you.” This promise of God’s responsiveness and generosity occurs throughout the Old Testament. Isaiah continues, using an image that will be central to Christ’s own sacramental words: “The Lord will give you the bread you need and the water for which you thirst.” Isaiah hears the Word of God, but its significance won’t become clear until Christ declares to the Samaritan woman at the well, “those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (Jn 4:14). The bread is likewise much more generous, much deeper, than earthly bread alone. We now know that the Bread of Life is Christ’s very body that we eat in the Eucharist, and Jesus explains how his body contains life-giving sustenance: “I have food to eat that you do not know about. … My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work” (Jn 4:32, 34). We partake in this heavenly food, which is in fact doing God’s will, when we take Christ into our own bodies (see If You Knew the Gift! for a longer reflection on this). Simply put, God’s generosity and purpose in giving is so much greater than we expect or can even imagine.

    The Holy Eucharist, provenance unknown | Image from pinterest.com

    Isaiah then prophesies in a crystal clear way the coming of Christ: “No longer will your Teacher hide himself, but with your own eyes you shall see your Teacher, While from behind, a voice shall sound in your ears: ‘This is the way; walk in it,’ when you would turn to the right or to the left.” Let’s consider for a moment that this act of giving us a Teacher in human form is another compassionate response to something for which we deeply yearn. A person who loves God longs to see His face, to do His will, but the mystery of our invisible and silent God is often a stumbling block. God knows this and has compassion for our lowly condition, scrambling about in this world blindly. The Incarnation of Christ as a baby in Mary’s womb is an incredible act of compassion for humanity. God comes to Earth so that we can see Him, hear Him, touch Him, and sustain ourselves sacramentally on His Body and Blood throughout these end times. There is no other reason but His love and compassion for His people, all of humanity. 

    And the second part of Isaiah’s prophecy above, where the voice of the Spirit tells us that “This is the way; walk in it,” is enacted when Jesus tells Thomas, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him” (Jn 14:6-7). Jesus reiterates that He is the answer to humanity’s longing to see God here on earth, but there’s more. By being the way, the truth, and the life, Jesus is giving us access to the heavenly food he references in the episode of the woman at the well: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.” So, what is the “bread you need” that the Lord gives us? This multi-faceted mystical food is both the body of His Son — uniting the spirit and the body, heaven and earthly needs — as well as an entire way of being that as Jesus tells us serves as sustenance for the body, too. This is the significance of Isaiah prophesying the Spirit saying “This is the way; walk in it” and of Jesus telling us “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”

    This is not just a moral lesson! Yes, living in the Way of Christ inherently means good moral choices and upright living, but this Way is a mystical link to our trinitarian Lord, whose love sustains us, even biologically so! Here’s the great leap for modern minds ruled by scientific “laws.” Do we really believe that a way of living can sustain us biologically, even if that way is God’s Way? Well, I share your skepticism, being a child of modern times, too. But let’s consider our saints; that is, those who have come closest to actually living the Way of Christ. I’ll take one of our great Dominican saints as an example: St. Catherine of Siena. Her confessor and biographer, Blessed Raymond of Capua, writes in The Life of Saint Catherine of Siena:

    After the virgin had had the first vision she was so full of the Holy Spirit that she went without food or drink for the whole of Lent until the feast of Our Lord’s Ascension; and yet despite this she was always bursting with life and happiness. … she was able to eat on Ascension Day, when she had wheaten bread and oil and vegetables. For it was not possible for any rich food to enter her stomach, either by natural or by supernatural means. When that day was over, however, she resumed her habitual fasting. Then she gradually reached a state of total abstinence almost unheard of in our times. But if her body took nothing, her spirit fed most sumptuously in its stead. While these things were happening, in fact, the holy virgin was devoutly receiving Holy Communion very frequently indeed, and on each occasion she was given so much grace that, with her bodily senses and all their inclinations thoroughly mortified, her soul and body were both equally nourished by the power of the Spirit. From this anyone with any faith must conclude that her life was wholly miraculous. 

    I myself have often seen that poor body, sustained by no more than a few glasses of cold water, reduced to such a state of exhaustion that we were all worried, imagining that she was about to die at any moment. Instead, as soon as any opportunity arose to honour the Divine Name, or do good to some soul, there would be a sudden wonderful change, and without the help of any medicine Catherine would regain all her life and strength and be strong and cheerful. She would get up, walk about, and go about her work as easily as the people who were with her and who were in good health: she did not know the meaning of fatigue.

    I ask you: where did all this come from, if not from the Spirit who delights in such works? What could not be done by nature, He did by miracle. Is it not perfectly clear that it was He who gave strength to her soul and body? (155-156).

    We see from Raymond the two sources of Catherine’s miraculous sustenance: the Body of Christ in the Eucharist and the Way of Christ in her prayer and good works. And don’t think this is some exaggeration by an eager biographer and friend — her lack of eating was so well documented and commented upon that she was ridiculed for it by many devout religious people, saying it was a trick of the devil or her trying to seem holier than the rest of them while taking food on the sly. She wanted to keep others from their hateful thoughts, so she tried to eat tiny morsels when at dinner with them but Raymond tells us, “The holy virgin did not swallow any of the vegetables or other things that she masticated, for she spat out all the large bits; but because it was impossible for some little bits of food or juice not to go down into her stomach, and because she liked to drink fresh water to refresh her throat and jaws, she was obliged to throw up everything she had swallowed every day. … She did this throughout the rest of her life because of the grumblers, particularly those who were scandalized by her fasting” (162).

    St. Catherine of Siena (1746), Giovanni Battista Tiepolo | Wikimedia Commons.

    Let’s restrain ourselves from diagnosing some eating disorder or extreme food allergy here. Raymond details how Catherine had utterly given her thoughts, will, and soul into God’s hands. She was a saint by any measure, and lived the Way of Christ. There is ample evidence that she was sustained not only spiritually, but bodily by that Way. 

    My only point is that God’s generosity is so great that it goes deeper and farther than we even expect. Many people would just be happy with physical bread for a day. Others with pain in this life but happiness for eternity. But God gives us both, here and now, because the Reign of Christ has already begun and we have both His Body and His Way to sustain us spiritually and bodily – in this life and the next.

    Caveat: I’m not suggesting that any of us try out the “St. Catherine Diet.” But this wordplay on diet fads tells us much about how we approach food, our bodies, and biology. The science of intake and output is a pathetic shadow of what’s important and lasting when it comes to our bodies on this earth. Jesus and the saints open up to us a new understanding of bodies in time, bodies and their interplay with spiritual food. I find this fascinating and inspiring, even if I doubt that I’ll ever experience it.

    One of the lessons in this different way of looking at food is that, unlike today’s body-image-obsessed thinking, it operates on eschewing thoughts of oneself and thinking of others instead. This frees up our concern with our own bodies and using food simply for our own benefit. What, then, in this heavenly worldview, is food? Does it lose meaning? Is it just something we need and use in this life, but really holds no value? As a devoted home cook who loves food, this is a depressing thought! 

    Still Life (c.1640s), Pieter Claesz | Image from fineartamerica.com.

    I think an answer can be found in the use of harvest imagery by both Isaiah and Jesus in today’s readings. Isaiah proclaims, “He will give rain for the seed that you sow in the ground, And the wheat that the soil produces will be rich and abundant.” God’s life-giving water, the rain for the seed we sow, is His Son. He is the life! And He produces a rich and abundant harvest. How He goes about this is detailed in the Gospel. Matthew tells us, “he summoned his Twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits to drive them out and to cure every disease and every illness. Jesus sent out these Twelve …” This is the establishment of the Church and the Way, where Jesus establishes a new Israel with 12 Apostles taking the place of the 12 tribes. God’s plan is to very overtly establish a new Way, Truth, and Life by having Christ work through his Apostolic Church. Christ bestows on them miraculous powers, making them adopted sons of God, allowing the love and action of the Trinity to flow through them. Could Christ have snapped His fingers and cured everyone in the Holy Land? Sure, but that wasn’t the Way that God had planned. The Way is important because we must “walk in it” in order to receive the grace and sanctification that prepares us to be in God’s presence for ever. Having us be active participants in the Way rather than doing it for us gives our lives meaning.

