Monday of the Fourth Week of Lent: Isaiah 65:17-21, John 4:43-54.
Yesterday we leapt forward, pushing our clocks ahead an hour as we transitioned into Daylight Savings Time. My wife spent her life getting up early to swim (around 5 am!) and so this transition always bothered her because just as the sun would be making its way into her morning workouts, she’d be plunged back into darkness for another month.
Yesterday, she went walking with a good friend who confided to her that she actually sets her alarm clock back 5 minutes each day for a month leading up to Daylight Savings Time because she has such a hard time adjusting to the change.
On the other hand, I am more of an evening person, so I am more bothered in the fall when my evenings suddenly go black much sooner than I thought they would. It’s an interesting lesson in how we create little realities for ourselves that are sometimes revealed for what they are: self-made constructions of happiness and comfort.
The Persistence of Memory (1931), Salvador Dalí | Image from the Museum of Modern Art.
Sure enough, yesterday I had a moment of elation when I looked out the window after dinner and realized how light it was. I could go for a walk, enjoy the sunshine, maybe putter around in the garden! Suddenly, new possibilities were open to me that haven’t been open for the past I-don’t-know-how-long. Silly, I know, but that was how I felt. And what really changed? Nothing but an arbitrary shift of the clock.
This incredible shift in mindset is something we’re asked to experience in today’s readings. And rather than an arbitrary clock change, an actual new reality has opened up between Heaven and earth to cause this change in mindset.
If we allow ourselves to be complacent in what we think we know of the New Testament, the gospel reading appears like any other healing story. A man asks Jesus to heal his son and Jesus does it without even having to go to the man’s house. But if we allow the new reality of God-come-to-earth as Christ to illuminate our souls — like we allow the newfound post-dinner hour of light to illuminate our outlook on the evening — something altogether different is happening.
St. John tells us that Jesus is traveling back to Galilee after coming north through Samaria. In the verses just prior to this, Jesus encounters the Samaritan woman at the well and in their conversation he reveals to her, “I am the Christ” (Jn 4:26). Based on his conversation with her, she believes and so does an entire town of Samaritans who get him to spend several days with them. Who he is — the reality of the Messiah come to earth — has dawned upon them and changed their entire outlook on their own lives.
To signal that a new spiritual reality is making itself known, a reality more important and fundamental than the earthly reality, Jesus rebuffs his disciples’ urgings to eat by responding, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work” (Jn 4:34).
He goes on to encourage them to help him usher in the new mindset that should accompany this new reality: “look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together” (Jn 4:35b-36). Jesus is trying to get the Apostles to notice this new reality in which they have a part to play.
Christ Enthroned Over the River of Life (1220), Beatus of Liébana | Creative Commons, courtesy of the Morgan Library & Museum. This is MS M.429 (fol. 141), called the Las Huelgas Apocalypse, the latest dated (1220) and largest surviving manuscript of a Spanish tradition of illuminated commentaries on the Apocalypse by the monk Beatus of Liébana. The series of manuscripts constitutes Spain’s most important contribution to medieval manuscript illumination.
We are so used to being Christian that we no longer comprehend the massive change of reality that happened at the Incarnation. Perhaps we never fully understood it. Fr. Jean Corbon, OP, writes, “In Jesus the entire energy of love impregnates human energy with an ‘anointing’ that makes this human energy its own and gives it life” (Wellspring of Worship, 40). In other words, the divine love that continually flows between Father, Son and Holy Spirit now descends into humanity to find a new home there, to begin to work within humanity until the end of time.
Fr. Corbon reminds us that the first creation moment saw everything come from nothingness into being, but “In the new creation that is beginning here, he who is eternally begotten of the Father is fashioned out of living earth, namely, the entire being of his mother” (37). This new creation is something that has never existed before: fully God and fully human, a man to change history and the fabric of spiritual being.
This is what the Father promises to Isaiah in the first reading today! He proclaims, “Lo, I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; The things of the past shall not be remembered or come to mind. Instead, there shall always be rejoicing and happiness in what I create.” The newness of our beings, when divinity has come to dwell among us, cannot be overemphasized. It is an entirely new creation, creating a new heaven and earth that did not exist before.
He continues: “For I create Jerusalem to be a joy and its people to be a delight; I will rejoice in Jerusalem and exult in my people.” The Catechism teaches us that the Church herself, the bride of Christ, is the New Jerusalem that God promises. It exists on both Heaven and Earth and is beloved to the Lord.
What we encounter in Chapter 4 of John’s gospel is the beginning of the New Jerusalem, brought about during the new creation that Jesus Christ has ushered in. This is a new reality filling the world with light — the Samaritans see it like new hours granted by Daylight Savings Time. Can we? Does it affect our mindset as much as the arbitrary change in hours does?
New Jerusalem Revealed (contemporary), Alexander Sorsher | Image from pixels.com.
When the royal official in today’s gospel reading asks Jesus to come to his house to heal his son, Jesus responds, “Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will not believe.” Perhaps Jesus is contrasting the man’s state of mind with that of the Samaritans, who believed in him purely by encountering him and speaking with him. No “signs and wonders” were required apart from the truth that he spoke. But the man just plows on as if not hearing: “Sir, come down before my child dies.”
What is going on here?
I think this speaking-past-one-another illustrates how this man is oblivious to the reality that the Messiah has ushered in. The man has not come to encounter Christ — he is living in his usual, un-transformed world that is dominated by fear of death. He has come not to encounter a new reality that does away with that fear but instead to find something that will, in fact, confirm his fears of the ultimate domination of death by keeping it at bay for a while.
Notably, though, he does not come to “test” Jesus — it seems that he already has placed a good deal of hope in him. Thus, when Jesus says that they need signs and wonders “to believe,” it seems that he is referring to a deeper “belief” than the more surface belief that he is a type of healer. He seems to be just stating a fact of human nature.
He may be gently lamenting that this man isn’t of the right mindset, but he nonetheless performs this wondrous act of healing. He heals the man’s son not to prove that he’s a wonder-worker, but to affect the man’s entire mindset on the reality that walks among them. He performs this miracle so that the man might be shocked out of his usual, un-transformed world and believe in something greater: the new creation and the New Jerusalem being built around him. This is why Jesus always points back to the Father — it is the Creator who is accomplishing this new creation by incarnating His Word in humanity. Belief in Jesus is belief in the Father, belief in salvation, belief in a new spiritual reality.
How curious that we can be more affected by our clock changes than changes in the fabric of our spiritual reality! As Christians, we’re called to become more attentive to our spiritual selves (by dying to our worldly senses and desires) so that we can be awestruck by the Christ Event dumping immense light into our lives.
That’s what Lent is here for: to help us become aware once again, appreciative once again, transformed once again.
Sunday of the Fourth week in Lent: 2 Chronicles 36:14-16, 19-23, Ephesians 2:4-10, John 3:14-21.
In today’s gospel reading, Jesus has a memorable meeting with Nicodemus, a Jewish member of the Sanhedrin, a faithful Jew, and eventually a full disciple of Jesus who comes with myrrh and aloes along with Joseph of Arimathea to retrieve his body from the Cross.
Jesus presents himself to Nicodemus as a modern, living version of Moses’s serpent on the staff that saved the Jews bitten by poisonous serpents in the desert. While foreign to us if we are not versed in scriptures, this comparison would undoubtedly have been powerful and shocking for Nicodemus. In fact, Jesus’s words finally explain the significance of God instructing Moses to make a bronze serpent and mount it on a pole.
As we dig into today’s gospel reading, we are struck with the entire span of salvation history from the Garden of Eden to Christ’s Paschal Sacrifice on the Cross. Also, we see Nicodemus as a true Christian, converted to Christ, moving from the darkness to the light.
Nicodemus and Jesus on a Rooftop (1899), Henry Ossawa Tanner | Wikimedia Commons. On the left is a study that Tanner did for the finished painting on the right. I appreciate the nimbus on Christ in the study, acknowledging that he is the “Light of the World,” despite the meeting occurring at night.
St. John tells us that Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night. In just this simple statement, we can glean many things. Some scholars believe that a leader of the Jews would only come by night because it would be unseemly for a member of the Sanhedrin to join the crowds and rabble who followed this traveling preacher by day. Whether he was too busy with his duties, too proud to be seen going to learn from an unlearned miracle-worker, or too bashful to present himself openly, we encounter this powerful man coming to Jesus under cover of night.
As historians and scholars have envisioned this meeting, there is a compelling argument that they met on a rooftop. First of all, this was (and is) common practice for men to retire to the rooftops after their evening meal on the hot, Middle Eastern nights, in order to enjoy cooling breezes. Second, Jesus makes some memorable statements about the air and the Spirit, likely choosing the moment when the phenomenon of the breeze could help him make this point: “The wind 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” (Jn 3:8).
Jesus speaks of a spiritual logic unknown to those merely born of the flesh, encouraging Nicodemus to break out of his disbelief and earth-bound assumptions about what is possible. So, we see Nicodemus coming to Christ at night to know more about this man sent by God, and God, in return, engages him in the deepest truths. Is this not the exact journey we all make to Christ? Do we all not suffer from a certain bashfulness to approach Him openly in a culture where our faith is seen as antiquated, naïve, and gullible? Yet Jesus is there, waiting for us with deep truths.
These deep truths are inevitably deeper than we are prepared to comprehend. Jesus reveals himself to Nicodemus as not just “a teacher who has come from God” (as Nicodemus calls him), but as the “Son of Man” and God’s “only Son.” And Jesus ups the stakes to eternal bliss or eternal damnation based on this very fact alone: “everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life … but whoever does not believe has already been condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” Nicodemus definitely got more than he bargained for by coming to this “teacher” by night.
As we think about this “all-or-nothing” statement by Christ, we are reminded of the gospel a few days ago where he proclaimed, “whoever is not with me is against me,” that is, scattering people instead of gathering to the Kingdom. Why does our Lord deal in these absolutes? There can be no doubt here that he is asking us to be “all-in,” much like he asked Abraham to sacrifice his son or Noah to build the ark (see the post, A Glimpse of Heaven). And just as Abraham’s assent was blessed by founding the nations and Noah’s assent was blessed by saving humanity from destruction, our assent to Christ will be blessed with everlasting life.
In all cases, the call is personal. It is an individual meeting with the unfathomable God. Just like Nicodemus, we all must go to have a personal encounter with Christ to listen to what he has to tell us.
Pope Benedict the XVI put this succinctly at the beginning of his encyclical on love: “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction” (Deus Caritas Est, 1). Today’s gospel is one of many very concrete examples of this encounter in action.
Jesus proclaims elsewhere in John’s gospel, “I am the light of the world” (Jn 8:12), and he makes a similar statement here with Nicodemus. His words may have stung Nicodemus, since he came to Christ at night:
“And this is the verdict, that the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come toward the light, so that his works might not be exposed. But whoever lives the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.”
He is urging Nicodemus to come to him in the light of day, openly. But more than that, he needs Nicodemus to understand that God and truth dwell in the light, and this is something to always glory in, to be proud of; in fact, by believing in this truth and light, and acting in it, a person is securing for himself or herself a place in Heaven.
Jesus mentions the concept of being exposed, and there is absolutely an aspect of vulnerability in this. As he says, the “verdict” is that “people preferred darkness to light,” thus living in the light does not exempt one from pain and suffering as a result of this exposed vulnerability. This fact is wonderfully demonstrated in Jesus’s incredible comparison of himself to Moses’s serpent on the staff.
That story from the Book of Numbers speaks of events 1,475 years before Christ sits with Nicodemus on the roof. The passage is exceedingly odd at first glance: God first punishes the Israelites for complaining by sending poisonous serpents among them. In terms of today’s gospel, we could say that they are living in darkness (complaining and turning from God), and as a result they are bitten by serpents and die. Upon their admission of guilt and atonement, Moses prays for deliverance. At this point, God instructs Moses to mount a bronze serpent on a pole; subsequently, when the people look up at the serpent on the pole after being bitten, they are spared from death.
Before we wonder what kind of witchcraft is going on here, let’s again consider it in terms of today’s gospel reading: by looking up at the serpent, the Jews in the desert are re-confirming their belief in God, who promises to protect them. They gaze upon the source of their suffering, the serpent, exposed, held up in the light for all to see, and they do not die. Importantly, they do not avoid suffering (that is, they continue to be bitten by serpents), but they avoid death through their continually re-confirmed faith in God.
Moses and the Brazen Serpent (1898), Augustus John | Creative Commons, courtesy UCL Art Museum/ArtUK. I like the impressionistic style Augustus John employs in this painting, the flowing waves suggesting a divine entrance into the fabric of humanity. As with any encounter with the divine, sin will merit pain and “gnashing of teeth,” and the purifying energy of God may not be pleasant for those in sin. I also see a bit of the devil in the bare-chested man on the right side of the canvas, which for me, at least, recollects the Garden of Eden connection.
It would be fair to say that the serpent is the symbol of humanity’s sin against God, ever since Adam and Eve in the garden. This sin is poisonous and it brings about the reign of death. The people repent and say to Moses, “We have sinned in complaining against the LORD and you. Pray the LORD to take the serpents away from us.” The act of looking up, heavenward, to the sign of the sin they lived with, is the action that reminds them of their dependence on God and his saving mercy. God’s divine mercy flows to the sinful, bitten individual in that moment, not through the arcane power of a bronze staff, but through the symbol that the staff presents to the Jewish believers in God.
