Tag: salvation

  • Why Should We Do Good Works?

    Why Should We Do Good Works?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The Theological Fuss Over Salvation and Justification

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Do Good Works Earn You Anything?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Moses in the Promised Land! … And More About the Transfiguration

    Moses in the Promised Land! … And More About the Transfiguration

    Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord. Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14, 2 Peter 1:16-19, Luke 9:28b-36.

    Rejoice! Today we commemorate and celebrate the gratuitous love of the Father to bolster the faith of Peter, James and John by allowing them to witness a vision of Jesus in his glory. This episode in the life of Jesus and the Apostles is so rich and full of meaning for the Church. On Sunday, I led a discussion with our Lay Dominicans and inquirers about the Transfiguration in anticipation of this feast day. We discussed St. Thomas Aquinas’s writing about the fittingness of the Transfiguration as presented in the Summa Theologica, Part III, question 45, and I’d love to share a few bits of that fruitful discussion here.

    The Transfiguration of Christ: Part of an iconostasis in Constantinople style. Middle of the 12th century. This is the earliest of the three paintings of the Transfiguration on this page. Below, you’ll see how the human expressiveness was emphasized in later Western art, while the symbolism of color, line, and figure took precedent over emotional content in the Eastern icon tradition (in fact, the more “fixed” and inexpressive faces are meant to indicate a more transcendent reality in this tradition).

    Fittingness Versus Necessity

    One of the questions an inquirer asked during our discussion was, “If the Transfiguration never happened, would the Crucifixion and Resurrection still have happened? In other words, was it necessary to our salvation?” This question is actually at the heart of how St. Thomas presents many aspects of salvation history. He readily admits that God could have ordered things differently — even to the point of not having the Incarnation or the Passion. These things, according to St. Thomas (and St. Athanasius and St. Anselm before him), are not “necessary,” per se, but he shows how they are “fitting.” The Latin word he uses is Convenientia, which translates to suitable, appropriate, harmonious or beautiful. The Church Fathers had a very good reason to be thinking in this way. First of all, they knew that they could never fathom the mind of God and “prove” some sort of necessity around the events and stories of our salvation history. Second, they had a huge body of texts that emerged from the early years of the faith, some orthodox and true, and some that were not. This contemplation of convenientia was a critical tool in helping to decide what writings were part of the canon of the New Testament. 

    As that same inquirer pointed out during our discussion, a good example of something that was NOT fitting would be in the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas, when Jesus is said to curse and kill a child who bumped into him. This is not consistent or harmonious with what we know of God and of Jesus’ ministry on Earth. 

    But beyond a tool for determining the truth of early texts, I think contemplating fittingness is a fantastic perspective for any kind of lectio divina. With this starting point, we can ask questions about why events happened and have them always point back to God and how he is revealing himself to us (as opposed to treating the divine plan like a puzzle to be solved, as if we could ever comprehend it fully!). In the case of the Transfiguration, the “why” of the event is answered amply by many Church Fathers. Here’s what St. Thomas has to say: “For anyone to walk straight along a road, he must have some knowledge of the end … Above all, this is necessary when the road is hard and rough, the going is heavy, but the end is delightful … Therefore, it was fitting that He should show His disciples the glory of His clarity (which is to be transfigured), to which He will configure those who are His.” In other words, one reason the Transfiguration happened was to provide the Apostles with the backbone to persevere when the going got tough — to let them see the goal of divinization alongside Jesus. Understood as a completely unnecessary but helpful and beautiful blessing for the Apostles (and the Church as a whole), we can start to glimpse the overwhelming, overabundant love the Father has for us, his delight in showing us a Way to him through his Son.

    Transfiguration (1560), Titian | Wikimedia Commons. Ah, the Italian Renaissance. Titian indicates a number of internal dramas within each unique face, and is a master of color and composition, with dynamic (and melodramatic) poses somehow all working to frame Christ in his glory.

    Bright Clothing

    Another aspect we discussed was that more than Jesus’s face was transfigured: “his clothing became dazzling white.” This might seem like a simple detail, but the Church Fathers fastened onto it with gusto. The first reading from the Book of Daniel gives us a clue as to why they might have done so: “The Ancient One took his throne. His clothing was bright as snow … Thousands upon thousands were ministering to him, and myriads upon myriads attended him.” So bright white clothing seems to be an important detail in this beatific vision, but what does it mean?

    St. Thomas tells us that “the clarity which was in His garments signified the future clarity of the saints.” This might seem like a leap, but he traces it back to St. Gregory the Great, who wrote, “because in the height of heavenly clarity all the saints will cling to Him in the refulgence of righteousness. For His garments signify the righteous, because He will unite them to Himself.” As we think of garments as things that cling to and adorn a person, this parallel starts to make more sense. The saints cling to Christ and his Way, and by so doing, they fulfill the word of God given to Isaiah: “You shall put all of them on like an ornament” (Isaiah 49:18). Thus, the Transfiguration is truly the full beatific vision: Christ in his glory, surrounded by the law (Moses) and the prophets (Elijah) and all the saints (his bright clothing, adorning him). What is nice about this understanding is that we see glory going back to God rather than ourselves in this vision of heaven. It’s not about us gaining virtue and being so good that we are given the gold star of heaven. It’s about us loving God so much (as close as we can mirroring the love he first gives to us) that we adore and adorn him, becoming more and more like Christ as an acknowledgement of the plan the Father has for all of us. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so the saying goes, and we can see a small truth — yes, we are trying to imitate Christ, but even more than trying to flatter him we are trying to sincerely love him and show the world that he is the only Way to heaven. Let us be your brilliant clothes, nothing more, O Lord!

    We also discussed how there is more support for this understanding of the bright clothing in the Book of Revelation according to St. John: “Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, ‘Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from? … These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’” So John was doubly gifted with the vision of the Transfiguration during Jesus’s lifetime and then again in the visions that became the Book of Revelation. Only this time, the white robes have received their color from walking the Way of Christ — from going through “the great ordeal” and washing them in “the blood of the Lamb.” Whether adorning Christ or more literally being worn by the saints in heaven, the brilliant white clothes seem to symbolize the members of the Church who have remained faithful to the Way and entered into the divine heavenly eternity.

    There is one last interesting note we discussed about the clothing. One of the great early Church Fathers was Origen, who lived in the first half of the 200s AD. His influence was huge. Many later Church Fathers quote Origen when discussing the Transfiguration and many other mysteries of the faith. He writes that the white garments are “the words in the Apostles which indicate the truths concerning Him,” that is, the Gospels themselves. Origen adds that if someone speaks with deep theology of Christ and explains the Gospels brilliantly, “do not hesitate to say that to Him the garments of Jesus have become white as the light.” Imagine saying that the next time you hear a good homily! “Hey, Father, the garments of Jesus really became white as the light today! Thanks!”

    Transfiguration of Jesus (icon), 1408, Theophanes the Greek | Wikimedia Commons. Artwork from Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral in Pereslavl-Zalessky. This is one of the most common and copied icons of the Transfiguration, notable for it’s white star-shaped depiction of Christ’s brilliance, the positioning of all the secondary characters, and the lines of revelation shooting down to the Apostles. I always like how icons manage to paint more than just a single moment in time, and we see both the climb up to the mountain on the left and climb down on the right as well as little moments of the life of Moses and Elijah in the upper corners. Great way to depict kairos time!

    Moses, Elijah, and Unfinished Stories

    Of course, the other important detail, as we see in each of the paintings on this page, is that Moses and Elijah were present during the Transfiguration. Our little discussion group talked about how this might be fitting. First, we read the six separate ways that St. Thomas points out the significance of these two towering Old Testament figures. The one most often mentioned St. Thomas attributes to St. Hilary of Poitiers: that Moses symbolizes the law and Elijah the prophets, and this reminds everyone that Christ was foretold by these two important men.

    But then one of our life-professed Lay Dominicans made an observation that none of us had considered before: “Isn’t this the first time Moses appears in the Holy Land?” We all went silent, and then burst out with agreement. Even Fr. Gabriel admitted that he had never read any commentaries that bring up this important detail.

    Next, we had to contemplate how this might be fitting and why it might be important. We noted that both Moses and Elijah leave scripture with their stories somewhat unfinished or at least a little unsatisfying to the listener. Moses is told by God that he can’t enter into the Promised Land because the generation he ushered through the wilderness was so ungrateful and rebellious. So, he dies just outside of the Promised Land. In a way, he must suffer and sacrifice for the sins of others (sound familiar? nice foreshadowing of Christ). Elijah, on the other hand, is taken up to heaven alive. Why? What is he doing there? He’s not the Messiah, even if he is one of the greatest prophets.

    Both of these stories find a suitable and fulfilling ending here in the Transfiguration, however. Moses does get to enter the Promised Land, but only now and here, with Jesus Christ as the Savior who ushers in the Kingdom. God is not a vengeful God but a loving God whose plan spans all time and who loves us so much that he instructs and points the way through generations upon generations. He wants Moses with him — Moses the bearer of his law who now comes back to the bosom of the Father in the presence of the fulfillment of that law.

    Why Elijah is still alive, keeping the Jews in a state of suspense about his possible return, becomes clear when he returns here to commune with and point to Jesus Christ. Elijah, speaker of God’s living Word, never dies as the bearer of that living Word, and only reappears alongside that living Word made flesh. Jesus, who unites the dead (Moses) and eternal life (Elijah), is in the center of this vision. Jesus is the true Alpha and Omega here.

    Like the brilliant clothes, Moses and Elijah are not there for their own glory, but to adorn and ornament Jesus Christ, the Son with whom the Father is well pleased. The Father’s voice and the Holy Spirit in the form of a cloud (something seen because it obscures the sun and darkens the sky and yet somehow “a bright cloud overshadowed them” in Matthew’s account) also appear, but again, to point to the Son. If ever there was an argument for the divinity of Jesus Christ, this is it!

     

    I hope this post did some justice to sharing the fruits of a lively discussion and I also hope it enkindles a newfound reverence for the wonder of the Transfiguration. Thank you, God, for this vision of heaven, given to sustain us in our belief, faith, and fidelity to your Word.

  • Contemplating Corpus Christi

    Contemplating Corpus Christi

    The Blessing of the Wheat in Artois (1857), Jules Breton | wikimedia.

