Friday in the Fifth Week of Lent: Jeremiah 20:10-13, John 10:31-42.
Today’s readings show the inexorable movement of Jesus’s ministry towards the Passion but also the irrefutable logic he provides in his works and words. The take-home message of the gospel narratives seems to be that since humanity can’t accept the divine truth brought into their midst, Jesus must be crucified as a sacrifice on our behalf, not just to fulfill prophecy, but as a very real atonement on our behalf for our rejection of Him, the Spirit, and the Father.
Jeremiah was a “repent, the end is near!” prophet. The Book of Jeremiah is so interesting in part because it is a first-hand account of someone we’d probably call a crazy person if we saw them on the street corner. In the verse prior to the ones in today’s reading, he explains that he tries not to be that guy and he knows he’s a “laughingstock,” but he can’t resist God’s message within him: “If I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,’ then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in and I cannot” (Jer 20:9). He shares a clear insight into what it means to completely give yourself over to God: “O Lord, you have enticed me,” he says, “you have overpowered me” (Jer 20:7). This is a great example of how we can’t pigeonhole God into a single metaphor or image. He’s not always the benign guiding light or the patient beating heart of love. Sometimes He’s the urgent master, beguiling us with His energy and leading us to preach like wild people (or wear camel hair and eat grasshoppers and wild honey like St. John the Baptist).
Jeremiah Seated in the Ruins of Jerusalem (Jeremias auf den trümmern von Jerusalem), 1837, Eduard Julius Friedrich Bendemann | Wikimedia Commons.
So in today’s reading, Jeremiah laments that he is abandoned by his friends and trapped by his enemies, but he is aware that in a way he brought it upon himself. After all, he pointed out how wicked everyone was and how they would be conquered and enslaved. Not exactly words to win friends. At the beginning of this very chapter, the priest Pashhur beats him and puts him in the stocks for a day because he hears him prophesying. When he is let out, Jeremiah delivers a tirade complete with curse and death sentence for Pashhur. Firebrand, indeed. So we must read today’s lament within this mixed bag of emotions: a man who wants to save his people, but ends up being hated by them. When he tries to hold it in, he can’t resist God, whom he loves but also feels a bit exhausted by. He notes the inevitability that God will triumph over those persecuting him because He is “a mighty champion.” Jeremiah has cast his lot with the Lord over all else, and it’s interesting to hear the way he describes God. The lectionary reads at one point, “O LORD of hosts, you who test the just, who probe mind and heart,” and it seems like Jeremiah is speaking from experience, as one who has been tested in mind and heart. The NRSV Bible translation of this verse is “O LORD of hosts, you test the righteous, you see the heart and the mind; let me see your retribution upon them, for to you I have committed my cause,” and we hear even more clearly the internal dialogue Jeremiah is having with the Lord. He is saying, you’ve tested me, you know my heart and mind, so let me confess that I want to see your retribution on them, for I have long ago committed to you and you know that I am just a petty human doing your work.
The passage we read ends in a seemingly triumphant way: “Sing to the LORD, praise the LORD, For he has rescued the life of the poor from the power of the wicked!” And I don’t mean to question the legitimate praise and truth in this statement, but when we read the very next verse, omitted from today’s reading, we get quite a different picture of his struggle. He says, “Cursed be the day on which I was born!” (Jer 20:14) and a little later to clarify: “Why did I come forth from the womb to see toil and sorrow, and spend my days in shame?” (Jer 20:18). These are the words of a tortured soul. He knows on a certain level that he is but God’s tool in this life, yet he is also committed to and entranced by God. He knows that he is doing good work but also knows that the Lord has planned the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian Exile for the Jews. Jeremiah teaches us that the life of the prophet is a hard, hard, thing. That God’s love sometimes carries a difficult message, one that will make you hated.
Pashur Smiting Jeremiah in the Temple (c.1648), Leonaert Bramer | Wikimedia Commons.
Which brings us to our greatest prophet and Only-Begotten Son of God, Jesus Christ. Much like Jeremiah, he faces some serious hatred and persecution, as the first line of today’s reading states, “The Jews picked up rocks to stone Jesus.” But Jesus handles Himself very differently than Jeremiah. We never get the sense in the gospels that he is mentally tortured, even when crying in the Garden of Gethsemene, or that He wishes to see the Lord’s retribution on the people. Exactly the opposite: He still wants to grant them salvation and forgive them, all the way to His death and triumphantly so with His Resurrection. This is the great game-changer in history. No mere human could do this. It is why God had to send us His Son and have Him take on the flesh of humanity so that He could enact such forgiveness and love when those of us who were merely human would have failed long before.
How can he accomplish this? The fact that he is the Logos of God has something to do with it. In today’s reading, he displays the irrefutable logic inherent in the Logos. Faced with stoning, He calmly asks, “I have shown you many good works from my Father. For which of these are you trying to stone me?” Logical point one: why would you stone a miracle worker? Point two: these good works have come from God the Father, why would you stone someone bringing you works from God?
Christ in Prayer (1595-1597), Doménikos Theotokópulos (called El Greco) | Wikimedia Commons. I love El Greco’s painting of a pure, patient, innocent-yet-all-wise Christ, looking to His Father with eyes full of devoted love, despite all its difficulty.
They respond that it’s not the good works but his words, that “You, a man, are making yourself God.” He responds first by pointing out that God Himself in the Scriptures (in Psalm 82, to be precise) says “You are gods,” when he is speaking to the highest earthly authorities (judges, kings) to remind them of their moral responsibilities and the fact that they’re failing at giving justice to the weak and not the wicked. Jesus’s point is that if the Scriptures, the very Word of God, in fact, call some humans “gods,” especially when those were being called to the carpet for shirking their duties, then why is it blasphemy for him to call himself “Son of God” when he is enacting the works of the Father? His logic resides in the Scriptures, the Law itself. He goes on to let the works of the Father be his testimony:
If I do not perform my Father’s works, do not believe me; but if I perform them, even if you do not believe me, believe the works, so that you may realize and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.
In other words, if I perform no miracles, then you shouldn’t believe me. But look at these works of the Father and you can believe them even if you don’t believe me. Maybe through them, you’d realize and understand when I say I am the Son of God. His logic cannot be questioned. There is no arguing with it. They simply try to grab him. Our lectionary reads, “but he escaped from their power.” The Greek, however, is that he “went forth from” (ἐξῆλθεν / exēlthen) — interestingly, the same verb used to describe the water and blood that “flowed” from his side when he is pierced by a spear on the cross — “their grasp” (literally, their hands). This sense of “going forth” like flowing water reinforces the sense of irrefutability of the logic that we hear from the Logos of God. When water flows, we are somewhat at a loss of how to stop it, just like the Word of God can’t be stoppered and Jesus can’t be arrested before His time. These things are not subject to the will of humanity; they operate on a different plane and they are inevitable.
Crucifix of the Pierced Heart of Jesus from the Mother House Chapel of the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Ixelles, Belgium | image from rscjinternational.org.
As we have read Jesus’s exchanges with the Jews in Jerusalem all week, I am struck by the repeated rejection He received and the unwillingness of the Jews to hear His message. There were many years when I only got the “greatest hits” readings on Sundays, often focused on his miracles and great sayings, and they don’t portray the fuller story of his work as a prophet who is rejected by his people. The gospels are definitely meant to be read as a narrative, straight through, beginning to end. The whole Bible for that matter, for how else can we see the redemption of Jeremiah in the figure of Christ, who experiences his same tribulations but bears it with a patience, a steadiness, and a love that is unequaled by mankind.
Thursday in the Fifth Week of Lent: Genesis 17:3-9, John 8:51-59.
Today’s readings compare God’s foundational covenant with Abraham and the New Covenant he offers through Christ. The terms of the covenants change, both the scope of God’s promise as well as the requirements from humanity. The constant, however, is the Word of God, providing the providential ordering of our lives.
What stands out for me in the first reading is the earthly terms of the covenant God establishes with Abraham. Note the earthly elements: making him “exceedingly fertile,” giving him “the land in which you are now staying, the whole land of Canaan, as a permanent possession,” and changing his name from Abram (“Exalted Father”) to Abraham (“Father of Many Nations”). God’s plan seems to be one of choosing the patch of earth and people that he will till and tend, waiting for the fruit that it will bear. This fruit, of course, is Mary, and in turn, Christ.
God’s Promise to Abraham (1866), woodcut by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld for the “Bibel in Bildern” (Bible in Pictures) | Wikimedia Commons.
Even the terms of the covenant placed upon Abraham and his offspring are very earthly. Genesis reports God’s command in the verses after today’s reading: “Every male among you shall be circumcised.” Symbolically and bodily, this is very important. The very organ for procreation, the method for being “exceedingly fertile,” will be marked for God. It will be exposed in a symbolic opening of one’s heart to be a servant of God. This is a permanent mark of a tribe, more permanent than pagan piercings, more indelible than tattoos. There is no hiding or turning back from this bodily mark in this world.
Circumcision lays the foundation for Moses and the generations after him when God presents them with a multitude of laws. The Abrahamic nations needed to live with the incontrovertibility of circumcision so that later generations could accept more prescriptive laws intended to keep them pure in body, mind, and spirit. Into this people, Mary was born miraculously without sin via the Immaculate Conception. And the prescriptions on purity and a cultural willingness to accept God’s law prepared her to accept the Incarnation of Christ in her womb.
Returning to our reading, let’s dwell for a moment on the opening verses: “you are to become the father of a host of nations. No longer shall you be called Abram; your name shall be Abraham.” This is the essence of the Word of God: to create, to name, to make manifest his plans. No other “word” operates in this way. I might name my dog “Thunderbark,” but that doesn’t make his bark actually sound like thunder. In fact, our act of naming things often describes what we see, hear, touch, smell, or in some other way process through our senses. God’s Word, on the other hand, is creative and generative in that reality conforms to his Word rather than his Word describing what already exists. He is the Creator — he makes it exist.
We know from St. John that Jesus Christ is the Word of God, specifically the Λόγος (Logos). In the prologue to his gospel, he gives us the most influential Christian text on the Logos: “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. … All things came into being through him … And the Logos became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:1, 3a, 14). Logos, as I have noted in a previous reflection (The Life-Giving Word) is only partially defined by the English “Word.” It does literally mean “word,” “discourse,” or “account,” but by the time John writes his gospel, it had about 600 years of philosophical meaning attached to it as well. There are several threads that likely would have influenced John:
The writings of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c.535-475 BC) and his followers, who took the word logos that was already in common use and gave it more of a philosophical meaning, that of the reason or truth inherent in the world. From here we can see how Aristotle formulates logos as “reasoned discourse,” one of the three modes of persuasion.
The writings of the Greek Stoics (c.300 BC – 200 AD), who spoke of logos as the active reason pervading the Universe. They used the term λόγος σπερματικός (logos spermatikos) to mean the generative principle of the Universe that creates and takes back all things. This sounds a lot like God, which they intended, since logos for them was a type of spiritual or supernatural “ordering essence” in things.
The writings of the Hellenized Jew Philo of Alexandria (20 BC – 40 AD), who takes the Stoic philosophy a bit father. He calls Logos “the first-born of God,” and writes, “the Logos of the living God is the bond of everything, holding all things together and binding all the parts, and prevents them from being dissolved and separated.” But for Philo, the Logos is an intermediary divine being, a demiurge that is God’s instrument of creation, and this is soundly rejected by the developing Christian Church that upholds the equality and consubstantiality of the Son and the Father in the Trinity.