As Catholics, we know well that, in the liturgy, divine sanctification works in and through symbols, from the altar and ambo to the bread and wine. The bronze serpent on the staff is this type of sacramentalized symbol that his prophet on earth made under his instruction.
The Jews understood the symbolic importance of this staff as a way to encounter God’s grace and they kept the physical staff around for centuries. They may have begun to confuse the symbolic function of the staff with a divine presence, however, because 740-ish years later we read in 2 Kings that King Hezekiah orders the destruction of the staff, which he calls Nehushtan (“a mere piece of brass”) because the Jews were burning incense to it and essentially treating it like an idol.
Now I don’t know much about divine numerology, but I do find it interesting that exactly another 740-ish years later, we hear Jesus tell Nicodemus the Pharisee: “just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” With this statement, the Word of God reveals the full scope of this symbol Moses was instructed to make. “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent”: note that the parallel being drawn is to the fixing of the serpent to the pole and lifting it up, the fact of exposure for all to see. “So must the Son of Man be lifted up”: this refers to his Crucifixion, where he becomes the ultimate symbol for humanity. And finally the salvific import: “that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” Like the sinful Jews who re-confirmed their belief in God and were saved from dying, we receive an infinitely greater promise and divine grace given to us when we behold Christ on the Cross, believe in him, and are granted eternal life that eradicates all sway of death.
Yes, consider this! Christ is admitting that living in the light constitutes suffering at the hands of those who live in the darkness. What greater sign than his broken and crucified Body hanging on the Cross for all to see? But just as the suffering from being bitten by serpents is ameliorated by gazing at that exposed suffering on a pole, our suffering from sin in this life is ameliorated by gazing on the Lord’s suffering on the Cross, done for our sakes.This is exactly what “on our behalf” entails!
He allowed himself to be affixed on the Cross like the serpent on Moses’s staff so that we could have salvation as we gaze upon him and live in his light!
Moses and the Bronze Serpent, mural in All Saints Margaret Street church in London (1889), tiles painted by Alexander Gibbs | photo courtesy Lawrence OP, flickr.com. Note that over the centuries, the connection of the bronze serpent and the cross has been made much more explicitly, as in this tile work.
Sometimes the scope of God’s saving plan is just breathtaking. So many moments of patience and mercy over the millennia, from Adam and Eve, through Moses, and ultimately Jesus Christ. And so subversive of our normal worldly affections, too, in the use of the lowly and hated serpent as a resounding symbol for overcoming sin, much like using the reviled Cross as a throne for our Savior.
I am brought back to the all-or-nothing statements we keep encountering this Lent. After this reflection, I am struck by the fact that Jesus is saying these absolutes because he must remind us that he is God’s plan, God’s gift. To not recognize and believe in him is to throw God’s gift back in his face. It is worse than living in sin — it is a deliberate act of defiance and rejection of our Creator. We must listen to Christ, and St. Paul does a fantastic job of reminding us in today’s second reading: “God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ — by grace you have been saved.”
Serpent Illustration by Katie Scott | courtesy katie-scott.tumblr.com.
Third Sunday of Lent: Exodus 20:1-17, 1 Corinthians 1:22-25, John 2:13-25.
Today we receive the Word of God in its most accepted and unchallenged form (the Ten Commandments) and then it its most radical and challenging — St. Paul bragging of the humiliation of the Cross and Jesus himself blowing up the concept of the Jewish temple as a sacred meeting place with God.
The scene of Jesus casting out the moneychangers and animals was so serious that the Jews used this as one of the two main charges against Christ in his trial (that he claimed to be God and he wanted to destroy the temple). We need to ask ourselves why Jesus was so radical in today’s gospel and what it tells us about his New Covenant with us.
Christ Driving the Traders from the Temple (Kristus uddriver kræmmerne af templet), after 1570, from the workshop of Pieter Brueghel the Elder | Wikimedia Commons.
St. John’s account of this scene occurs at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, unlike the three synoptic gospels where it occurs at the end. To me, this is interesting because it is another example of how John’s worldview is so transformed by Christ. Every event and detail overflow with his divinity; Christ is in control and in his power and glory throughout the gospel of John.
The first thing that jumped out at me was the whip of cords (a flail or scourge) being used to drive the moneychangers and the animals out of the Temple. Jesus using a scourge on people? A close translation is needed here and unfortunately the Lectionary isn’t exact on this line. The original Greek specifies that the whip was only used on the animals. Here is the scholar David Bentley Hart’s translation: “And, having fashioned a stockwhip out of cords, he drove all of both the sheep and the oxen out of the Temple; he also spilled out the coins and overturned the tables of the moneychangers.”
So while Jesus undoubtedly uses forceful methods to get the animals and money interests out of the Temple, it is not a depiction of violence against another human. This passage has been used to justify righteous war and violence, not to mention a “muscular” Christianity, and I think these are misunderstandings and poor applications of Jesus’s example.
Christ’s point here is that they should “stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.” Having animals and moneychangers in the Temple served a very practical purpose. For those who traveled far to reach the Temple at Jerusalem, it was inconvenient and difficult to bring their required animal sacrifice with them. It was much more convenient to be able to buy an animal for sacrifice there. The doves, in particular, were targeted towards the poor and women/widows who couldn’t afford a lamb or ox but who still needed an animal sacrifice.
Furthermore, Jewish law forbade foreign or secular coinage to be used in the Temple, hence the proliferation of money changers. Jerusalem was both a holy city and a crossroads for many cultures — caravan routes from Asia and Africa crossed there, as well as Gallic and Roman people from Europe thanks to the Roman Empire. The livestock and money changers, therefore, served a very useful purpose. But Jesus is clearly incensed that they are operating there in the Temple.
We must not mistake his response as a simple desire for Temple purity. Jesus was not overly concerned with the fetishization of purity, as the Pharisees criticized several times (pointing out that his disciples did not fast like they did, nor did he and his disciples fastidiously wash before meals like they did). Instead, I think his point is that the Jews were placing the doing of deeds ahead of the heart-and-soul encounter with God.
This is consistent with his critique of the Pharisees and scribes: “They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. They do all their deeds to be seen by others” (Mt 23:4-5a). Yes, the livestock and money changers serve a useful purpose but this purpose is not to deepen the faithful’s experience with God. Instead, it is a marketplace of convenience, serving the needs and desires of humans.
What’s more, those who sold the livestock and changed money made their living in this fashion — essentially profiting from a person’s journey to worship God. This self-serving practice is certainly not fit to occupy a position within the Temple. Perhaps the difficulty of bringing animals to the Temple was part of God’s plan to help people prepare their hearts for meeting him, much like our Lenten sacrifices. Perhaps the prescriptions on Temple coinage also came about purely as part of a bureaucracy of human convenience and desire.
The Temple Sacrifice (1995), Zely Smekhov | Image from zely-smekhov.com/
In this light, it becomes much more clear why Jesus became so upset as to drive off the livestock and command the money changers to leave. This was no longer a dwelling place for the Lord, a sacred temple unto Him. It was simply a place of ritualized practices developed with convenience and efficiency in mind.
The Jews had reduced the temple to spiritual rubble all on their own. All that was left was for Christ to show the inadequacy and irrelevance of the Temple as he instituted a new temple in his Body and Blood. This was not understood yet, but what was apparent was the pure shock of Jesus’s actions. Any disruption to Temple workings would be an affront to those in power — the scribes, the elders, the Sanhedrin. They held the authority in this place, and this traveling preacher was worth next to nothing in their book. Such actions were tantamount to terrorism in their eyes. Add to this the fact that he was suggesting an end to commerce and the ability for many people to obtain animals for their ritual sacrifices, and the disruptive nature of this act is apparent.
Yet let’s not get carried away with this image of Jesus’s forcefulness and a promise of temple destruction. That is the same road the Jewish zealots tread with their expectation of the Messiah. God has his own way that does not correspond to human intelligence or intuition; that way is always love and self-sacrifice. We get the first hint of the underlying divine Way and Truth in the midst of this scene when the Evangelist writes, “His disciples recalled the words of Scripture, Zeal for your house will consume me.” This passage comes from Psalm 69, the Prayer for Deliverance from Persecution. Despite what it sounds like — someone being taken over by righteous anger (zeal) and lifted up to a position of power — this scriptural reference is to someone who is greatly persecuted and at the end of their rope, pleading for God’s deliverance.
There is a real desperation in Psalm 69, which begins, “Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold.” It continues: “Do not let those who hope in you be put to shame because of me … It is for your sake that I have borne reproach, that shame has covered my face … It is zeal for your house that has consumed me; the insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.” In many ways, St. John’s use of this reference early on in his gospel is a foreshadowing of the Passion and Death of our Savior.
It also helps us connect the final lines in today’s gospel when John tells us that Jesus understood human nature well. His great empathy with us comes from his Incarnation and living a fully human life; he knows life’s temptations and failings. The desperation of Psalm 69 speaks to the common human experience of trying to be faithful to God amid a culture consumed with earthly things. The reference to this psalm underlines the drastic nature of the Temple’s decline in Jesus’s mind, as well as a people so committed to their rituals instead of the presence of God in their midst that they will persecute and kill him.
As our gospel continues, the Jews, likely angered and put out, demand from him: “What signs do you show us, since you do these things?” Now, of course Jesus could have healed someone, raised someone from the dead, or performed some other miracle, but we are validating the mindset of the Jews if we think this way. Jesus only does miracles to bring people closer to God, to take away spiritual blindness, to enkindle hope or teach them about spiritual sustenance. The stakes here are not individual journeys of faith but the very locus of faith for the entire human race. The Temple was God’s dwelling place on earth, the most sacred place for humanity. What sign of this magnitude can Jesus give them other than himself?
Christ driving the Traders from the Temple (1600), version located in London, El Greco | Wikimedia Commons.
And so he says, “Destroy this temple and in three days I shall raise it.” I envision him saying this with a quiet calm, in contrast to his other forceful actions. As John tells us, “he was speaking about the temple of his body.” What greater sign could there possibly be than the Resurrection?
But the import of this exchange between Jesus and the Jews is that this is not just a sign. As we now know, he establishes his Body and Blood as lasting spiritual food, as part of the New Covenant with humanity. The sign of the Resurrection denotes a new reality: the liturgy bursts upon us, divinification is made possible as we walk his Way faithfully, the mystical Church is born, eternal life is made available to humans, and the old Temple is made irrelevant.
In some ways, I almost think we can read the first part of Christ’s sentence, “Destroy this temple,” as truly referring to the Temple in Jerusalem, almost like a directive to humanity. Yes, destroy this temple because you will no longer need it and its empty, convenience-driven rituals that have made it no longer fit as a dwelling place for God. And, because He is the dwelling place of God on earth, we can understand the destruction of the Temple and his own death as an equivalency. Thus, he will raise his Body, which is and already has been the only real Temple since the Incarnation.
Imagine the divine responsibility and patience it took for him to know this reality and to attempt to teach it to the Jews in a way they could start to accept. Not only is it a mystery of faith to understand the starting point of the Incarnation and how it has irrevocably changed the entire Jewish religion, but the ongoing work of Jesus in his ministry and acceptance of his own Sacrifice and Death is simply so counter-intuitive to our human conception of power and glory that it needed to be lived out to be believed.
Thus, we hear John tell us that while he was in Jerusalem, “Jesus did not entrust himself” to all the people who started flocking to him; and John notes that he “did not need anyone to testify about human nature for he himself understood it well.” Because he is fully human and fully divine, Jesus knows how human hearts are fickle and how people can quickly twist signs and prophets to their own ends. He desperately wants to love humanity and bring them close to himself and the Father, but he must operate in the world in a way where his ultimate end as a loving sacrifice for humanity can be accomplished and not thwarted. Again, St. John presents us with a fully in-control Lord who steers himself and his disciples to the New Covenant with single-minded purpose.
Artist’s illustration of a supernova, iStock
As I reach the end of my reflection, I’m struck by the radicality of the New Covenant that is Jesus Christ. So much is centered on him, his Body and Spirit. He is the most dense spiritual supernova around which the universe rotates. He is the new Temple, transforming a type of ritual worship centered on a building into a true communion with God that provides real spiritual food.
No human could imagine such a transformation of the Jewish covenant. It took God to come in person to make this important transformation happen and, in the process, open up for us the gates of Heaven. I suppose this is why we have such a shocking scene as he upsets the entire Temple economy in today’s gospel. How else can we grapple with the sheer upending of our old way of knowing God?
Third Sunday of Advent: Isaiah 61:1-2a, 10-11, 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24, John 1:6-8, 19-28.
One of my favorite passages from Isaiah occurs in today’s readings. It seems to have been especially significant for Christ as well since we see Him read it to His hometown synagogue in Luke’s gospel. (I have to admit that another reason I like this passage is that I fondly recall playing what I think is Matt Maher’s best composition, Isaiah 61.) Today, the voice of the Anointed One is spoken (announced, as it were) by Isaiah while John the Baptist likewise cries out in the desert, also announcing Christ, and also quoting Isaiah. This third Sunday in Advent marks a great intersection of prophecy, the fulfillment of the Time of Promises, and the announcement of the Incarnation in our midst.