     Today is the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ — aka, the Feast of Corpus Christi. We were fortunate to celebrate Mass in Park City at St. Mary’s Church, presided by Fr. Chris Gray, who is about to be transferred to the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City to serve as rector, and undoubtedly become a Monseigneur or even greater someday. He’s a great priest. He’s likeable, has a great singing/chanting voice, is funny, but most importantly, has a great reverence for the liturgy. So, in addition to a meaningful homily and prayerful sacrifice of the Mass, we enjoyed a Eucharistic procession around the church and a benediction, complete with incense and chanting of St. Thomas’s Tantum Ergo Sacramentum. 

    This solemnity is the great marker of the Catholic faith; a dividing line between Protestants and Catholics. We believe that in the Eucharist the Body and Blood of Christ are really and truly present — mystically and spiritually available to us in all their power and glory. Protestants believe that Jesus was speaking symbolically when he said the bread and wine were his body and blood. Why does this matter? Because if we want to follow the entire Way given to us through Christ, we can’t ignore the sacraments and the Eucharistic miracle he gives us. (The early Church was unanimous in believing in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Heck, in 110 AD, St. Ignatius of Antioch told the Smyrnaeans to “keep aloof from” the heretical Gnostics “because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ” (Epistle to the Smyrnaeans, 7).) The sacraments are the way his Spirit is active in the world. Would you dare not believe in the power and work of the Holy Spirit?

    Since the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church has affirmed that “for believers the sacraments of the New Covenant are necessary for salvation” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1129). Protestants believe nothing of the sort. It seems to me that theirs is a passive religion when it comes to salvation — taken in passively by grace and faith alone. In comparison, Catholics are taught that we have an active role in receiving grace, through the sacraments and in love and charity of God and neighbor.

    But something else stuck with me as I contemplated today’s readings and the significance of the solemnity. When Protestants say the Eucharist is just a “symbolic act,” they are in fact missing the depth of the symbolism. We, too, believe it is a sign — the greatest of all signs — but the significance of the sign is that it points to a new reality. So, I’d like to blog this Feast of Corpus Christi about the intersection of sign, symbol and reality as well as the unique and troubling (for some) insistence of Jesus Christ that we eat his actual body and blood.

    Sign, Symbol and Reality

    It can be confusing to talk about signs and symbols because they’re often lumped together. Unless you’re a semiotics professor, we all sort-of shoot from the hip here. (The academic field of semiotics that started perhaps with the ancient Greeks but blossomed in the second half of the 1900s is dedicated to studying sign, symbol, meaning and the like, but if there was ever a field that felt like splitting hairs, it’s semiotics.) Let’s first acknowledge that these words definitely overlap and share meaning, and not just in English, but also in Greek, Latin and Hebrew:

    EnglishLatinGreekHebrew
    signsignumσημεῖον (sēmeion)סִימָן (siman)
    symbolsymbolumσύμβολον (symbolon)סֵמֶל (semel)

    Despite the difficulties involved, I’d love to lay out a general difference between sign and symbol for the purpose of this blog. Let’s take a cue from the Latin signum, which is something that marks or identifies. An everyday usage could be something like a military signum in the form of a battle standard, and a supernatural signum would be a heavenly sign or miracle. We can see where we get the word signature (a personal “mark” that identifies the signer). I like also to think of a road sign, which points towards something. Taken together, let’s think of “sign” to mean a material thing that points to something else that holds extra meaning. So, when we make the sign of the Cross, it means more than just cross-shaped gesture around the face and chest area. It’s a sign of following Jesus Christ.

    “Symbol” has an interesting history, too. In the ancient world, the Greek word symbolon described an object like a piece of parchment, a seal, or a coin that was cut in half and given to two parties. It established a relationship between them. When the halves of the symbolon were reassembled, the owner’s identity was verified and the relationship confirmed. To take poetic license with this etymology, we might say that a sign is like a signature, but a symbol is only half the story (half the signature). It points to something even more complex: a relationship to a shared history.

    As a short side note, the early Christians and Church Fathers called the Creed they developed in the Council of Nicea and further councils as the “symbol of faith” or just the “Symbol.” This reveals that they saw our Creed as a way to recognize another Christian, and that a shared relationship is at the heart of our faith (shared with Christ and shared with one another as the Church).

    In our language, we’ve applied the deeper, more abstract meaning of “symbol” into words like symbolism, which implies a shared cultural story that lies behind the symbol. To sum up, I think “sign” is more direct, although still pointing to something outside itself (we say, “what does that signify?” and we expect a direct answer). I think “symbol” is a bit more complex and abstract, pointing to something more like a shared story of significance (we say, “what does that symbolize?” and we push our minds to think of things like metaphor, analogy, and mythological and religious stories).

    These terms have a deep history in our faith tradition. Circumcision is a sign of being a Jew, but it is a symbol of a circumcised heart — a life dedicated to God and living within his laws and precepts. Burning incense in our churches is a sign of reverence to our Holy God, and it is a symbol of our prayers rising up to Him in Heaven, as well as a symbol of immolating something precious to us as an offering to the Lord according to our covenant with Him. Importantly, signs and symbols in our religious tradition are material things in the world that point to spiritual realities we cannot see, touch, or otherwise sense. They help our physical humanity interact in some way, no matter how diminished, with something greater and immaterial. As St. Thomas writes: “Signs are given to men, to whom it is proper to discover the unknown by means of the known” (Summa Theologica, III, 60.2). I love the fact that he says signs are “given” to us, reminding us that there is logic and intentionality in the way God created the universe, even down to knowing how we might apprehend material things in the world and apply signification of greater things to them.

    The Blessing of the Wheat in Artois (1857), Jules Breton | wikimedia. Religious processions, typically with the exposed Blessed Sacrament in a monstrance, are another important Christian sign. They symbolize our spiritual journey to everlasting life, our affirmation that we are in the world but not of the world and are on our way to our real home. Religious processions used to be more widespread, especially in Europe, and I think it’s a bit of a shame that they have fallen out of fashion. They’re a great way to show our secular society that there is an alternative to the narrative of consumption and materialism that is constantly fed through our devices and experiences.

    This idea that signs are a bit more straightforward and symbols are a bit more complex gets turned on its head when it comes to the sacraments. This is because, as signs, they point to the mystery happening in our midst.

    The Church teaches that the sacraments are the greatest of signs in our faith lives because they transcend being signs and actually have real spiritual effects within us. Even just at face value, each sacrament is more than a typical sign, which is a single material object or action. In their execution, the sacraments include a form of the liturgy specific to each — that is, the prayers, movements, and physical items used in each rite. So a sacrament includes a number of other “signs” within it, such as water, candles, incense, etc. For instance, water is a sign of spiritual purity, but when water is used in the sacrament of Baptism, that sign takes on more meaning and contributes to a larger understanding of the “sign” of the sacrament of Baptism. Likewise, the Eucharist has the material appearance of bread and wine, but those symbols/signs are part of a larger liturgical movement that calls down the Holy Spirit in sanctification and intones a shared set of prayers between priest and believers. The whole sacrament, then, is a “sign,” but is so much bigger than other types of signs.

    It’s hard to overstate just how deep and important the sacraments are as signs. The Catechism of the Catholic Church sums up a discussion of the sacraments with the words of St. Thomas: “Therefore a sacrament is a sign that commemorates what precedes it – Christ’s Passion; demonstrates what is accomplished in us through Christ’s Passion – grace; and prefigures what that Passion pledges to us – future glory.” As a collection of material signs, prayers and action of the Holy Spirit, a sacrament is a sign that “points to” many other symbols and signs in salvation history at the same time it is doing active spiritual work through the power of the Holy Spirit. 

    All of this sets the stage for discussing the Eucharist on this Feast of Corpus Christi. As I thought about the great sacramental sign of the Eucharist, three aspects jumped out at me: how the bread and wine are a symbol of — and somehow the reality of — manna, the sacrificial Lamb, and the true Body and Blood of Christ.

    Bread of Affliction, Bread from Heaven

    The Passover figures greatly in a full understanding of the sacrament of the Eucharist. Perhaps the best exploration I’ve read is Brant Pitre’s Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist. Highly recommended. I’ll do my best to summarize a few things here.

    One of the seemingly smaller aspects of the Jews’ flight from Egypt is bread. On the original Passover night, the Jews had to get ready to move quickly because after the angel of the Lord passes by their homes and slaughters the firstborn throughout the land, they must hightail it out of Egypt. This means they don’t have time to let their bread rise with yeast and they have to bake and eat unleavened bread during their flight.

    Moses enshrines the memory of the Exodus in the Festival of Unleavened Bread: “For seven days you shall eat unleavened bread with [your Passover sacrifice] — the bread of affliction — because you came out of the land of Egypt in great haste, so that all the days of your life you may remember the day of your departure from the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 16:3). So much can be said about this “bread of affliction”! The bread made by human hands, out of necessity being less than satisfying — what a great symbol of our metaphysical state of being separated from God. The act of intentionally depriving ourselves of material comfort — a great parallel with the intentional deprivations practiced by saints and monastics thousands of years later. 

    But there is more to be said about bread as a symbol.

    Detail from The Israelites gathering Manna (c.1490s), Ercole de’ Roberti | Image courtesy nationalgallery.org.uk

    Wandering in the wilderness after they fled Egypt, the Israelites complained to Moses that they were hungry. God showed his love by raining down bread from heaven to sustain them. “The house of Israel called it manna; it was like coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey … The Israelites ate manna forty years, until they came to a habitable land” (Exodus 16:31, 35). Unlike the bread of affliction, the manna from heaven is both pleasing to the senses and extremely nourishing. Bread as a symbol had been sanctified. But sanctified bread came only from God, it was not something that could be made by humans. 

    After the Exodus, bread would never again be “just bread” for the Jews. It would always also be a symbol of God’s love for them and his commitment to them. God chooses good symbols; bread sustains life, and he was training them to understand that he sustains life even more fundamentally than physical food. By the time of King David, 450 years later, they had memorialized manna as more than normal bread: “he rained down on them manna to eat, and gave them the grain of heaven. Mortals ate of the bread of angels; he sent them food in abundance” (Psalm 78:24-25). 