The oldest known icon of Christ Pantocrator, 6th-century encaustic icon from Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai | Wikimedia Commons. This famous icon represents the perfect union of the human and the divine in Christ. The features on his left side (the viewer’s right) represent the qualities of his human nature, while his right side (the viewer’s left) represents his divinity.His right hand is shown opening outward, signifying his gift of blessing, while the left hand and arm is clutching a thick Gospel. Below is a mirrored composite of this image (made in Photoshop) that illustrates how the divine essence (left) is pure and perfect while the human nature (right) is painted in shadow with all of the “weathered” nature of the body and the earth.
John’s Logos is not a synthesis of these definitions, nor does he simply “borrow” from these more developed and earlier systems, which many scholars want to claim. I think that is a condescending and belittling statement that discounts the true divine revelation at work in John’s Christology. Certainly, he did not invent the word Logos, but he instills the particularity of Jesus’s person that other philosophies employing Logos simply do not contain. Much like Christ reformulates our understanding of the terms life, death, and father, he gives new meaning to the word Logos. That being said, I think we must consider the vibrant meaning this word already contained by the time John uses it. It does translate to “word,” but it’s fair to say that John also understood it to mean reason, a generative principle in the universe, and an ordering essence.
By insisting that Jesus Christ is the Logos of God and the Son of God, he says that this particular Jew who died on a cross around 33 BC was the ordering essence of the Universe, reason and truth incarnate. Thus, when Jesus speaks, the generative Word of God, the Logos is brought to bear in the world. That same Word that gave Abraham his name and established circumcision to prepare the fertile soil that would bring forth Jesus Christ as its fruit is, in fact, dwelling in Christ. Every time Christ speaks in John’s gospel, he brings forth real truth, and he is sure to remind us that he is sent from God and is speaking God’s Word, not something he generated himself as a man. We hear of no one else in sacred scripture who makes this claim.
Jesus Among the Doctors (1862), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres | Wikimedia Commons.
So, the question is, how can you resist the Word of God, the Logos of the universe? How can you doubt it, not trust it? A few verses before our gospel reading today, Jesus asks this very question: “If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me?” (Jn 8:46). He then answers his own question for them: “Whoever is of God hears the words of God. The reason you do not hear them is that you are not of God.” This is a continuation of yesterday’s gospel reading and reflection; Jesus is trying to remind them of who their spiritual father is, namely God the Father. He points out that their disbelief in him stems from their fundamental distance from God the Father. They reject him because they have already rejected the Father in spirit.
The exchange in today’s gospel, the remainder of chapter 8, displays just how much they have rejected the Father and, in turn, how far they are from accepting Jesus and the Kingdom he offers. Their response to him (just before the reading picks up) is “Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?” They have devolved into name-calling, certainly not the sign of people who hold God dear to their hearts.
Then, they take up jeering: “Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died? Or the prophets, who died? Who do you make yourself out to be?” They are not open to hearing the content of his words in the least. They are just picking out phrases he says to throw them back and wound him. Their rejection is complete when they pick up stones to throw at him; since their barbed words seem not to work, they try to carry out the violence physically. All of these words and actions come from a sinful spirit, a soul being fed by Satan and not God.
What exactly is Jesus trying to say to them that garners this barrage of insults? The text sounds like Jesus desperately wants to break through to them, saying, “Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever keeps my word will never see death.” This sentence is worth examining. The first half of the sentence occurs so often throughout the gospels (John writes “Amen, amen,” while Matthew, Mark, and Luke use a single “Amen,”) that it is the most characteristic thing about his speech patterns. Jesus is the only one to use it at the beginning of his statements rather than the end of a prayer or as a confirmation of some other saying. And all of these writers have chosen to keep the Hebrew word “Amen” even though Greek has a word for “truly”: ἀληθῶς (alethos). So, “Truly I tell you” and “Verily I tell you” are not good translations here. There is no reason to translate a word that we regularly use in all of our prayers.
To get at what “Amen” means other than “truly” “or “verily,” let’s turn to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s fantastic Introduction of Christianity, where the entire first chapter delves into this question: “‘Amen’ simply says once again in its own way what belief means: the trustful placing of myself on a ground that upholds me, not because I have made it and checked it by my own calculations but, rather, precisely because I have not made it and cannot check it” (75). This Hebrew word expresses that one’s being is grounded in belief and faith. It marks the rootedness of oneself in the faith of our singular God. It could easily be translated as “I believe” when used at the end of a prayer or when receiving the Eucharist. Ratzinger goes on to write:
The Christian attitude of belief is expressed in the little word “Amen”, in which the meanings trust, entrust, fidelity, firmness, firm ground, stand, truth all interpenetrate each other … The indivisibility of meaning, ground, and truth that is expressed both in the Hebrew word “Amen” and in the Greek logos at the same time intimates a whole view of the world. … For to believe as a Christian means in fact entrusting oneself to the meaning that upholds me and the world; taking it as the firm ground on which I can stand fearlessly (76, 73).
So what is “Amen” when it is used by Jesus not as a confirmation of belief but as an introduction of something he is saying? I believe he is affirming that he is the firm ground on which we can stand. He is the source of the Amen, the Logos that is truth and meaning. And I don’t think this is just a clever rhetorical trick he uses to establish authority. It pours out of him 50 or so times in the New Testament, part and parcel of the truth he gives as a gift to humanity.
After he says, “Amen, Amen,” He says λέγω ὑμῖν (legō hymin), which translates to “I say to you” or “I am telling you,” but legō just as correctly translates to “teach” or “command.” Thus, we can just as truthfully translate the first half of his statement, amēn, amēn, legō hymin to be: “The truth is here, I am teaching it to you.”
The Sacred Heart of Jesus (Serce Jezusa), 1911, Józef Mehoffer | Wikimedia Commons.
The second half of his important statement is “whoever keeps my word will never see death.” As you might imagine, there is more depth here than first appears in our English translation. The verb “keeps” (τηρήσῃ / tērēsē) means to “watch over,” to “guard,” and to “observe.” And, lo and behold, “my word” is logon (from logos). As we have detailed, since Christ is the Logos, when he says “observe my logon,” we can understand this to mean “whoever upholds the truth I bring to the world.”
The entire statement has the lyrical feel of a proverb because the next verb “see” is θεωρήσῃ (theōrēsē), so we have some alliteration and rhyme between two verbs of beholding: tērēsē and theōrēsē. And let’s not think he means “experience” death when he says “see death.” This verb theōrēsē means to see in the sense of “to observe (as a spectator)” or “to contemplate (as in the mind)” and thus is much more consistent with the meaning of death as a type of sleeping, an inferior force in the world compared to the life from the Logos, as we discussed in the reflection on Lazarus, See the Glory of God.
‘Amen’ simply says once again in its own way what belief means: the trustful placing of myself on a ground that upholds me, not because I have made it and checked it by my own calculations but, rather, precisely because I have not made it and cannot check it.
– Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 75.
I know that this has been a long examination of a simple sentence, but where have we arrived? I think this changes the tenor of the statement to be less of a desperate “listen to me!” to more of a confident declaration of his truth and revelation of his being. “Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever keeps my word will never see death” can be also translated (in the context of this discussion), “The truth is here, I am teaching it to you; whoever upholds the truth I bring to the world will never be held in the thrall of death.”
Christ in the Desert (1933), Nicholas Roerich | image from arthive.com. I like this painting in that death is pictured in the shadows and could be mistaken for a black mountain if not for Christ’s patient, pervasive light that illuminates his grotesque charade.
To tie this back to our opening observation about the contrast between the Abrahamic covenant and the new covenant given by Christ, God’s promise is no longer earth-bound. In fact, it’s about transcending the scope of earthly concerns, specifically death, and accessing the divine. For our part, our requirement is almost absurdly simple: uphold in our hearts the truth Christ brings into the world. Of course, in practice, this turns out to be harder than it sounds.
Jesus’s final statement in today’s reading also speaks to the revelation of his being, and this one really throws the Jews into a fit. They scoff and ask how he can possibly know that Abraham saw his day and was glad. His answer: “Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM.”
Whoa! We get his signature opening of truth and the statement that their spiritual and ethnic father was γενέσθαι (genesthai), that is, “brought into being,” and before that, he (Jesus Christ) “is” — a different verb, εἰμί (eimi), which means to exist, not to be brought into being. He affirms John’s prologue that he is the Logos made flesh, that he exists from the beginning, with God and of God. By telling them that Abraham was glad for his arrival on earth, he also affirms that he has existed throughout all time, has been with all of the prophets and is above them.
As we say in the Liturgy of the Hours, “He is the first-born of all creation; in every way the primacy is his.” With this lens of comprehension on his statement, the argument that the Jews are attempting to have with him in the temple is almost laughable. As St. Paul says in his letter to the Colossians,
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell (Col 1:15-19a).
What is the sum total of all these heavy theological concepts that come together in Jesus Christ? For me, if I am a Christian, I accept all that Christ reveals as Logos, as Truth, as God. What he tells us today is that when we accept him (“guard” his Logos in our hearts), we are accepting a reality of God’s providential plan for humanity.
In his 1998 Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio, Pope Saint John Paul II writes, “The word of God reveals the final destiny of men and women and provides a unifying explanation of all that they do in the world” (81). Do we allow this to happen? Is our worldview fundamentally Christological?
Do we interpret all of history through Christ or do we think that he’s just one voice among many holy voices? Do we think that has some truthful things to share with us or do we accept that he is the very truth and meaning that have ordered the universe from the beginning of time?
These are important questions — he forces us to make a choice because only by accepting his truth can we transcend death. If we want sanctification, divinization, and salvation, we have the Way, the Truth, and the Life right here with us.
Wednesday in the Fifth Week of Lent: Daniel 3:14-20, 91-92, 95, John 8: 31-42.
Today’s readings give us a glimpse of what it looks like to be freed from the slavery of sin alongside the Son of God and also what it looks like to be stuck in our slavery. It’s clear that faith is the key ingredient.
The first reading from the Book of Daniel is the other perspective of the reading we had two weeks ago (which we discussed in Mercy is the Master Principle). The young Jewish men named Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah were given Persian names by King Nebuchadnezzar’s chief official. As we hear, they are called Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego; it is a form of forced assimilation, as is the king’s decree that all must bow and worship the golden statue he has erected.
But our young Jewish men refuse, and when called in front of the king to explain themselves, they profess their faith in the God of Abraham. Their speech is noteworthy:
If our God, whom we serve, can save us from the white-hot furnace and from your hands, O king, may he save us! But even if he will not, know, O king, that we will not serve your god or worship the golden statue that you set up.
Their faith does not depend on a display of power from God. They say “if he can save us, may he do so.” Importantly, they add, “even if he will not save us, know that we won’t serve your god or worship your statue.” Now that’s a refreshing display of faith. We’re used to hearing laments of how God can forsake his people, yet these three aren’t filled with fear, doubt, or anger.
The story of Daniel and the Three Youths in the Fiery Furnace (1725-1750), Adrianoupolitis Konstantinos | Wikimedia Commons.
The passage we read a few weeks ago provides Azariah’s great prayer, but today we hear instead the reaction of the king before they are cast into the fire: his “face became livid with utter rage,” he heats the furnace up “seven times more than usual” and has “some of the strongest men in his army” bind them and cast them into the fire. His over-the-top, emotional reaction is emphasized in his unnecessary measures like superheating the furnace and having his strongest men cast them in. This is the reaction of human, earthly power when it is defied.
It’s a show of power that is truly impotent in the face of a power that comes not from this world. Contrast this with God’s patience and mercy when we defy him. Also, let’s contrast this with God’s wrath, which he has under control, does not use unjustly or emotionally (see The Purifying Fire We Call God’s Wrath).