The Messiah’s words of self-announcement through the mouth of Isaiah are so poetic. For me, perhaps their most lovely attribute is that they give glory to God the Father with every line, while still revealing the role and personhood of the Messiah. He begins with “The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me,” and we see the Blessed Trinity in full display. He speaks of the action of the Holy Spirit, resting upon him, sent by the Father as a way to anoint the Son. This is the fundamental relationship of the Three Persons as we understand it. The Father is the creative force, the genius of Creation, who sends the Spirit to grace, bless, and anoint in the created universe. The Son is the full recipient of the Father’s Spirit and Love, the promised Anointed One sent to do His will as none other in history can. As we read the rest of the opening sentence, we receive a condensed nugget of the Christian mystery of faith: “he has sent me to bring glad tidings to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners, to announce a year of favor from the LORD and a day of vindication by our God.” Christ’s redemptive power, the Good News, the healing, the freeing from enslavement to sin, and the victory over death are all here prophesied. Amazing!
This is the sentence that Jesus reads in the synagogue at Nazareth when He starts his ministry, just after resisting the Devil’s temptations in the desert (Luke 4:16-19). We can marvel at the layers of revelation in the Word of God speaking through Isaiah nearly 800 years before Christ will quote his prophecy in the Nazorean synagogue. The Word, now incarnate, speaks the very words He delivered to Isaiah so long before. Why does He reveal Himself in this way? One reason is that God sows in the heart of humanity a longing for deliverance, a desire to know Him that grows over time and is not only appropriate for the dignity of the Son of God but makes humanity more receptive to His message. Another reason that becomes apparent is that there is an inherent humility to the coming of the Lord — first as a fragile baby born in an animal stall, and even in his revelation of Himself in this way. Let’s remind ourselves of what St. Luke writes after Jesus reads this verse from Isaiah: “And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth” (Lk 4:20-22a). Jesus sits! And instead of proclaiming “It’s me! I am the Anointed One!” He says that this illustrious prophecy has been fulfilled in their presence. There’s no doubt about what He’s saying, but He couldn’t have chosen a more meek and humble way to say it. It’s important to note that Christ is not only lending legitimacy to Himself here — He is blessing the entire past tradition and Time of Prophecies. His divine majesty radiates in all directions, past, present, and future, from this moment of His Reign beginning on earth. Imagine if the prophecy was never fulfilled: it would cast doubt on not only the beloved prophets but God’s fidelity to his people; perhaps even God’s existence. Christ’s coming attests to God in every way, blessing the entire stream of salvation history. He truly is — by His very existence — a day of vindication by our God. And for one brief moment, before they recall that He is Joseph’s son and their human instinct of skepticism takes over, the entire synagogue recognizes Him as the Anointed One: “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” Even here, in the episode that teaches us much about humanity’s inability to discern truth in front of them, we see that creation cannot help but recognize the incredible, humble and gracious majesty in front of them.
Christ in Majesty, historiated initial ‘A’ on a bifolium from an Antiphonal (c.1400), unknown artist | Image from christies.com. From the description at Christies: “This bifolium comes from a magnificent Antiphonal made for an unidentified Benedictine monastery. The initial opens the responsory for the first Sunday of Advent, ‘Aspiciens a longe ecce video dei potentiam’. Carrying the opening of the first feast of the Antiphonal, this page is illuminated more extensively and more splendidly than any other and it is certainly the work of the principal illuminator. The exquisite monochrome figures in the initial staves and the full-page border inhabited with birds, beasts and figures are unique features. This artist is not precisely identifiable but he was clearly within the circle and influence of the illuminators responsible for two of the greatest manuscripts produced for the court of Wenceslas IV: the Master of the Golden Bull and the Master of the Bible of Konrad of Vechta. This leaf can be placed alongside them as being one of the highest achievements of Bohemian court illumination and thus of European art of around 1400.
Jesus Christ Himself, fully human and part of creation, also rejoices in the Incarnation:
I rejoice heartily in the LORD,
in my God is the joy of my soul;
for he has clothed me with a robe of salvation
and wrapped me in a mantle of justice,
like a bridegroom adorned with a diadem,
like a bride bedecked with her jewels.
As the earth brings forth its plants,
and a garden makes its growth spring up,
so will the Lord GOD make justice and praise
spring up before all the nations.
This gracious way of rejoicing is simply a pleasure to read and contemplate. May we all say the words, “in my God is the joy of my soul”! The image of the Father clothing His Son in a “robe of salvation” is beautiful on its own, and takes on a heart-wrenching quality when we recall the robe and crown of thorns the soldiers put on Him during His Passion. The other lines evoke the pure beauty of a bride and groom on their wedding day and the life-affirming nature of an abundant garden as they contemplate the Kingdom of Heaven that is here. For what else is the promise of ultimate justice for humanity and never-ending praise for God but the Kingdom of Heaven? All of this spoken without boasting and with continual deference to the Father, from whom all these blessings flow.
When we study the gospels, we discover that Christ’s entire ministry is a deliberate and methodical revelation of His prophesied divinity and Incarnation to His followers. This simple point is so important for Jesus to make because 1) it shows the overabundant generosity of the Father, 2) it must be insisted upon because of its sheer uniqueness and miraculous nature in the history of the universe, and 3) it’s impossible to understand the redemptive quality of Christ’s sacrifice and Resurrection unless we recognize that He is, in fact, God’s Son, the promised Anointed One who perfects the Old Covenant and offers saving grace from the nation of Israel to the rest of humanity.
And thus John the Baptist occupies this seminal pivot point between the Old Covenant and the New, proclaiming that the Son of God has finally come to earth. We’ve grown up knowing that this was his message, and he sort-of disappears in the wake of Christ’s great ascendency. I think he might be slightly dismissed as an interesting side note in our contemplation of our faith. But let’s consider how important this final prophet is (and recall our reflection on Thursday when Jesus said John is, in fact, the greatest of Jewish prophets, Elijah, come back as promised). The evangelists give him pride of place at the beginning of the gospels; St. John in today’s gospel states, “A man named John was sent from God. He came for testimony, to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him.” John the evangelist is matter-of-fact here: John the Baptist was sent from God to testify to the light, that is, to testify that the Christ has actually come and graced the earth with His Presence. Note that the evangelist states that the reason the Baptist does this is “so that all might believe through him.” This statement carries many layers of meaning. We begin to appreciate the importance the Jewish faith placed on prophets and their role in speaking the truth — prophets ratify, in a way, the will of God on earth. We see this throughout the old testament when the kings and judges would summon the great prophets of the age to help them interpret God’s will in events as they unfold. God Himself establishes this co-leadership of prophets among the Chosen People as He appoints Aaron, Moses’ brother, as his prophet (Exodus 7:1). Also present in the evangelist’s words is the knowledge that as the one announcing the arrival of the Messiah, the Baptist is the last of the prophets, the fulfillment of what they had promised, and this is another way people can believe in Christ “through him.”
St. John the Baptist (1878), Auguste Rodin | Creative Commons, courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Properly stated, a prophet is someone who speaks for God to His People (cf. Amos 3:8; Jer. 1:7,17; Ezek. 3:4). The original Hebrew נָבִיא (nabi) is a cognate of Akkadian verbnabu= “to call” and Arabic naba’a = “to announce.” We see this shared meaning of “calling out” very clearly in John the Baptist. He defines his entire existence as simply that: crying out in the wilderness. He is nothing but a voice, God’s mouthpiece in the world, with a simple message. The way he proclaims this to the priests sent to question him again sheds light on the layered mystery of revelation in God’s plan: “I am the voice of one crying out in the desert,
‘make straight the way of the Lord,’ as Isaiah the prophet said.” Like Jesus, John identifies himself through the words of Isaiah. Unlike Jesus’s meek appearance when He sits in the synagogue to share this revelation, John is wild in appearance, unabashedly baptizing all who will come, loud in his proclamations. He is the living voice of God’s Word in a different way than Christ (who is actually God). The grammar of his statement to the priests attests to this, the small “I am” before Isaiah’s prophesy echoes the great I AM of God Himself to Moses. Rather than “I AM who I AM,” John places his entire being, his “I am,” in Isaiah’s prophecy to be the voice crying out in the wilderness. This matches the wildness of his character; his entire being is truly a voice crying out in the wilderness. We can appreciate his abandonment to his prophetic appointment from God as we consider the readings of the past week that remind us to encounter the passionate love of God with an equally passionate seizing of God into our beings, violently pushing aside our worldly attachments and roadblocks. John refuses any other definition for himself. He tells them that he is not the Christ, not the Prophet, not Elijah — he refuses to be distracted by considerations of his own personhood because he has given himself completely to the task before him, to be the voice crying out in the desert, “make straight the way of the Lord!”
So, let us thank St. John the Baptist for his indefatigable demonstration of faith in God and his reminder that we must always be in the process of making straight the way for the Lord. As much as Jesus’s teachings perfect us, this remains the initial Christian call: prepare your heart, level the mountains and valleys it contains to make a straight path for Christ to come in and transform it. We must not only recall and thank St. John the Baptist, but we must imagine him here before us in his camel hair shirt, up to his calves in the Jordan, offering us a handful of blessing water as he repeats, make straight the way of the Lord. We can never tire of hearing it, never think we’re above the raw wildness of his character and call, because if there’s one thing we’re good at, it’s obscuring that way for the Lord with our own desires and thoughts of ourselves.
The Ascension of the Lord: Acts 1:1-11, Ephesians 1:17-23, Matthew 28:16-20.
What an incredible feast we celebrate today. It marks the end of the physical presence of Christ in the world (in this age, at least) as well as the divine mystery of the Trinity that God will unfold in a new and expanded way for us at Pentecost. For Christ tells us that He is always with us, despite the fact that His body ascends to heaven. What do we make of this paradox? How can He be “with us” while clearly He ascends out of this world? Is this just a cute phrase meaning “the memory of me will be with you”? No, definitively not, as Pentecost and the sacraments attest. Christ’s ascension is a necessary element of salvation history and the glorification of God; the ascension enables a new reality for the Church to operate “in Spirit and Truth.”
As we contemplate today’s readings, we’ll see that this new reality is a place where God has been yearning to meet us since Adam and Eve left the garden — perhaps a spiritual plane as much as a place, it can be examined through the concept of glorification.
Holy Trinity (1620), Hendrick van Balen | Wikimedia Commons. Today’s feast celebrates the day that Christ ascends to heaven to be seated at the right hand of the Father, and our reflections reveal that the Holy Trinity is the great mystery central to our faith.
But let’s start with the Ascension and what we learn from the Acts of the Apostles. What’s odd about the Ascension is that it can almost be lost in the liturgical year, coming just a week before Pentecost, within the Easter Season. This may deceive us into thinking that it’s somehow not as important or at least less important than the Resurrection or Pentecost. Yet as we examine it, we find that it’s not only psychologically impactful for the Apostolic Church but also essential to usher in a new spiritual reality for the Church, a reality that persists until the Final Judgement. Its importance is signaled by the time frame; the author of Acts tells us that “he presented himself alive to them by many proofs after he had suffered, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.” Forty days marks spiritual preparation and purification, often before a new mission or calling. Notably, Jesus spends forty days in the desert just after being baptized by John and prior to starting His earthly mission. And here we are told that Jesus spends forty days with His apostles between His Resurrection and His Ascension. Luke and John tell us that He uses this time to explain how the Easter events fulfill scriptural prophecies as well as the meaning of many of His teachings that they were unable to comprehend before His Passion and Death. In other words, Jesus delivers the first full catechism to his Apostolic Church, the amazing Christology that defines the Church to this day.
So the purification of the Church during these 40 days exists in the physical presence of the risen Lord and His fully revealed teachings. And if the 40 days are also a preparation for a new mission and reality, what are they preparing for? Jesus explains that they’ve been preparing to be baptized in the Holy Spirit: “the promise of the Father about which you have heard me speak; for John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” As we know, this comes at Pentecost, and, indeed, the Spirit comes with an intensity and impact that is totally surprising.
But why must Christ ascend? The answer comes in the question His apostles ask just before He ascends: “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” With this question, they show that they have not yet seen the mystical connection that Christ serves as a “gate” for humanity (the Way) and they still see him as a Messiah who will accomplish all things physically Himself. Now, none of those things are technically wrong — Christ is the Messiah, and it is through His unique entrance into history that Israel is restored and the world is saved, and He will return physically at the end of time for the Final Judgement. But they’re missing the point that Christ came to establish a new relationship with God for humanity. They’re missing the point that the Church needs to exist as a way to draw people to God precisely through the spiritual presence of Christ within them, not the physical presence of Christ by Himself. Christ is the gate and the Way because He is the nexus where divinity and humanity were joined, sins were sacrificed, and a new relationship with God was made possible (we’ll call this glorification below). But He doesn’t come to simply take over and do everything for us. He comes with an invitation for us to go through Him to the Father; we must use our free will and our actions in this life to unite ourselves with God; we must do some work, too. (As a side note, I think this is a better way to think about salvation through faith and works: our “work” is not community service but the work of living out God’s commandments, the work of bringing God’s will to the world through our own actions.)
This is why Jesus’s answer to His apostles is: “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” These are His last words as He exists bodily on the earth, before “a cloud took him from their sight.” Note that in His final words, He is giving them their Apostolic mission. They will receive power, they will be His witnesses to the ends of the earth. This is why He must ascend: so that the apostles no longer look to Him as a physical person to do this work. They must be imbued with the Spirit of God to exist with the mystical reality of the Trinity because God’s plan is that we are no longer called slaves, but friends. God wants theosis, divinization, for all of us. This requires faith, in which we are blessed if we “have not seen and yet have come to believe,” as Christ explains to St. Thomas. Christ provides salvation to us through the Cross and Resurrection, but that salvation takes on the specific characteristic of being a Way to our own divinization. That Way is one where He is not seen, where we must forge a relationship with God and see Him in the world through each other and the rest of creation.