    And 1,000 years after David, when Jesus perfects our understanding of God’s law and the words of the prophets, he deepens this reference to manna: “[My flesh and blood] is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever” (John 6:58). Jesus brought something new and shocking to the already-rich symbol of bread. God allowed the symbol to convey meaning for many centuries specifically so he could invoke all that the symbol of bread stood for and use that image to point to a new reality in our midst. Note what is going on here! It’s a reversal of how material signs usually operate in our entire way of building meaning. Until this moment, the material sign of bread was a pointer to something deeper, a symbol of God’s love and commitment. Jesus himself used this conventional symbology during his miracle of the loaves and fishes, when the bread demonstrated God’s inexhaustible and overflowing love for humanity. But now, the rich symbol is used to point to a new material and spiritual thing. In other words, usually things act as symbols pointing to complex concepts, but here the complex symbol is pointing to a thing. A very corporeal and perfectly spiritual thing that is Christ’s actual flesh and blood. 

    I’d even argue that it had to happen this way. Only with a symbol that was so richly endowed could Jesus teach us about the mystery of the gift he was giving us. He’s saying to us, “Even with how awesome you thought that manna given in the Exodus was, the gift of my flesh and blood for you to eat is the real bread of heaven because it does more than keep you alive in this world.” 

    Bread is still a material thing, and it’s still a symbol with a rich history of meaning, but now that symbol is pointing to something new, a new thing, the reality of the Eucharist.

    The Sacrificial Lamb

    Much like bread, the sacrificial lamb has thousands of years of meaning attached to it for the Jewish people. All the way back to Abraham, we have the willing but difficult sacrifice of the son, replaced by the ram provided by God. But the sacrificial lamb really becomes codified in the lives of Jews during the Passover, when each family takes an unblemished lamb (from the sheep or goats) and “the whole assembled congregation of Israel shall slaughter it at twilight. They shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. They shall eat the lamb that same night” (Exodus 12:6b-8a). The lamb here is an interesting mix of symbol (much more than just a lamb, it is a symbol of fidelity to God’s command) and physical sustenance. We really see the roots of the Eucharist clearly — in a ritualized way, believers gather as a community to slaughter the lamb as a sacrifice to God, then eat it.

    Detail from the Brothers Haggadah (left) and the Rylands Haggadah (right, both from 1330-1350), manuscripts from Catalonia that detail Jewish life. | Image courtesy Museu d’Historia de Barcelona. These particular images show the slaughter of the Passover lamb and the painting of the lintels with the blood.

    Famously, the Jewish faith includes a lot of animal sacrifice. Sin offerings were a common form of sacrifice and this particular ritual is important for Christians to understand because the phrase “He died for our sins” very much refers to this practice. God told Moses that they must make regular offerings as a payment of sorts for their sins. God prescribed that “The sin offering shall be slaughtered before the Lord at the spot where the burnt offering is slaughtered; it is most holy. The priest who offers it as a sin offering shall eat of it; it shall be eaten in a holy place in the court of the tent of meeting. Whatever touches its flesh shall become holy” (Leviticus 6:25-26).* Note the insistence of the holiness of the event and the offering, which is again eaten. Strikingly, the ritualized sin offering is transformative — “whatever touches its flesh shall become holy.” We can locate a number of things in our religion that echo this transformational aspect of the sin offering: primarily, the Eucharist, which is the new offering for sin that we eat and which transforms us into something holy, but also things like holy relics of the saints, from which we have seen miracles transmitted.

    So imagine what must have been dawning on the Apostles, who were brought up with the rich symbology of the bread and the rituals of the sin offerings with an unblemished lamb, when “On the first day of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover lamb is sacrificed” (Mark 14:12), they were led to the upper room for him to institute the Eucharist during the Last Supper. Surely, some of them remembered John the Baptist declaring when he saw Jesus, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:36). They were told he was the lamb who was going to produce some sort of never-before-seen, world changing sin offering! 

    Sure enough, Jesus uses the sign of the lamb, as well as those loaded signs of bread and wine, to point back to himself, the nearly unfathomable mystery of salvation for all of humanity. “Jesus took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to the disciples, and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body’” (Matthew 26:26). He sanctifies and sacralizes the bread, meaning that he makes it holy with his own essence and by his own divine power, then tells them to eat it, just like they eat the flesh of the Passover lamb. And why is the wine used? “Drink from it, all of you,” he says, “for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matthew 26:27-28). It is used because the sin sacrifice requires real blood, real suffering.

    We might ask why not use actual sacrificed lamb meat as the Eucharist during the Last Supper? I’ll offer a theory (Aquinas offers his own). I think there had to be a physical and mental break with the traditions of the Old Testament. Jesus was instituting a new covenant where he was going to be sacrificed, not a lamb. The “remembrance” of this great event is more fittingly placed in the symbols of bread and wine, which were symbols of a covenantal relationship with God and signs of God’s abundance. What’s more, the difference of Christ’s flesh is accentuated here — the God-man’s flesh cannot be appropriately signaled by actual meat of any sort. Jesus Christ’s body is united not just with a spirit, but with God’s Spirit. Meat would be too similar and encourage us to fall too short of recognizing this great difference.

    Truly Eating Flesh

    In the gospel of John, when Jesus tells the crowd, “the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh,” the Jews don’t react well, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (John 6:51-52). Does Jesus back off a little and say, “I’m speaking symbolically”? No! He doubles down. He says, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (v.53). He is insistent on this point, which sounds a heck of a lot like cannibalism to ears not prepared for it and hearts not realizing that this is God speaking. 

    And as if to punctuate the literal nature of what he means, Jesus adds, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day” (v.54). But English fails us here, because in verse 53 he uses the common Greek verb for eating, “phagein” (φαγεῖν), while in verse 54 he ups the literalness and uses the verb trōgō (τρώγω), which means to gnaw, munch, or crunch. Those who gnaw on my flesh!!

    As if he’s not shocking enough, he’s also claiming to be able to give eternal life through this eating of his flesh. The divine power of the Eucharistic sacrament is laid bare. But it’s only available to those who are willing to eat his literal flesh. Very truly, I tell you!

    People call the gospel of John the most theological and the most symbolic. With the confluence of these two ideas, we see what Christianity is all about: we know God through a highly symbolic language that points to new realities, new things. Again, if what Jesus is doing is reversing the typical “sign /symbol is a physical thing pointing to a complex idea” into “complex sign/symbol is pointing to a new physical thing” (i.e., his flesh in the Eucharist), then this is precisely why our theology is the opposite of a mythology. Myths are stories to help us understand our world and experiences, but Christian theology is the exploration of God revealing himself to us as reality itself. Traditional sign/symbol meaning making is great for talking about ourselves and our experience, but God saw fit to use symbols in a new way: to help us access his own infinite reality.

    Thinking back on our celebration of the Feast of Corpus Christi, these thoughts were swirling around in my head as I listened to Fr. Gray’s homily and prayed with the congregation during the consecration of the Eucharist. The Eucharist contemplated and received can be an emotional thing. And I was contemplating what emotions Jesus may have wanted us to feel when gnawing on his unbloody flesh in the form of the host and the wine. Why insist that we physically interact with his flesh in this way? Why be a sacrificed lamb, whose holiness spreads to everything it touches but is at the same time unapologetically messy in its grease and juice and chew?

    I have been taught to feel joy and thankfulness for this incredible gift of the Eucharist. I have imagined it sanctifying my mouth, my esophagus, and my stomach as well as my soul as I ingest it. Aquinas teaches us that the great difference between this food and other food is that instead of us turning the food into ourselves (by nourishing our cells and organs), the Eucharist helps turn us more and more into Christ. I love this teaching and love approaching the Eucharist with this in mind.

    But, for the first time, I felt something different. As I considered the bloody sacrifice of the Cross and Christ’s insistence that we eat the flesh of this sacrifice, I had a catch in my throat. The moment when we as a congregation shout “Crucify him!” during our Good Friday Mass of the Passion came flooding back to me and my culpability as a sinner unfit for unity with He who is all good came over me. My eyes threatened to tear as I thought about the sheer sorrow of having to eat of a sacrifice that humanity made necessary through our initial disobedience and stubborn stupidity when he came in bodily form. There is something of the gag reflex here — of choking on something that is both sweet and horrible. Horrible not because of taboo (as in cannibalism), but horrible because we needed such a sacrifice. Horrible because that suffering of that very real savior Jesus Christ actually happened, and we remember that when we proclaim the Eucharist to be his very real presence. 

    Of course, God transformed our sorrow into awe and joy with the Resurrection, and this is the point of sharing in the Eucharist — sharing in the Resurrection. So, I didn’t dwell on that feeling of self-repulsion, because I don’t think it reflects what this sacrament is all about. At the same time, I think it was a positive experience. I think there are infinitely plumb-able depths to the reality of the Eucharist that is pointed to by our simple signs of bread and wine. I think Christ’s insistence on actually eating his flesh is something we need to take seriously and contemplate.

    And I thank God for the fact that his Son’s flesh is made unbloody and spiritual in our sacrament. I praise him for his wisdom and his gentleness with us, who condemned his Son to death, only to desperately need his saving Body and Blood so that we can partake in the Heavenly banquet that is everlasting life with him.

    Procession for Corpus Christi (1510-1520), Master of James IV of Scotland | wikimedia.

     

    * Note: it is worth re-reading chapter 23 of Leviticus, where God teaches Moses how to celebrate festivals, or “holy convocations” to honor him. These are the seeds of the sacraments as we know them today: liturgical rites with specific practices and gestures that endured for 1,500 years before Christ instituted the New Covenant. The “sign” of each sacrament points back here (indeed, back to Abraham and Isaac), and simultaneously points to Christ’s life, work, death and Resurrection, as well as pointing to the everlasting life to come.

  • Who is the Holy Spirit?

    Who is the Holy Spirit?

    VERONA: Apse of Chapel Miniscalchi in Saint Anastasia’s church from year 1506 designed by Angelo di Giovanni with main scene of the Pentecost.