In all of his power, King Nebuchadnezzar becomes an archetype of someone who is a slave to sin. His power, extreme passions, and pride distort his soul and the breath of divinity God has placed in humanity. He cannot blossom in his humanity, which requires embracing love. In fact, he eventually goes mad (see William Blake’s illustration below):
“He was driven away from people and ate grass like the ox. His body was drenched with the dew of heaven until his hair grew like the feathers of an eagle and his nails like the claws of a bird. At the end of that time, I, Nebuchadnezzar, raised my eyes toward heaven, and my sanity was restored. Then I praised the Most High; I honored and glorified him who lives forever” (Dn 4:33-34).
God shows us that when we are enslaved to sin, we become no more than base animals. It is the spark of divinity in us that raises us up from that state. God frees us from the slavery of sin, a type of insanity and animalism.
Nebuchadnezzar, the Tate impression (1805), William Blake | Wikimedia Commons. Nebuchadnezzar was part of the so-called Large Colour Prints; a series begun in 1795 of twelve color monotype prints. These were painted on millboard, after which the board was put through Blake’s printing press. After they were printed, Blake and his wife Catherine added ink and watercolor to the impressions. It existed in four impressions (copies), now in: Tate Britain in London, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and a fourth which has been missing since 1887.
King Nebuchadnezzar is the figure who shows us slavery to sin but he is also the one who points out the state of being freed from sin and blessed by God. In today’s reading, he makes another notable comment. Upon seeing figures still standing in the furnace, he exclaims, “I see four men unfettered and unhurt, walking in the fire, and the fourth looks like a son of God.” This clear choice of words for “son of God,” לְבַר־ אֱלָהִֽין׃ (bar-Elahim), when read with the full view of salvation history provided by Jesus Christ, is a reminder that when we are blessed with eternal life, we live with the Son of God. Elsewhere, this figure is identified as an angel of God, but here, viewed through the white-hot fire intended to purify — the trial by fire that these young men have survived — this salvific figure is seen as the Son of God.
This brings us to Jesus in today’s gospel from St. John. This is the third of four consecutive days we read from chapter 8 of John’s gospel where Jesus is displayed in a series of confrontations with dubious Jews in the temple area. On Monday, he schooled the scribes and Pharisees who attempted to bring him an adulteress for judgment, establishing that he was the law in letter and spirit. Yesterday, he made bold claims of his authority and parentage, noting that by disbelieving in his divinity, they will die in sin. Today, he turns to what should be a more trusting audience than the Phariseees, “those Jews who believed in him.” But even with these people, we find that their elevated notions of who they are get in the way of hearing his message.
He tells them, “If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” What a lovely promise! And a quotable quote, as they say, for 21st-century thinking: the truth will set you free. Our contemporary problem is that we ignore that the truth comes only from the Son of God and we think some other “truth” that we will discover will set us free.
The problem in Jesus’s time was the second half of the aphorism, the “set you free” part. They object: “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone.” Slavery was a very much a reality in these days. They object to the use of the word because it has real-world implications and a terrifying historical value for them.
By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down yea we wept when we remembered Zion (1942), Saul Raskin | image from mutualart.com. This is Raskin’s illustration of Psalm 137 that he painted for an illustrated Book of Psalms. Enslavement has always haunted the Jewish mind, and Jesus’s words about slavery to sin were difficult to digest.
But Jesus doesn’t budge. Much like he does in re-framing their worldview around death and life with the raising of Lazarus (see See the Glory of God), he is determined here to re-frame their understanding of slavery and freedom. He explains, “everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin. A slave does not remain in a household forever, but a son always remains. So if the Son frees you, then you will truly be free.” His point is an important one: we slaves cannot stay in the Father’s house, the Kingdom of God, of our own volition, good works, faith, or anything else we do. It is only when the Son frees us that we stop being slaves and can become adopted sons and daughters of God.
How does the Son free us? He brings us the truth from the Father about how we must order our lives, and we must fully accept his Truth. He also brings a New Covenant, established on the Cross, that pours out the liturgy upon us, and we must participate as one Church in this everlasting liturgy of life in order to stay in the Kingdom and no longer be slaves to sin.
Today’s reading continues as he urges them to do what the Father has said, “I tell you what I have seen in the Father’s presence; then do what you have heard from the Father,” but they continue to oppose His point of view and the truth He is giving them. They respond that their father is Abraham, sadly identifying themselves primarily through their human progenitor rather than their Creator whom they supposedly love and worship above all else. Jesus meets them here, however, and says,
If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works of Abraham. But now you are trying to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God; Abraham did not do this. You are doing the works of your father!
Jesus will tell them even more about his relationship to Abraham in tomorrow’s reading. Here, he notes that they can’t be true children of Abraham because they are doing something he did not do; that is, Abraham listened to and obeyed God no matter how difficult his commands, while they are not. Note how subtly Jesus continues to reframe the conversation — he talks about Abraham as their spiritual father, the one who guides their moral choices, while he knows that they are talking about Abraham as their ethnic father.
His final remark is to be read in this same spiritual vein: the work of their actual spiritual “father” (not Abraham) is to willfully not listen to the truth Jesus brings. What father does he mean other than Satan, the father of sin and prince of the world?
They begin to meet him on this spiritual father footing, but retain a stubborn literalism in the ways of the world they think establish their own worth. They say, “We were not born of fornication.” They seek to legitimize themselves (we’re not bastards! we have a true father!), although Christ continues to push on the point that the only legitimizing source is God in heaven. They add, almost sullenly, as if finally conceding what he’s saying, “We have one Father, God.”
Aha! They finally arrive to the place he was leading them. So Jesus can begin to make his logic heard: “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and am here; I did not come on my own, but he sent me.”
The Sacrifice of Jesus Christ, Son of God, Gathering and Protecting Mankind (1562), Frans Floris I | Wikimedia Commons.
This conversation continues in tomorrow’s gospel reading, but today’s reading displays for us the slavery of sin in a very interesting way. Just as shackles hold one down, hold one back from free movement, we see the Jews being held down from spiritual growth, even mental opening to the possibility of Christ. Nothing is holding them down but their own stubbornness, their own attachments to definitions made in the world (ethnicity, legitimacy from human ancestors), and their unwillingness to let go of the comfort of their self-assuredness.
This is why Jesus preaches so energetically about the need for humility throughout his ministry. Pride is the veneer we build up over our eyes so that we will not notice our own enslavement to sin. We must dissolve this pride and open ourselves up with humility so that we can grow into the truth that Christ gives us.
This demands a vulnerability, a willingness to say that our Father is the invisible one who we can’t prove exists but in whom we believe more solidly than the ground beneath our feet.
Tuesday in the Fifth Week of Lent: Numbers 21:4-9, John 8:21-30.
Today’s readings present us with a seminal scene from the Old Testament that bridges the entire span of salvation history from the Garden of Eden to Christ’s Paschal Sacrifice on the Cross. In the gospel, Jesus speaks of himself in terms of the actions of Moses in the Old Testament reading, and in this way, the two passages — 1,475 years apart — shed light on one another.
Serpent illustration by Katie Scott | courtesy katie-scott.tumblr.com.
The passage from the Book of Numbers is exceedingly odd at first glance: the Lord punishes the Israelites for complaining by sending poisonous serpents among them; upon their admission of guilt and atonement, Moses prays for deliverance, after which God instructs him to mount a serpent on a pole; subsequently, when the people look up at the serpent on the pole after being bitten, they are spared from death. What kind of witchcraft is going on here? A magic serpent staff to ward off a plague of poisonous snakes?
Let’s slowly interrogate this story to understand what’s going on. First, what is this great sin that deserves a plague of poisonous snakes? On one hand, it seems like somewhat innocuous, albeit irritating, grumbling. We hear, “But with their patience worn out by the journey, the people complained against God and Moses.” This is just human nature, right? However, it wasn’t general complaining, it was complaining specifically against God and Moses. It showed a lack of trust, despite the wonders given to them in escaping Egypt, encountering God on Mt. Sinai, receiving the commandments, being given manna and quail and water from a rock.
Mistrust in the midst of wonders — does this remind us of anyone? How about Adam and Eve? And who plants the seeds of mistrusting God in the mind of Eve but the serpent? Thus, God’s sending of the serpents is the reminder of humanity’s original sin in mistrusting God’s providence and grace.
It would be fair to say that the serpent is the symbol of humanity’s sin against God. 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 first requirement in the recipe for God’s mercy has been met: contrition. Next comes Moses’s prayer, followed by divine mercy in the form of … well, another serpent. God instructs Moses to “mount it on a pole, and whoever looks at it after being bitten will live.”
The Word of God truly seems baffling here, operating on a level that is not immediately evident. Nonetheless, being the obedient servant of God that he is, Moses complies with the Lord’s instructions, “and whenever anyone who had been bitten by a serpent looked at the bronze serpent, he lived.” 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.
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 in the forms 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.
The Jews understood the symbolic and importance of this staff as a way to encounter God’s grace and kept it 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” (Jn 3:14-15). With this statement, the Word of God doesn’t just restore the symbolic importance of the serpent staff, he also 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, not to the serpent itself (in other words, Jesus is not comparing himself to a serpent!). “So must the Son of Man be lifted up” — this refers to his crucifixion, where he becomes the ultimate symbol for humanity; and note that he refers to his human nature here when saying “Son of Man” to emphasize that the same sin symbolized by the serpent is being affixed to the cross in the sins of the human person, for which Jesus stands in as a sacrificial lamb.
And finally the salvific import: “that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” Just as the Jews who were sinful and bitten by snakes saw the staff were reminded of their belief in God and were saved from dying at that moment, we have 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, as if it is only sleep by another name (as we explored in the reflection, See the Glory of God).
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.
All of this brings us to today’s gospel, where Jesus tells the Pharisees “if you do not believe that I AM, you will die in your sins.” This is one of a series of super bold statements John reports of Jesus. It doesn’t get much more blunt than this; by invoking the name of YAHWEH in reference to himself (I AM Who I AM), Jesus is clearly saying that he is God as well as a man. Plus, he tells them that only a belief in him as God will save them from dying in sin. We can hear echoes of his conversation with Nicodemus, “whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” His message is consistent and resounding: he is to be the symbol of sin pinned down, raised up on a Cross in hatred by men, but in reality a sacrament of God’s grace and love. This is the Word of God writ large in the temple; this is stunning.
The Pharisees don’t get it. All they can say is, “Who are you?” The scribes and Pharisees in John’s gospel seem to be stuck in this morass of defining Jesus’s provenance. Later in this chapter, they will say, “Aren’t we right in saying that you are a Samaritan and demon-possessed?” And we’ve already heard them get hung up on their belief that the Messiah could never come from Galilee. Over and over, Jesus tries to tell them that he is from the one “who is true,” that His Father is in heaven. But this truth is too radical, too supernatural, too blasphemous in their minds to even compute.
Jesus tries again in today’s reading to make Himself clear:
When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I AM, and that I do nothing on my own, but I say only what the Father taught me. The one who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, because I always do what is pleasing to him.
Again, it is simply stunning to me how he refers to himself as “I AM” and constantly puts the focus back on God the Father. It is plain as day. Whoever tries to tell you that Jesus was a social rabble-rouser and malcontent, like so many other “Messiahs” at this point in history, well that person needs to read the Bible a little more closely. What political activist uses his moment in the limelight to say “I do nothing on my own but I only say what the Father taught me”?
He does not seek glory and he has hard teachings (such as eating his Body and drinking his Blood for salvation) that push away many would-be followers. And he literally schools the experts in Jewish law (see yesterday’s post), establishing his own wisdom and command over divine teaching. Finally, we have his selfless, miraculous death and resurrection, when the Son of Man is raised like the serpent staff of Moses for us to gaze upon.
Our only job at this point is to believe. To fully believe after we have been given such wonders. Let us not be like Adam and Eve and mistrust God in the midst of the wonders we are given. Let us not be like the Israelites in the Exodus who do the same. We are a new people, the Church, in a New Covenant, and have been given the greatest sacrament of all.