    This higher meaning gives us focus beyond the immediate and beyond our individual bubble. It’s an outward turning rather than an inward turning. The gifts Christ bestows on the Apostles are meant to be used for the benefit of others, not for the benefit of the Apostles. He tells them to proclaim “The Kingdom of heaven is at hand” as they cure, resurrect the dead and drive out demons. (Just imagine the burning glow of Christ’s glory infusing them as his inexorable Reign begins in human history!) Importantly, though, He ends his instructions with, “Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give.” He knows the sad temptations humans have when granted power, to use it seeking personal glory. He reminds them that they have freely been graced with these miraculous powers and they should freely give them. The subtext is that the power is not theirs at all — it’s God’s. They must be turned outward towards their fellow human because this is God’s posture, always giving, always generous, always loving. They are the first to walk the Way of Christ, and it entails not just the doing but a pure, loving generosity of spirit.

    But let’s get back to the harvest and what this heavenly perspective on food might be. Jesus invokes the now-famous saying “The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few” before charging his Apostles with their mission. But what makes him say this? Matthew tells us: “At the sight of the crowds, his heart was moved with pity for them because they were troubled and abandoned, like sheep without a shepherd.” It is his overwhelming compassion for humanity that prompts him. When we are ashamed of our sins or feel completely unworthy of God’s love, remember this! It is precisely our fallen state, our flailing about in temptation and sin, like sheep without a shepherd, that makes God want to help us. He not only knows all of our flaws, He is so overwhelmed with loving compassion to help us that He will do anything, including allowing his Son to be hung on a cross. Christ looks at the suffering and pathetic people and what is his response? Is it condemnation? No. Is it scolding? No.

    It’s an excitement for a plentiful harvest.

    Wait, what?

    The Harvest (Zur Erntezeit), 1891, Friedrich Kallmorgen | Image from flickr.com.

    Yes, this is so unexpected that we must slow down and take notice. To Christ, crowds of troubled people = an abundant harvest. What logic is driving this? There is only one logic at work, the logic of love. Only love, which soothes trouble and heals deep wounds, would consider crowds of suffering, troubled, sinful people to be wheat to harvest. This is because love — God’s love in particular — isn’t just a nice emotion or a feel-good moment. It’s entirely transformative. This is demonstrated through healing lepers, raising the dead, etc., but the bodily miracle simply mirrors the deeper spiritual miracle. It’s deeper because bodies will eventually wear out and die, but the soul will last forever. God’s love transforms sinful souls, doomed to spend eternity away from God, into healthy, flourishing souls that will feed others spiritually as they walk the Way of Christ. I must imagine that this is why Christ sees a plentiful harvest in these crowds: because his transformative Way (which is itself sustenance) will create more food for others, multiplying its way around the globe.

    Christ’s vision for humanity is a vision of glory. It is a perfecting vision; what we are called to be, feeding one another in the same way the three persons of the Trinity endlessly pour out their love for one another. Food, as we are starting to see, has a deeply multiplied meaning in this heavenly perspective. Food, of course, sustains our bodies; it is something coming from outside that nourishes us. God shows us that we can be food for others, too, in a similar way that Christ is for us (minus the Holy Eucharist). The concept of something-from-without-nourishing is evident as we are transformed from being inward-facing to being outward-facing. We become spiritual food for others, focused only on being a nourishing agent for them. We become travelers on the Way of Christ, joining in the great mystical Church, proving humanity with a new model of living, both here on earth and later in heaven.

  • An Eternal Rock

    Memorial of Saint Francis Xavier, Priest (Thursday in the 1st Week of Advent): Isaiah 26:1-6, Matthew 7:21, 24-27.

    Today’s readings ask us to consider how we use the word “strong” when it comes to our faith life. It seems reasonable that we encourage one another to keep our faith strong, or, as George Michael famously sang, “you gotta have faith.” But, like that song, this sentiment is completely about us, about putting things in our power. Rather than preaching this gospel of self-empowerment, our scriptures tell us – over and over, from Genesis to the Book of Revelation – that “strength” is God’s. What’s in our power? Simply to recognize this and rely upon it.

    The Creation Story (c.1530), Lucas Cranach the Elder | Image from pinterest.

    Isaiah is clear: “A strong city have we; he sets up walls and ramparts to protect us.” The prophet portrays God as a diligent ruler who builds protective structures for His people. The space created by God is what is strong. The people abjectly rely on the strength of their ruler and his fortress to protect them: “Open up the gates to let in a nation that is just, one that keeps faith.” Isaiah uses the Hebrew word אֱמֻנִֽים (’ĕ·mū·nîm), which properly means “one who is trustworthy,” although it is commonly translated as “one that keeps faith,” as in “one who did not betray his faith.” Consider this: in the ancient world, faith in something was generally understood to come from concrete proof in reality. God’s work in the world and in the lives of the Jewish people was a palpable thing. How different from what it has come to mean today, i.e., belief in something without proof. So, what Isaiah is saying is that the strong city of God should admit people who are trustworthy, who live by His commandments and do His will. He is not saying to admit people who fabricate for themselves a belief-without-proof. This was inconceivable to people who observed God in everything around them and Who was central to their very history and existence. Far from the abstract word we use today, we might say that “faith” for ancient Jews was more akin to acting in concordance with expectations. In other words, “keeping faith” or “having faith” was adhering to God’s commandments and precepts, in other words, being trustworthy. “Being faithful” was demonstrating that you could be trusted by God not to betray Him or stray from Him. “Faith” was concretely observable.

    “Trust,” on the other hand, was the word that had more in common with today’s understanding of “belief without proof.” Isaiah’s next line describes how the word trust was used: “A nation of firm purpose you keep in peace; in peace, for its trust in you.” Isaiah says that God protects his faithful people because they trust that He will come through for them. For the Jews, it’s not a question of whether there’s a God or not, it’s more a question of whether a person can trust in God’s intervention on their behalf. This clearly causes a bit of a problem in the “don’t put the Lord your God to the test” category. At issue, I think, is expecting God’s saving grace and protection in this world, in this lifetime. The prophets and, finally, Jesus Christ, clarify that God’s Kingdom is not the same as the world. Jesus repeatedly speaks of death as “sleep,”  and emphatically points out that everlasting life happens after resurrection from this sleep/death. Put your trust in God, but don’t expect His actions to come about according to your timeline or in the way you expect.

    And so our scriptures are full of the tension between trusting in God or trusting in something else in the world (money, power, our own intelligence, etc.). The problem is that humans live in a fallen state, temporarily separated from their Creator and longing to hear Him, see Him, feel Him. (We can begin to understand the divine genius behind the Incarnation – God’s loving us so much to be present to us in human form.) In our spiritual weakness, we stop trusting in the invisible One and start trusting in worldly things that give us immediate feedback and immediate satisfaction.

    The Prophet Isaiah (early 1700s), Antonio Balestra | Wikimedia Commons. While that looks like a dentist’s tool in the cherub’s hand, it’s not a tooth with gum tissue he’s holding – it’s the burning coal set to Isaiah’s lips.

    This is why Isaiah’s cry to his people is “Trust in the LORD forever! For the LORD is an eternal Rock.” And here we have it: the eternal rock, the strength, is the Lord. We need the urgings of the prophets because we are weak and tempted by the world. In acknowledgement of worldly temptations, Isaiah follows this with, “He humbles those in high places, and the lofty city he brings down … It is trampled underfoot by the needy, by the footsteps of the poor.” The measure of the world is wealth, and Isaiah’s words remind his listeners that this measure is false and will be overturned by God.