    Pentecost is one of our highest feasts — marking the anointing and confirmation of the Church by the Holy Spirit. It is a true turning point for humanity, when God begins to interact with us in a new way. The Church’s liturgy for Pentecost is so full of the mystery surrounding the action of the Holy Spirit that it provides us with a dazzling array of Scripture to shed light on this event. The Vigil Mass has an extended form, much like Easter Vigil. Through four Old Testament readings and associated psalms, it reminds us how the Spirit has been guiding us and transforming our activity into something holy from the beginning of time. We hear of humanity’s hubris in the Tower of Babel, a symptom of our fallen state that God remedies by confusing our language. Lest we think that God is a malevolent God, doing this to spite us, he promises us through the prophet Joel, “I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh. Your sons and daughters shall prophesy … Then everyone shall be rescued who calls on the name of the LORD.” Of course, this is realized at Pentecost when the Spirit descends on Mary and the Apostles and reverses the confusion of Babel.

    But it’s more than just a loosening of tongues. Those tongues have something new to proclaim. We have become intelligible to one another once again, but only in a specific mode: allowing the Spirit to talk through us, to tell us about the Triune God and his saving plan for us through the person of the Son.

    The incredible reading from Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones is an astounding prophecy of the Pentecost in the upper room in Jerusalem. God tells Ezekiel, “Prophesy over these bones, and say to them: Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD!” Note how this foretells exactly what will happen. The “dry bones” of the Jews and Gentiles hear the word of the Lord from the mouths of the Apostles, the new prophets of a new age. God assures Ezekiel that his word will be efficacious. God tells the bones, “See! I will bring spirit into you, that you may come to life.” Indeed, Ezekiel sees sinews and flesh cover the bones as they stand, “but there was no spirit in them.” Now, note carefully — God tells Ezekiel to pray to the Holy Spirit: “Prophesy to the spirit, prophesy, son of man, and say to the spirit: … come, O spirit, and breathe into these slain that they may come to life.” How surprising! I find it more than a little striking within the Jewish context that the God who time and again reminds them that he is the one and only God, the Creator, tells his prophet Ezekiel to turn his appeals to the Holy Spirit. This is one of several times in the Old Testament, in fact, that when we read carefully, we see that God is telling us something about himself, about the three persons of the Trinity. It would take centuries until the Councils of Nicea and Constantinople could properly articulate an understanding (dumbed down for our human intellect) of the Trinity having one and the same essence of a single God, but three distinct persons in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Nonetheless, we can trace their distinction to moments like these in Ezekiel and even to the creation story itself where God tells us that it is him, but also his Word and his Breath that act in creation in different ways.

    Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones (1866), Gustave Doré | Wikimedia Commons.

    I want to take a moment to reflect on the person of the Holy Spirit. I think many of us might be quietly (and innocently) caught in a type of subordinationist heresy. Simply put, this means that we have the tendency to think that God the Father is hierarchically the main and most powerful person of the Trinity — effectively subordinating the Son and the Holy Spirit to being lesser than him. Don’t fret, we would be in good company because several early Church Fathers like Irenaeus, Tertullian and Justin Martyr were also likely subordinationist, but that’s because the Church hadn’t yet been forced to think hard and long about the relationship between the persons of the Trinity. That was foisted upon the Nicene Council by Emperor Constantine I to figure out in the year 325 A.D. In fact, it was the more serious heresy of Arianism, where Jesus was taught to be a created being, that was the cause of the council, but the effect was the same — the council came up with our formulation that we repeat in our Creed to this day, where the Father, Son, and Holy spirit are proclaimed to be consubstantial with one another. That is, of one and the same essence.

    Perhaps it’s because of some of the references to the Spirit in Scripture might make us feel that it is not as, I don’t know, approachable (?) reliable (?) as the Father. For me, it’s when Jesus tells Nicodemus, “The wind (pneuma) blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit (Pneumatos)” (John 3:8). This passage leaves me with a sense of flightiness about the Spirit (although I think that’s erroneous). Plus, the Apostles are waiting in the upper room for the Spirit to come, and it seems like no one knows when it will come. So, we don’t know where it comes from, when it will come, or where it will go next. A heretic might say that this Spirit sounds unreliable. But Jesus tells us emphatically that “everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him; but he who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him” (Luke 12:10). So, let us never say that the Spirit is unreliable!

    Turning back to Scripture, of course, we find that the Spirit is both efficacious and reliable. If Ezekiel on the plain of bones isn’t convincing enough, we have the Word of God, Jesus, who tells us, “It is the Spirit who gives life” (John 6:63), and in reference to reliability, “how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him [than those who are evil and also fulfill promises]?” (Luke 11:13). We learn from Jesus that the Spirit gives us life, which is why we baptize in his name, and the Spirit is the one who speaks through us when we are blessed by God. The Spirit is the Father’s way of acting in and through us. All of this is possible because the Holy Spirit is God’s actual spirit! But I don’t know if that helps clear up the subordinationist heresy. A person’s spirit certainly seems to be an integral, if not central, part of oneself. But it’s not that whole self, is it?

    This is where we go wrong — using ourselves as a reference point to try to understand God. We should always go the opposite way and use the mysterious truth God reveals about himself to better understand ourselves.

    This Pentecost, I really leaned on correcting any misconceptions I was harboring about the Holy Spirit as a secondary divine player. Some of this was reflecting on the work of the Council of Nicea in affirming that the Spirit is the same exact divine essence of the Father and the Son. Another was a re-reading of the opening of the Letter to the Hebrews, where the Holy Spirit speaks through the writer (St. Paul or one of his followers) with this astounding and clear proclamation: “[The Son] is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being” (Hebrews 1:3). I’m not presuming to tackle one of the most difficult fields in all of theology in understanding the mystery of the Trinity, but there is one point that my brain was able to process here. Being of the “same essence” is a technical way to talk about being “the exact imprint of God’s very being.” This phrase from Hebrews is very specific and resonates with me differently.

    If we apply the “exact imprint” thought to the creation scene, we might see something different. When God creates Adam, he “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” — this breath is his Spirit (rukah in Hebrew and pneuma in Greek refer equally to breath, spirit and wind). This is not a metaphor, it is a way that God is revealing the mystery of the Trinity to us. The action of a human breathing might bear some resemblance to God breathing, but only a shadow of it. The Father is so superabundant and generative that when he breathes, his breath contains all that he is. This is no normal exhale. This breath is God sharing his very essence, so strongly that this essence has its own personhood and action in Creation. In the same fashion, the Word is from God, and it is also fully God, a personhood of his essence who is active in the world in a special way. This Creator who can make all of Creation with a Word and a Breath imbues his essence into everything simply by thinking about it! His presence is so overwhelming that just a whiff of his essence could spawn a thousand galaxies (although everything he does is intentional and intelligible, as his Word and law attest). Imagine what his actual, full Spirit can do!

    These are things we cannot do — imbuing our very selves in our breath and world — and we have no power to create and inspire and be truth. And yet, by the grace of God we actually can create some things (physical, emotional, mental) and we can inspire one another, and we can speak the truth, all just in an infinitely reduced way compared to God. Do we pride ourselves in our little godhood or do we recognize that what we are sharing in is a gift from the one who created us? Can we realize just how much greater God’s power is than our little triumphs in life? 

    More importantly, are we doing the good that God wants us to do? I want to shift from thinking about how the Spirit is fully God to thinking about how important it is that God is giving his full self to us now in the End Times. We receive the Spirit as much as the Apostles in the upper room did, albeit the way this manifests in us is different. While the Spirit is present in all of our Sacraments, Baptism and Confirmation confer on us a personal evangelical call that we too often ignore. Consider what happened to the Apostles when the Holy Spirit descended on them. We are told in the first reading of the Pentecost liturgy during the day, “And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in different tongues, as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim” (Acts 2:4). What did they proclaim? The rest of Acts chapter 2 relates Peter’s great homily, where he proclaims, “This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you both see and hear” (Acts 2:32-33). Here’s the nugget! The Spirit is poured out so that the Apostles can share the saving truth that God worked through his Son, Jesus Christ.

    The Spirit is not poured out simply to make them feel emboldened or to grace them for being good people. There is a purpose, because now the End Times have begun and all of humanity is given some time to turn their hearts to the Way, the Truth and the Life before the Last Judgement.

    Pentecost, the descent of the Holy Spirit in the chapel in the village Stitar, Croatia. Photo from Adobe Stock.

    Note how the Letter to the Romans acknowledges this moment that we still live within, found in the Pentecost Vigil epistle reading:

    We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now;
    and not only that, but we ourselves,
    who have the firstfruits of the Spirit,
    we also groan within ourselves
    as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. …

    the Spirit too comes to the aid of our weakness;
    for we do not know how to pray as we ought,
    but the Spirit himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings.

    In other words, the whole point of life is the “adoption, the redemption of our bodies,” when we will be reunited perfectly with God. We — indeed, all of creation — are groaning in the labor pains brought about by Christ’s life, death and resurrection. And the Spirit is here to help us during this time, filling our mouths with the saving message of Jesus Christ, which gets us to this adoption, i.e., Heaven.

    Let’s repeat this: the Spirit is given to us (today, in our Sacraments and freely by grace) specifically to fill our mouths with the redemptive message of Jesus Christ — intelligible in all languages and meant for all people. We are supposed to be sharing the Way, the Truth and the Life with others. This is what it means to truly love your neighbor. I meet so many Christians who think loving your neighbor means good deeds, kind words, and a helping hand. But without the message of Jesus Christ, who was literally raised bodily from the dead to create a new path to salvation for us, these good deeds are meaningless. Because the point has never been this life or making things better in this world. The point has always been to do God’s will, which is absolute goodness and truth, so we can be as worthy as possible for the redemption he is holding out to us. How can we have fallen so far from this message?

    The second reading on the Pentecost liturgy celebrated during the day makes this point crystal clear: “If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also, through his Spirit that dwells in you” (Romans 8:11). Being raised from the dead — body and soul — to dwell with God in Heaven is the point of the Spirit being sent to us. That’s what we celebrate on Pentecost and that’s what makes us Christian.

    I pray on this Pentecost that Catholics will be shocked out of their lukewarm tendencies, their acedia that keeps them comfortable in their jobs and money and little material triumphs. We must truly let the Spirit that has soaked our souls in our baptisms and confirmations to open our mouths to proclaim with the Apostles that Jesus Christ is the Way that all humanity has been given to share in God’s eternal glory.

  • The Heavenly Womb

    The Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year C: Micah 5:1-4a, Hebrews 10:5-10, Luke 1:39-45.