Allegory of Salvation (c.1555), Antonius Heusler | Wikimedia Commons. The description states: John the Baptist makes a man (Adam), clothed only with a loin cloth aware of the crucified Jesus. Behind the man are standing Isaiah and an apostle. In the background are shown the Brazen Serpent, the Annunciation to the Virgin and Christ triumphing over Death and the Devil.
Monday in the Fifth Week of Lent: Daniel 13:1-9, 15-17, 19-30, 33-62, John 8:1-11.
Adultery is the theme in today’s readings. As we are presented with stories about this sin, one of the great sins against the Ten Commandments, we learn about a different kind of adultery, which is a betrayal of God in our hearts. We also learn about the fidelity God provides even in the midst of our sin — that his law protects us from sin and also picks us up when we fall.
In the first reading from the Book of Daniel, we read about the “God-fearing woman, Susanna” and the wicked judges who accuse her of adultery with a fictitious young man. It is they who have succumbed to lust for her. The author writes, “They suppressed their consciences; they would not allow their eyes to look to heaven.” I appreciate how this describes the moment of slipping into evil; they act here by suppressing their consciences and keeping their eyes from looking to heaven. The gaze of a person to heaven, yearning for and obeying God, is a great way to envision our relationship with him. We are always striving to be worthy of him, of his grace and mercy. By intentionally looking away from heaven, these wicked judges are breaking off their relationship with God.
So, what is this relationship? First of all, it is a relationship that he began — with our initial Creation as his children, and then with the covenants he initiates for us throughout history. This reveals that he loves us and wants us to be close to him. As we discussed in our reflection, The Purifying Fire We Call God’s Wrath, being close to him requires some preparation because his purifying essence embraces all that is good but burns all that is evil. With his covenants, he gives us a path to follow in order to not be burned but be embraced. We call this path the Law, but note that it serves the purpose of helping us grow in the Spirit, not that it should simply be followed for the sake of being followed.
Where does adultery come in? Well, marriage is a microcosm of this covenant with God (assuming we’re talking about marriage in the Church, not a civil union). Marriage carries with it a vow, a covenant between the man and woman. There are rules (law) to follow that define that fidelity and that covenant, but holding it together is the love they have and that will grow between them (the spirit).
On top of this legalistic view of marriage vows, marriage is a sacrament because God sanctifies the union. The couple vows to be loving and faithful to each other with the help of the Spirit. God, in turn, enters the sacramental marriage and becomes present in their union. Each is Christ for one another.
The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine of Siena (c.1460), Giovanni di Paolo (Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia) | Wikimedia Commons.
Adultery is a spiritual sin as much as a breaking of the law. That is why James in his letter “Adulterers! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God” (James 4:4). Adultery is here applied to choosing the world over God. Jesus, too, uses the word to refer to a faithless people who have turned spiritually away from God: “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah” (Mt 12:39).
Some have written that because adultery is such a serious sin in God’s eyes it is used as a metaphor for spiritual sin in turning away from God. But I think this is backward. Adultery is breaking a personal covenant with one’s beloved, and Jesus teaches that the “greatest commandment” is to love God first, then love our neighbor as we love ourselves. To say that human marriage and adultery is of primary importance and it can then be extended to our relationship with God is backward in priority.
Our personal covenant of love with God is the primary relationship that orders our lives and marriage on earth is a beautiful microcosm of that love. After all, God is the source and Christ the example of the type of selfless love we are called to bring to our marriages. Adultery with our spouse on earth is perhaps a more tangible way for us to grasp the great sin that is adultery against God.
Detail from Susanna and the Elders (1653), Jacob Jordaens | Wikimedia Commons. While I think Jodaens is off with his smiling Susanna, as if she’s enjoying the intrusion of these nasty men on her bath, I think he’s spot on with the devilish faces of the judges and their grasping hands. It speaks to their lustful focus on her.
So when the two elder judges in the Book of Daniel “would not allow their eyes to look to heaven,” they are on the path of becoming spiritual adulterers. When they act upon their lustful desires by attempting to rape Susanna and then falsely accuse her of adultery, we are given a juxtaposition of worldly adultery and spiritual adultery. Their false testimony as judges in a court and the ensuing guilty verdict begs the question of why laws can fail to provide justice. Human justice, as we all know, often does fail and miss the mark — it is not divine justice and it is tainted by the sins each of us carries with us.
But Susanna appeals to God for divine justice, not to the court for human justice. And, “The Lord heard her prayer. As she was being led to execution, God stirred up the holy spirit of a young boy named Daniel.” The story reminds us that while God is the source, he works in this world through the Spirit and through other people. Daniel’s youth speaks to the purity and honesty we hope for when we think of justice. And his spirit-given wisdom allows him to trap the wicked judges in their lies. The whole episode validates spiritual fidelity to God as well as marital fidelity to one’s spouse.
Cropped image of The Innocence of Susanna (c.1621), Valentin de Boulogne | Creative Commons, courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Note the emphasis of the children and the child-like honesty of divine justice.
The gospel from St. John presents another look at marital vs. spiritual adultery. In this account, the question of the Law and the Spirit come into even sharper focus. This account has often been presented to us in a very moralistic sense, i.e., don’t judge others and God’s mercy is boundless, even for sinners. But we are very far removed from traditional Jewish ritual practice, and I think we’re both missing the point and mistakenly generalizing a specific act of teaching that Jesus presents.
All signs point to the fact that this is almost identical in nature to the first reading, where several judges are falsely accusing a woman of adultery in a miscarriage of justice. The key is when Jesus says, “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” He is not saying that only sinless people can execute justice (no judicial system could exist!). He is referring to the Torah where it is written that if “you make a thorough inquiry, and the charge is proved true,” then not only shall the adulterer/adulteress be stoned, but “The hands of the witnesses shall be the first raised against the person to execute the death penalty” (Deut 17:4, 7).
You see, this woman was dragged before Jesus by the scribes and Pharisees although the Torah relates that witnesses must bring her to the temple for justice. If these scribes and Pharisees truly caught her in the act and are witnesses, then they should cast the first stone (a serious act that must be justified otherwise you are murdering, not carrying out justice). Otherwise, they are sinning by lying about witnessing the adultery.
So, “let the one among you who is without sin” is the same as saying “whoever witnessed this should be the first to stone her.” Jesus is living the law more fully then these scribes and Pharisees are. Tellingly, no one casts a stone.
Detail from Jesus and the Sinner Woman (c.1886), Vasily Polenov | Creative Commons, courtesy Artbible.info.
The other key that tells us this episode is more about Jesus’s authority as the Word and Law than it is about mercy and forgiveness is his act of writing in the dirt. St. Augustine of Hippo writes an enticing few lines about this act:
“You have heard, O Jews, you have heard, O Pharisees, you have heard, O teachers of the law, the guardian of the law, but have not yet understood Him as the Lawgiver. What else does He signify to you when He writes with His finger on the ground? For the law was written with the finger of God; but written on stone because of the hard-hearted. The Lord now wrote on the ground, because He was seeking fruit” (Tractate 33 on the Gospel of John, 5).
This interpretive move is a nice way to look at the new reality of God in the flesh, working in humanity in a new way.
But let us also understand this more literally within Jewish ritual law. For accusations of adultery without witnesses (as Jesus knows this is), the Torah describes a water trial (called Sotah) that the woman must undergo. It instructs, “the priest shall take holy water in an earthen vessel, and take some of the dust that is on the floor of the tabernacle and put it into the water. … the priest shall put [the charges and penalties] in writing, and wash them off into the water of bitterness. He shall make the woman drink the water of bitterness that brings the curse” (Numbers 5:17, 23).
“Holy water” was written in Hebrew as “living water,” and we can begin to see how Christ, who is living water and our high priest, is enacting the Sotah ritual as prescribed in the Torah. He (the water) writes in the dust the charges and penalties, fulfilling the letter of the Law that He wrote. Let us also keep in the front of our minds that this is the incarnate Word of God. The Word that forms the Torah and its prescriptions around how to carry out justice. As Jesus affirms, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Mt 5:17).
Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery (c.1600), Pieter Brueghel the Younger | Wikimedia Commons.
So the scribes and Pharisees came to entrap him and they truly have no clue about who they are challenging. He is the Word, the fulfillment of the Law — he knows it better than they ever could. He knows that these prescriptions are in place so that there is no miscarriage of justice. He lifts up the law to fulfill the spiritual work it is intended to do: to keep our hearts clean from lies and sin, to keep sinners from perverting the justice God intends in the world.
On what other evidence might we think this episode is not about “forgiveness no matter what”? His parting exchange with the woman bears no resemblance to the other miracles he performs when forgiving sin or healing. He says, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on do not sin any more.” He confirms that he was also not a witness to adultery on her part (which is the point of the encounter with the scribes and Pharisees). Does that mean that she didn’t commit adultery? Not necessarily, but that’s not his mission.
Recall that the Samaritan woman at the well was living in adultery and had five husbands, yet he shared with her one of his most thorough revelations of divinity. Mary Magdalene was also a prostitute, but she became one of his close disciples. It’s not that adultery against a spouse doesn’t matter — the Word of God clearly says it does. It’s that his mission is about fidelity of Spirit. He preaches primarily on the dangers of adultery in the context of our most fundamental covenant with God.
Nothing about this final exchange is like the other miracles or healings he accomplishes. He does not ask her about her faith or belief. He does not establish the atonement and request for mercy that is the requirement for spiritual healing. We must conclude that this encounter is not about sin being forgiven. So when Jesus says, “Go, and from now on do not sin any more,” I’m sure that he was speaking of spiritual adultery just as much, if not more, than spousal adultery.
For me, at least, returning to these familiar stories with a new lens and spirit of contemplation has shed light in new ways. I’m sure that none of these reflections are the ultimate exegesis of scripture, but going through the effort has helped me feel much closer to Christ this Lent.
Fifth Sunday of Lent: Ezekiel 37:12-14, Romans 8:8-11, John 11:1-45.
Resurrection. Each one of today’s readings discusses resurrection. The gospel presents us with the last of Jesus’s great signs in St. John’s gospel, the raising of Lazarus from the dead. We must ask ourselves: what do the prophets and Jesus have to say about death and overcoming death?
Through the mouths of prophets in the Old Testament, God promises us a triumph over death. Because he speaks to us through analogy, millennia of commentators juggle the importance of the literal resurrection of the body, the salvific resurrection at the final judgment, and a more fundamental aspect of the triumph of the Spirit.
What we hear in today’s reading seems to be not just a spiritual triumph, but a bodily triumph. Ezekiel says: “O my people, I will open your graves and have you rise from them.” He also says, “I will put my spirit in you that you may live, and I will settle you upon your land,” so the body and spirit are essential in this triumph over death. We clearly hear that bodies will rise from graves, and the Spirit of the Lord will be put into them.
The full context of this scene in Ezekiel, chapter 37, is that the Lord whisks Ezekiel off to a valley filled with “very dry” bones, people who were clearly dead for a long time. The Lord tells Ezekiel to prophesy to the bones and they will become people again. When Ezekiel follows his commands, they become more than just animated skeletons: “suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them.”
Then, the Lord prompts Ezekiel to ask for the breath of life to fill them, “and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.”
Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones (1866), Gustave Doré | Wikimedia Commons.
So Ezekiel prophesies about the full resurrection, body and spirit, but the Lord also makes a point that this is a metaphor for the life of faith here among his Chosen People: “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’”
Remember that Ezekiel was a prophet during the Babylonian Exile, when the Jews were cut off from the “land of milk and honey,” where Moses had established their lands. So when Ezekiel says in today’s reading, “I will open your graves and have you rise from them, and bring you back to the land of Israel,” he is speaking of a literal return of the nation back to the land of Israel.