    In the gospel reading, Jesus takes up Isaiah’s theme of God being the rock and the strength upon which we should rely. The first verse from St. Matthew: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the Kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” This should sound familiar – doing “the will of my Father” is what Isaiah says about a nation “that keeps faith.” Jesus tells us that actual faithfulness to the commandments and spirit of God’s law is what we are called to do in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. This is a call to practice what we preach, to not simply profess to believe in God without submitting to His will.

    Next, Jesus reminds us of God’s strength being the only real, reliable strength for us. He uses the image of the rock: “Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house. But it did not collapse; it had been set solidly on rock.” This is an interesting little parable because through Christ the strength of God, the rock, becomes something we can work with and use. Let’s unpack this. In this parable, what we do in our lives is compared to the type of house we build. The foundation of this house is what makes the difference. If the foundation is rock, our house will not collapse. In Christ’s words, if we listen to his words and act on them, we can withstand storms and disasters, and our lives will continue (in the next life). 

    Jesus emphasizes acting on His words. In other words, living according to God’s will. The rest of the parable makes this clear:

    And everyone who listens to these words of mine
    but does not act on them
    will be like a fool who built his house on sand. 
    The rain fell, the floods came,
    and the winds blew and buffeted the house. 
    And it collapsed and was completely ruined.

    It’s interesting to dig into this. Acting on His words seems to have a bolstering effect, a solidifying effect, making our foundation solid, like rock, instead of shifty, like sand. This action is a type of embodiment of God’s will – making it real and alive through us. And that is precisely Jesus Christ Himself! He is the example of the embodiment of God’s will, even more, the mystical Incarnation of God Himself into humanity. He is the pinnacle, the apex, of His own teaching, and by following His teaching we are able to share in this embodiment of God on earth. This is part of God’s inscrutable plan, that He infuses the world through His human creatures, renewing and healing all of creation through us. 

    And the stakes could not be higher. A life built on sand results in complete ruin. The eschatological implications are severe: no entry into the eternal Kingdom of heaven. 

    St. Francis Giving His Mantle to a Poor Man (San Francesco Dando il suo mantello ad un povero), 1297-1299, Giotto | Creative Commons, from wikiart.org.

    The picture we are left with nicely re-frames the great challenge of Christianity. We might think that trusting in our invisible God is the challenge – what we would call today “having faith.” But this intellectualizes what is actually a challenge of actions. In other words, we’re making a mental game out of something that is much more practical and within our reach (albeit no less difficult). The challenge Christ lays before us is acting in the world according to God’s will. Listening to His Word and acting accordingly. This means forgiving, being humble, giving away wealth, caring for others more than ourselves, avoiding sin, praising and thanking and fearing God every moment. These are all things we do, and what Christ and the saints teach us is that when we do them over and over, God becomes more apparent to us and trusting in Him and relying on Him become easier and easier. 

    Let’s remember, then, why Advent is a season of penance, almsgiving, and prayer. These are the actions we are called to do before we can enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

  • On Feasting, Being Saved, and Recognizing

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

    In today’s readings, again we encounter Isaiah’s stunning prophecy of the Christ Event and a passage from the gospel that illustrates Christ’s prophesied reign at work in the world. On Advent days like these, we are reminded that Jesus Christ’s miraculous actions 2,000 years ago are contiguous with the Church’s ongoing work in the world as His bride and with his return at the end of time. Advent is here to remind us that His works were not just historical. He began His Reign when being born unto Mary, but it continues through the Spirit’s action in the Church and we anxiously await its culmination. We are living in the End Times! Keep your lamps trimmed and burning as we await the return of the bridegroom!

    Today’s reading from Isaiah points out three aspects of the 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, while this sustenance might be spiritual, the image used by Isaiah is rich and abundant food: “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. So, not just base sustenance but 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. They would certainly agree with Isaiah and his description here, but would 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 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 philosophical 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 made up by people rather than emanating from the source of all goodness). 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.

  • Glimpsed by Prophets

    Tuesday in the 1st Week of Advent: Isaiah 11:1-10, Luke 10:21-24.

    Imagine what it must have been to be a true prophet! Someone like Isaiah, Joel, or Jeremiah – given glimpses of God’s will and the heavenly kingdom. Today we hear an important prophecy of Advent: Isaiah sees Jesus, sprung from the “root of Jesse,” describing him and the world he ushers in. It’s remarkable, especially in light of yesterday’s reflection, because Isaiah describes both the Jesus Christ who comes to the Apostles in the flesh and the Jesus Christ who is the bringer of the Reign of God and end times. As we reflected, this is the same Christ, the same moment of kairos that we anticipate during Advent. Let’s dive into this moment with one of our great prophets, Isaiah, for we, too, participate in the prophetic announcement he makes.

    Just as we mark Advent as a time of paring down and preparation, Isaiah foresees that God’s people will be winnowed and devastated before the root of Jesse blossoms. In the chapter prior to today’s reading, Isaiah speaks of God’s wrath at his “godless nation,” those “who make iniquitous decrees, who write oppressive statutes, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right” (Is 10:1-2a). Isaiah tells them that God uses the Assyrians as “the rod of my anger,” and describes the penance of the Jewish nation as the cutting down of a forest. “Look, the Sovereign, the Lord of hosts, will lop the boughs with terrifying power; the tallest trees will be cut down, and the lofty will be brought low” (Is 10:33). This is truly a penance for sins committed against God, and we can connect our penitential season to this ages-old story among God’s people. Isaiah writes of the completeness of the humbling: “The remnant of the trees of his forest will be so few that a child can write them down” (Is 10:19). This is important! We so rarely take seriously the need for things like fasting, prayer, almsgiving, and humility before our God, but it is emphasized continually in our scriptures. From Abraham taking his son to an altar to Esther, in sackcloth, praying to God for three days to Jesus himself, stripped and beaten and hung on a cross (penance for our sins, not his), we are reminded that penance and supplication are necessary precursors to deliverance. We must ask ourselves how we are participating in penance and preparation this Advent.

    Upon this backdrop of a devastated forest, Isaiah foresees a shoot springing from the root of Jesse “and from his roots a bud shall blossom.” This new growth comes from old and revered rootstock: Jesse, grandson of Ruth and Boaz, was from the tribe of Judah and his youngest son was David. Yes, the greatest king of the Israelites sprung from Jesse, but more importantly, many generations later that line of David produces Joseph, Jesus’s father. Genealogy is important in our Judeo-Christian tradition because it shows how God remains true to His People over time and why the passing down of God’s revelation through families is so important.

    O Root (c. 2010), Sr. Ansgar Holmberg, CSJ, of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet | Image from thejesusquestion.org.

    I find Isaiah’s vision so striking because he is able to perceive the action of the Trinity. “The Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him: a Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, A Spirit of counsel and of strength, a Spirit of knowledge and of fear of the LORD, and his delight shall be the fear of the LORD.” We’ve all seen people who stand out from others, who have a light in them, who say or do something that seems divinely inspired, even if just for a moment. Imagine what Isaiah sees in Jesus, who is the Son of God, with the Spirit of the Lord indeed resting upon him, instilled in his very being, giving him wisdom, understanding, counsel, strength, and, reciprocally, such a sense of thanks and fealty to his Father that he delights in the fear of the Lord. Great mysteries of the Trinity are revealed to Isaiah in this moment, and he sees the interweaving love of the Three Persons.