The Ascension of Christ (1513), Hans Süss von Kulmbach | Creative Commons, courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. I find the depiction of only Jesus’s feet rising to heaven to be hilarious in a way, given the words of the angels.
The angels (“two men dressed in white garments”) accentuate this point when they say, “why are you standing there looking at the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven.” In other words, the promise of the Final Judgement still stands, and Christ will once again be present on earth in bodily form, but we are not to just look at the sky as we await that moment. We have work to do. Our baptism in the Holy Spirit has given us a share in the divinity of Christ, and our job on earth is to get to know our wonderful, infinitely perfect and mysterious God, bringing Him and His will to this world.
This lens helps us better hear what St. Paul tells the Ephesians in the second reading:
I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.
Note how St. Paul is praying for the gifts of the Spirit to come to this fledgling part of the Church: wisdom, revelation, enlightenment, and faith. They will need faith and spiritual gifts to truly become the Body of Christ. Paul knows that the purpose of the Church is to share in the great power that the Father gave to Jesus:
God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.
Paul tells us here that the Church is “the fullness of him who fills all in all.” What an amazing destiny for us! Do we all comprehend that this has been entrusted to us? That our work in the world as Christians is not just being a good person and being nice to others, but to participate in the mystical relationship of love that is the Trinity, to bring God to the world and in the process be deified ourselves as we strive for perfection according to the Way of Christ? WOW! That’s a seriously awesome charge.
Let’s reflect for a moment on this concept of divinization, deification, or theosis, as the Eastern Churches call it. It’s not something that a paragraph or two in a blog post can do justice to, but let’s dip our toes into this deep water. Divinization is not the belief that we become gods in some sort of pagan pantheism. Divinization instead refers to the spiritual state of being united with God to such an extent that we are able to share in the holiness that characterizes God. The metaphor often used is that of a piece of metal thrust into a fire: it becomes hot, it glows, and it is malleable, taking on aspects the fire imbues upon it, but it is still metal. This is the true goal for all Christians on the earth: not just to “be good” like Christ, but to unite our human nature with the divine nature like Christ.
Coronation of the Virgin Mary (c.1340-1350), Jacopo di Mino del Pellicciaio | Wikimedia Commons. Our primary example of divinization is the Virgin Mary, the supreme example of how highly God seeks to raise humanity in communion with Him.
As you might imagine, the thought of divinization made theologians and churchmen in the Western Church somewhat uncomfortable over the centuries. Part of this is because of the fear that people would seek to be treated like gods (like the Roman caesar, who claimed to be a god). The word for this in Greek is apotheosis, not to be confused with theosis.
I think there is another, related concept to help us avoid this pitfall: glorification. We must constantly refer back to Jesus, the perfect union of the human and the divine. Jesus, despite His divinity, always pointed back to the Father and credited the Father for everything. He tells the Pharisees, “If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father who glorifies me” (John 8:54). Here is an important lesson about divinization: we must not seek glory for ourselves like secular heroes (what Aquinas calls vainglory), but instead remember that all glory belongs to and is bestowed by God.
So if glory is more than just fame or renown, what is it? St. Augustine calls glory clara notitia cum laude, or “brilliant celebrity with praise.” Augustine gives us the second part of the equation “with praise” to signal that we’re talking about how we humans interact with divine glory. A first step in glorifying God is praising the wonders of His creation, which are a partial reflection of his abundance, goodness, and perfection. But truly glorifying God must go beyond this. Here an excerpt from the Catholic Encyclopedia is particularly helpful:
This praise involves not merely intellectual perception, but also the practical acknowledgment by heart and will which issues in obedience and loving service. The endowment of intelligence with all that it implies — spirituality and free-will — renders man a higher and nobler image of the Creator than is any other being of this visible world. The gift of intellect also imposes on man the duty of returning to God that formal glory of which we have just spoken. The more perfectly he discharges this obligation, the more does he develop and perfect that initial resemblance to God which exists in his soul, and by the fulfillment of this duty serves the end for which he, like all else, has been created. (“Glory” by Fr. James Fox, 1909)
In other words, our intellect, spirituality, and free will enable us to glorify God in a much deeper way than the existence of creation being a testament to His awesomeness. The final sentence in this excerpt is worth examination. We can read “the more perfectly he discharges this obligation [of returning glory to God]” to mean the “goal of the Christian life.” And the object of that sentence is the divinization bit: “the more does he develop and perfect that initial resemblance to God which exists in his soul.” Thus we see how divinization and glorifying God are related: our whole-hearted glorification of God in our praise and loving work is what brings about our divinization. Like Christ, who glorified God in the most unimaginable loving gift of Himself on the Cross, we are called to glorify God and that is the Way to divinization.
With this connection in mind, some of Jesus’s words come into sharp focus. As He says in His final prayer for the Apostles before His betrayal in the garden:
Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed (John 17:1b-5).
Jesus’s prayer reveals how glory is a gift that marks divinity, that the Persons of the Trinity give glory to one another in order to better reveal the essence of divinity to humanity. Jesus asks the Father to glorify Him in order that Jesus may glorify the Father in return (through the Easter events). Why do they do this? As Jesus said, this instills in humanity the knowledge of the “only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”
Thanks to the events of Ascension and the coming Pentecost, we can understand this not as book knowledge but rather experiential knowledge. Jesus tells us that eternal life is “that they may know you.” The kingdom, the reign, of God is living in the reality of glorification. It is a constant, ever-gifting of glory among the Trinity that we get to participate in! Our praise of God: glorification. Our works of love: glorification. Our faith in the unseen yet perpetually active God: glorification. (The priest exhorts us at the close of the Mass: “Glorify the Lord with your life!”) With a constant focus on the glorification of God, just like Jesus in His ministry, we can live our lives with the realistic goal of divinization. This is a new reality that Jesus and the Holy Spirit bring about in the world. As St. Peter writes, “If you are insulted for the name of Christ, blessed are you, for the spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you” (1 Pt 4:14). In other words, if our constant glorification of God through our works and words that spread the Gospel of Christ invite ridicule or suffering, our hearts can be glad in the knowledge of being blessed by the Spirit of Glory. And here we see why the Church Fathers insisted that the primary actor in divinization is the Holy Spirit. Since glory comes from God, it is the Spirit that glorifies the Father through us. Likewise, if any share of glorification comes to us, it is also through the Spirit.
The Ascension (1636), Rembrandt | Wikimedia Commons. I quite like Rembrandt’s visual emphasis on Christ and the Holy Spirit in this painting. Baby angels are cute, too.
And so we can bring this reflection to a close, hopefully better understanding why Jesus ascends to the Father. It is only in this way that our primary relationship with God is through the Holy Spirit and the sacraments Jesus institutes. The Holy Spirit is the author of our divinization. The Holy Spirit makes our glorification of God real and not just lip service, by stirring our hearts and uniting the divine soul within us with its Creator. Jesus tells his apostles in today’s gospel reading, “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” The more we reflect upon the mysteries of our faith, the more we see the undeniable and essential logic of the Trinity: that each Person is required for God’s mysterious saving plan for humanity. When Jesus says, “And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age,” we have the Father’s glorification of His Son as proof of this eternal existence, and we can expectantly await Pentecost, when we celebrate the sending of His Spirit to be with us until the end of time.
Tuesday in the Sixth Week of Easter: Acts of the Apostles 16:22-34, John 16:5-11.
Today’s readings may seem like standard Easter season fare: miraculous things happen with Paul as he evangelizes throughout the Near East and in the gospel, Jesus talks about His impending death and Resurrection. But we have to stop and examine them closely because they reveal some important aspects of the Holy Spirit, and therefore about the Holy Trinity, God Himself.
In the gospel reading, Jesus clearly references each Person of the Trinity separately. He says, “Now I am going to the one who sent me,” referring to His journey back to the Father. He proceeds to guide them through a new way of viewing a departure from this world. This is the psychology of the New Covenant, wherein death no longer has finality for us. First, he marvels a bit that “not one of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’” as a way to signal that something greater resides in the place He is going. This is a gentle way of telling the apostles (remember, this is John’s account of His long speech during the Last Supper) that they are still focused on the wrong thing (i.e., death) and should be focused on the right thing (i.e., everlasting life with God). He notes that “grief has filled your hearts,” and this psychology of grief is one that we struggle with to this day when we think of a loved one who has passed.
Jesus then describes the unfolding of the Church in the final days and tells them how His passing will benefit them more than if Jesus stayed on earth. This is rather incredible, and something that we don’t consider much as we think about our Savior. Jesus says, “it is better for you that I go. For if I do not go, the Advocate will not come to you.” Thus, the first thing we hear about the Trinity is that the Persons act separately in the world, according to their time. Let’s consider how logical this is: God is One and indivisible. Thus, while God’s essence is incarnate on the earth in bodily form (i.e., Jesus), He is also not actively working in the form of His Spirit. As we are taught, a human has a body and a spirit, united and given life by God. So I can speak of myself and refer to my body (Michael’s body) and my spirit (Michael’s spirit). Let’s apply this to Jesus. He has His body, which He will offer up as a sacrifice, gathering all the world’s sin to be sacrificed in His Body on the Cross. He also has His Spirit, which in the case of God incarnate, is the Holy Spirit itself. Let’s repeat: Jesus’s Spirit is the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit. This wonderful mystery is what makes our salvation possible. The immortal takes on mortality so that it can burst into this world and give us a share in immortality, defeating death, which can never take God. The world-changing realities that Jesus is revealing to this small band of his apostles are truly mind-boggling, and He acknowledges this in the verses following today’s reading: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” They cannot bear them because of their sadness and also because they have not yet seen him risen from the dead. The realities must begin to unfold on their own for the apostles to grasp what’s going on.
The Intercession of Christ and the Virgin (before 1402), attributed to Lorenzo Monaco (Piero di Giovanni) | Creative Commons, courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Jesus tells His apostles that while the Holy Spirit is bound to the Body of Christ in the world, it cannot be active in the world apart from Him: “if I do not go, the Advocate will not come to you.” Jesus’s death, Resurrection, and Ascension to the Father mark (at the very least): 1.) the salvation of humanity from the reign of death, 2.) the beginning of a new age, the “final days,” when we can sacramentally participate in the life of the Trinity and the reign of God, and 3.) the release of the Holy Spirit into the world as God’s primary way of interacting with humanity.
Jesus expounds: “if I go, I will send him to you.” Again, once Jesus ascends, the Spirit can be sent to them. Note that we reflect Jesus’s statement in the Nicene Creed: the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son.” Jesus can send His Spirit just as the Father can because “All that the Father has is mine” (Acts 16:15). Yet notice how Jesus maintains the autonomy of the Spirit as a Person of the Trinity. He continues to refer to the Spirit as “him” and “he.” In His ministry, He calls the Spirit the Paraclete and the Advocate. How mysterious and wonderful that the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, is granted personhood in the way that the Son is granted personhood. The Spirit is undoubtedly a part of God and a part of the Son (indeed, the very spirit of the man Jesus Christ), yet Jesus speaks of Him as an independent actor in the world. This is consistent with how Jesus acknowledges that everything He is given is a gift from the Father — He does not even speak of His own Spirit as something that He has ownership over. And this seems right and just, for how can a man “own” his spirit, even if that man is the Son of God? The spark of divinity, the Breath of God, is not owned or subservient to any being. And here the Person of the Holy Spirit is not inferior or subservient to the Person of the Son. All Persons of the Trinity are united in God’s love, which grants autonomy and truth above all.
Then Jesus gives us some incredible insight into the action of the Spirit in the world: “And when he comes he will convict the world in regard to sin and righteousness and condemnation.” What can this mean? Is the mission of the Spirit to “convict the world”? When we look at the original Greek, we indeed see the verb ἐλέγξει (elenxei), and according to Thayer’s Greek Lexicon, this means: “1. to convict, refute, confute, generally with a suggestion of the shame of the person convicted; 2.to find fault with, correct.” How can this be, since the Spirit is known also as the Consoler? Does a consoler convict people? Also, how does this jive with the fact that God is ultimate goodness and love?
Let’s consider that Jesus is doing some consoling of His own with His apostles when He shares this promise of the Spirit. He explains in the next verse, “sin, because they do not believe in me; righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will no longer see me; condemnation, because the ruler of this world has been condemned.” He is telling them that the Spirit will uphold the fact that Jesus is, in fact, the Savior of the World. There is a certain consolation for them to know that they are following the true path, the true Son of God. So the Spirit will convict those who willfully do not believe in Christ (their sin is convicted), will uphold the righteousness of those who do believe (he will do it because Christ who has ascended cannot be there to do it), and condemnation of the chief priest/Pontius Pilate (“the ruler of this world”) for executing the Savior.
Fire of the Holy Spirit (contemporary), Davy Cheng | image from fineartamerica.com.
We can start to see how “Consoler” is an appropriate title for the Spirit who will uphold the mission of Christ in the world, thus consoling Christ’s disciples. But how about reconciling this action of convicting the world with the nature of God being goodness and love?