Yet as Christians, we understand that the Word of God speaking through the prophets is the same Word of God that becomes incarnate in Jesus Christ. Thus we understand Ezekiel’s words through the lens of Christ as well; he establishes the new Jerusalem as the Kingdom of God and himself as the new temple. To rise bodily from the graves of the exiled Jewish people and be brought back “to the land of Israel” is to find life in the hundreds of millions of believers who make up the Church, the Body of Christ.
Consistent throughout these levels of meaning — bodily and spiritual resurrection, Jewish nation and Christian Church — is how God’s will is opposed to death. The essence of God is the opposite of death. It is the generative spirit of life.
St. Paul speaks of this in today’s reading, telling the Romans that the Spirit, the Person of the Trinity through Whom Christ was raised from the dead, constantly gives us this power of life. He says, “If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also, through his Spirit dwelling in you.”
We must dig deep to understand the spiritual wisdom of St. Paul. Filled with the Spirit himself, he is describing a new way of being, one which dispels a preoccupation with death. Before Christ, humanity was so preoccupied with death as the inevitable fact of existence that it ruled their minds, determined their actions, and “deadened” their souls (and continues to do so for those outside of Christianity). Paul’s consistent message in his epistles is that Christ changed all of this. By rising from the dead — moreso, by placing the divine and immortal God into a mortal human form and having that particular human’s selfless sacrifice so overpower death in significance — death need no longer dominate our lives.
God came to us in love and gave us his Spirit to dwell within us! He writes, “if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the spirit is alive because of righteousness.” Death, for St. Paul, is more of an accidental aspect of our bodies and fleshly desires than it is a finality. The only finality that matters to St. Paul is the unconquerable, generative life given to us by God.
This is the point Jesus attempts to make by raising Lazarus from the dead. While this is the greatest of his miracles in the gospels, it seems that the triumph of the sign he gives might be marred by uncomprehending minds. Don’t get me wrong, there is much cause for rejoicing in this gospel reading, but if we follow Christ’s words and reactions closely, we see that John is saying something about the reception of his message.
St. John gives us a number of clues in this chapter that what Jesus intends is flying over the heads of those with him. John signals the importance of Christ’s message at the beginning of the chapter: Jesus says, “This illness is not to end in death, but is for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” The point, in other words, is “the glory of God,” not how awful death is.
And so we hear the curious logic: “Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that he was ill, he remained for two days in the place where he was.” What type of healer would stay put when he hears that a loved one is ill? An earthly healer bound in mind and spirit to the finality of death would run to their aid immediately. But Jesus, that is, God Incarnate, operates differently. His plan is to show his love for Lazarus and his sisters by opening their eyes to the fact that death isn’t the real finality. Or at least he will try to have them see this point.
Resurrection of Lazarus (6th century), mosaic in Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy | Wikimedia Commons.
Several times he tries to tell his apostles that he’s going to wake Lazarus from his sleep. They first miss the point by saying “Master, if he is asleep, he will be saved.” As if Jesus needs a reminder of the final judgment and salvation of the righteous!
Why does Jesus say “sleep”? If we try to understand the world through his eyes, death is just sleep by another name — it does not hold the same frightening finality and inexorable dread that it does for us.
Jesus tries to be more direct. “Lazarus has died. And I am glad for you that I was not there, that you may believe. Let us go to him.” Then, the sad Eeyore that is Thomas says gloomily, “Let us also go to die with him.” I can just imagine the suppressed eye roll from Jesus at this weird misunderstanding of his words, as if they were going to emotionally “die” with Lazarus while sitting shiva with Lazarus’s sisters. Jesus’s message will continue to be clouded by this emotional response we have to death.
We commonly associate Martha and Mary with the famous episode in St. Luke’s gospel when they welcome him into their house for a meal. Years of sermons have impressed upon us that Martha represents the busy believer who is caught up in the rituals of service while not basking in the Spirit right in front of her. Mary represents the opposite: choosing to bask in his presence and let other tasks slide. But this isn’t Luke’s gospel. Here, St. John perhaps gives us a reverse picture: if anything, Martha is closer to appropriately accepting Christ and what he signifies than Mary is.
First clue: Martha comes to meet Jesus outside of town “but Mary sat at home.” Martha says that if Christ had been there Lazarus would not have died. Many have tried to read some type of chastisement in this statement, but I’m not sure the context supports it. She immediately follows this statement with a profession of faith that God will answer any of Jesus’s prayers. The sum of her statements seems like she laments that he was not there but respects his power and authority. Jesus tells her that Lazarus will rise, and her response is similar to the apostles’: “I know he will rise, in the resurrection on the last day.”
Jesus patiently responds with one of the more memorable lines from the gospels: “I am the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” Jesus accomplishes much, theologically speaking, in this response. First, he takes her belief in the resurrection and makes it immanent in his presence. It is now, not later. Second, he blows up our traditional understanding of death and life. How can someone live “even if he dies”? How can a person of faith “never die”? Let’s recall that Jesus first refers to death as “sleep”. It does not hold the finality that we give it. In this passage, he is saying that the life he gives is way more substantial and significant than this sleep we call death. Plus, in him this life is here now; we need not wait until the last day.
Martha seems to get it. He asks her if she believes and she proclaims that she does. She adds, “I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world.” Does she understand the true implications of his coming? Perhaps so! This proclamation of faith is on the order of the famous one that Peter gives him after his difficult teaching about eating his Body and drinking his Blood in order to have eternal life.
The Raising of Lazarus (c.1616), Jusepe de Ribera, lo Spagnoletto | courtesy Museo del Prado.
Mary, however, is another story. Martha encourages her to get out of her self-absorbed sorrow and go to see the Lord. When she does, Mary is a blubbering puddle of emotion: “she fell at his feet and said to him, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’” This is all she says as she and her companions take to weeping. She is absorbed in herself, in her belief that death holds a significant finality for Lazarus and all of us.
Jesus’s reaction is interesting and has, in my mind, been regularly misinterpreted. There is an issue with translation. Our lectionary says “he became perturbed and deeply troubled,” while the NRSV Bible says, “he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved,” and the Douay-Rheims Bible says that he “groaned in the spirit, and troubled himself.” What’s the verb here?
In the original Greek, it is ἐνεβριμήσατο (enebrimēsato), which literally invokes snorting like a horse. It means “to be greatly fretted or agitated; an expression of indignation” [The Analytical Greek Lexicon, p. 134]. The verb shows that his indignation was internal. The second verb phrase, ἐτάραξεν ἑαυτόν (etaraxen heauton) means “agitated (or troubled) himself.” So, this being perturbed and troubled is clearly directed inwardly. Why?
He asks them where Lazarus has been laid and after they say, “Come and see.” Then the shortest of verses (verse 35): Ἐδάκρυσεν ὁ Ἰησοῦς. Jesus wept. The verb, a form of dakruo, means a quiet, silent weeping, and is only used for Jesus in the entire New Testament. Some of the people note his weeping as a sign of how much he cared while others grumble about the fact that he should have done something to keep Lazarus from dying. At this, Jesus becomes internally perturbed/indignant again (embrimōmenos).
What do we make of these different emotional states of Jesus? First deeply internally agitated, then silent weeping, then internally agitated again? Fr. George Corrigan, OFM writes online the following analysis:
Two interpretations of embrimaomai in 11:33 have been suggested. First, Jesus was ‘perturbed’ with compassion for Mary when he saw her weeping, and second, that he was ‘perturbed’ with anger. It is hard to linguistically justify the sense of “compassion.” Anger is more consistent with the word’s meaning. In the latter case there have been a number of suggestions why he was angry: (1) he was angry because of the faithless weeping and wailing of Mary and ‘the Jews’—they were grieving, as St Paul said, ‘like the rest of men, who have no hope’ (1 Thess. 4:13); (2) he was angry with death itself, the consequence of sin, which caused such pain; (3) he was angry with himself for not coming sooner to heal Lazarus and so prevent his death and the grief it caused Mary and Martha. This last suggestion is unlikely because Jesus knew he was going to raise Lazarus from death. The first suggestion has most to commend it, because the text says it was when Jesus saw Mary weeping like the rest that he became perturbed…but we often rebel at that interpretation.
I tend to agree with Fr. Corrigan here, although I would say that “anger” isn’t quite the term I would use. Even though the Greek points to the perturbance being internal, I don’t think Christ was angry with himself. This would imply that he did something wrong, something that he regrets, and we learn especially in the gospel according to St. John that he was fully God, in control, and purposeful in all of his actions. Remember, he intentionally waited to come to visit and said that Lazarus’s state was “for the glory of God.” There is a plan here.
I also don’t think that he’s angry with death and the associated homilies that paint this whole episode in the rhetoric of war — that Christ is doing battle with death. That perspective gives too much power and authority to death, the exact opposite of what Christ is trying to get us to understand. He calls death “sleep;” he is neither scared nor intimidated by death. He states matter-of-factly: “Our friend Lazarus is asleep, but I am going to awaken him.” As if waking someone from a dream. Easy-peasy. His whole point is that we are held under the sway and the spell of death and he has something so much more powerful and significant for us. This isn’t battle, this is swatting away the fly. It is the sizzling away of the water droplet in the awesome purifying presence of God.
The Raising of Lazarus (c.1630), Rembrandt | Wikimedia Commons.
So, we are left with the first option that Fr. Corrigan presents (or maybe other options that the Word of God is waiting to plant in our hearts after fruitful contemplation). There might be an internal perturbation because Jesus is seeing the sad necessity of his Passion and death, which is coming next in the gospel. Is this a frustration with Mary and the weepers? Maybe. Perhaps it’s a frustration with the state of humanity, so captive to the thrall of death that they can’t see the alternative even when God is present with them. After all, Luke tells us he also weeps over Jersualem and their pigheadedness in not accepting him.
The weeping and the internal agitation are not so opposite (at least one scholar has been so afield as to suggest that Jesus was bipolar!). In my mind, the agitation is the power of God surging passionately in him, a gut-like reaction to the thrall of death he finds in humanity. The silent weeping is his humanity, also fully present in him, and it is sandwiched between these surges of embrimaomai to remind us that our love and emotion comes from God and returns to God. The surges of embrimaomai embrace our human affections in a power that is not from humanity; it is from God and it agitates to release us from the thrall of death.
So, I’d replace “anger” in this examination of the passage with a “gut-like surge, the passion of God’s rejection of death.”
As we finish the gospel reading, we see that even after they have come to the tomb and Jesus asks them to roll back the stone, Martha, the one who seems closest to believing and understanding him, balks, saying that there will be a stench. He replies, “Did I not tell you that if you believe you will see the glory of God?”
We hear no more about a stench, even when Lazarus comes out of the tomb. The glory of God wipes out everything that we think we know to be true. No stench, no death, no laws of physics and biology hold sway in the face of God. Jesus emphasizes this fact when he says, “Untie him and let him go.” It’s his beloved Lazarus, whom he just raised from the dead, and does he rush over to hug him and cry tears of joy with him? No. He reinforces his message that we are slaves to our perception that death holds finality over us by saying “untie” and “let go.”
This is the New Moses, leading his people out of slavery in a new and much more radical way.
Astonishingly, even at this, we hear that “many of the Jews” who saw this “began to believe in him.” WHAT? Not everyone was ready to throw down their belongings and follow him at that moment?? Are you kidding me? Perhaps this is what Jesus saw when he wept his silent tears. No amount of work in his mission while alive can convince the people of God’s radical descent to create a new reality outside of death for them.
It will take his own death and Resurrection for people to see the Glory of God.
The Raising of Lazarus (Opwekking van Lazarus), 1631, Jan Lievens | Wikimedia Commons.
Saturday in the Fourth Week of Lent: Jeremiah 11:18-20, John 7:40-53.