    After this vision of the Trinity in Christ, Isaiah shares with us a vision of his righteous works: “Not by appearance shall he judge, nor by hearsay shall he decide, But he shall judge the poor with justice, and decide aright for the land’s afflicted.” Here we have a clear statement about how the righteous man (the Messiah, in fact) operates in terms of social justice: a preference for the poor and afflicted, without bias based on appearances. This is echoed in the book of Samuel, which relates how God guided him to choose the next king (David) from among Jesse’s sons: “the Lord said to Samuel [about the oldest son, Eliab], ‘Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart’” (1 Sam 16:7). God reveals to both prophets, Isaiah and Samuel, how his sight works (it peers into the unseen heart of humans) and how justice should flow from this type of God-bestowed sight and wisdom. It is worth re-reading the chronicles of David in the book of Samuel; we see parallels with Christ and how the Spirit of God dwelt with his Chosen People – specifically in the line of Jesse – in so many eras.

    But wait, you might say, perhaps Isaiah is just talking about David in this passage? Let’s get our historical timelines in order. King David made Jerusalem the capital of the united Jewish nation right around 1000 BC. Isaiah didn’t proclaim his prophecies until almost 300 years later, around 740-700 BC! He couldn’t have been talking about David because David was long dead; the kingdom had split between Judah and Israel and was about to be destroyed by the Assyrian empire. The blossoming bud from the root of Jesse is someone farther down the line from David. Isaiah the prophet sees Christ the Messiah, and although he doesn’t know his name, he describes him and the world he ushers in.

    Isaiah delivers his prophecy with some beautiful poetry: “with the breath of his lips he shall slay the wicked. Justice shall be the band around his waist, and faithfulness a belt upon his hips.” Indeed, as the incarnate Word of God, Jesus’s every word accuses and condemns wickedness. He is wrapped in justice, and will deliver it in the final judgment, and as for faithfulness, his very incarnation is the manifestation of God’s faithfulness to humanity. Only poetry can strive for the wonder and sheer beauty of this perfect Messiah that Isaiah glimpses in his prophetic vision.

    And then Isaiah’s prophecy changes from describing Christ to describing the world that Christ ushers in: “Then the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; The calf and the young lion shall browse together, with a little child to guide them.” These scenes are certainly miraculous, and, importantly, they describe a world where the needs and desires of the flesh are gone. In their place, peace reigns. The fallenness of our world is no more, in fact the very “rules” under which we think the world operates are confounded. We see nothing of the instinct of hunting creatures or the incompatibility of vulnerability and ingrained predation. Isaiah shows us a deeper reality in creation where all beings share a peaceful spirit. 

    The Peaceable Kingdom, woodcut (1950), Fritz Eichenberg, for The Catholic Worker | Image from michaelanthonyhoward.com.

    This scene culminates in the most frightening scene for a parent: “The baby shall play by the cobra’s den, and the child lay his hand on the adder’s lair. There shall be no harm or ruin on all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be filled with knowledge of the LORD, as water covers the sea.” And here, in the place where our human instinct to protect our young from danger merges with the from-the-gut animal instincts we see confounded in the preceding verses, we start to understand that a greater parent provides such powerful love that it conquers animal instinct itself. The Father does not permit “harm or ruin” because His essence infuses all of creation “as water covers the sea.” He perfects creation and removes all violence and conflict, simply through His being. This is the power of God and our ultimate destiny.

    How seamlessly Isaiah sees the humanity of Jesus as the bud from the root of Jesse as well as His divinity as the Incarnate Word as well as His kingdom, established in and with the Father’s love that transforms humanity. What Isaiah glimpses is no less than the complete mystery of the Son of God, in his kairos moment of incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and final judgment. This is properly called the Christ Event that descends upon the world and ruptures history like nothing before or after. What an ecstatic vision for Isaiah! How could he even take it in and utter it without the grace of God? 

    Importantly, this is the very vision we celebrate in Advent. We await the coming not just of the babe but the Christ Event, even while we exist within the reign he began with his sacrifice and resurrection. We exist now within a thread of historical time that is superseded by and subsumed within the great Christ Event that is ongoing.

    Turning our attention to today’s gospel from St. Luke, we must have Isaiah’s prophecy in mind. Recall that Isaiah’s first words about this bud from the stump of Jesse are: “The Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him: a Spirit of wisdom and of understanding.” And how does the gospel start? “Jesus rejoiced in the Holy Spirit.” This is what Isaiah foresees! He glimpsed this and, through Isaiah, the Lord gave us the promise of Christ, who comes with the Spirit of the Lord resting upon him. The gifts of the Spirit are wisdom, understanding, counsel, strength, and knowledge and fear of the Lord. Jesus shares the wisdom and respect for the Lord that the Spirit gives him: “I give you praise, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike.” This is not the only time in the gospels that Jesus speaks of the blessedness of being childlike. What He means is the openness and naïve trust with which children typically encounter the world. Jesus’s own openness to and trust in His Father have resulted in God’s grace and gifts of the Spirit.

    The knowledge that is given to Christ is, in part, the reciprocal nature of His own membership in the Trinity: “All things have been handed over to me by my Father. No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.” Far from being a prideful or arrogant claim (as the Chief Priests, scribes, and Pharisees might suggest), Christ is trying to share as plainly and truthfully as possible the nature of our Trinitarian God. He is unfolding the mysteries of our faith; mysteries, we must remember, that are integral to our salvation because these mysteries transform and perfect the Jewish tradition into Christianity. Everything must become Christocentric in order for his sacrifice to his Father to make sense to us, so that we can rightfully conform ourselves to the perfect human teacher bestowed upon us, who continues to grace us in the sacraments and throughout our lives.

    The Holy Trinity I (La Santisima Trinidad I), contemporary, Candelario Cervantez | Image from fineartamerica.com.

    The import of His revelation is underscored in the final verses from today’s reading: “Turning to the disciples in private he said, ‘Blessed are the eyes that see what you see. For I say to you, many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.’” There is a profound humility in Christ speaking about this moment in this way. He speaks deferentially to the Spirit and the Father, ascribing to the Father alone the timing and method of revealing His instrument of salvation to the world. Jesus Christ is truly remarkable for me in this moment: when the rest of us would be understandably puffed up with importance to be graced by the Spirit and to find out that we are the gatekeepers for humanity’s salvation, Christ instead offers a gracious and deferential comment to His Apostles. Blessed are you, He confirms. Not “I am one with God! Bow down and kiss my feet!” No, quite the opposite: it’s “how blessed you are to be hearing and seeing God’s unfolding revelation in the Christ Event.” (And, soon he’ll be washing their feet.) If we want an example of how base human nature is transformed by God against every fleshly instinct, here it is. “The baby shall play by the cobra’s den … and there shall be no harm or ruin.” And here our childlike Jesus Christ realizes His Kingship without succumbing to pride or power. 

    What can we do with such humility?? It seems like I can’t even breathe without thinking of myself. In moments when I read the scriptures and re-discover His perfection, I feel like I can never abase myself enough to be worthy of my Savior. It’s good that it’s Advent. I need time to contemplate my Lord, to remember who this man and God is, to remember that my understanding of the world is circumscribed by silly laws and rules that really have nothing to do with the kingdom God holds for us. The fact that Christ turns to His Apostles in this gospel moment – apostles who were flawed humans just like us – is our sign that He loves us as much as He loves His Father. It reminds me that God’s infinite love and forgiveness is the matrix that will transform all of creation, that it’s not about me, really, and the more I can remember that, perhaps the closer I can be to the Spirit of our Lord.

     

  • For What are we Waiting?

    Sunday in the 1st Week of Advent: Isaiah 63:16b-17, 19b; 64:2-7, 1 Corinthians 1:3-9, Mark 13:33-37.

    We are reminded at the beginning of Advent that we are entering a liturgical season of special significance: one where we pare back distractions and excesses as we wait for the birth of Christ. These short days and long nights of winter are supposed to be marked by prayer, almsgiving, and acts of penance. All of this while we wait for a blessed event, often cast in a heartwarming holiday glow. But the Church is clear that this is not all that we await. Christ Himself tells us in today’s gospel reading that we are also awaiting Judgment Day and our final union with God. How many of us put this awful and awesome vision in our sights as we putter about during these 4 weeks before Christmas? It’s a reminder of what a Christian should be doing: embracing this life while achingly desiring the next life. 