    Today’s readings present us with a familiar scene, the kindly image of pregnant Elizabeth greeting pregnant Mary. This is the Visitation of Mary. Mary travels to the hill country, she “enters the house of Zachariah,” the women exchange pleasantries. It’s December 19th and Salt Lake City is covered in snow. The whole scene can lull us with its domesticity as I dream of cozying up to the fireplace and doing a puzzle this afternoon. The gospel reading with its overtones of “nesting” fits perfectly.

    But, let’s dwell with the Word of God for a moment and let it reveal its wonder and wisdom to us. There is something deep happening in this gospel reading. We are witnessing the turning point of history, when the time of the Prophets meets the time of the Messiah. Hidden in this countryside meeting of cousins is a glorious revelation for the world, much like the glorious revelation Himself will soon be given to the world, yet hidden in a humble manger.

    Icon of the Visitation | Image from legacyicons.com. There are plenty of beautiful paintings of the Visitation, but I wanted to choose one here to emphasize that this was as much a meeting of Jesus and John as Mary and Elizabeth. And while it is more common to see John depicted in a pose of humility in sacred icons, I like this one particularly because it shows John “leaping for joy.”

    There are many present at this meeting – there is Elizabeth meeting Mary, but also John meeting Jesus, in fact the prophets (remember that Jesus will say, “And if you are willing to accept it, John himself is Elijah who was to come,” (Mt 11:14)) meeting the Messiah, and finally the Spirit filling humanity. Let’s remember the central action of this scene. After Mary enters the house and greets Elizabeth,

    When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting,
    the infant leaped in her womb, 
    and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, 
    cried out in a loud voice and said, 
    “Blessed are you among women, 
    and blessed is the fruit of your womb.”

    Several things happen before Elizabeth speaks: first, the infant John reacts to the Messiah entering his presence. Remember, this is John’s entire reason for being – the Father has given him the solemn job of preparing the world for the Messiah and recognizing Him when He comes. John is more than a normal baby; he is chosen and exalted by God and because his soul is so much greater and full even at this stage of his life, he is able to model for us the true meaning of joy by leaping in the presence of the Lord (see last week’s reflection for more thoughts on this joy). John’s great soul seems to envelop his mother at this point because she herself prophesies! She is “filled with the Holy Spirit” and “cries out in a loud voice” – both things we read of prophets in general and John in particular during his ministry. The Holy Spirit gives her the wisdom and courage to proclaim the truth present in front of her: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.”

    There is a reason the Hail Mary joins these words with the angel Gabriel’s words during the Annunciation (“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you”): this moment is John’s first pronouncement to the world that the Savior is present in his pure vessel, the virgin womb of Mary. God makes his Word heard, first through an angel and then through the Holy Spirit speaking through John and Elizabeth. Both times, the proclamation is made to Mary (and in the retelling of the gospel, to the world). Mary is, in fact, the archetype of the Church herself. The Church, who bears and protects and is transformed by Christ, is being announced as blessed and full of grace (literally and figuratively). The original Greek is worth noting, since Gabriel calls her Kecharitōmenē (One Whom Grace Inhabits) and Elizabeth calls her Eulogēmenē. I unpack Gabriel’s words in a prior reflection, but let’s understand what the Holy Spirit is saying through Elizabeth here. The root word is eulogéō, which is a combination of eú, meaning “well, good” and lógos, which we should all recognize as “word, reason,” or in this context “speaking,” which is how we arrive at “bless” for eulogéō. Greek scholars also note that this word can properly mean “confer what is beneficial” when we read of how God blesses His people and they bless him in return. The point is that there is an action combined with the word – the blessing is coming from someone, through being spoken, and is thereby conveyed on someone else. Who is speaking? The Holy Spirit! That means that God Himself is conveying blessings upon Mary and His Son in this scene. This scene is thus tied to not just the Annunciation but Jesus’s Baptism when the Father calls down from heaven, saying, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” (Mt 3:17), as well as the Transfiguration when the Father proclaims, “This is my Son, whom I have chosen, listen to Him” (Lk 9:35). All of these scenes are the revelation of Christ to humanity, accomplished by the Father and the Holy Spirit.

    Returning to today’s gospel passage, let’s look at the curious self-awareness that Elizabeth shows after God proclaims the blessedness of Mary and the presence of His Son:

    And how does this happen to me, 
    that the mother of my Lord should come to me?
    For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears, 
    the infant in my womb leaped for joy.

    How fascinating that her own voice is intermingled with that of the Spirit and John’s expansive soul. She is fully aware of the fact that Mary bears the Christ in her womb, and she marvels that she is lucky enough to be in the presence of them both. But she also calls attention to her own body, to the feeling of John leaping for joy. This, I believe is a purposeful and profound passage for us. We are invited to consider what it is like to be pregnant with another being growing inside us. I have no personal insights here, but I have two children and my mother had 10 pregnancies. From what I’ve observed and read, the feeling is at the same time alien and could not be more integral and personal. There is not just something growing inside you, but someone. I’ve come across this quote from author Anne Christian Buchanan and it seems insightful: “To be pregnant is to be vitally alive, thoroughly woman, and distressingly inhabited. Soul and spirit are stretched – along with body – making pregnancy a time of transition, growth, and profound beginnings.” There is something of this being “distressingly inhabited” and having one’s soul stretched going on in our gospel scene. Elizabeth is profoundly aware of the movement in her womb – something that is her but not her. She is doubly inhabited here because she is “filled with the Holy Spirit.” What are we being told about God’s will for us here?

    The Visitation, Jakob and/or Hans Strüb (1505) | Image courtesy the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. I like the slightly distant looks in Mary and Elizabeth’s eyes here, as if they are witnessing the expansion of their souls, the meeting of the prophet and the Savior, and the Holy Spirit beside and within them.

    Let’s take a look at Elizabeth’s final words: “Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.” The final piece of the revelation puzzle begins to appear. Our work is trust in the Lord and acceptance of His will. It is Mary’s faith that has made her blessed. Mariologists would quibble here that she was blessed upon her own birth by her virgin mother, in fact blessed by God before time began. But the Holy Spirit is blessing her here for her belief and acceptance of God’s will, for she was granted free will and could have denied the incarnation of Christ offered to her. Thus, blessings come upon Mary (who is us, remember: the Church) when she accepts God’s will; more, even: when she accepts God Himself and allows Him to grow within her.

    We are invited to consider the womb as the reality of our spiritual life here on earth. It is the intersection of our biology and our spirit. Our soul – that invisible and intangible essence within us that allows us to recognize and commune with God – needs to grow, just like the body. Sadly, many of us neglect it. But Christ has shown us the Way. We must empty ourselves of personal ambition and self-centeredness and open ourselves up to the Spirit, to God’s will.

    Elizabeth and Mary are at the heart of God’s revelation of Himself to us because this is precisely how He works through us to achieve our salvation. Just as Mary is the living vessel for God, the Ark of the New Covenant, we are all to become vessels for the Spirit. Indeed, in today’s second reading during the Office of the Readings (part of the Divine Office), St. Irenaeus tells us, “Man is the vessel which receives God’s action and all his wisdom and power” (from Against Heresies). What’s more, we all undergo that mysterious, life-giving process of gestating something new and wondrous within us. Irenaeus continues: “if man perseveres in God’s love, and in obedience and gratitude to him, he will receive greater glory from him. It will be a glory which will grow ever brighter until he takes on the likeness of the one who died for him.” This is our deification, our ability to take our first steps in the Kingdom, imperfectly while still on this earth, but entrance to the Kingdom is indeed promised to us if we follow Christ the Way. What a marvelous plan that uses the very biological processes of gestating and becoming (processes He created, of course) in order to bring about the formation of the soul in the likeness of Christ. Note, though, that this plan is only made possible because of Christ. The Jews “persevered in obedience and gratitude” (off and on) but they still waited for a Messiah to save them. Humanity had no actual way to achieve eternal life or enter the Kingdom of God until Christ. Irenaeus elaborates: “He wanted to invite man to take on his likeness … establishing man in a way of life in obedience to the Father that would lead to the vision of God, and endowing man with power to receive the Father. He is the Word of God who dwelt with man and became the Son of Man to open the way for man to receive God, for God to dwell with man, according to the will of the Father.” To paraphrase Pope John Paul II, we must always remember to view the world through a Christological lens. Nothing makes sense without Him. 

    So, located in this everyday, humble scene of two pregnant women, we find the glowing embers not just of the greatest prophet and the Messiah, but the wisdom of our entire religion. We are all “pregnant” with a soul. While it may seem foreign to us, this thing can be a person, just like pregnancy. We can allow God to inhabit our souls. God can fill us with His glory, helping our souls swell with His love and moving us toward perfect unity with Him and eternal life in the Kingdom. We are all invited to participate in a heavenly womb, at once foreign to us and also something that could not be more personal. If pregnancy is “a time of transition, growth, and profound beginnings,” then the heavenly womb wherein we gestate God in our souls is even moreso. Knowingly or unknowingly, we have been doing this since our own moments of creation, and as we turn to the gospels this Advent, we can recommit ourselves to this work of believing in God, accepting His will in a deeper and deeper way until we can also leap with joy simply to be in His presence.

    Visitation of Mary to Saint Elizabeth, Cristoforo Gherardi (c. 1541), currently in the Musée des Augustins, Toulouse | Wikimedia Commons. Note how crowded this scene is as painted by Gherardi. An archetype for the Church, indeed!

  • As Wheat Gathered by the Lord

    Third Sunday of Advent: Zephaniah 3:14-18a, Philippians 4:4-7, Luke 3:10-18.

    Gaudete in Domino semper! These are the first words of today’s second reading and, in fact, the introit (opening chant) for the third Sunday in Advent, marking Gaudete Sunday every year. What does it mean? The Latin translates as “Rejoice in the Lord always,” so we celebrate Rejoice Sunday. Hooray!

    But what is joy, really? St. Thomas Aquinas writes that “joy is caused by love,” either in the presence of something that is loved or having that thing you love achieve it’s proper state of goodness (Summa II-II, q28.1). There is joy in earthly things, but the highest joy is spiritual because the highest form of love is charity (caritas). As St. Thomas writes, “according to 1 John 4:16: ‘He that abideth in charity, abideth in God, and God in him.’ Therefore spiritual joy, which is about God, is caused by charity” (Ibid). There is something circular here, something only the Creator Himself can generate: we rejoice in God always because God is the very charity that creates the joy we have. It boils down to simply allowing ourselves to exist wholly in His generative presence, which is love itself, and which generates the joy we experience.