Today’s readings display the evil plots of those who willingly disbelieve. In the Old Testament and New, we see those with hardened hearts speak ill of and plan the destruction of the righteous. We must beware of this tendency that arises when we are not open and inquiring, always humble in the presence of God.
Jeremiah was a spitfire of a prophet, to be sure. He did God’s will without fail, but also reveled a bit in divine justice, or vengeance as he would call it. In today’s reading, God reveals to him that there are those who dislike his preaching and are plotting against him. We hear, “Let us destroy the tree in its vigor; let us cut him off from the land of the living, so that his name will be spoken no more.”
We hear similar evil words throughout sacred scripture and secular history. It reminds me of our Lenten reading of Joseph’s brothers (sons of Jacob), plotting against him and selling him into slavery (see Tend to the Good Fruit of the Vineyard). They say, “Here comes that master dreamer! Come on, let us kill him and throw him into one of the cisterns here” (Gen 37:19-20). Both of these episodes display a disease at the heart of the speakers, their flawed hearts allow jealousy, anger, self-centerdeness, defensiveness, and, ultimately, malice to grow.
Even if murder is not physically enacted, Jesus tells us that the intent is enough to condemn us. As the fulfillment of the law, Jesus warns us that we must be more than just followers of the letter of the law; we must allow God’s Law to inhabit our hearts. From another reading this Lent, he illustrates that while we know we should not kill, “whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment” (Mt 5:22). His point is that while we might refrain from the physical act of murder, we may still hold murderous intent — malice — in our hearts (see Salvation is Based on Our Core Person … for a fuller reflection on this). The reading from Jeremiah (and Genesis) displays this murderous intent in stark words.
Witches’ Sabbath, or the Great He-Goat (1820-1823), Francisco de Goya y Lucientes | Creative Commons, courtesy Museo del Prado, Madrid. The rapt and deformed (unformed might be a better description) faces of the witches painted by Goya in his “Black Period” remind me of the evil plots and empty hearts of those in the world who are paying more attention to Satan than to God. In the process, they are becoming enslaved to themselves and Satan and losing their humanity.
Turning to today’s gospel reading from St. John, we encounter a crowd of very divided Jews reacting to Jesus’s words. Some were convinced that he was “the Christ,” while others wanted to arrest him. What has them in such a state?
In the verses just prior to our reading, we learn that it is “last day of the festival, the great day,” which is known as Hoshana Rabbah. This is the last “day of judgment” in the Jewish calendar, when they process around the temple seven times and have a great temple service, imploring the Lord for a bountiful year ahead. Water played a special role throughout the festival of Sukkot during this period of history. On each morning of the seven days, the priests would travel down to the river to gather water and bring it back to the altars, where it would be poured into special holes that would allow the water to drain at a slow rate, flowing from God’s altar. On this last day of Hoshana Rabbah, the priest makes a great show of the water libation as an appeal to God to provide water for the people in the year ahead. It is at this time that Jesus cries out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water’” (Jn 7:37-38).
No wonder the crowd is aghast! Jesus, as if in answer to the priest’s prayer, tells the people to come to him for living water. He is saying that he has God’s power of restoration for the people. This proclamation forces the Jews to make a decision, to react. Will they accept the Messiah in their midst or reject him?
If they believe him, they must follow him in order to receive this living water that God will provide. Here, at the culmination of a great seven-day festival, replete with rituals and priestly roles, they are facing the option of potentially replacing all of these things that define them with faith in a single man (a Galilean at that!).
On the persuasive side, his preaching during the festival has “astounded” them with his wisdom and command of God’s Word. Plus, he is renowned for working miracles, in the temple and beyond. But the stakes are incredibly high for them. The alternative to following him is that they maintain the rituals and beliefs that are much more comfortable to them. It’s inertia vs. actuation. Comfortable doubt vs. faith in something new.
Jesus and the Samaritan Woman at the Well (c.1420) Southwest German? | Creative Commons, courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Jesus offers us living water – will we accept his offer like the Samaritan woman (who appears about to jump into the well in her act of pulling up the water)?
We hear that “Some of them even wanted to arrest him, but no one laid hands on him.” These are the ones who have chosen doubt, and we see where it leads them: arrest, persecution, shutting him up. The gospel emphasizes that these feelings from diseased hearts lead nowhere. St. John Chrysostom explains in his Homily 51 on the Gospel of John:
Such a thing is malice! It will give way to nothing, it looks to one thing only, and that is, to destroy the person against whom it plots. But what says the Scripture? “Whoever digs a pit for his neighbor, shall fall into it himself” (Proverbs 26:27). Which was the case then. For they desired to kill Him, to stop, as they thought, His preaching; the result was the opposite. For the preaching flourishes by the grace of Christ, while all that was theirs is quenched and perished; they have lost their country, their freedom, their security, their worship, they have been deprived of all their prosperity, and have become slaves and captives (Homily 51, 3).
The problem with plotters is that they are too caught up in the short-term and in themselves. Chrysostom shows us that the long view, the perspective where we interact with the eternal, has a “rightness” that does not belong to us. This eternal perspective God invites us to share shows us that those malicious Jews (and all who exhibit malice) “have lost their freedom” in that they are captive to their own prejudice and small-mindedness; “they have been deprived of all their prosperity” in that they no longer grow as human beings but shrink into desiccated shells of hatred.
Study of five grotesque heads (c.1494), Leonardo da Vinci | Wikimedia Commons. da Vinci’s sketch truly makes me think of the chief priests and Pharisees, wicked plotting and self-righteousness evident in their bearing.
Today’s gospel continues by showing us the diseased hearts and malice of the chief priests and Pharisees. They chastise the guards for not arresting Jesus: “Have you also been deceived? Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in him?” They attack the guards as being feeble-minded and offer themselves as the authorities on what is correct. They display their myopic determination to be seen as “right.”
And when Nicodemus, a Pharisee who has come to Jesus previously with an open mind, urges them to give him a chance to talk with them before condemning him, they lash out. They venomously reply, “You are not from Galilee also, are you? Look and see that no prophet arises from Galilee.” We are shown that the diseased hearts of these impotent plotters devours them, so much so that they begin attacking their own.
What a stark choice we are given in John’s gospel. On one hand, we have the Son of God, speaking with authority, working miracles, and offering life-giving water. On the other, we have the chief priests, Pharisees, and doubters — plotters all — who have no light and no truth to offer their people. All they offer is malice. If we judge by the fruits, we can see that this tree is diseased. And as Chrysostom points out, “it will come to nothing.”
The passage ends: “Then each went to his own house.” They are left with nothing but themselves and their evil thoughts.
Friday in the Fourth Week of Lent: Wisdom 2:1a, 12-22, John 7:1-2, 10, 25-30.
I don’t know about you, but I get a clear sense of inertia drawing us towards the Passion and Holy Week in today’s readings. I’ve always found the rejection Jesus experiences in St. John’s gospel to be palpable, and when joined with the reading from the Book of Wisdom today, it creates a profound and sad condemnation of the people in his time.
Worse yet, we might be more implicated in this sad commentary than we realize.
The passage from the Book of Wisdom sounds like a real-time response from the skeptics listening to Jesus, yet it was written some 80 years earlier. The wicked people in the passage complain that “he is obnoxious to us … He professes to have knowledge of God and styles himself a child of the LORD. To us he is the censure of our thoughts; merely to see him is a hardship for us.” This sounds very much like the internal mental script of the chief priests and scribes who attack and test Jesus.
What’s more, we hear truly wicked, devilish thoughts: “With revilement and torture let us put him to the test,” “For if the just one be the son of God, he will defend him and deliver him from the hand of his foes.” These last bits of blasphemy and mockery actually did occur while Jesus hung on the Cross:
Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, “You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.” In the same way the chief priests also, along with the scribes and elders, were mocking him, saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he wants to; for he said, ‘I am God’s Son’” (Lk 27:39-43).
The Mocking of Christ (1616-1617), Gerard van Honthorst | Wikimedia Commons.
Such similarities emphasize the wickedness of the people who mocked Christ; their words are nearly identical to those called out in the Book of Wisdom decades earlier. However, as we look at this entire chapter of the Book of Wisdom from which this passage comes, we see that this wickedness refers to a larger group of people than just those who mock Christ. The chapter starts by identifying these people as those caught up in existential angst: “Short and sorrowful is our life, and there is no remedy when a life comes to its end … For we were born by mere chance, and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been … reason is a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts; when it is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes” (Wis 2:1-3). These people have rejected God and the teachings of the Jewish fathers, that he intentionally created us and has given us his covenant.
This rejection is even deeper in that they reject the Spirit that is in each of us when they say that “reason is a spark” that comes just from our biology, and when that spark is extinguished, nothing is left but ash. This is a full denial of the spirit and the soul. It is secularism, atheism, scientism.
What to do with this existential angst? The response of these wicked ones is to live life voraciously while they can. They say, “let us enjoy the good things that exist … Let none of us fail to share in our revelry; everywhere let us leave signs of enjoyment” (Wis 2:6, 9). When there is nothing to our existence but the world we see in front of us, there is also no basis for moral considerations. There are no repercussions beyond this world.
Therefore, they say, “Let us oppress the righteous poor man; let us not spare the widow or regard the gray hairs of the aged. But let our might be our law of right, for what is weak proves itself to be useless” (Wis 2:10-11). By rejecting God in their flawed understanding of their own existence, these people have lost their moral bearings. Everything looks to be ripe for the picking, for the using and for the abusing.
Thus, the final indictment against the thoughts and words of these people that we read today can be extended to all those who are amoral, who reject God, and who employ Social Darwinism in their worldview. It reads: “These were their thoughts, but they erred; for their wickedness blinded them, and they knew not the hidden counsels of God; neither did they count on a recompense of holiness nor discern the innocent souls’ reward.” The “recompense of holiness” and the “reward” is eternal salvation itself, the greatest testament to God’s being. The fact that God is there and offers us recompense and reward drives the need to order our lives according to his Word.
This criticism is just as important today as it was 2,000 years ago. Our culture and economy are almost entirely devoted to consumption and living life voraciously. Our politics are infused with an evil streak of Social Darwinism where “might is right.” The root of the problem is the same: a rejection of God, a disavowal of the spirit and soul, and a blindness to the revelation of the Lord in history that points to a greater life beyond this one.
The frightening implication is that when we descend into materialism or scientism, in a way we are participating in the mockery of Christ. They are logically and inexorably connected.
Let’s put this more plainly. When all we can think about is that new car, new dress, new thing we want to buy; or when we think that the world is made of only explainable natural phenomena; or when we feel that it’s our right to get what we want, well, that’s when we’ve shut ourselves off from the source of life, from accepting the mystery, from living in the humility of a creature in God’s presence.
And joined with these perspectives is a gut reaction that someone righteous telling us otherwise “is obnoxious to us.” In these moments, we are much further down the road of mocking Christ on the Cross than we might realize.
Christ Carrying the Cross (1510-1535), Hieronymus Bosch or follower | Wikimedia Commons. Bosch is a master of grotesque human expression, and this piece is no exception. It strikes me to see the variety of ways evil is personified – that is, made personal by various people – and how the power of Satan twists and distorts us, obscuring what is good in us. The other striking thing about this painting is the serenity and prayerful visage of Christ in the midst of this miasma.
In the gospel reading, Christ struggles with Jews who have turned themselves away from hearing and seeing God. The reading opens by tracking the movements of our Lord almost as if he is under siege: “he did not wish to travel in Judea, because the Jews were trying to kill him.” In the full text of Chapter 7 in John’s gospel, we hear him encourage his brothers to go to Jerusalem without him during the Festival of the Tabernacles. Then he also goes, but secretly.