    For me, today’s readings ask me to consider what exactly I’m waiting for during this Advent “season of waiting.” As a child, I was waiting for that great Christmas morning of gift opening with my family. As a young adult, it was the feeling of warmth as my family gathered for the holidays; later it was the re-enactment of the “magic” of Christmas morning (and the preparations and decorations along the way) for my own children. I have to admit that on the balance my Advents haven’t been terribly spiritual. Church punctuated these years of Advents sometimes as a way to punch through the ersatz Christmas haze with moments of solemnity. Other times, Church simply heightened the anticipation for Christmas; for instance, part of the experience of Christmas Eve Mass was the relief of finally getting out of those dress clothes and into pajamas, knowing that gifts and goodies came next. I can tell myself that it’s hard to stay focused on the Christ event – that is, His coming to the world in its entirety, both as a babe and as King in judgment – when the Charlie Brown Christmas album is making me want to scamper about the house with abandon. But that’s a cop-out, and so is blaming “commercialism.” As Christians, we’re called to much, much more. Part of our journey is learning the discipline required to keep God front and center.

    Christmas Illustration 1294 – Vintage Christmas Cards – Season Greetings – Cathedral (2017), “Tuscan Afternoon” | Image from fineartamerica.com.

    There are many reasons to love the prophet Isaiah, and today’s first reading gives me another. He has such a clear understanding of God’s loving perfection and our dismal abilities to live upright lives on our own. The reading starts with a crystal clear lament over the dangers of free will: “You, LORD, are our father, our redeemer you are named forever. Why do you let us wander, O LORD, from your ways, and harden our hearts so that we fear you not?” Isaiah identifies God’s plan and permission that we have the freedom to wander from His ways and even choose to harden our hearts against Him. Isaiah asks the question that a holy man must ask: why? In other words, if you love God with all of your heart, mind, and soul, then you despise the worldly temptations that lead away from God. Wouldn’t it be better if we didn’t have those temptations or if we weren’t so easily distracted from our father and source? But God is not a tyrant; He grants us the free will to cook our own goose if we choose to.

    And cook our own goose we do! Isaiah is blunt in his assessment of how successful we’ve been with this free will of ours: “all of us have become like unclean people, all our good deeds are like polluted rags; we have all withered like leaves, and our guilt carries us away like the wind.” Two fascinating images here – the first is the uncleanliness of who we are, so much so that even what we consider to be good deeds “are like polluted rags.” I believe that what Isaiah calls pollution is the prideful belief in ourselves as authors of goodness soiling our actions. The scriptures remind us again and again that all good comes from God, not from us. When we wander from Him and do not “fear” him (i.e., revere Him as the author of all goodness), we pollute our good deeds by believing that we are creating goodness. The second image is the withering, the dying, of our souls, and the stirring image that “guilt carries us away like the wind.” Maybe because it’s autumn and I’ve been out raking leaves, but this image really touches me. Guilt, of course, requires a knowledge that what you’ve done is wrong. And as a prophet to the Chosen People, there is no room for Isaiah or his listeners to wriggle out of this one. Likewise for us, we know the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ. We have been raised with the Good News of the gospels as our mother’s milk. Guilt should and would carry our withered husks of souls away like the wind were it not for the sacrament of Confession. Note that Isaiah also calls God “our redeemer, you are named forever,” that is, the one who rescues us from error and wipes away our sins. Before Christ, this involved rituals and sacrifices at the temple; after Christ’s great sacrifice, this entails our intentional and remorseful confession to God in the presence of a priest. Both acknowledge God’s work as redeemer.

    Study of a Spray of Dead Oak Leaves (1879), John Ruskin | Image from artfund.org.

    The hard truths about our human condition lead Isaiah to implore God with a sentiment we will hear echoed by Jesus in the gospel reading: “Would that you might meet us doing right, that we were mindful of you in our ways!” I think Isaiah answers for us what we’re really waiting for during Advent: God coming to meet us. What an interesting and theologically deep event! “Would that you might meet us doing right” means that it is God who chooses the meeting at a time and place over which we have no control. We’re used to thinking that we go to meet God when we die – that’s what we hear at every funeral, after all. But here, it seems that God is actually coming here while we’re still alive. Isaiah’s words mean that we march on in our free will existence until He comes, like children running around the house while their parents are away. Will we be going to bed at a decent hour and not eating junk food? Or will we be torturing our sister and not feeding the dog?  

    The gospel reading comes from the 13th chapter of St. Mark’s gospel. This chapter details Christ’s words towards the end of His ministry, just before His Passion, death, and Resurrection. It is almost like the Book of Revelation in miniature – He foretells the destruction of the temple, the persecution of His disciples, a “desolating sacrilege” being set up, false Messiahs, cataclysmic events in the skies, and the stars falling from heaven. This frightening series of events culminates in: “Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven” (Mk 13:26-27). This is Christ’s return for the Final Judgment when he gathers his elect, that is, those who are to be saved. This is the context for today’s reading. This is what Jesus is referring to when He says, “You do not know when the time will come.” Jesus’s words of advice for us is to be alert and watch for this final coming. He says, “Watch, therefore; you do not know when the Lord of the house is coming, … May he not come suddenly and find you sleeping.” The unspoken but obvious bit is that we want to be part of the elect, of those who are brought to heaven to live with God forever. We do this by not “sleeping” on the job, by living out a moral life according to Christ’s teachings.

    The Last Judgement (1536-1541), Michelangelo | Wikimedia Commons.

    This is one way to look at Advent, reminding ourselves to watch for the end times. In this vein, we are taught that Advent is a penitential season where we pray, give alms, and practice small acts of penance (perhaps time spent in prayer or service, perhaps small deprivations of our desires to focus us on God rather than things of this world). This is spiritual training camp. What a different perspective than “I need to get my shopping done and put lights on the house!” But this is our challenge. Yes, we can live in the now, with its joys, desires, disappointments, and victories. But we have to be constantly training for that heavenly kingdom, too. We have to find time for daily prayer and giving glory to God. Otherwise, we’re sleeping on the job.

    And God bless St. Paul for giving us the positivity and hope that we need when considering God coming to meet us. In the second reading, he reminds us that “in him you were enriched in every way, with all discourse and all knowledge, as the testimony to Christ was confirmed among you, so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ.” He reminds us that Christ Himself has guaranteed the spiritual gifts and enrichment to prepare us for God’s coming. All we have to do is remain faithful to His teachings and invite God to accomplish His will through us. Advent sharpens the edge on our Christian lives. In the midst of our fat, jolly, and drowsy Christmas personas, we have to also be lean, sharp, and awake.

    There is another way of looking at Advent, with less emphasis on the spiritual training camp aspect and more emphasis on the anticipation. I’d like to explore this through the play Waiting for Godot. For those familiar with Samuel Beckett’s celebrated tragicomedy, you’ll recall that it’s a play in two acts where nothing happens. Two men wait for Godot (whoever that is, although many see God in this character), but Godot never arrives. The play explores the human traits of forgetfulness, anxiety, over-intellectualizing, boredom, suffering, despair, nihilism, and absurdity. In the light of Isaiah’s reading today, it’s as if the characters are stuck in the wandering phase of free will, far from the light of Truth and purpose that is God. Their sometimes nonsensical banter reminds me of “polluted rags” and “withered leaves” blowing in the wind. It is possible to experience this play as a poignant truth-telling of the modern condition. While true, how sad it is! Theirs is a waiting with no real purpose, to the effect that the audience is convinced that they’d be better off not waiting at all and getting on with their lives. And this is the great sin described by the play and the worst temptation of our existence: to convince ourselves that we need not wait because no one is coming.