    Adoration of the Magi (detail), Domenico Ghirlandaio (1488-1489) | Wikimedia Commons.

    As we dig into St. Paul’s exhortation in the second reading, we should note a subtlety to today’s Lectionary translation. We hear today, “Your kindness should be known to all,” but “kindness” is an interesting translation of the original Greek, ἐπιεικὲς (epieikes), which means gentle spirit or gentleness. The Latin Vulgate translation is Modestia vestra nota sit omnibus hominibus, or “let your moderation be known unto all men.” So, we have a key word, epieikes or modestia, which is variously translated as forbearance, gentleness, reasonableness, moderation, and humility. In fact, our Lectionary is the only place I’ve found it translated as kindness. This is a point to consider, especially in the context of what we are called to do and to be. Certainly, our call to love God and then our neighbor as ourselves (simply put, a call to caritas or agape) can manifest itself as kindness. I’m not saying this is a mis-translation. But kindness emphasizes an act that we do – something we call up within us and enact on the world around us. These other words: forbearance, gentleness, moderation, and humility, all emphasize a state of internal calm that radiates through our actions. It is best phrased in perhaps the closest translation, gentle spirit. This emphasizes an internal ordering toward God, a letting go of self rather than an assertion of self. St. Paul is exhorting the Philippians (and all of us) to be known for our gentle spirit. Indeed, in the next sentence he says, “Be anxious about nothing.” This is Christianity on earth: a gentle spirit, anxious about nothing, living in Christ and awaiting His triumphant return; awaiting our own second birth into heaven. This is the essence of Gaudete Sunday, especially.

    This gentle spirit, ordered to and ordered by God, is compatible with St. Thomas’s discussion of joy, too. He writes, “joy is not a virtue distinct from charity, but an act, or effect, of charity” (Summa, II-II, q 28.4). Joy, in other words, is brought about by charity. As stated earlier, when God loves us, joy is the natural effect. Contemplating and living in the Christ event brings this joy back to the surface of our minds. Living in Christ also means allowing God’s love – charity – to flow through us to others. Our gentle spirit can be anxious about nothing as we are rejoicing in God always because we exist within the constant effects of charity.

    This is getting a little abstract and philosophical (as St. Thomas tends to do). Let’s bring it back to the reality of Jesus Christ, man and God, alive on earth. In his excellent apostolic exhortation in 1975, Gaudete in Domino, Pope Paul VI reminds us: “But it is necessary here below to understand properly the secret of the unfathomable joy which dwells in Jesus and which is special to Him. It is especially the Gospel of Saint John that lifts the veil, by giving us the intimate words of the Son of God made man. If Jesus radiates such peace, such assurance, such happiness, such availability, it is by reason of the inexpressible love by which He knows that He is loved by His Father” (III). Pope Paul VI goes on to recount the number of ways John tells us Christ knows the Father and is united with Him: “It is an unceasing and total exchange: ‘All I have is yours and all you have is mine.’ The Father has given the Son the power to judge, the power to dispose of life. It is a mutual indwelling: ‘…I am in the Father and the Father in me….’.” Pope Paul VI’s point is to more clearly flesh out the charity that gives us joy. Perfect charity is the relationship between God the Father and God the Son: “Here there is an uncommunicable relationship of love which is identified with His existence as the Son and which is the secret of the life of the Trinity: the Father is seen here as the one, who gives Himself to the Son, without reserve and without ceasing, in a burst of joyful generosity, and the Son is seen as He who gives Himself in the same way to the Father, in a burst of joyful gratitude, in the Holy Spirit.” And, the best part: “And the disciples and all those who believe in Christ are called to share this joy.” There it is! This is the fullness of what St. Paul means when he says rejoice in the Lord always.

    Christ in Prayer, El Greco (1595-1597) | Wikimedia Commons.

    This (and every) Advent, we remember the anticipation of the world awaiting its Savior. We also anticipate the second coming of Christ. And, finally, we celebrate Christ being here with us already. This third reality is most clearly articulated here on the third Sunday of Advent through St. Paul’s words to the Philippians, who were themselves living in the new reality brought to the Earth through His death and resurrection. Zephaniah, too, in the first reading foresees this age: “the King of Israel, the LORD, is in your midst, you have no further misfortune to fear … Fear not, O Zion, be not discouraged! The LORD, your God, is in your midst, a mighty savior; he will rejoice over you with gladness, and renew you in his love.” What a deep and accurate prophecy! This is the same Word that speaks through St. Paul to the Philippians, a Word that unveils the meaning of the Christ event in the lives of humans. How can we fear misfortunes here on earth when the grave has been conquered and eternal life in Heaven has been offered to us? Humanity’s greatest fear and sadness, that we will cease to exist one day and that life has no meaning beyond the present, has been blown to bits by Christ’s sacrifice. What joy that His love of the Father has provided us a Way to the Kingdom! Rejoice in the Lord always!

    We cannot end this reflection without gazing at the titanic figure of St. John the Baptist, the great prophet, the voice crying out in the wilderness. In the gospel reading, John teaches the crowds to stop being selfish: “share with the person who has none … Stop collecting more than what is prescribed … Do not practice extortion.” Let’s remember that John has felt the effects of charity come to earth; he “leaped for joy” in Elizabeth’s womb when Mary, carrying Jesus, came near. Like a supernova, the child even as an embryo radiated charity upon the world, transforming the hearts of those open to Him. John is so transformed that he spends his life preparing the world for Jesus. What other messianic figure in that day (and there were many, as we know from the historic record) tells his expectant, adulatory followers that he doesn’t want their praise, that “one mightier than I is coming. I am not worthy to loosen the thongs of his sandals”? Only a man who has been transformed by God and holds no stock in worldly things can so thoroughly cast off the mantle that his followers want to place on him. John, filled with the zeal of the Lord, infects his followers with the anticipation of Christ that fills him. What’s more, this anticipation is not just one of looking and waiting but one that paves the way for charity. He tells them to stop being selfish while they wait so that they can prepare themselves for the more radical baptism in the Spirit that Jesus will bring to them. If they can repent, strip away their concern for worldly pleasure and security, they will create fertile ground for the message Christ brings.

    Preaching of St. John the Baptist, Domenico Ghirlandaio (1486-1490) | Wikimedia Commons.

    I choose the agricultural metaphor purposely, because John, in his brilliance as a prophet, does the same. Let us concentrate on these final words of the gospel reading as John describes Christ: “His winnowing fan is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” On the most obvious level, the metaphor is one his listeners can understand given the tools and occupation common to their time and place. A winnowing fan is used at the harvest to separate the good grain from the husks, dust, stalks and other “chaff” that do not serve as food. Metaphorically, the wheat are those who please God while the evil ones are the chaff. The harvester is Christ, the one who brings the final judgment. But the metaphor is agricultural particularly because it involves growth and harvest. He could have used a metaphor of a builder choosing strong stones instead of weak ones, or any number of other metaphors. But this one reminds us that life is at stake. First, life is implicated because we can grow into wheat or dead stalks. This is a living process in which we are bound up. Second, life is at stake because the wheat will go on to a greater life (gathered into the barn, or kingdom of Heaven) while the chaff will be burned in unquenchable fire. Finally, the third and most intricate reading here is to consider what the life of mature wheat is. Wheat feeds us, it is nourishment, it is an offering of life. Literally, it forms the grain offering, the minchah, that is prescribed in the Book of Leviticus where the finest parts of the grain, the semolina, are offered to God, either ground, cooked, or burnt. This is our destiny, to feed others, and to be an offering of life to the Father. Our greatest destiny and goal is to be gathered like wheat to the Father where we cease living simply for ourselves (that is, to grow nice, fat grains on the stalk). The mature wheat, having been grown rejoicing in the charity of God, achieves its ultimate purpose: to nourish others and be an offering to God Himself. Astounding depth in a simple metaphor!

    And this is why John must begin the process by having us turn our mindset away from self and towards others. Our ultimate purpose, revealed through Christ, is to grow into something great with a purpose beyond us. If we allow ourselves to rejoice in the Lord always, to be fully caught up in His love, we just might achieve it.

    Wheat, Thomas Hart Benton (1967) | Image courtesy the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

  • The Comprehensive Way

    Second Sunday of Advent: Baruch 5:1-9, Philippians 1:4-6, 8-11, Luke 3:1-6

    It’s a phrase familiar to us: the valleys shall be filled and the hills made low. We hear it from St. Luke and Baruch in today’s readings and, of course, Isaiah, whom Luke quotes. On a purely aesthetic level, my reaction is a bit of dismay; I like mountains and valleys – they’re a magnificent part of God’s creation. But this might be part of the point – they are striking features of this world, but the Savior’s reign is not of this world. It is incomprehensibly greater and more difficult for us to imagine, much less get to. That’s the point in a nutshell: by leveling mountains and valleys, God makes the Kingdom accessible. He gives us a way to come to Him, a way specifically embodied in Jesus Christ.

    As we dig into the syntax and phrasing of Luke’s gospel, we’ll see that there are more layers to this message that speak to the role we play and the role God plays. We begin to see the genius of this image and the crystalline truth to Jesus’s words to St. Thomas as recorded by St. John, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn 14:6).

    But first, let’s turn our attention to the prophecy in the book of Baruch, in the past seen as either a part of Jeremiah’s prophetic books, a stand-alone book written by Jeremiah’s scribe, or a text closely fitting near Jeremiah and Lamentations (incidentally, Baruch is not a part of the Protestant Bible or the Hebrew Bible, but was included in the Catholic canon as early as the mid-300s by Church Fathers like Athanasius and Cyril of Jerusalem). The prophet is directly addressing the people of faith, whom he calls “Jerusalem.” This word cannot be separated from the holy place, however, where the Jews placed their great temple, the dwelling place for God. Thus, Jerusalem is both a people and a holy place, which is why the Catholic Church teaches that the new Jerusalem is the Church herself, both a temple to God and the people of God. With this in mind, we hear the prophet say: “Jerusalem, take off your robe of mourning and misery; put on the splendor of glory from God forever: wrapped in the cloak of justice from God, bear on your head the mitre that displays the glory of the eternal name.” Note that we are hearing instructions for how to present ourselves. There is preparation happening (as we live out during this liturgical season) and that preparation takes a specific form: wrapping ourselves in the cloak of God and the ceremonial headdress (mitre) that has God’s name upon it. This means we are to proclaim ourselves as belonging to God, proudly and loudly. Note, too, that we might call this a way of presenting ourselves, and we can start to see another facet of how Christ is the Way.