Then, “About the middle of the festival Jesus went up into the temple and began to teach” (Jn 7:14). It seems that God’s will is that his incarnate Word be present and be heard at the festival. The Festival of the Tabernacles is symbolically important because the Jews commemorate their time “on the move” from Egypt to Israel when they lived in temporary accommodations (the title of the Festival, Sukkot, is translated as “tabernacles” or “booths”). Thus, they are commemorating their temporary status, and Jesus is there to move them to a new place spiritually.
The Jews are “astonished” by his teaching and say, “How does this man have such learning when he has never been taught?” His answer is that the teaching is not his but “his who sent me.” Today’s reading focuses on this concept: hearing God through Jesus, seeing the invisible in the visible, encountering the unknown through the known. The question is if the Jews (and, by extension, we) can overcome our earth-bound notions to do so.
But We Know Where He is From
The Jews are hung up on a single fact: “But we know where he is from. When the Christ comes, no one will know where he is from.” They reference a belief, possibly from a passage in Isaiah or Micah, that people will not know from where the Messiah comes. Ironically, they are about to prove this belief as correct, since they do not comprehend from where Jesus comes.
Jesus acknowledges that they might know he’s from Nazareth, in Galilee, but that’s not the whole story. He says, “You know me and also know where I am from. Yet I did not come on my own.” The Greek word translated here as “on my own” is ἐμαυτοῦ (emautou), which is translated in other editions as “of my own initiative,” “of my own accord,” and “on my own authority.” He adds, “but the one who sent me, whom you do not know, is true.” I prefer the ESV Bible version of this last sentence for clarity’s sake: “He who sent me is true, and him you do not know.” This establishes Jesus’s relationship as an ambassador for God, and the fact that the Jews do not know God in the way they should.
He doubles down with his final sentence: “I know him, because I am from him, and he sent me.” He accomplishes several things in this sentence, establishing his own knowledge of, proximity to, and mission from God the Father. Note that Greek words used to say “from him” are παρ’αὐτοῦ (par’autou), and English doesn’t quite convey the close proximity that is connoted here. It properly means “close beside,” “in the presence of,” or “from the side of.”
Jesus thus makes a series of explicit statements in this compact exchange:
You indeed know me and that I come from Galilee
But I haven’t come to you on my own authority
The one who sent me is not made up, is real and, in fact, the source of all truth
What’s more, you don’t know this source of truth, who happens to be your God
Finally, I am the one who knows Him, I am from close beside Him, in fact He sent me specifically to you
I find it interesting that we are told Jesus was astonishing the Jews in the temple with his learned and perfect teaching, but John doesn’t give us any of his words of teaching. Instead, we get this passage that he “exclaims” or “cries out” as he is aware of the doubts in the crowd. John is more concerned with showing us the drama of the Jews accepting Jesus the man joined with the divine Word of God. It’s interesting because this has hung up believers for millennia. The heresies of Adoptionism and Arianism reared their heads as early as a few hundred years after Christ and continue into the present day. The heart of these heresies (and of the Jewish doubters in the crowd) is that notions of Jesus as a man rule out other, mystical truths.
Jesus Preaching in the Temple, c.1800, unknown Russian icon writer | Wikimedia Commons.
This is an easy trap to fall into, especially these days as our way of knowing the world is dominated by the scientific method. I, for one, love history — imagining ages past and influences on people of different eras. But using a historical lens to interpret something fundamentally mystical — that is, the mysterious descent of the divine into the flesh of humanity — well, it leads to atrocious conclusions about Jesus like those found in Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Sadly, this book has been a #1 New York Times Bestseller and does nothing but present Jesus as a failed political zealot. Plus, it’s a tired, old argument of doubt. It’s so old that it happened exactly when Jesus was preaching astonishingly at the temple. It’s there in today’s reading.
We must do better than this. We can’t ignore the historicity of Jesus, but we also can’t simply use the scientific/historical lens to look at Jesus the man. Pope Benedict XVI published Jesus of Nazareth (he was Cardinal Ratzinger at the time) as a more mature reconciliation of the facts of Jesus operating in a specific time and culture with the mystical reality of his Personhood in the Trinity. As he notes, “We are not meant to regard Jesus’ activity as taking place in some sort of mythical ‘anytime’” (11), so his historical person is important. But, he points out that his book “sees Jesus in light of his communication with the Father, which is the true center of his personality; without it, we cannot understand him at all, and it is from this center that he makes himself present to us still today” (xiv).
This is what today’s readings are telling us: we cannot know Jesus without seeing how he dwells with the Father. Our notions of Jesus the man are simply inadequate in understanding him, the mystery of God, or the great Church that has emerged as his Body and Bride here on earth.
Thursday in the Fourth Week of Lent: Exodus 32: 7-14, John 5:31-47.
Today’s readings give us the iconic scene in Exodus when God sees the Israelites waiting for Moses at the base of Mt. Sinai making “a molten calf and worshiping it.” God utterly rejects this, noting, “they have become depraved.” God notes “how stiff-necked this people is,” and he wants to finish creating his Covenant with Moses in the way he intended, with a receptive people. So he says, “Let me alone, then, that my wrath may blaze up against them to consume them. Then I will make of you a great nation.” Let us understand this scene carefully because we may make several theological missteps if we start to go down the wrong interpretative path.
On one hand, we have the fire-and-brimstone set of Christians who would use this passage to claim that God is vengeful and filled with wrath for anyone who strays from the straight and narrow path. This is the gospel of fear, which is not really compatible with Christ’s message of agape. On the other hand, we have the everything-is-love set of Christians who would happily disregard this passage as “that’s not really what he meant” because nothing about this scene jives with their vision of a God they want to believe in.
Let’s cut through what we want to believe and how we want the world to conform to our expectations, and start to see the God who is revealed to us through sacred scripture. There are a few points of doctrine that Western and Eastern Christians have always agreed upon: God is all-good, God is complete (that is, does not need anything outside of himself), and God is unchanging.
He explains these facts about himself in his statement to Moses: “I AM who I AM.” In other words, he is defined by nothing outside of himself. He is fullness of being, and as his interactions with us throughout our history show, this fullness is essentially good.
Untitled painting from Glory to God Alone, Tron-Eilert Holst-Pedersen | image found on tehpbilledkunst.com.
A logical extension of these beliefs is what is called Impassibility, or the fact that God is free from affections or emotions, which are a type of changeability. In other words, if he is complete and unchanging, then he doesn’t get angry, he’s not surprised, he’s not jealous, etc. Yet this leads us to imagine an impassive (note the difference from “impassible”) God who seems not to care one way or another about anything. That can’t be right, Christ proves the opposite! Plus, we hear about wrath, anger, jealousy, delight, and more all throughout the scriptures. What’s going on here?
One of the better articles I’ve read on this conundrum of an impassible yet wrathful God was posted on the Catholic Standard by Monsignor Charles Pope in 2019. He explains that we must understand God’s wrath is experienced by us, not as an emotion raging within him. He writes about the analogy of trying to mix water and fire:
God’s wrath is our experience of the total incompatibility of our sinful state before the holiness of God. Sin and God’s holiness just don’t mix; they can’t keep company. Think of fire and water; they cannot coexist in the same place. Bring them together and you can hear the conflict. Think of a small amount of water poured into a large fire: the water droplets sizzle and pop; steam rises as the water boils away. … We must be purified before entering his presence, otherwise we could not tolerate his glory. We would wail and grind our teeth, turning away in horror. The wrath is the conflict between our sin and God’s holiness. God cannot and will not change, so we must be changed or else we will experience wrath.
So we can affirm impassibility in that God does not lose self-control or experience emotions in the ways that humans do. I tend to agree with our Church Father, Tertullian, though, who writes, “Angry he will possibly be, but not irritated, nor dangerously tempted; he will be moved, but not subverted” (Against Marcion, II.16). Tertullian’s point, in part, is that we can’t really know how God may or may not “feel,” since it is beyond our capacity. But, he notes that one thing is for sure: “it is yet palpably absurd of you to be placing human characteristics in God rather than divine ones in man, and clothing God in the likeness of man, instead of man in the image of God” (ibid, II.16).
As I wrote in Mercy is the Master Principle, there is something in the original Greek that points to God’s visceral reaction that we might interpret (by analogy) as “emotional” or “affective.” When he is viscerally moved to compassion, the verb has its root in the word for intestines and internal organs: σπλαγχνισθεὶς (splanchnistheis). This is a nice nuance to add to Msgr. Pope’s analogy of the fire, which is by definition an element that is impassive and will burn anything regardless of its good or evil nature. Let me tentatively put this forward: because God is all goodness and purity, the purifying fire of his nature has a valence, meaning that it is weighted with all things good and against all things evil. Thus, when goodness approaches Him, the reaction is unity, which we experience as delight, warmth, and embrace. When evil approaches Him, the reaction is rejection and elimination, which we experience as wrath, anger, and jealousy.
Transfiguration of Jesus (2004), Armando Alemdar Ara | Wikimedia Commons. I think this beautiful interpretation of the Transfiguration might also be a nice way to visualize the purifying fire of God.
Let’s return with these thoughts to our story from Exodus. God says, “Let me alone, then, that my wrath may blaze up against them to consume them.” Two things to note: first, he maintains his discourse and relationship with Moses, not to mention the promise to build for him “a great nation.” When he asks Moses to “let him alone,” we might see this as a test for Moses, probing to see if Moses is able to fully inhabit the mercy of God and reflect this same mercy in a request to save his people. In any case, God is exhibiting his mercy here simply in the fact of conversing with Moses about it, giving him a chance to halt the purifying essence of God from burning through his people.
The second thing to note is that God is not consumed by wrath; he is not out of control with human-like emotions. He is measured, speaking frankly and with mercy to Moses. In fact, he presents his wrath as a fundamental part of who he is, a purifying force that simply blazes up in rejection of the sin it encounters. This shows us the mercy and compassion of God while maintaining his essential, indivisible nature, “I AM who I AM.”
Moses steps into his role of chosen prophet and law-giver admirably, reflecting back to God the mercy that he himself was shown. He pleads for the sinful people to be saved. God, ever merciful, grants his prayer.
We hear, “So the LORD relented in the punishment, he had threatened to inflict on his people.” In some ways this wording is unfortunate because the words “punishment” and “threatened” feed a misunderstanding of God as one who is overly emotional and fickle (the theological terms would be passible and changing). This sentence could have also been written “So the LORD granted Moses’s prayer and mercifully spared the sinful people from His purifying essence.” In this way, we should understand his “punishment” as simply the incompatibility of sin and blasphemy with the presence of God. Likewise, “threatened to inflict” is “told Moses would occur if His presence fully encountered and burned/purified the sinful people.”
The Worship of the Golden Calf (1519), Raphael | Creative Commons, courtesy arthive.com. This fresco is in the Papal Palace at the Vatican.
The problem that caused this whole kerfuffle was that the Israelites couldn’t even make it a month in the desert without seeing miracles or a sign of their God before they turned away to embrace an idol. This brings us to the gospel reading and the theme Jesus picks up: unfaithfulness to God when you cannot see him.
The first line Jesus speaks in today’s reading is a little fuzzy without context: “If I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is not true.” He is not contradicting what he will say later, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (Jn 14:6); instead, he is drawing a distinction between speaking on one’s own behalf and speaking with the authority and power of God. He is clear in the verse prior to the one we read: “I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge; and my judgment is just, because I seek to do not my own will but the will of him who sent me.”
Thus, “If I testify on my own behalf” means “if I’m standing here preaching to make a name for myself.” And rightfully, then, his testimony would not be “true,” since Truth comes from and points to the Father. He makes this point again in the second half of the reading: “yet if another comes in his own name, you will accept him. How can you believe, when you accept praise from one another and do not seek the praise that comes from the only God?” He refers here to those priests, prophets, and scribes who wish to get fame and glory in this world, who “accept praise from one another.” They are all caught up in a game with themselves and ignore the reality of God, invisible but not unknowable.