    Waiting for Godot, text by Samuel Beckett, staging by Otomar Krejca. Avignon Festival, 1978. Rufus (Estragon) and Georges Wilson (Vladimir) / photographs by Fernand Michaud | Wikimedia Commons.

     

    But the more fundamental error of the characters (if we read the play through a Christian lens) is that they do not know Godot, the one for whom they are waiting. Take this exchange, for example:

    POZZO: (peremptory). Who is Godot?
    ESTRAGON: Godot?
    POZZO: You took me for Godot.
    VLADIMIR: Oh no, Sir, not for an instant, Sir.
    POZZO: Who is he?
    VLADIMIR: Oh he’s a . . . he’s a kind of acquaintance.
    ESTRAGON: Nothing of the kind, we hardly know him.
    VLADIMIR: True . . . we don’t know him very well . . . but all the same . . .
    ESTRAGON: Personally, I wouldn’t even know him if I saw him.
    POZZO: You took me for him.
    ESTRAGON: (recoiling before Pozzo). That’s to say . . . you understand . . . the dusk . . . the strain . . . waiting . . . I confess . . . I imagined . . . for a second . . .
    POZZO: Waiting? So you were waiting for him?
    VLADIMIR: Well you see—

    This reveals the absurdity of waiting for someone you don’t know, yet having the meeting be important. Such a meeting creates only anxiety and questioning. This is not the type of waiting that we are called to in Advent. The concept was explained beautifully to us today by Fr. Gabriel, OP, at St. Catherine of Siena Newman Center this morning. He spoke of his childhood, when he and his brother got ready for the annual visit of their aunt, uncle and cousin. They would lay out all of their cousin’s favorite games and get everything ready so that the moment he came in, they could jump into their loving friendship with great joy. This is the type of anticipation that we might use as an analogy for the anticipation of Advent. The key is that you can’t truly anticipate someone without knowing this person already. And this is so very true of Christ. He gave the Church His Spirit so that we can know Him intimately now – in the Eucharist and sacraments, in our communal prayer as a Church, in the love that infuses the world in so many actions by the faithful. As Fr. Gabriel said, we are not waiting for a stranger or a distant judge, but for the source of love itself, our Lord Jesus Christ.

    What great joy there is in this type of Advent anticipation! It encompasses and eclipses all of the giddy night-before-Christmas moments I’ve had with my brothers, sisters, and children. Waiting for the coming of love in the person of Christ is something that can completely overtake our beings, thrill us with the exciting anticipation of being a part of that love for ever.

    In this light, I can be less critical of the “glow of the season.” It shares, however intentionally or tangentially, in the anticipation of the coming of love. All of that holiday cheer and joy is this love already present on earth, from people knowingly or unknowingly allowing God to work through them. Consider: generosity is perhaps the virtue we most associate with the season. Generosity is the loaves and the fishes, the Passion, the Eucharist, forgiveness and absolution. Generosity and charity are palpable acts of God in the world. In Advent, we are simply called to acknowledge God in these works and work to conform our entire lives to His commandments and will. We can’t be perfect, but we can try.

    In closing, I acknowledge that part of the Advent message falls flat for most modern ears. It smacks of hard work and joyless self-flagellation. I don’t think this is the case. Advent can be joyous anticipation, but also one that recognizes that all is from God and for God. The only check on our joy must be that we don’t lose ourselves in the pleasures of this world and thoughts of ourselves – the One we wait for, the One in whom we place our joy, is Christ.

  • What is Truth?

    What is Truth?

    Good Friday of the Lord’s Passion: Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12, Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9, John 18:1 – 19:42.

    With so much evil at work in the events of the Lord’s Passion and Crucifixion, it feels almost like an oxymoron to call this “Good” Friday, but the Truth that is Christ, the Word of God, nailed and hung on a cross for all to see, that is the Good that we commemorate. This is what it means to be Catholic: to understand the ultimate good while acknowledging the evil; to stand in the face of our chaotic, sinful nature and embrace the saving reality of Jesus Christ rather than run screaming and crazed into the abyss of nihilism. Today’s readings , in particular, with the strong, in-control Jesus shown to us by St. John teach us that the Truth rises above the petty evils of the humans who try to have power over it.

    The first reading from Isaiah is so striking. The Word of God speaks so clearly of his own Passion and Death through the mouth of Isaiah. He foretells the beating, scourging, and crown of thorns: “Even as many were amazed at him — so marred was his look beyond human semblance.” He foretells his blessed silence in the face of persecution: “Though he was harshly treated, he submitted and opened not his mouth; like a lamb led to the slaughter.” He foretells his ignominious death when he was treated like a criminal: “a grave was assigned him among the wicked and a burial place with evildoers, though he had done no wrong nor spoken any falsehood.” Such precision of detail in this prophecy!

    But the most significant aspect of Isaiah’s prophecy is that the Word of God tells us the reason this Passion is endured. He says, “he was pierced for our offenses, crushed for our sins; upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole, by his stripes we were healed.” This idea of taking on sin as a “lamb led to the slaughter” was understood from the time of Moses in the use of the scapegoat. When instituting Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), the Word of God instructed Moses: 

    Aaron shall cast lots on the two goats, one lot for the Lord and the other lot for Azazel. Aaron shall present the goat on which the lot fell for the Lord, and offer it as a sin offering; but the goat on which the lot fell for Azazel shall be presented alive before the Lord to make atonement over it, that it may be sent away into the wilderness to Azazel. … Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task. The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness. (Leviticus 16:8-10, 21-22).

    Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur (1878), Maurycy Gottlieb | Wikimedia Commons.

    So the scapegoat was in use in Judaism about 1500 years before Christ. About 700 years before he comes to earth in the flesh, through Isaiah, the Word of God sows in the memory of the Jewish people the significance of the new sacrifice he will accomplish: “through his suffering, my servant shall justify many, and their guilt he shall bear. … he shall take away the sins of many, and win pardon for their offenses.” As a new scapegoat, Jesus Christ will be the ultimate sacrifice, uniting the two goats Aaron was told to use, the son Isaac and the substitute ram Abraham sacrificed, and all of the millions of other sacrificial animals and food items the Jews had slaughtered and burned over the millennia. As the true Son sacrificed, Christ puts an end to the endless wheel of animal sacrifice. These animals could never intentionally take on the sins of all and in an overwhelming river of agape atone for humanity — only the divine Son of God, the Messiah, could do this.

    Today’s readings shift in tone with the second reading from St. Paul to the Hebrews, when he writes, “we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God.” While Christ is the ultimate sacrifice, the replacement for the scapegoat, he is also God-and-man, who institutes the new covenant through himself. He somehow seamlessly integrates the ultimate agency of “great high priest” with the supplication of a servant. John’s account of his Passion in the gospel reading shows us how he accomplishes this.

    Note how differently the arrest transpires from the accounts in the synoptic gospels. Here, “Jesus, knowing everything that was going to happen to him, went out and said to them, ‘Whom are you looking for?’” He, knowing all, is the one who goes to them. It’s not Judas who holds the agency, the power, by going to him and kissing him on the cheek. It is Jesus who holds the agency and the power.

    This is emphasized when he tells them “I AM,” the same words used by God the Father to Moses. This is the moment of the great I AM, the Word of God, speaking Truth in all its splendor. And this Truth is too much for the guards to handle: “they turned away and fell to the ground.” Jesus is willing to be the sacrifice for all and to accept the Passion and Crucifixion, so he is not intending to scorch them with glory of God. But even so, just the sheer Truth of the Word asserting his being and authority in his moment of glory sends shockwaves through the earth and humbles those with evil intent, against their will.

    So he must ask them again who they are looking for and then says, “I told you that I AM. So if you are looking for me, let these men go.” Even at the beginning of his humiliation, he is the one issuing instructions. Such is the power of God and the blindness of those who do not see it.

    Detail from The Capture of Christ with the Malchus Episode, Dirck van Baburen (1617) | Creative commons, courtesy Wikimedia.