I think the key to understanding this seeming paradox is found in the verses immediately following today’s gospel reading. Jesus continues to give the apostles hope by describing the close guidance the Spirit will provide them: “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.” Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit as the “Spirit of truth.” Just as Jesus is the fulfillment of the Law, the Holy Spirit is the very truth of God, active in the world. We must understand this aspect of the Spirit if we are to understand how He works in the world. The truth of God is not something that is “maybe this, maybe that.” It is not equivocal, up to interpretation. It is “what is right,” which means that there are things that are wrong. How unpopular in today’s world where the prevailing axiom is “this problem is not black and white, it’s many shades of grey.” Let’s not deny that there is complexity in the world and that most problems are multi-faceted. But that’s not the same thing as saying that right and wrong don’t exist. Sure, problems can be multi-faceted but at the same time, the individual choices that make up a solution to complex problems can be right or wrong. Since the Creation, God has been sharing with us His truth, His commandments, in order to teach us the right and wrong that make up goodness in the world. Do we have the intellectual space for God’s truth when we demand that everything is nuanced and no “truth” exists that can transcend everyone’s specific context? This is the central claim of the postmodern world, that specific perspectives are the only real thing and there is nothing universal, no “truth” that can transcend or supersede specific contexts and perspectives. (Of course, this claim is itself a universal “truth,” oh, the irony!). Yet the history of salvation demonstrates the opposite: there is universal truth, and that universal truth is God.
Let’s return to the question of love and “convicting the world” coexisting in the Spirit of God. I am reminded of our reflection about the Purifying Love of God (see The Purifying Fire We Call God’s Wrath). God’s love, uncompromising in its truth, has a terrible aspect to those in sin, who cannot stand its purity. This is how we can speak of the “wrath of God.” Simply put, there is no room for evil, sin, and wrong thinking in the presence of God. God’s ultimate goodness, truth, and love vaporize those things in his purifying fire. This is why no one could look at God when He was with Moses on Mt. Sinai. This is why His Spirit appears as a cloud that obscures our sight, protecting us from a fire that none of us is truly able to bear.
So it is the truth that the Spirit brings that is both loving (after all, His message is that of Christ) and convicts those in the wrong. Only truth points out right and wrong. All human legal systems try in an imperfect way to get to “truth” in order to convict those in the wrong. Jesus shares with us that the Holy Spirit is really the only one who can do this infallibly. We must live in Him and with Him in order to access the truth.
This brings us around to today’s first reading where St. Paul and Silas are unjustly stripped, beaten with rods, and imprisoned in Philippi. We don’t hear the verses leading up to this, which explain why they are treated in this way. I don’t mean to make light of anything, but it’s a little funny that what causes all of this is Paul being annoyed by a spirit that inhabits a slave girl. The scene is this:
One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave-girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling. While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” And it came out that very hour. But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities. (Acts 16:16-19).
So Paul releases the girl from spiritual possession, the power of which is a gift from the Holy Spirit, but the consequence is that the greedy owners want retribution. This is quite the commentary on truth. The spirit of divination is something that evidently brings truth into the world. After all, it correctly identifies Paul and Silas as slaves of God who “proclaim a way of salvation.” But this spirit has possessed a human in what must be understood as a type of enslavement; after all, she is an actual slave, which is not a coincidental or accidental aspect of the story. The spirit of truth is being used not to free people to make their way to God but instead as a way to make greedy people rich. This is not the objective of truth, it is against the nature of truth as found in God. Thus, Paul’s exorcism is just, and it tells us something of the fact that even when truth is found, it must be used appropriately, with reverence to God and His plans for humanity.
The way truth is enslaved in the girl is again enacted when Paul and Silas are imprisoned under the care of a jailer who “put them in the innermost cell and secured their feet to a stake.” Now that’s a depiction of the entrapment/imprisonment/enslavement of truth! But this is against the very nature of God. It simply cannot stand. No force of man or nature can capture and silence the truth of Jesus Christ.
Silas (contemporary), Carolina Ines Vivenza | image from useum.org.
I love the fact that Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God for the other prisoners to hear. What light in the darkness! Does this not remind you of Hananiah, Azariah and Mishael as they are put in the fiery furnace by Nebedchunezzar? Or Esther during her three-day petition to the Lord? Paul and Silas are so full of the Holy Spirit it swells in my heart just to read it. And of course they are — only as such, as ones fully embracing and being embraced by the Spirit, could the earth be shook, their chains broken, and the doors of the jail flung open. Let us all take heed: this is how we must be, not wavering in our joyful embrace with God despite beatings and jailing. The truth of Jesus Christ must be so much a part of who we are that nothing stops the truth that we pour out of ourselves into the world. The truth comes with prayer, praise, and thanksgiving.
What’s more, the truth comes with love. For what does Paul immediately do but shout out in a loud voice to the jailer: “Do no harm to yourself; we are all here.” He does not blame or seek retribution on the jailer who was simply doing his job. He meets him with love and an offering of salvation: “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you and your household will be saved.” In an almost storybook ending, the jailer takes them home and bathes their wounds, they, in turn, catechize and baptize him and his family, and they all “rejoiced at having come to faith in God.”
Speaking the truth, that is, convicting the wrong and upholding the right, is part and parcel of the loving work of the Holy Spirit. There is no contradiction here. In this way, the first reading is the real-time reporting of the work of the Holy Spirit as Jesus promised He would come. St. Paul is a fantastic, enduring figure of one who intimately knows the Holy Spirit and brings the Word of God to the world fully within the embrace of the Spirit. That is why his letters make up such an important part of our scriptures and why we should read them over and over as we slowly gain more insight into God’s love for us.
So we have explored Jesus’s promise of the Holy Spirit and how the Advocate will come to convict those rejecting the truth of Christ and uphold those who have embraced the truth of Christ. Logically, our next question is: so what? How does this make me a better Christian?
I think the first repercussion of this knowledge in our lives is that we must allow ourselves to be conformed to the truth. The truth is no small line item in Christianity. Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” so it is clearly THE central item of what He brings to us. This emphasis on truth does not end with the Cross — He promises us “the Spirit of truth” when He speaks of the Holy Spirit. Thus, this way we’ve discussed of understanding truth as something that reveals and upholds Godliness and righteousness and at the same time reveals and condemns sinfulness must be central to who we are in the world. This is the Way that is Christ. I am not a neo-Inquisitionist; I don’t think we should imagine we as individual people have a monopoly on truth (see my second repercussion below). But I do think that we have become rather limp in our modern Christianity. We have accepted too much of the postmodern insistence that there is no universal truth. When we conform ourselves to the truth that is Christ, we uphold the clear commandments he gives and condemn the sins that he condemns. There is nothing wishy-washy about Christ and His ministry. He fulfills the law that God has given His Chosen People. There should be nothing wishy-washy about our faith and the truth we bring to the world, either.
The clearest embodiment of being “conformed to the truth” that strikes me is our approach to morality, in other words, doing right vs. doing wrong. For perhaps the last 400-500 years, our understanding of morality has been dominated by a sense that we should do something, often against our own inclination. This is a dangerous road we’ve been on, and one that doesn’t lead to God. This sense of should inevitably leads to guilt and a feeling of sinfulness rather than living in the embrace of God. In other words, morality has become an external obligation rather than an internal desire to unite and conform oneself to God. Morality has become a bugbear. Why would we turn morality into something we frankly loathe because it makes us feel bad about ourselves? Morality is supposed to be about goodness, about Godliness. And perhaps here is where we can pivot. If we have been emphasizing an obligation where what is right is often opposed to what we want, we can pivot to contemplating the right as the very thing we want.
This is the act of conforming ourselves to the Truth that is Christ: morality is knowing what Jesus would do and what Jesus would say. It is an embrace of the good in the world and a rejection of sin. It is a willingness to be led by the Spirit as opposed to being led by our base desires, our greed, our lust, and our pride. We willingly change and mold ourselves to the model of Christ, and we are given so many gifts to do it: our conscience, the Holy Spirit, and the Church.
This brings me to the second repercussion that strikes me from today’s reflection. Let’s suppose that we want to open ourselves to the Spirit. Let’s assume we are also surrounded by secular pressures and ideas … work, “me time,” healthiness, politics, etc. It can be tricky teasing apart the Spirit’s action and God’s voice in our lives from everything else. Meditation in a goat yoga class might seem equivalent to adoration at church. But these things are definitively different. How can we discern the voice of God, the action of the Spirit in our lives? In short, sure, even if we want to conform ourselves to the truth that is God, how do we know and uphold the truth in any given situation? Well, myriad books have been written on the subject, and in the end, the Church herself gives us the tools: prayer, the sacraments, especially the Mass, and the Word of God. These might seem humdrum, but only by training ourselves with the history of God’s saving work and feeding ourselves on the Word and Body of Christ can we begin to commune with the Spirit.
Yoga Goat (contemporary), Anna Afzelius-Alm | image from saatchiart.com. Goat yoga – yeah, it’s a thing.
There is a specific aspect of the Holy Catholic Church that is fundamental to our recognition of the Spirit and truth in our lives: the Magisterium. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, the Magesterium is the authority of the Catholic Church to provide for us the authentic interpretation of the Word of God. This is something that the Protestant Churches have rejected. But for me, whatever historical and political complications made that seem like a good idea, rejecting the authority of the Church is a horrible overshot, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The fact is that the Holy Spirit is a mysterious force in the world, and He has made Himself intimately known to the Apostles, the great saints like Paul, and many of our popes and martyrs. These figures began to assemble the discernment, knowledge, writing, and teaching of the Catholic Church as early as the first days of the Church and the Council of Jerusalem. Their accumulated teachings continue to this day. Who are we — what kind of mad pride do we have — to insist that we would have a better interpretation of the Word of God or more faithful/truthful/honest knowledge of the Spirit than the incredible tradition of Fathers and Saints that have made the Magisterium what it is? Friends, the Catholic Church is the Body of Christ, the physical and spiritual manifestation of Christ in the world that has been guided by the Holy Spirit from Pentecost onward. This body is also a body of knowledge and authority, a guide for us in our messy lives. The most obvious and available manifestation of the Magesterium is the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It’s not a pick-and-choose catechism. We can’t just agree with the things we like and quietly decide to ignore those that trouble us. We must study and come to grips with the teachings of our Church in order to fully conform ourselves to the truth that is God. There is no other way; the Church was established by Christ and guided by the Holy Spirit. May we fully embrace the Way, the Truth, and the Life!
Tuesday the Fifth Week of Easter – Acts of the Apostles 14:19-28, John 14:27-31a.
In today’s readings, we hear Jesus promise his apostles, “Peace I leave with you,” and yet we hear in the first reading that Paul is stoned and left for dead when bringing Christ to the people of Lystra. What kind of peace is this? Moreover, how can we reconcile Jesus’s words that He gives his apostles peace when He says elsewhere “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matt 10:34)?
What is interesting about these moments when Jesus invokes the concept of peace is that they are both directed to the twelve apostles and act like bookends on his ministry while alive with them. The “not peace but a sword” passage is from the gospel of St. Matthew and occurs during his exhortation to the Twelve Apostles when he sends them out to the surrounding towns after He “gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness” (Matt 10:1). First, let’s note that this is a fulfillment of the “gathering of Israel” prophesied in the scriptures (cf., Deut 30:1-5, Isa 11:11-12, Jer 29:14, Ez 20:41-42), as Jesus tells them “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, 6 but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt 10:5b-6). But it is also preparation for the work the apostles will do after the Resurrection: “For so the Lord has commanded us, saying, ‘I have set you to be a light for the Gentiles, so that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth’” (Acts 13:47). As we reflected in Who are His Sheep? there is a natural progression to the spread of God’s salvation — first, within the Chosen People, then to all the nations. The apostles’ mission is to be radical evangelists in both cases. Jesus tells them, “Take no gold, or silver, or copper in your belts, 10 no bag for your journey, or two tunics, or sandals, or a staff” (Matt 10:9-10a). What kind of mad mission is this? We might imagine that the apostles would be terrified without the safety net of money, extra clothes, and basic defense like a staff. But by all accounts, they went joyously, buoyed by the overflowing love Jesus was bestowing on them, made supernaturally courageous and unbothered thanks to the gifts of the Spirit. And here we can reflect on the singular focus of their mission: “As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment” (Matt 10:7-8). They are to be like Jesus, spreading the Word of God by mouth and by deed. What else would one need? We often think of “being like Christ” as a moral imperative, a perfection of sinlessness. But here we see what being like Christ really is: an outpouring of saving words and saving work, a laser-like focus on God the Father whose reign is at hand, and a complete lack of ego because “you received without payment,” so you should give endlessly without expecting thanks, payment, or recognition. Wow, I don’t know about you, but I find this thrilling.
Ministry of the Apostles (1660), Fyodor Zubov | Wikimedia Commons.
Jesus must be honest with the apostles as He sends them out to do His work: “I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves … 17 Beware of them, for they will hand you over to councils and flog you in their synagogues” (Matt 10:16-17). Note that the gospels don’t report this type of treatment in the years of Jesus’s ministry but rather report that many were healed, many demons cast out, and many new disciples were gained. Thus we must acknowledge that Jesus was referring to the treatment the apostles would receive after his Death and Resurrection. In this prophetic mode, He continues, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt 10:28). As in so many places in the gospels, Jesus redirects His disciples to consider the reality of God — both His love and His judgment — as so much more important than the trials of this world. So the apostles are warned that they will be persecuted but in the same breath reassured that they should not fear the trials of the body because they do the good work of salvation for the soul. As we shall see, this is advice that St. Paul lives out.
Now we have the appropriate context to understand His words:
Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.
35 For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; 36 and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.
37 Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; 38 and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39 Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.