    Young Man with a Mitre, Pieter van Mol (1611-1650) | Wikimedia Commons.

    Next, we hear the prophet speak in the future tense about Jerusalem and we must understand that there is an eschatological meaning here; in other words, the future being proclaimed is the final meeting of humanity and God: “For God will show all the earth your splendor: you will be named by God forever the peace of justice, the glory of God’s worship.” This is a great promise, that God will show all the earth the splendor of His faithful. And it reminds us that while we can proudly present ourselves as belonging to Him, the reason we can do this is that the real action is His. He, in fact, lifts us up. He is the agent of salvation, we are His subjects. And so the prophet commands: “Up, Jerusalem! stand upon the heights; look to the east and see your children gathered from the east and the west at the word of the Holy One, rejoicing that they are remembered by God.” What a great Advent message we hear the Jewish prophet declare hundreds of years before the birth of Christ. We present ourselves as God’s faithful, we look to the east (the direction of the rising sun and the Son of God, the Morning Star) and we see there that God has expanded His salvation to all humanity. And now the great image: “For God has commanded that every lofty mountain be made low, and that the age-old depths and gorges be filled to level ground, that Israel may advance secure in the glory of God.” By now we realize that these physical landforms are to be understood within a different context: not the earthly but the heavenly kingdom. The valleys are the low spots of the spiritual journey, the mountains are the seemingly impassible obstacles the soul faces on its journey to God. God’s work is to level the spiritual ground, to give us a way to Him, clear and straight. This Way, of course, is Jesus Christ.

    St. John makes this clear in the Book of Revelation: “I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. It was prepared like a bride dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, ‘Now God’s presence is with people, and he will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them and will be their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death, sadness, crying, or pain, because all the old ways are gone’” (Rev 21:2-4). The new Jerusalem, the very one that God spoke about with the prophet Baruch, is shown to St. John. Jerusalem (the city, the people) has prepared itself and dressed itself with the glory of God, like a bride dressed for her husband. And in this ecstatic vision of completeness, God is there, establishing a new reality for humanity in His kingdom, one without death, sadness, crying or pain. The book of Revelation is the vision of the Church having made her way across the straightened path to be united with God.

    Armenian icon of the New Jerusalem (1645) | Wikimedia Commons. The description reads: “The Angel shows Saint John the Celestial Jerusalem, a vision which constitutes the triumphal completion of the Apocalypse.”

    In the gospel, St. Luke makes the effort to explain that John the Baptist arrives in the world in a very specific time and place. He mentions Caesar, Pontius Pilate, Herod, Annas and Caiaphas. Why might he do this? Because he wants to emphasize that well-known prophecies are being realized on earth in a real way. This is an important shift in the eyes of the Church from one age to another; from the Time of the Promises to the Last Times. So John the Baptist is recognized immediately as the one whom Isaiah prophesied: “A voice of one crying out in the desert: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.’” This preparation, this initial way we prepare ourselves, is a deeper explanation of what Baruch sees. Baruch commands the faithful to stand up proudly and wrap themselves in the cloak of God’s glory. But in practical terms, how can a sinner do this? John the Baptist, in announcing Christ, shares the first part of His Way: “John went throughout the whole region of the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” This is part of what it means to wear an ornamental headdress with God’s name on it, to proclaim yourself as His – we must repent of our sinfulness, ask for His forgiveness, be baptized, that is consecrated, to Him. The Way has begun. This is how John can exhort us to “make straight his paths,” which is to make straight within ourselves the spiritual righteousness for which God designed us. This act of getting our spiritual house in order is just the beginning of the Way, but frankly something most of us spend the greater part of our lives trying to accomplish. It’s okay, we’re still on the Way.

    The gospel reading ends with the final words of the prophecy: “Every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill shall be made low. The winding roads shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”  It’s important to see the shift in agency here. We are the agents of making straight God’s paths within ourselves, which is a matter of repentance and consecration of ourselves to God, but God is the one who does the work of filling valleys and making low mountains. This is important because we can’t think that Christianity is about us building the City of God. This work of redemption and the salvation of the New Jerusalem is entirely God’s will and only He has the power to accomplish it. We can’t be pulled in by overly charismatic communities here on earth who congratulate each other on their great work. This is a dangerous road of making idols out of our own work and clinging to this world. We must be on the Way to God, toward the spiritual kingdom that we neither deserve nor can earn nor can build. Humility is at the heart (which is why John preaches repentance and why Advent is considered a penitential season of preparation). St. Luke tells us later in this chapter that Jesus is identified as this one whom we have been preparing for. He is the salvation of God whom “all flesh shall see.” This is the importance of the incarnation of God in the flesh. He has come in a form we can see and touch, in our form, and He is the one who will straighten and smooth the Way to God.

    The Way. This was perhaps the most difficult thing for me to grasp when I was a child because its so abstract. I could see Jesus as the Truth (He always proclaims the truth since He’s the very Word of God), and I could see the Life because of the Resurrection. But the Way seemed a bit weird – He’s a human, not a dirt path! As I’ve reflected upon this over the years, however, I realize that the Way is both a path and a way of acting or comporting oneself. Plus, I realized that Christ can transcend normal boundaries like He does in the Mass when being present in the Liturgy of the Word and in the signs of the bread and wine. He is perhaps more easily understood as the Way in the fact that He provides a perfect example by which we can model our lives and behavior. But more than that He is a Way in that we walk upon Him, His body that He laid down for us; we feed spiritually upon Him in the Eucharist; we gain adopted sonship and daughtership to God the Father through His incarnation; and we walk through His empty tomb to our own Resurrections that He made possible. There is no humiliation and condescension He will not bear for us. These more mystical and spiritual Ways are so much more profound than the role modeling Way because they bridge this world and the next. They are the heart of our faith and hope. The Way is much more complex and complete than I ever realized.

    Mosaic of Christ Pantocrator (“ruler over all”) from the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey (1261) | Wikimedia Commons.

  • Feasting and Recognizing God

    Feasting and Recognizing God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Streaming Toward God’s Mountain

    Monday of the First Week of Advent, Year C: Isaiah 2:1-5, Matthew 8:5-11.

    Today we peek into the cosmic story of Christ. The word “cosmic” is important to Catholicism and is worth unpacking a bit. At its most basic, the cosmos is the physical universe in which we live. Since we believe that the cosmos was created by God and we have an important role in His creation, the cosmos is always intertwined with God’s will for Christians. Note that this is very different than the direction modern scientists called cosmologists take when looking at the universe. They study the component parts of the universe (planets, stars, gases, forces, etc.) and sometimes arrive at grand theories about what it all means. Stephen Hawking is a good example, with published books entitled A Brief History of Time, The Grand Design, and the un-humble The Theory of Everything. No doubt Mr. Hawking is an incredible scientist, but scientists deal in what can be measured and what can be conjectured through logic. Theirs is a world limited by the measurable world and the confines of the human brain; revelation from God plays no part.

    Cosmos, Kasia1989 (2013) | Image from deviantart.com  .

    As Catholics, we can support, enjoy, and learn from science, but we must always prioritize our faith in God, God’s revelation to humanity through the prophets, and the life and teachings of His Son Jesus Christ over science. Not “maybe there are good points on both sides.” Science and faith do not need to be opposed – there are many writings today showing how complementary they are – but it takes an acceptance of faith and religion to arrive at this perspective. We cannot move forward as Christians if we secretly think that people who believe in the spiritual world or God’s intense plan for humanity are gullible or misguided. I say this because I feel that we underestimate the lengths to which secular science, movies, news, etc. have enculturated us to look askance at religion and its claims. My two children, who have attended Catholic school through high school, get a troubled look of disbelief every time I bring up God’s role in what is happening in our lives. It’s not new to this generation – there have been “cafeteria Catholics” for as long as there have been Catholics, deciding which parts of the Creed or the tenets of faith they choose to believe. But in centuries past, the existence of the spiritual world was not in doubt. Ancient and medieval peoples accepted that there was more to life than just what they could see and measure – they used religion, myth, legend, and more to try to talk about the spiritual side of life. Today, however, we have inherited centuries of accelerating scientism and secularism since the Enlightenment, and the bedrock of belief in the spiritual side of life, much less God, has been eroded to a thin plane, often ignored.

    So, back to the cosmos: it’s more than quarks and black holes. In fact, saying that the cosmos is made of quarks and quantum fields is like saying the experience of a luxury hotel boils down to cotton fibers in the towels and scent combinations in the shower gel. In other words, we’ve focused so much on the details of what the physical elements of the cosmos are made of that we’ve forgotten what the forest looks like while gazing at the microscopic organisms in the soil. The Catholic understanding of the cosmos is a much more expansive perspective, one that acknowledges the handiwork of the Creator in his creation. Fr. John Hardon’s Modern Catholic Dictionary defines “Cosmic Christ” as “The second person of the Trinity, made man, seen as the origin or beginning and end or purpose of creation.” The opening of the Gospel of St. John explores this mystery of the cosmos, that the logos, issued forth by God, in fact part of God, took a human form. We simply cannot understand the cosmos without this mystery: God decided to manifest in measurable, human space in the form of Jesus Christ, forming a connection and bridge between the invisible spiritual kingdom where He reigns outside of time and this palpable existence we have inside of time. Consider our Nicene Creed: “For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.” We don’t know why God chose to enact His plan of salvation in this way, but we praise Him for it! Thus, I return to my opening sentence: today we peek into the cosmic story of Christ. He is our Way to salvation, a part of a grand story God has laid before us, a story of a physical universe wrapped up in the mystical, spiritual reality of God.