    I love the response he gives to Peter when he cuts off the ear of the slave: “Put your sword into its scabbard. Shall I not drink the cup that the Father gave me?” By asking Peter this question, he maintains his Way, that is, to teach how to bring oneself into right relationship with the Father, even in the midst of the heightened tension and passions of his arrest. His love for his disciples (and all of humanity) never dims; he is ever-constant in his mission to bring them closer to God, closer to understanding that accepting the “cup” given to you by the Father is the ultimate good and right thing to do.

    Christ’s integrity is on full display throughout John’s account of the Passion. When questioned by Annas, he simply replies that he never hid in secret and always preached the truth in the temple area for all to hear. When the temple guard strikes him for speaking this way (apparently this man considered it impertinent), Jesus replies: “If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong; but if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?” Jesus never wavers from “speaking rightly,” that is, bringing the truth of God to the world.

    Altarpiece with the Passion of Christ: Flagellation (c.1480-1495), anonymous (German) | Creative Commons, courtesy The Walters Art Museum.

    This discourse on truth in action and in word reaches a high point with Pilate. Taking up significant space in the gospel of John, this exchange displays for us the truth of God over and against a worldly relativism. Upon the question of his kingship, Jesus replies, “My kingdom does not belong to this world.” He establishes the foundation for his words and actions in an irreproachable source: Heaven, eternity. In his Roman worldview, Pilate may have understood this to mean Mount Olympus, home of the Roman gods. For any worldview, this claim is astonishing.

    But Pilate cuts to the chase, since Jesus uses the word “kingdom”: “Then you are a king?” Jesus’s response lays bare the question at hand, namely, how can a secular power judge God? This is a short-circuit of the fundamental relation of things. Jesus says: “You say I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” So there we have it: Christ is here not for some earthly understanding of power or kingship, but to testify to the Truth. And the way he speaks of Truth is analogous to God Himself, since people can already “belong to the truth,” and these people listen to his voice. God and Truth as presented by Jesus are the same, incorruptible thing. Truth (and God) is an undeniable thing, more real than the fantasies of power we lay upon the world.

    Pilate’s response betrays the horrible relativism that blinds our eyes, plugs our ears, and stifles our mouths when it comes to God’s Truth: “What is truth?” In the narrative, Pilate immediately goes to the Jews to say that he finds no guilt in Jesus, presumably because Jesus clearly has no intention of disrupting the secular power structures at work. But Pilate’s offhand “What is truth?” hangs in the air for us to weigh against the solid, undeniable truth of God-and-man in the shackled body of Jesus Christ.

    What is truth? Truth stands in front of you! Here he is, the great I AM whose utterance of his being makes men fall prostrate. The one who has openly taught in Jerusalem’s temple for years, the one whose truth is so real and cutting that the chief priests and elders can’t stand it anymore.

    But Pilate sees the world through political eyes, through a mind that seeks to live another day, fight another fight until death finally takes him. In this world where the prize is simply survival and worldly success as much as you can manage, truth becomes malleable according to the circumstance. This is a natural consequence of giving oneself only to this world. This moral relativism is an easy way to drug a conscience into a stupor so that it no longer bothers you.

    But conscience is the voice of the spirit God gives you at your birth. By smothering it with explanations that soothe it, you are turning your back on God, stifling his voice in your life. When you flippantly dismiss truth as something that we simply construct to take a stand on something arbitrary, you seek to place yourself outside of God’s law.

    Christ Carrying the Cross (Cristo abrazado a la cruz), 1580s, El Greco | Wikimedia Commons.

    Yet here in the gospel of John, even Pilate who has completely given in to moral relativism responds to something in Jesus. What is this mysterious something that convinces Pilate and leads him to say, “I find no guilt in him,” and offer to release him or Barrabbas? What else but the Truth that Jesus Christ embodies in human form causes Pilate, even after the Jews take Barrabbas and demand crucifixion, to say, “Take him yourselves and crucify him. I find no guilt in him.”

    Even then, when they say Jesus made himself Son of God and Pilate “became even more afraid,” he goes to Jesus to have one last conversation. Jesus, shackled and unloved, asserts to Pilate that he “would have no power over me if it had not been given to you from above.” Jesus refuses to budge from his claim to truth from Heaven, showing Pilate that even he, the unbeliever in truth, is operating within its omnipotent sphere. Pilate, clearly shaken, “tried to release him.”

    We know that this ends in Jesus’s Crucifixion, that Pilate succumbs to the secular pressures of being an appointee of Caesar’s and grants the Jews their bloodthirsty wish. But it is striking to see how Jesus in his quiet statements of authority in God, as the bringer of the Truth, holds Pilate in thrall over and against his self-proclaimed skepticism of truth. His interaction with Christ continues to resound in Pilate: “Pilate also had an inscription written and put on the cross. It read, ‘Jesus the Nazorean, the King of the Jews.’”

    And so perhaps Pilate doesn’t succumb as completely as we think. He proclaims the Truth that came to him; he places the Truth over the head of the Savior. When the chief priests ask him to change it to indicate that this was a claim that Christ made, not the Truth, he responds, “What I have written, I have written.”

    Christ on the Cross (1745-1750), Giovanni Battista Tiepolo | Wikimedia Commons.

    Why is there so much focus on Jesus Christ as the embodiment of God’s Truth on earth during this Passion? In short, this is the great belief of our faith. Jesus Christ wasn’t just another man, another teacher, prophet, or miracle-worker. He was (and is, as he is Resurrected, in Heaven, and our primary intercessor with the Father) the very Truth itself. What that Truth says is, “I AM,” thus he is God. That Truth gives us the greatest commandment, the Way to the Father.

    Our faith is that the historical particularities of the God-and-man in 33 AD matter. The Word of God was made incarnate at a particular time in a particular place, according to a plan that is not ours to understand in its completeness but to live within thanks to the grace of God and the saving work of his Son. Why does this matter? Because this real Truth said real things and performed real actions. We can never accept moral relativism, in fact, we are called to repudiate the slipperiness of relativism with the very fiber of our beings. We believe in an absolute Truth, that truth has been expressed by God on this earth in Jesus Christ — both his knowable words and works put down in the New Testament as well as his unknowable mystery.

    This is not fashionable. We live in an age of acceptance of all perspectives. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t accept others and all of the differences they represent. We absolutely should! But we accept them for the God in them, as brothers and sisters on the Way to God. We don’t accept viewpoints that seek to weaken or refute Jesus Christ’s sovereign claim to Truth. We don’t accept statements that place our Lord on a continuum of some-right-but-some-wrong things. We cannot become watered-down Christians! Look, today, at what our Lord did for us, becoming the ultimate sacrifice, the scapegoat to end scapegoats, shouldering the burden of humanity’s sins and still standing in the great truth of His “I AM.” Our response can only be a humble and truthful Lord Have Mercy!

    Mural of the crucified Christ and Trinity above the altar at the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City, Utah (1918), Felix Lieftuchter | Creative Commons, image courtesy Lynn R. Johnson
  • Courage and Cowardice

    Courage and Cowardice

    Wednesday of Holy Week: Isaiah 50:4-9a, Matthew 26:14-25.

    Today’s gospel focuses on Judas’s betrayal, much like yesterday’s reading. Coupled with the first reading from Isaiah, we get a clear look at what it means to live in the light compared to living in darkness. 

    Today’s first reading is from a section of Isaiah’s prophecy entitled “The Servant’s Humiliation and Vindication” in the NRSV Bible. He speaks in the first person as a blessed servant with a “well-trained tongue” for whom God “opens my ear that I may hear.” This servant accepts his gifts and uses them: “And I have not rebelled, have not turned back. I gave my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who plucked my beard; My face I did not shield from buffets and spitting.” This is a person who uses his human faculties and talents with the grace of God and is persecuted for it, like Jesus in his ministry.