Jesus sees all of time. He knows that many will not welcome His message or accept His sacrifice. Even within the same family, some will follow Him for their soul’s salvation and others will reject Him. When He says “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword,” He reveals something about the path to salvation. This path demands that He absolutely must come first (that is, He, our triune God). That is why Jesus asserts that we cannot be saved if we love parents or children more than Him. He invokes these intimate relationships purposefully, in order to illustrate that our relationship with God must be so fundamental to who we are that it comes before anyone or anything else. To renounce God would be worse (and more ridiculous) than renouncing ourselves because it renounces the very One who made us, who made everything. This can seem extreme to those who lack a close relationship with God, but to people like the saints, there is nothing shocking about these statements. What it reveals to everyone, regardless of who they are, is that Christ’s message forces you to take a stand. Either you fundamentally put God first, before all else, and you achieve salvation, or you don’t. This is where the image of the “sword” makes sense: it cleaves apart the believers from the unbelievers. It is unavoidably violent not in its nature (the nature of the path is, in fact, love), but in how it is received in the world. Because the Way to God that is Christ is fundamentally nonviolent love, it doesn’t revel in this “sword-like” effect brought about by those wolves who attack the sheep. This is why He tells us we must “take up the cross.” Only those who are convicted (not those who convict) are put upon the cross. Only those who are the object of violence, not those delivering violence, are put upon the cross.
Jesus and the Twelve Apostles (12th century), fresco in Cappadocia | Wikimedia Commons.
So we can see that Christ’s first use of the word peace at the beginning of the apostles’ ministry is an intricate and paradoxical message about the Way. By preaching love and working deeds of love, the apostles will be forcing people to come face-to-face with a God they must choose to accept or reject. This is not peace on earth but a troubling of their spirits, a stirring of their spirits. Like accelerant on a fire, the apostles will bring about an internal uproar that people must reconcile within themselves. This is not “peaceful.”
On to today’s gospel reading and the second use of “peace” by Jesus to his gathered apostles. This passage occurs during His lengthy speech to the apostles on Holy Thursday in the gospel of St. John, after He has washed their feet at the Last Supper. His moment of glory is at hand, and as He sees the details of His glorious sacrifice laid out before Him, He wants to prepare His apostles to build the Church after their moments of confusion and dismay. So, He says, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid.” This is a different peace than the one He refers to at the beginning of their ministry. To use his own terms, we might refer to the first peace as a worldly peace and this second peace as the Lord’s peace. He deliberately distinguishes between the two. He bestows the peace of the Lord because they have chosen God to be their sole companion. These men and women have left their homes, their occupations, and their families; they have preached God’s word and done His works; they have been given gifts of the Holy Spirit and will be given much more. In short, they are on the Way to God, the Way of the Cross. This is why He urges them not to let their hearts be troubled or afraid. The peace the Lord gives them is a type of steadfastness of spirit and a sense of the rightness of their deeds. This is a peace of the heart, a peace in their souls.
Christ Taking Leave of the Apostles (1308-1311), Duccio di Buoninsegna | Wikimedia Commons.
Thus we can see that the Lord’s peace can exist within a person even when the peace of the world does not exist. Every martyr is a testament to the Lord’s peace existing in the midst of the violence of the world.
The rest of today’s gospel shows us the depth of Jesus’s empathy and care for His beloved apostles, his fledgling Church. Knowing how they might react to His death, still hidden from them, He says, “If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father; for the Father is greater than I.” And He even gives them the reason that He is choosing this path, certainly something they will be asking themselves in the days to come: “but the world must know that I love the Father and that I do just as the Father has commanded me.” In this last sentence, He summarizes the Way of the Cross. It demands that a person demonstrate his love for and obedience to the Father. This love and obedience encounters the messiness of the world in myriad ways — sometimes it’s beautiful like the art that is poured into a cathedral, sometimes it’s mundane like the care for the sick, and sometimes it’s awful in the martyrdom of the saints.
And so we can return to our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, with Jesus’s words ringing in our ears. We hear that “some Jews from Antioch and Iconium arrived and won over the crowds. They stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city, supposing that he was dead.” Here are the wolves of whom Jesus warned his apostles. The matter-of-fact reporting of Paul’s stoning and being left for dead is shocking; this is the incomparable St. Paul whose epistles help to not only form the early Church but define so much of our own instruction and theology. But more shocking is the following sentence: “But when the disciples gathered around him, he got up and entered the city.” The miracle of a man stoned almost to death simply getting up is amazing in itself, but what stands out to me is the fact that he walks right back into the city where he was stoned! My first thought is, wow – that’s some serious fearlessness! But in light of today’s reflection, I begin to see that this is the Lord’s peace.
The Stoning of St Paul and St Barnabas at Lystra (1672), Barent Fabritius | Creative Commons, courtesy Hoogsteder & Hoogsteder.
Paul exhibits those facets of being blessed by the Lord’s peace that we pondered above: a steadfastness, an untroubled heart, an internal peace that comes from a singular focus and mission that nourishes him from within.
Indeed, the rest of the reading shows us what the Lord’s peace within a person can achieve. They gain “a considerable number of disciples” in Derbe then return to the city where Paul was stoned and “strengthened the spirits of the disciples and exhorted them to persevere in the faith.” I am amazed by this model of strengthening and perseverance, repeated so many times in the lives of the saints. Some might claim that persecution itself helps one on the path to sainthood and ultimately to God, in a sort of pain-yields-gain model. But in the light of today’s reflection, it seems much more likely that we are learning something about the qualities of the Lord’s peace. This gift from God, this strengthened, peaceful spirit, is bestowed even more bountifully by God when we act out His will in the world. It is not the persecution and pain that begets more peace but our unreserved gift of ourselves to God that garners His love in return.
The Martyrdom of St Stephen (1616-1617), Peter Paul Rubens | Wikimedia Commons. God bestows His peace ever more bountifully on those who do His will.
So we must not misunderstand Paul and Barnabas’s words when they say, “It is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the Kingdom of God.” I don’t think they mean that the hardships in themselves guarantee the entrance to the Kingdom but that these hardships are inevitable when the word and will of God (themselves a “sword”) are active in the world through the disciples of Christ. In other words, the world is filled with wolves who will react violently to the choice God will thrust upon them in the form of His disciples. The hardships we undergo are a part of the world in which we must live, a world fundamentally fallen, and we are here to help achieve the salvation of fallen souls, so we will inevitably encounter violence and hardships. This is the Way of the Cross.
It makes me wonder what hardships I’ve encountered as I follow Christ. Not many if I’m honest. What does this say about me as a true follower? Am I bringing the “sword” of Christ by proclaiming that we must put God first, above all else? Have I helped accelerate the fire of God’s discernment in the souls of others?
Monday and Tuesday the Fourth Week of Easter – Acts of the Apostles 11:1-26, John: 10:11-18, 22-30.
Yesterday’s and today’s readings are in sequence, both the first reading and the gospel. I’d like to think about them together because this provides a fuller look at how the Church first spread beyond the Jewish enclaves around Jerusalem and into the Gentile communities of the Near East. They also show us how Jesus is simultaneously fulfilling the specific promise of Israel’s Messiah yet defining the community of “sheep” to be saved by criteria that are not restricted to a Jewish heritage.
Good Shepherd, 5th-century mosaic from the tomb of Galla Placidia in Ravenna | image from flickr.com.
Let’s start with the gospel readings where Jesus uses the image of the Good Shepherd to describe Himself. The first aspect of the good shepherd He points out is self-sacrifice: “I am the good shepherd. A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” This is in contrast to the paid worker who abandons the sheep in tough times because he only works for money. The second aspect is a hard-to-describe quality of knowing: “I know mine and mine know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.” How can we understand this? This type of knowing can only come from a few things: perhaps a long, close acquaintance such as one with a friend, family member, or co-worker with whom you interact every day; or another way to “know” someone comes through the bond of love and trust that transcends the physical aspects of the person. This second type of knowing we might see in a mother and child, forged through gestation, feeding, and care over years, present in their mental and physical attachments. Or we might see this in a husband and wife who have grown so close in love that they know what the other person is thinking, they anticipate the other person’s needs before they are spoken, they instinctively know when the other enters the room without having to look up. This is what I mean by a love and trust that transcends the physical aspects of a person — you don’t need to see them to feel their presence, you don’t even need to have them be present to hear them in your mind, how they might react to something. In this way, love and trust fuse people together in an altogether more-than-physical way. We might dare to call this way of knowing mystical because it belongs to the family of spiritual mystery that we encounter in the liturgy.
Jesus is saying that He knows His sheep and they know Him in this way. More than that, this is the same way that He and the Father are in relationship. How incredible! I’d definitely use the term mystical once we understand that this is a sharing in the Personhood of the Trinity. I don’t want to lose track of the first way I identified above, the close acquaintance gained by repeated interaction. This is displayed in Jesus’s constant prayer to the Father throughout His life — whether in the desert, on the mountain, before meals and miracles, or simply in His solo time. This way of prayer is an essential element of our mystical “knowing” when we have a hard time seeing the physical presence of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Jesus models for us the love and trust born of filial relationship as well as the prayer life that reinforces the companionship, love, and trust: these are our ways of knowing God.
The message of the Good Shepherd would have meant something specific to His Jewish audience. The Word of God first used this language with Ezekiel (see Ezekiel chapter 34), and the full message was that God Himself will come to replace the bad shepherds (i.e., chief priests and leaders) of Israel: “my sheep have become food for all the wild animals, since there was no shepherd; and because my shepherds have not searched for my sheep, but the shepherds have fed themselves, and have not fed my sheep … I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out” (Ez 34:8,11). Thus, when Jesus says that He is the Good Shepherd, by invoking Ezekiel He is telling them that they have fallen down on the job of shepherding God’s people and that He Himself is God, here to do the work Himself.
Initial M depicting the parable of the Good Shepherd from a French illustrated manuscript | Creative Commons, courtesy the Free Library of Philadelphia.
What’s more, the Word of God tells Ezekiel that His sheep are more than just those living in Israel: “I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them into their own land; and I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the watercourses, and in all the inhabited parts of the land. 14 I will feed them with good pasture, and the mountain heights of Israel shall be their pasture” (Ez 34:13-14a). Here we see a different and broadened definition of God’s people than “descendants of Abraham and Jacob” or “house of David” or “of the twelve tribes.” In other words, the genetic heritage that grants the Jews the status of Chosen People is not equivalent to the group of people who will be saved (here called “my sheep”). I make this point not to diminish in any way the important status of the Chosen People, but to point out that the eschatological end God envisions for humanity is not restricted to the Chosen People. God reveals Himself as the great “I AM,” the only God, to the Chosen People so that they can nurture this truth over the millennia and become a shining light for all of the nations. As He tells Isaiah: “I will give you as a light to the nations,that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Is 49:6). Thus, Israel as a light to the nations, is there precisely so that salvation may reach beyond it, “to the end of the earth.”
Jesus is the promised “light to the nations.” Remember, when he is presented in the Temple as a child, holy Simeon took him in his arms and declares Jesus to be, “a light for revelation to the Gentilesand for glory to your people Israel” (Luke 2:32). Thus, we can see the trajectory of these various threads. When Ezekiel relates that God will feed his sheep “on the mountains of Israel,” he is referring to the spiritual wisdom and revelation of Judaism. Those sheep from outside of the Jewish nation will be brought to “the mountain heights of Israel” to feed on the good pasture of their spiritual wisdom. In this manner, Jesus glorifies Israel while being a revelation for Gentiles. He does not create a new religion but fulfills all of the prophecies and promises within Judaism: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill” (Matt 5:17). He upholds Judaism while making way for the eschatological expansion of the faith to the rest of the world. So, yes, His ministry is primarily, overwhelmingly, focused on Jews, Jewish towns, and Jerusalem; His chosen twelve disciples stand as the chosen twelve tribes, and all of His Words and works are those that He seeded in the minds and mouths of the Jewish prophets over the millennia. But multiple times throughout the gospels we receive the message that the reign of God that He brings is open to non-Jews: the exorcism of the Canaanite woman’s daughter, healing of the Centurion’s servant, etc.
The story of the Canaanite woman in Matthew, chapter 15 is especially interesting because some people use one of Jesus’s quotes to show that He only came for the Jews: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt 15:14). But that interpretation takes the quote out of context. This is actually His answer to his disciples who want Him to send the woman away — it’s a statement that reveals what they’re thinking and not a fulfillment of their request to dismiss her. In fact, after she shows perseverance in asking for His help, He commends her and grants her wish for her daughter. The lesson is clearly a contrast: the woman’s perseverance of faith stands out against constant skepticism and lack of acceptance from the Jews. Jesus makes abundantly clear that His saving work is open to all who have faith.
That’s why we have to pay special attention to His words in yesterday’s gospel: “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.” Who are His sheep? “Other sheep that do not belong to this fold” may mean dispersed Jews in other lands, or — as we see fulfilled in the Acts of the Apostles — the “Greeks,” the Gentiles. Jesus establishes the fact that His sheep “know” him like He knows the Father, that they will “listen to my voice.” This spiritual, mystical knowing does not rely on genetic Jewish heritage. This is the knowledge that the Creator places in our souls at the moment of our creation. This is our response to God within us, cultivated as we listen to His call and by our prayers, our desire, our thirst.
In today’s gospel, Jesus repeats this language and makes even more clear that His sheep are not simply those of Jewish heritage. He says to the Jews gathered around Him: “you do not believe, because you are not among my sheep. My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me.” So, not only are the sheep to be saved and brought into this “one flock” open beyond those of Jewish heritage, some Jews will actually be excluded from the flock. The Chosen People kept the flame of God’s revelation to humanity alive, but the sheep to be saved are those who respond to God with all their hearts, minds, and souls — a different set of people not determined by the status of Chosen People.
I Am the Good Shepherd (contemporary), Jackson Studios | image from etsy.com.