    Today’s first vision from Isaiah paints the picture of God’s salvation for all humanity, not just Jews. The imagery is worldly: “The mountain of the LORD’s house shall be established as the highest mountain and raised above the hills.” The highest mountain is an image we see in many cultures – it represents wisdom (where the gurus live) and the closest we can get to God. What is interesting about God’s revelation to Isaiah is that it’s not just humanity straining to get to heaven here. It’s the “mountain of the Lord’s house,” meaning that God is participating with humans in drawing them to Himself. Our religion has a participatory God. And we are drawn to this loving God: “All nations shall stream toward it; many peoples shall come and say: ‘Come, let us climb  the LORD’s mountain, to the house of the God of Jacob, That he may instruct us in his ways, and we may walk in his paths.’” I love this revelation because it must have surprised the Jews in many ways. Their nation was established by God’s favor in overcoming their enemies on the battlefield. There had been an exclusivity to their nation and to God’s favor that set them apart. But here we have Isaiah being shown that all those non-Jewish nations will come streaming to the Jewish people’s God. What’s more, they will want to climb it, learn His wisdom, and act as He commands. This is a picture of all humanity being converted to God! 

    The Watzmann, Caspar David Friedrich (1825) | Wikimedia Commons

    So the first reading gives us the broad strokes of a cosmic story, where images and metaphors serve to instruct us that God’s plan is grand, it involves all of the cosmos, and it is a type of fulfillment. The gospel reading delves into a specific movement to that mountain by a single Roman centurion – a conversion to God from outside the Jewish fold that fulfills Isaiah’s vision and shows everyone that the cosmic wheels are turning around this man Jesus Christ. My wife and I hold this scene close to our hearts as these are the words we echo right before receiving the Eucharist at Mass: “Lord, I am not worthy to have you enter under my roof; only say the word and my servant will be healed.” The deep humility and faith of these words are striking and provide a fitting mantra for Christians who come into the real presence of their Lord and Savior. But today I am hearing with equal gravity the second part of the centurion’s speech. He professes an unshakable belief in the authority and power of Christ here on earth. “For I too am a man subject to authority,” he says, and he lives in a military world where orders are given and then followed to a T. The difference is that centurions are taught that Caesar is a god and to obey him absolutely, and yet here he replaces the earthly power structure with something greater that has come to earth, someone who has power over life and death. This is a radical conversion, one that has made a new man of the centurion, although that spiritual movement to God’s mountain leaves him free to continue to live his life as a Roman soldier.

    I love also Jesus’s reaction: “When Jesus heard this, he was amazed.” Oh, to be the source of amazement for our Lord! And before responding to the centurion He marks the importance of this moment, foretold by Isaiah, by validating the centurion’s words for his followers: “I say to you, many will come from the east and the west, and will recline with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob at the banquet in the Kingdom of heaven.” The exclusive Jewish faith has become an inclusive faith through Christ. A universal faith that draws people to it through the person of Jesus Christ.

    This moment holds great significance for us in Advent. Can we see ourselves as part of the great movement of humanity towards God’s mountain? Can we lose our sense of self importance along the way, immolating it as we reflect on the authority and power of our God to keep His Word? Advent is a celebration of people on the move to God, waiting for Him to consummate their love for Him. Can we keep our eyes on this great cosmic story?

  • Infinite Value

    Infinite Value

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

    The sad and wonderful day is here. We must mourn with Mary because her most perfect Son has been tortured and killed, and this is a grievous wrong. But we must marvel at the willing act of charity that the Son carries out by offering himself wholly to the Father.

    St. John makes no bones in today’s gospel account of the Passion and Crucifixion that Jesus is in total control and is offering himself without a struggle. He tells the most powerful secular ruler in the region, Pontius Pilate: “You would have no power over me if it had not been given to you from above,” and “My kingdom does not belong to this world. If my kingdom did belong to this world, my attendants would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not here.” Jesus has been consistent through his entire life that he comes from his Father above and does his will. As his faithful, let us truly take on the significance of this claim.

    Pietà in St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican (1498), Michaelangelo | Wikimedia Commons.

    It has been in vogue for the past few decades to portray the gritty reality of Christ’s suffering. I’m thinking, of course, of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, but also books that try to know Jesus the man apart from Jesus the Lord. Yes, the bloody details of the Passion are important to remember, but they are not the point. Likewise, it is of supreme importance that he truly was a man, but it can never be separated from the fact that he is (and always was) also God. We did not invent this “extra layer” of divinity as non-believers would claim.

    So if we are to spend our Good Friday time in fruitful reflections, let us take a cue from our great saints and spiritual teachers. In the collection of retreat conferences preached to his fellow Dominicans entitled Knowing the Love of God, Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange orients us to the truly important aspects of the Passion. He helps me to understand why Christ submitted himself to the Passion and Crucifixion in the way he did:

    Jesus took upon Himself the responsibility for all the sins of men, and He began to suffer for them as if it had been He who had committed them, as if He were impious, rebellious, frenzied, cowardly, ungrateful, and sacrilegious. He felt the divine anger and divine curse weigh on His soul while hell with supreme fury broke loose against Him. The horror of evil and all vices together seemed for an instant to suffocate Him. A cry burst from His lips on the Cross: “My God, My God, why have You deserted Me?” (Mt 27:46).

    In this darkness, in this abandonment, Our Lord performed His greatest act of love. In the midst of this anguish He loved His Father above everything and He loved us even to the giving of His life for our salvation, only grieving that a greater number were not saved. This act of love makes abundant satisfaction for all hatreds. The obedience that it involves compensates for all rebellions in the eyes of God. The humiliations of the Passion redeem all acts of pride. The gentleness of Him crucified repairs all acts of anger and His sufferings pay for all sensuality.

    This act of charity of the Incarnate Word has saved the world. (36).

    In short, there is an entirely different sequence of events going on than just the physical one. The spiritual events are the important ones. What unites the physical plane with the spiritual one is Christ’s Blood. It is literally shed in whip strokes, puncturing thorns, nails, and a spear. But this is no everyday blood: it is divine blood. Do we realize this?

    It’s not in vogue to talk about the supernatural value of Christ’s Blood; this seems like a 19th century, antiquated notion wrapped up in lace and the Latin Mass. But today is the day to re-embrace the importance of Christ’s Blood and how — because of its divine source — it accomplishes things that no mere crucifixion or sacrifice can accomplish.

    Sanguis Christi (1670), Gian Lorenzo Bernini | Wikimedia Commons. On the left is the original drawing and on the right is a painting from the workshop of Bernini. Bernini’s biographer, Filippo Baldinucci, writes: “He sometimes deepened his thoughts and speeches with a very high esteem and concept that he always had of the efficacy of the Blood of Christ the Redeemer, in which (as he used to say) he hoped to drown his sins. To this object he drew with his own hand, and then had an image of Christ Crucified printed, from whose hands and feet flow streams of blood, which form almost a sea, and the great Queen of Heaven, who is offering it to the Eternal Father. This pious meditation also made him paint on a large canvas, which he always wanted to keep in the face of his bed in life and in death.”

    Today’s second reading in the Office of Readings is from St. John Chrysostom’s catechetical teachings to those about to become part of Catholic Church. This is very appropriate since thousands are going to be baptized into the Church tomorrow night after having gone through their teaching, soul-searching, and vows. Chrysostom writes about the power of Christ’s Blood:

    If we wish to understand the power of Christ’s blood, we should go back to the ancient account of its prefiguration in Egypt. Sacrifice a lamb without blemish, commanded Moses, and sprinkle its blood on your doors. If we were to ask him what he meant, and how the blood of an irrational beast could possibly save men endowed with reason, his answer would be that the saving power lies not in the blood itself, but in the fact that it is a sign of the Lord’s blood. In those days, when the destroying angel saw the blood on the doors he did not dare to enter, so how much less will the devil approach now when he sees, not that figurative blood on the doors, but the true blood on the lips of believers, the doors of the temple of Christ.

    If you desire further proof of the power of this blood, remember where it came from, how it ran down from the cross, flowing from the Master’s side. The gospel records that when Christ was dead, but still hung on the cross, a soldier came and pierced his side with a lance and immediately there poured out water and blood. Now the water was a symbol of baptism and the blood, of the holy eucharist. The soldier pierced the Lord’s side, he breached the wall of the sacred temple, and I have found the treasure and made it my own. So also with the lamb: the Jews sacrificed the victim and I have been saved by it.

    There flowed from his side water and blood. Beloved, do not pass over this mystery without thought; it has yet another hidden meaning, which I will explain to you. I said that water and blood symbolized baptism and the holy eucharist. From these two sacraments the Church is born: from baptism, the cleansing water that gives rebirth and renewal through the Holy Spirit, and from the holy eucharist. Since the symbols of baptism and the eucharist flowed from his side, it was from his side that Christ fashioned the Church, as he had fashioned Eve from the side of Adam. Moses gives a hint of this when he tells the story of the first man and makes him exclaim: Bone from my bones and flesh from my flesh! As God then took a rib from Adam’s side to fashion a woman, so Christ has given us blood and water from his side to fashion the Church. God took the rib when Adam was in a deep sleep, and in the same way Christ gave us the blood and the water after his own death.

    Do you understand, then, how Christ has united his bride to himself and what food he gives us all to eat? By one and the same food we are both brought into being and nourished. As a woman nourishes her child with her own blood and milk, so does Christ unceasingly nourish with his own blood those to whom he himself has given life.

    As we reflect today on the great Passion and Crucifixion, specifically on the amazing gift Christ is giving humanity, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange can give us some final words to consider:

    According to the definition of the Church, the redemptive act of Christ has infinite value and efficacy. It makes satisfaction for any guilt whatsoever, repairs any offense against God, even though its gravity is infinite. It satisfies for all the sins of men, and still more … It merits all graces for even the most degraded souls, provided they are not stubbornly fixed in evil. It is impossible to think of a limit to the efficacy of the redemptive act. The redemptive omnipotence of the act of Christ, who immolated Himself upon the Cross, derives from the fact that it is a perfect act of charity performed by a divine Person; the perfect act of the Incarnate Word. It is a supernatural act of charity towards God which makes Him forget all offenses.
    (Knowing the Love of God, 30-31).

    What does this mean for you and me? It means that we should never be so low as to think we’re outside of the saving power of Christ. That would be a huge insult and underestimation of Christ’s redemptive act on the Cross. It also means that we owe everything to him and this act on our behalf. There is nothing that we have that was not given to us first by the Father and then, in order to make us perfect after we walk in the world in sin, by Christ.

    As I contemplate Christ on the Cross, may I be filled with humility, thankfulness, and admiration.

    The Crucifixion (1675), Bartolomé Estebán Murillo | Creative Commons, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.