    But this servant is “not disgraced,” he says, “I have set my face like flint knowing that I shall not be put to shame. He is near who upholds my right.” This servant lives fully as a human in the light of God’s presence and graces; as such, God is near to him and no amount of trying by other humans can make him disgraced or ashamed.

    I am struck by this person’s courage. Aren’t we all raised to be aware of others in our communities, to take care not to offend or make fools of ourselves? But this servant of God, by living fully in the light of God, is not defined not by social morés; he has found the true lodestar for humans: the Word of God for his well-trained tongue, the grace of God to open his ears, and the love of God to give him courage. Let’s think about this love, the source of his courage. This love coincides with a surety in the Lord, a thirst to be with Him, and an unshakable faith that what he has comes from God who has created him.

    A Muslim servant (1883), Vasily Vereshchagin | Creative Commons, courtesy arthive.com. Today’s reflection made me consider how each of us is called to be the courageous servant, near to God who upholds our “right.” It has also made me consider the Christian tenet that each of us has God within us, in our soul, and since we are called to humility and service, you can never judge a person based on their look or station in life. To that end, I’ve included a few lovely portraits from Vasily Vereshchagin that give dignity to the subjects and seem to reveal the light of God within them.

    Thus, the servant is absolutely aware that God lives beside him: “He is near who upholds my right.” I like the Lectionary translation here; the Hebrew is more literally translated as “He is near who vindicates/justifies me.” By using the phrase that the Lord upholds his “right,” we might actually come closer to the nuance in the Hebrew phrase since those words vindicate and justify have taken on a technical aspect after several thousand years of Church theology.

    We can think of this “right” in several ways. First, tracing the word “near,” the right is a statement of authority due to proximity. In other words, the servant’s sheer proximity to God, his state of “living in the light” of God, gives him the right to speak. Beyond the proximity argument, second is a statement of personal right to speak as an endowment specifically from God. This meaning traces back to the statement that “He…upholds my right.” God is gracing, upholding, this servant’s right to speak.

    Note that this is different than Natural Law envisioned by John Locke. Locke postulated that God establishes a Natural Law that grants all people certain unalienable rights. Many (myself included) think that scripture does not support Locke’s theory because, in scripture, people regularly lose their lives and communities (i.e., “rights”) when they live outside of God’s commandments and precepts. Today’s reading is a perfect example: the servant can claim his right because he lives in the light of God, as opposed to those who live in darkness. Even with the history-changing reality of Christianity, the basic right is the same: an invitation to accept God into our hearts, not a right for everyone even if they sneer at God and push him away.

    The third way we can think of “right” when the servant says “He is near who upholds my right” is the idea of correctness. God’s Word is Truth — the “well-trained tongue” is one that speaks the truth — and we can understand that the servant’s “right” is his accuracy in presenting the truth. 

    This reading culminates in a bold statement of the servant’s courage: “if anyone wishes to oppose me, let us appear together. Who disputes my right? Let him confront me.” Here is the full reality of the servant living in the light, speaking the truth. There is no space or “right” for those who live in darkness. We see a contrast between courage to speak and cowardice in not speaking, between truth and deceit.

    The Old Beggar Ninety Six Years (1891), Vasily Vereshchagin | Creative Commons, courtesy arthive.com.

    These contrasts are displayed clearly in the gospel reading from St. Matthew, where Jesus gives Judas the chance to be courageous and to speak the truth, but Judas chooses cowardice and deceit. The reading opens with an account of Judas’s visit to the chief priests and his agreement to hand over Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. We can only imagine the darkness of spirit that would have made Judas turn his back on the Word of God, the Truth incarnate. Like John who tells us that “the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas” to betray Jesus, Matthew tells us, “and from that time on he looked for an opportunity to hand him over.” In other words, Judas’s betrayal did not come about in some moment of passion but out of his fallen state.

    Just as in the gospel of John, Matthew tells us that while they were eating, Jesus says, “Amen, I say to you, one of you will betray me.” What is the point of saying this? Is it meant to alarm them, stir them up with doubt and suspicion of one another?

    St. John Chrysostom provides a window into what may have been Jesus’s motivation; he writes, “And before the supper, He had even washed his feet. And see how He spares the traitor. For He said not, such a one shall betray me; but, “one of you,” so as again to give him power of repentance by concealment. And He chooses to alarm all, for the sake of saving this man” (Homilies on Matthew, 81.1). As we reflected yesterday, Christ the Good Shepherd is at work, especially here when one of his chosen Apostles’ souls is at stake. In Chrysostom’s view, Christ is trying to give Judas a chance to come back into the light of God.

    Detail from The Last Supper in the Sistine Chapel (c.1481-1482), Cosimo Rosselli | image from sharingtravelmemories.com, including added circle. Note the devil placed on Judas’s shoulder as well as the halo that has turned gray. 

    Even after the distressed apostles say, “surely it is not me, Lord,” Jesus gives a dire warning, a last chance for Judas to come clean: “The Son of Man indeed goes, as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed. It would be better for that man if he had never been born.” Jesus has committed Himself to “going,” as John tells us, “Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father.”

    An interesting question to ponder is if he needed to be betrayed to the chief priests; if someone had to do it even if it wasn’t Judas. It seems quite plausible that he could have simply walked into the temple the next day of his own accord and started the sequence of arrest and death. So let’s take him at his word that he was willingly accepting death and did not need to be betrayed. Then we must also see his attempt to save Judas from this great sin as genuine. He truly hoped to save him and keep him from committing this betrayal. But, as we are taught, God has given humanity free will to accept or reject him, and in this choice lies our own salvation.

    Another way to think of this is in terms of fate. “Fate” is a concept that doesn’t take responsibility for the reality of humans making choices in regards to God’s invitation to be with him. Instead, “fate” makes it seem like its’ all out of our hands. I don’t think Judas was “fated” to betray Jesus, and based on today’s reading, Jesus didn’t believe that this was somehow pre-ordained by God, because he tries to save Judas from this error.

    So, what happens when Jesus speaks in truth like Isaiah’s courageous servant, saying, “if anyone wishes to oppose me, let us appear together.” He invites Judas to speak openly of any concerns or changes of heart, to return to him, without calling him on the carpet in front of the other Apostles. What is Judas’s response? “Surely it is not I, Rabbi?” He hides in the cover of deceit, he takes on cowardice rather than courage. This is because he has taken the devil into his heart rather than God and he operates in the devil’s ways.

    Jesus simply (and I must imagine sadly) responds, “You have said so.” This is the only sad truth he can utter in the face of Judas’s cowardice and deceit. Chrysostom gives us a heck of a reaction to this:

    Oh insensibility! He inquires, when conscious to himself of such things. … What then says the most mild and gentle Jesus? “You say.” And yet He might have said, “O thou unholy, thou all unholy one; accursed, and profane; so long a time in travail with mischief, who hast gone your way, and made satanical compacts, and hast agreed to receive money, and hast been convicted by me too, do you yet dare to ask?” But none of these things did He say; but how? “You say?” fixing for us bounds and rules of long suffering (Homilies on Matthew, 81.2).

    I love Chrysostom’s commentary here, if for nothing else because it shows that in 395 AD, his jaw was dropping at the deceitfulness of Judas in the same way mine is today. I also appreciate how he concentrates on the “most mild and gentle Jesus,” who sets an example for us on “long suffering,” that is, patience in the face of troubles caused by others. 

    Baptism of Christ (1580s), workshop of Jacopo Tintoretto | Creative Commons, courtesy of Cleveland Museum of Art. I appreciate the humble servant aspect of Christ depicted here as He begins His ministry, also the form of the Spirit that is pouring out the water of everlasting life.

    Let us take the challenge from Christ to live in the light of God, to have our “right” come from him and him alone. May we well heed the terrible choice that Judas makes to turn his back on God and live in the cowardice and deceit of the devil; “woe to that man.”