Once again, we hear the Word of God before He is incarnated as Jesus telling Ezekiel these same things hundreds of years earlier: “I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. 21 Because you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide, 22 I will save my flock, and they shall no longer be ravaged; and I will judge between sheep and sheep.” Thus, the Jews themselves will be sorted according to their acts and their hearts.
This message was lost in the fervor of the Jews being astounded at Jesus’s claim that “The Father and I are one.” They want to stone Him right after He says this. And then, of course, this great “blasphemy” (aka truth!) is used as the rationale for His Crucifixion. Therefore, this message did not sink in right away for the first Jewish followers of Christ who made up the Apostolic Church. When evangelizing throughout the Near East, at first they went only to Jewish synagogues. Today’s first reading tells us that the disciples fleeing the persecutions in Jerusalem “went as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch, preaching the word to no one but Jews.” But some preached Jesus Christ to the “Greeks” in Antioch (meaning non-Jews, aka Gentiles). This is the first record of deliberate evangelization to non-Jews. The author writes: “The hand of the Lord was with them and a great number who believed turned to the Lord.” What does it mean that “the hand of the Lord was with them”? Throughout the Bible, the hand of God signifies protection, blessing, and anointing. God tells Isaiah: “I will strengthen you, I will help you,I will uphold you with my victorious right hand” (Is 41:10b). Thus, those preaching to the Gentiles in Antioch are strengthened and protected by God in their efforts.
So, when the church in Jerusalem hears of this unprecedented work and sends Barnabas to investigate, he “saw the grace of God, he rejoiced and encouraged them all to remain faithful to the Lord in firmness of heart.” Let’s remember that Jesus promised, “I know mine and mine know me,” so Barnabas, filled with the Spirit, recognized that same Spirit of Christ alive in the work of the disciples preaching to the Gentiles. This mystical knowledge, so palpable at Pentecost, continues to pulsate through the early Church, calling the sheep who thirst for God, Jew and Gentile alike.
This is no small thing. As Peter tells us in the episode that yesterday’s first reading summarizes, “it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile” (Acts 10:28). But God provides Peter with a vision as he prays in which all of creation descends from heaven on a white sheet. It is a sign of the purification of Creation by Jesus’s great sacrifice. With Christ as the new Adam, Creation itself is re-sanctified and is no longer unclean. God’s voice tells Peter, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” The ripple effects of the Christ event in the fabric of history are making themselves felt in this revelation to Peter.
Peter Baptizing the Centurion Cornelius (1709), Francesco Trevisani | image from flickr.com.
Guided by the Holy Spirit, Peter ministers to Cornelius the centurion and his household of Gentiles. Thanks to his vision, Peter is beginning to understand what Jesus was saying when he said, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice.” Cornelius tells him that he was praying at his house when an angel appeared and tells him that his prayers were answered and he should seek out Peter. This is a man who is spending time with God, who yearns for Him; a man who is one of the sheep. So, Peter admits, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, 35 but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him” (Acts 10:34-35).
Jesus promises his Apostles that the Holy Spirit will be sent to them after He ascends to heaven, and indeed this is what happens in the house of Cornelius: “While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word. 45 The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles” (Acts 10:44-45). This is another Pentecost moment, and here the Holy Spirit descends upon Gentiles! Even the grumbling Jewish members of the fledgling Church in Jerusalem are mollified when they hear that the Holy Spirit was present to the Gentiles in the same manner He came to them:
[Peter said]: “If then God gave them the same gift he gave to us
when we came to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ,
who was I to be able to hinder God?”
When they heard this,
they stopped objecting and glorified God, saying,
“God has then granted life-giving repentance to the Gentiles too.”
The last two days’ worth of readings presents to us the growth of the Church beyond the Jewish community within which Jesus Christ came and ministered. It shows that the Spirit didn’t “force” a growth outside of the Jewish communities (as some scholars argue) but that this was a Spirit-fueled unveiling of a promise given to the Jews by Ezekiel and then Jesus. This idea of the eschatological sheep in God’s flock being defined outside of the strict genetics of the Jewish race was always present in God’s teaching. Just like the Holy Spirit came to infuse the Apostles in the upper room with the grace, wisdom, and courage to start their ministry in Jerusalem, the Spirit came to expand this grace to include Gentiles.
The growth of the Church unfurled precisely in the order promised by Christ, with the undeniable logic of the grain of wheat, dead to the earth but rising again in great bounty. No other gospel makes this as clear as the gospel of St. John, which is one of the reasons I find it so appealing. We find in the very first chapter, through the mouth of John the Baptist, that Jesus’s saving action would be for the benefit of the world, not just the Jewish nation: “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (Jn 1:29). The first epistle from John also makes the scope of His mission crystal clear: “he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 Jn 2:2).
In my mind, the move of some theologians to reduce the mission of Jesus to only gathering the nation of Israel to fulfill the prophecies pertaining to the Jewish God is too limiting and deaf to the revelation of the Spirit after the Resurrection. It is of the same ilk as writings that attempt to distill some version of a historical Jesus from the Christianity that developed after Jesus. Historical underpinnings are very important, as is the deep spiritual Jewish formation of the culture within which Jesus was born. But an attempt to find a Christ “before” or “outside of” Christology simply denies the fullness of God’s entry into the stream of human history.
Friday the Third Week of Easter: Acts of the Apostles 9:1-20, John 6:52-59.
Today’s readings are two incredibly important passages; one describes Saul’s transformation from persecutor to “chosen instrument” of Christ, and the other gives us Christ’s words that insist upon the literal ingestion of his flesh and blood, which we Catholics likewise insist is present in the Eucharist. What emerges as we hear these readings is a persistent focus on the need for the body, the flesh, to be purified and perfected as we are on our way to salvation.
In the first reading, we find “Saul, still breathing murderous threats against the disciples of the Lord.” He asks the high priest for letters to go to synagogues in Damascus that would give him the authority to arrest Christians and bring them back to Jerusalem in chains. He is zealous in his desire to stamp out the new Way of Jesus Christ. But, like prophets before him (Noah, Jonah), God has radically different plans for him. We are familiar with the story: a light flashes all around him and he falls to the ground (no horse is mentioned, but that has somehow crept its way into the story). He and his companions hear the voice of Christ: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. Now get up and go into the city and you will be told what you must do.”
The Conversion of Saint Paul, detail (c.1600), Caravaggio | Wikimedia Commons.
Paul’s conversion has a significant physical aspect: “Saul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him to Damascus. For three days he was unable to see, and he neither ate nor drank.” Whenever we encounter blindness in our scriptures, we can understand it to signify spiritual blindness, which certainly can be applied in this instance. But note here how the physicality of the blindness reduces Saul from this puffed up, powerful persecutor so someone who must be led by the hand. He becomes absolutely dependent on people, like a child. This is undoubtedly part of the penance of his conversion, and by taking the time to explain this aspect of the story, the author of the Acts of the Apostles is taking on the same insistence of the physicality of our faith that we will encounter in the gospel.
His physical and spiritual dependence is again emphasized when he is told that Ananias, a follower of the Way, will be the one to heal him. Saul is made vulnerable, delivered into the hands of the very people he set out to imprison. And how do disciples of Christ respond to persecutors? They turn the other cheek, they offer love, and in this case, spiritual and physical healing. Again, we hear very physical details about the healing: “Immediately things like scales fell from his eyes and he regained his sight. He got up and was baptized, and when he had eaten, he recovered his strength.” The scales are a physical manifestation of the spiritual mire, the spiritual blindness of this man who was a primary witness of the martyrdom of St. Stephen. It’s as if his sin and self-imposed blockages to the Word of God were crystallized, precipitated out of solution, pulled out like a filter that cleans filthy water. Directly after he gets up, able to see, we hear that he is baptized. Even though this seems to be reported casually, this is no small matter. Baptism in the name of Jesus Christ marked a full conversion of a person to the new Way and a direct rebuke of the chief priests and scribes who had murdered Christ. By accepting baptism, Saul was making a 180-degree turn towards Christ and away from the high priest whose approval he had just sought.
Another aspect of Saul’s conversion is his self-imposed fasting. Fasting was an important aspect of having an appropriate “fear of God” in the Jewish tradition. The fast, or taʿanith, was specifically when atoning for sins, to accompany contrition in the heart, and in supplication during earnest prayer (see our reflection Esther: Model of How to Petition the Father). Any reader familiar with Jewish tradition (which continues in Christian tradition) would understand that Saul would be searching his heart in atonement over those three days and would be deep in supplication and prayer with God. As St. Isaac the Syrian wrote, “When a man begins to fast, he straightway yearns in his mind to enter into converse with God” (Homilies 37, in Ascetical Homilies, 171). Yet once again we are tuned into the physicality of Saul’s conversion, that the once virile man who dragged Christians to prisons in chains had been reduced to a weak, blind, and utterly dependent child. This is just the beginning of the Way of the Cross. As Jesus tells Ananias, “I will show him what he will have to suffer for my name.” A more literal translation of this passage is “I will show him how much it behooves him to [or he must] suffer for my name.” But the point isn’t penance, it’s deliverance from the reign of death and into the salvation found in the reign of God. For Saul is cured of his blindness, he is made strong again at the hand of Jesus’s disciples, he is baptized into the inheritance of everlasting life. It’s simply that the Way of the Cross naturally involves suffering, which the one who suffers comes to understand is nothing more than purification in the Name of the Lord.
Ananias Restoring the Sight of St. Paul (1631), Pietro da Cortona | Wikimedia Commons.
Our Church Father Tertullian provides us with a nice way to think about a central truth in our faith. The Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes him as writing: “The flesh is the hinge of salvation” (CCC, 1015). The fuller context of the quote is as follows: “no soul can ever obtain salvation unless while it is in the flesh it has become a believer. To such a degree is the flesh the pivot [hinge] of salvation, that since by it the soul becomes linked with God, it is the flesh which makes possible the soul’s election by God. ” (De Resurrectione Carnis translated by Ernest Evans, 8). Written sometime around 220 AD, this passage summarizes a “take-home message” from Christ’s ministry and the scope of salvation history leading up to it. The flesh is clearly central — as Tertullian put it, a pivot, fulcrum, or hinge — to salvation, a phenomenon of the soul. Let’s unpack this. First, the soul is seamlessly united to the body in this life; the union of the soul (breath of God) and the body (clay or dust of the earth) is what makes me a person. The body is intimately entwined with the soul and thus it is part and parcel of our connection to God as defined at creation. Second, Christ spoke again and again about the importance of accepting God and the Way while alive here on earth, before the death of the body. More than just accepting God, we are called to act with charity towards our fellow humans (charity being a perfect reflection of the outpouring love that is God). In other words, what we do while we have these bodies matters. Our faith in God and our works of mercy and charity secure our salvation. Both faith and works happen while our personhood inhabits the bodies we have been given. Thus, “the flesh is the hinge of salvation” since without the actions of the flesh, salvation could not be secured.
I have to address one other item before we return to today’s readings. The title of Tertullian’s work is translated as “The Resurrection of the Flesh,” and the question inevitably turns to what happens after our death — if we achieve salvation, is our very flesh raised from the dead? This has been debated since the earliest days of the Church. St. Paul has a strong opinion that he relates to the Corinthians: “What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. 43 It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. 44 It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body” (1 Cor 15:42-44). He makes himself even more clear a few verses later: “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. 51 Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed” (1 Cor 15:50-51). But 300 years later, St. Jerome and St. Augustine insist that our bodies are indeed resurrected on the last day, and the medieval scholastics agree with them. So we read in the Catechism of the Catholic Church a quote from the Council of Lyons in 1274: “We believe in the true resurrection of this flesh that we now possess” (CCC, 1017). But this has been debated up through our contemporary times. St. Pope John Paul II wrote what is probably the most reasonable way to speak of our resurrection and eternal life: “It is always necessary to maintain a certain restraint in describing these ‘ultimate realities’ since their depiction is always unsatisfactory” (General Audience, 1999). In other words, we can affirm that whatever comprises our “person” will rise to have eternal life with God. In this life on earth, our “person” is understood to be a seamless union between soul and body, but will that be the same case (or the same body) at our resurrection? We will only know for sure on the Last Day!
Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, engraving by unknown artist | Wikimedia Commons.
Back to our readings. I am struck by how Christ insists upon the fundamental physicality with which we live our lives “on the Way.” Saul is to become one of the great examples of a man beaten, imprisoned, starved, shipwrecked, and rejected repeatedly while at the same time joyously bringing the light of the Word of God to the world. How can we expect the flesh to endure such things? Who would want to endure such things?
Jesus gives us the answer in today’s gospel, the culmination of the Discourse on the Bread from Heaven: “Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever.” Here is the great promise, the New Covenant. The one who feeds on me will have life because of me. What’s more, this bread that is His Flesh and Blood guarantees life forever. OK, pretty good reason to have our own bodies endure the Way of the Cross. Also, the promise includes a wellspring of life that we must understand extends to this life, not just life in Heaven. This food sustains and uplifts, rejuvenates and expands a person like no regular food can do.
The great question that has splintered groups from the Catholic Church is whether Jesus refers to symbolic flesh or literal flesh. We Catholics believe that He didn’t just stop at a symbolic or spiritual understanding of eating His Flesh and Blood. He says, “my Flesh is true food, and my Blood is true drink. Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood remains in me and I in him.” This is a response to the Jews saying, “How can this man give us his Flesh to eat?” He doesn’t respond by saying “I am referring to my flesh symbolically,” but instead repeats Himself, rephrases Himself, never losing the stubborn physicality of the message. Of course, His Flesh and Blood is spiritual food, but He also insists that it is His Body, His Flesh and Blood, the same physical thing that He brings to the Cross.
Breaking the Bread at Emmaus, a mosaic by Fr. Marko Ivan Rupnik, SJ | image from diocesi.torino.it.
What are we to make of this? Should we be grossed out and turn away like “many of his disciples” after they hear this teaching? Certainly not! We are not cannibals who feast on bloody flesh for flesh’s sake. The Eucharist is an unbloody offering of the flesh, done sacramentally and reverently, where the Holy Spirit is the means and the goal. Christ’s way of giving the Spirit to us through his flesh is an orienting reminder to who we are as Christians, willing to sacrifice our very selves to the Father. It is an insistence that the flesh matters. Just like fasting and mortification of the flesh are ways to purify the body, not in disdain for it but in acknowledgment of its intimate union with the soul, we can see how Christ’s offering of himself as food is another acknowledgment of the importance of our bodies. The body must be nourished by the right food — spiritual food — if it is to be ready to walk the Way of the Cross.
As Tertullian writes, the flesh is the hinge of salvation. We must not hide that, we must exult in that. Our greatest sacrament embraces Christ’s sacrificed Flesh and Blood, brought to the Father with greatest reverence, Who in turn offers it back to us as the Bread from Heaven. Alleluia!
Thursday in the Third Week of Easter: Acts of the Apostles 8:26-40, John 6:44-51.
Today’s readings describe the action by which we find salvation in Jesus Christ, and it starts by being first drawn by the Father. St. John gives us Jesus’s description of this action in the Discourse of the Bread from Heaven, and the Acts of the Apostles provides a concrete example in the Ethiopian eunuch master of the treasury.
Let’s start with the gospel. This is the end of the Discourse of the Bread from Heaven in John that we have been reading all week. Let’s recall that this discussion with the crowds begins with a provocation by them. They ask Jesus for a sign so that they can believe that He is the Chosen One from God. They say, “What work are you performing? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness …” as a way to bring up Moses’s greatness in comparison. This gives Jesus the impetus for discussing bread from heaven. He reminds them that it was not Moses, but God the Father who provided the manna, and that the bread God provides in the form of his Son is bread that does more than just fill your belly: this bread provides everlasting life.
The Gathering of the Manna (1460-1470), Master of the Gathering of the Manna | Wikimedia Commons. Note how this medieval painting depicts the manna in a decidedly communion host-like shape.
At His words, the crowds grumble, murmur, whisper, express discontent (the Greek word used is egongyzon). In the verse prior to the ones we hear today, they say, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” Jesus does not take offense. We’ve already seen Him deal with this same type of disbelief in His hometown of Nazareth (see the reflection A Prophet in His Own Land). His response simply turns their questioning back on themselves. He says, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.” In other words, if you’re really wondering about the truth of what I’m telling you, search first for the Father in yourself. In the next verse, He quotes Isaiah 54:13: “They shall all be taught by God,” and in so doing demonstrates that His coming — and their acceptance of it — has been set up throughout the history of their people. If they had listened to the prophets and more importantly the Father, they would have no question in their hearts about what he’s saying. There would be no egongyzon.
I love the phrase Jesus uses to describe how the Father works: He draws us. For the Jews, God had been working for millennia through the prophets, the judges, the kings, and the multitude of signs and wonders He gave them. His many covenants with the Jewish patriarchs were meant to draw the Jewish nation to Him, in heart and mind. By quoting the prophets, Jesus is reminding them of God’s active role in drawing them to Him.
But God draws all of humanity, at all points in history. This is evident most plainly in the beauty that we encounter in the world. Whether the sublime beauty of a rainbow or mountain range or the artistic beauty of a painting or cathedral, beauty itself is the creative gift of God in the world. We have a gut-like reaction to something outside of us. Whatever the beautiful thing is, it is fundamentally outside of us and fills us with a sense of wonder and appreciation for something other. Beauty is an antidote for self-absorption, one of the steps required as we encounter holiness. As we embrace and encounter beauty, we inevitably open ourselves up, specifically in the direction of wonder and appreciation, and these are attributes of the “awe” of God and the “fear” of God. Beauty is a mode by which God pulls and draws us to Him.
Nasturtiums (1957), Ansel Adams | Creative Commons, image from superkintaro.tumblr.com. Who can deny that the beauty of creation beckons to us? Whether form, spacing, color, texture, or a combination of these and more, there is something arresting that pulls us out of our headspace and makes us stop to gaze, to wonder, to connect. This, we must all realize, is God drawing us to Him. How can we respond?
I don’t think that beauty is the only way God draws us to Him (as the medieval scholastics amply laid out, goodness and truth are equally “transcendent” qualities found in God and in creation that draw us to Him), but I particularly like it. What’s so interesting about beauty, what’s so Catholic about it, is that it operates concretely in the world but at the same time clearly points to something that’s difficult to describe … for lack of a better word, something spiritual. The Catholic faith, like beauty, is firmly grounded in the world (it does not see the body as evil) yet equally embraces the spirit and the indescribable (i.e., God). If the core description of beauty is that something earthly and created exists in a way that points to something transcendent and spiritual, then Jesus Christ is the ultimate beauty, precisely because this body-pointing-to-heaven movement is made so transparent.
In today’s reading, Jesus clarifies that not only is being drawn to God a prerequisite to coming to Him, but in fact an inevitability: “Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me.” This action of first being drawn to the Father and then finding your way to Christ is illustrated in the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. This reading is a lovely portrayal of how God is the mover of all things, especially when one is open to receiving Him and doing His will. In this chapter from Acts, we discover that the apostle Philip was a mighty evangelist for Christ. First, he performs exorcisms, healings, and baptisms in Samaria, where he gathers a great following. Then, “the angel of the Lord spoke to Philip,” and commanded him to take a road south from Jerusalem, which he does at once. Note a few things here: Philip does not argue with the urgings of the Lord (via an angel) but is happy to go where he is sent. Second, this is the state of the Apostolic Church after Pentecost: one in body, mind, and spirit with the Lord, actively being led by the Spirit. This is the reign of God on earth, and the incredible spread of His Church is the fruit.
Philip is encouraged to approach an Ethiopian eunuch from the court of the Queen of Ethiopia. We learn some key facts about him: he has access to the entire wealth of the kingdom, being in charge of her treasury; he is curious and adventurous in the world, traveling to Jerusalem to see the holy city and worship; and he is learned enough to have procured scrolls containing the prophecies of Isaiah. In short, here is a man who has been drawn to the Father. He seeks out the truth and goodness of the holy city of which the entire region knows, he is drawn to further study Jewish holy texts even though he is an outsider to Judaism. Where will the Father take this man now that he has been drawn?
Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch from the illustrated manuscript the Menologion of Basil II (c.1000), unknown illustrator | Wikimedia Commons, from the Vatican Library.
Philip eagerly obeys the Spirit and “ran up and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet.” This man has even learned to read and speak Hebrew! Philip asks if he understands what is being prophesied and the man wisely says he needs a teacher, so he invites Philip into the chariot with him. Being drawn to the Father, he is not suspicious of this solo Jew wandering in the desert but opens himself up, inviting interaction, displaying courage and honesty. The passage is none other than Isaiah’s prophecy of the Savior’s Death:
Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter,
and as a lamb before its shearer is silent,
so he opened not his mouth.
In his humiliation justice was denied him.
Who will tell of his posterity?
For his life is taken from the earth.
And here we perceive an even deeper drawing in of Philip, in addition to the Ethiopian man. God speaks through Isaiah directly to Philip: Who will tell of his posterity? And again through the Ethiopian man: “I beg you, about whom is the prophet saying this? About himself, or about someone else?” God’s work is never complete, but constantly in action, spilling out His message of love and salvation over and over, through the liturgy, through the mouths of the faithful, and to the ears of the faithful and uninitiated alike.
It’s a fantastic recounting that “Philip opened his mouth and, beginning with this Scripture passage, he proclaimed Jesus to him.” Certainly, it could have simply said, “Philip proclaimed Jesus to him.” But it is important to note that this was a recounting of salvation history that the Word of God proclaimed through prophets for millennia, culminating in Christ. And it is an important note that the Word of God is an active force (through the Spirit) even now because Philip is just a vessel, a man who opens his mouth, while the true agent of the action is the implied Word of God, the divinity that spills forth from Philip. Where does the “drawing in” action of God lead humanity? Directly to Jesus Christ, as He says in the gospel reading, “Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me.”
Philip the Apostle Baptizing the Eunuch, Treasurer of Candace, Queen of the Ethiopians (18th century), unknown artist | from The Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, image from Flickr.
And the eunuch, bless his soul, receives the Word of God and believes with an immediacy that would make the skeptical Jews who actually met Jesus blush: “the eunuch said, ‘Look, there is water. What is to prevent my being baptized?’” Wow! That’s some effective catechism, Philip! And Philip baptizes him with water, signaling the repentance of the man’s sins and willingness to enter into a new reality with Christ. Some of the best bits of this joyful story happen after this baptism: “the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away [to Azotus on the Mediterranean coast], and the eunuch saw him no more, but continued on his way rejoicing.” The Spirit, ever active during the establishment of the Church, whisks Philip away to the cool coast for more evangelical work. The eunuch, likely suitably amazed, continues on his way, “rejoicing.” How fantastic that his heart is filled with joy at this encounter and baptism — God responded to his being “drawn in” by providing an overwhelming and overflowing grace. And let us not forget that this is the master of the treasury in Ethiopia, symbolic of the conversion of Gentile power to the true source of power in the world.
This is the activity of God: to provide for us through a gradual unfolding of Himself that culminates in the form of his Son in the flesh, an inexhaustible mystery, an inexhaustible font of grace and blessing, a gateway back to the Father, the source of the liturgy that always continues to provide for us until the end of time. Note that this is not a willy-nilly grace or a mercurial God! He shows us over and over how this was carefully planned, heralded in the days of the prophets and the Jewish patriarchs, carefully seeded in the virgin womb of the perfect Mother as he entered history in the fragile form of a baby. All of this was planned and pre-ordained as a way to prepare humanity to accept the gift of Christ that transforms the world. Now imagine being that gift, the Christ, and trying to explain to the “stiff-necked” Chosen People the import of your ministry.
Back to our gospel reading, Christ attempts to meet them on their level and put things in terms of the manna-from-Moses history they first brought up, “Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died; this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven.” To me (and probably you), this seems clear as day. But we have the hindsight of the initiated, those who have inherited millennia of Christology that began when Christ explained to his apostles in the upper room and “opened their minds to understand the scriptures,” (Lk 24:45-49) and to the disciples going to Emmaus, “beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures” (Lk 24:27). As a small side note, I strongly disagree with theologians who claim that a highly-developed Christology such as we find in the gospel of St. John was developed later, in the century following Christ’s death — these passages from Luke and similar ones in the other gospels show us that Christ Himself gave the apostles this understanding of His importance to the world. But the Jews who heard his words in today’s gospel had no benefit of the Resurrection and Christ’s teaching thereafter. The “living bread come down from heaven,” what does this mean when you’re a man standing in front of us?
Icon of the Supper at Emmaus (20th century), unknown icon writer | image from blogs.ancientfaith.com.
So Jesus makes it explicit: “whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my Flesh for the life of the world.” In tomorrow’s reading, we’ll hear how the astounded Jews questioned him about this eat-my-flesh statement and how He doubles down and explains “my Flesh is true food, and my Blood is true drink.” We’ll also hear how “many of his disciples” leave him because of this “hard” teaching. In today’s reading, he firmly establishes two facts: 1) the living bread come down from heaven grants eternal life, and 2) this bread has a fundamentally sacrificial quality where his very flesh will be sacrificed for the life of the world. Thus, there is a transactional quality to his fleshly sacrifice, like the sin offerings that the Jews had been performing for God for millennia. The difference is that this sacrificial offering will provide eternal life while the former ones done with lambs only remitted the sins of the people for a moment of purification.
Jesus is providing a teaching about the nature of our Triune God. Each Person of the Trinity perpetually offers the gift of Himself to the other Persons in the Trinity. This outpouring of self in love is the very definition of the Trinity. God draws us to the Son. The Son, in turn, offers Himself back to God. When Jesus says “the bread that I will give,” His gift is to God first, “for the life of the world,” and then also for us as we sacramentally recall and enact this once-and-forever sacrifice in our Mass. My point is that Jesus must teach us about His relationship with the Father while telling us about our own salvation. The sequence of saving action He shares with us is this: first, the Father draws us to Him, second, a natural and inevitable result of being drawn to the Father is to believe in Jesus Christ, His Son, and third, we enter into the divine relationship of love between the Father and the Son through the liturgy when we sacramentally Eat his Flesh and Drink his Blood. We can ponder elsewhere how this devouring of the bread from heaven is a transformational act for our bodies and our souls, a way to physically bring Christ to our bodies while accepting the Spirit into our souls, all in adoration and awe of the Father. But here, let’s ponder that each of these stages of entering into the reign of God demands our free will, choice, and acceptance of the gifts being offered to us. It is our choice to be drawn to God and not resist it. It’s our choice to believe in the Son as we understand that all of the Father’s work in the world points to the Son (just as the Ethiopian eunuch believes). And it is our choice to enter into the liturgy, to join the one, Holy, Apostolic, Catholic Church.
Blessed are we to learn of God’s plan, to have access to the divine relationship of love here and now, and in entering this divine relationship, to transform the world around us with love!