Jesus is attempting to counsel the scribes and Pharisees who challenge him for doing work on the Sabbath. He tells them that he is doing the work of his Father, that he is the Son of God. He says, “The works that the Father gave me to accomplish, these works that I perform testify on my behalf that the Father has sent me.” He is attempting to make visible for them the omnipresent but invisible God. His works testify both “on his behalf” (that he is the Son of God) and they testify to the reality of God the Father. He pinpoints their lack of faith despite all of the signs of his coming, both in his works and in the scriptures:
But you have never heard his voice nor seen his form, and you do not have his word remaining in you, because you do not believe in the one whom he has sent. You search the Scriptures, because you think you have eternal life through them; even they testify on my behalf. But you do not want to come to me to have life.
This paints a truly pathetic picture of the ones who are persecuting Jesus. They are blind to God, deaf to God, and do not even have “his word remaining in them,” all because of their act of rejecting him. He is giving them communion with the divine Lord and they reject it. Even the scriptures to which they cling for salvation are testifying to Christ, but they choose not to see it, they “do not want to come to me to have life.” These people seem just as doomed as the ones worshipping a golden calf at the base of Mt. Sinai. Perhaps even more because they don’t have to believe through an interlocutor like Moses, they have God right in front of them, working miracles and attempting to teach them.
Like God in the Exodus passage, however, Jesus shows them mercy and does not burn them in his purifying fire. He asserts:
Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father: the one who will accuse you is Moses, in whom you have placed your hope. For if you had believed Moses, you would have believed me, because he wrote about me.
He shows them that they have created a golden calf in Moses, that they are worshipping an image that is easier for them to believe in than the invisible God on high. But this very idol they have created is true to God and will accuse them to the Father because he knows and has written about the living Word of God long before his coming.
The Triumph of Christianity over Paganism (Le Triomphe du Christianisme sur le paganisme), 1868, Gustave Doré | Wikimedia Commons.
Today’s readings give me a greater appreciation for the person of Jesus Christ, where the “I AM” in all its pure being is mysteriously united with a human nature susceptible to all of the temptations of this world. By his very nature, God rejects and purifies evil, like fire vaporizing a water droplet. Yet within the person of Jesus, this essence maintains ultimate self-control and obedience to the mercy and goodness of the Father (which he can only do because he is at the same time wholly the essence of the Father, too).
The divine essence does not struggle with or burn out a human nature that would, if it was anyone of us, have wanted to yell, punch, or demolish the self-righteous scribes and Pharisees criticizing him. Christ somehow manages to seamlessly integrate these two natures and persevere in preaching the Truth, the Word, while warning them with mercy about their errant ways.
Let us attempt to understand the coming together of divine impassibility and yearning for the good. This is what we are all called to be as we imitate our Savior.
Tuesday in the Fourth Week of Lent: Ezekiel 47:1-9, 12, John 5:1-16.
Water figures strongly in today’s readings. Water is the great bringer of spiritual purification and cleanliness. God’s law prescribed that Jews must ritually purify themselves in water before partaking in everything from meals to sacrifice before the Lord. Water is also the substance of physical life, sustaining humans and all of creation.
We reflected at length on the connection between the life-giving and spiritual-purifying aspects of water as presented to us in the story of Jesus at Jacob’s well with the Samaritan woman (see If You Knew the Gift!). Today, we see how water figures in prophecy about the Kingdom of God, specifically in the person of Jesus Christ.
Ezekiel, writes during the Babylonian Captivity around the years 596-574 BC, like the events found in the Book of Daniel. Ezekiel is given prophetic visions from the Lord about both the destruction of Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the temple. Remember that the temple in Jerusalem was the heart of the Jewish faith, where the presence of God dwells. It had supreme importance for them, and the destruction of the temple along with all of Jerusalem was a catastrophic event. Thus, when we hear of a rebuilt temple, we must understand that this is a restored connection with the presence of God.
Solomon Dedicates the Temple at Jerusalem (c.1896-1902), James Tissot or followers | Wikimedia Commons.
Today’s reading is part of Ezekiel’s vision of the restored temple; an angel shows him “water flowing out from beneath the threshold of the temple toward the east,” which is the direction that the temple faces. The angel takes him away from the temple and the water builds and deepens, first into a stream and then into a mighty river. In the east, it reveals its life-giving nature, it “empties into the sea, the salt waters, which it makes fresh. Wherever the river flows, every sort of living creature that can multiply shall live.”
This type of imagery should be familiar to us. We have explored how Jesus tells the Samaritan woman that he provides “life-giving water.” It is the endless river of life flowing from the Trinity, the “self-opening of our Thrice-Holy God,” as Fr. Jean Corbon, OP puts it. The river in Ezekiel’s vision, therefore, we can understand as the same river of life that St. John will see in the heavenly Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation. This is the eschatological vision of the river: the life abounding in the river is everlasting life.
In this eschatological vein, let’s examine the importance of the direction of the east that Ezekiel takes great pains to emphasize. One of our Church Fathers, Origen, explains why the direction of the east is important to us:
“Atonement comes to you from the east. From the east comes the one whose name is Dayspring, he who is mediator between God and men. You are invited then to look always to the east: it is there that the sun of righteousness rises for you, it is there that the light is always being born for you. You are never to walk in darkness; the great and final day is not to enfold you in darkness” (Hom. 9, 5. 10: PG 12, 515. 523.).
For centuries, this is why Catholic churches have been built with the altar facing the east. We worship in the direction of Christ, the “sun of righteousness” rising for us, where “light is always being born” for us.
This brings us to the physical nexus of Ezekiel’s vision. Recall that he is describing the temple. The saving nature of the river, deep and wide in the east, points to the sacred nature of the temple. Since the river starts in the temple, our experience of divinity starts in the temple. This building (like our Catholic churches) is important because it is our physical place where we encounter God.
In Christ, though, the physical and the divine co-exist. This changes everything, and even while Ezekiel was a devout proponent of all kinds of traditional Jewish religious prescriptions, his mystical vision inexorably points to a new temple that is nothing the traditional Jewish faith could envision. God is presenting him with a vision of the new temple in the person of Christ.
River in Saint-Clair (1908), Henri-Edmond Cross | Creative Commons, courtesy Wikiart.org. How can we imagine the divine river of life? This work of pointillism stimulates my imagination.
At many points in Christ’s ministry, he tells us how he is establishing a new priesthood (with Peter and his apostles), a new sacrifice to replace all other ritual sacrifices (the Eucharist as initiated at the Last Supper), and a new direct communion with God through himself. Most strikingly, he not only identifies himself with the temple, but being greater than the temple: “I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. … For the Son of Man is lord of the sabbath” (Mt 12:6, 8).
He is not abolishing physical buildings for worship, but he is re-defining the symbolic and religious meaning that the Jews placed on Jerusalem’s temple. This is most evident when the temple shroud is ripped in half and the earth shakes when he dies on the Cross. Brent Pitre, PhD, explains the importance of these events: “with the tearing of the Temple veil and the earthquake—the whole universe, ‘heaven and earth,’ were symbolically being torn asunder” (Jesus, the New Temple, and the New Priesthood, p.63). Again, with Jesus being the physical union of divinity and humanity, everything changed.
Pitre’s article referenced above is a great academic deep-dive into the implications of Jesus replacing the Jewish concept of the temple in Jerusalem. He traces the depth of the temple in Jewish consciousness: “From a theological and liturgical perspective, for a first-century Jew, the Temple was at least four things: (1) the dwelling-place of God on earth; (2) a microcosm of heaven and earth; (3) the sole place of sacrificial worship; (4) the place of the sacrificial priesthood” (48). It’s worth a read if you’re interested in exploring this further, and it certainly underscores the radical nature of Christ’s message for the Jewish people.
One last item to note from Ezekiel’s vision: the fruit born by the trees growing on the banks of the river has a life beyond the river. He says, “Every month they shall bear fresh fruit, for they shall be watered by the flow from the sanctuary. Their fruit shall serve for food, and their leaves for medicine.”
As we have explored in previous reflections, Jesus counsels us in discerning between good and bad prophets, “by their fruits you will know them” (Mt 7:20). The idea is that the fruit reveals the heart of the person: “every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit” (Mt 7:15). Thus, when Ezekiel tells us that the fruit growing on the banks of the river of life “shall serve for food and their leaves for medicine,” the Word of God is telling us that those who are fed by this divine river will be transformed in goodness, in turn feeding and healing those in the world. This is the action of God’s mercy and agape as he works his will through us.
Turning to today’s gospel reading, we find the incarnate Word of God in Jerusalem for a Jewish feast day and he is by the Sheep Gate. This likely references the sheep market where people could buy sheep for sacrifice at the temple. There are also pools there, presumably used to ritually wash the animals before they were used in the temple. “In these lay a large number of ill, blind, lame, and crippled. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years.”
A few things are being conveyed to us. First, Jesus is drawn to the place where the outcasts go in a bid to purify themselves like the sacrificial animals. More than simply outcasts, they were spiritually unclean in the Jewish mind. They exhibit a certain desperation in waiting for a “stirring” of the waters by an angel whereby the first one in the water is cleaned by divine action. We might be reminded of the story of the Canaanite woman begging for Christ’s mercy and healing: “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table” (Mt 15:27).
But here there is even deeper symbolism because this is the temple, these are waters meant to be used for purification in order to give sacrifices to the Lord. When Jesus asks the paralytic “Do you want to be well?” the man answers pitiably, “I have no one to put me into the pool.” He does not ask the Lord to heal him, for he does not recognize who he might be. He simply laments his predicament. Despite his pitiful state, the man has undiminished hope and faith, having been ill for 38 years.
Christ Healing the Sick at the Pool of Bethesda (c.1615-1620), Pedro Orrente | Wikimedia Commons.
Given the logic of healing stories, we might expect that Jesus will be the one to “put him into the pool,” perhaps after first asking for his faith in God. But that’s not what happens. Jesus has something deeper to say and do. He instead says, “Rise, take up your mat, and walk.”
Several things happen here. First, Jesus cuts through the ritual nature of the temple, displayed in this outlying washing pool for sacrificial animals and the infirm where the first one in the pool gets healed. He establishes a new, direct connection to healing in himself. This is underscored by his instruction to “take up your mat,” which provides a temporary dwelling place for the man in the temple. That dwelling is no longer needed.
Second, he provides the divine energy personally to the man so that he can rise by himself and walk on his own. The river of life enables us to “bear fresh fruit” of our own. The man is enabled to be fully human, blossoming in the love of God.
Third, Jesus performs an act of healing on the Sabbath. The Jews, particularly the Pharisees and scribes, will use this act of “work” on the Sabbath to persecute and eventually arrest Jesus. It is a major theme of the gospels, and juxtaposes their hangups with particularities of the law while disregarding the Spirit of God among them.
But have you ever wondered that Jesus might be intentionally healing on the Sabbath, not just doing his ministry as if it were any other day? Let’s return to the quote from Matthew I referenced earlier: “I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. … For the Son of Man is lord of the sabbath” (Mt 12:6, 8). Christ is establishing in himself, here at the temple in today’s reading, what he says in that passage from Matthew. Here, in the temple, he does the “work” of replacing the temple through his own saving person and mission. As the Lord of the Sabbath, united with God to whom the sacrifice is being offered, he releases humanity from our ritual debt of sin offerings and atonement.
In yesterday’s Office of Readings, we read the account from Leviticus on the complicated ritual for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, with all of its purifications, sacrifices, and sprinkles of blood. Notably, one lamb was to be sacrificed to God while the other was to have all of the Jews’ sins cast upon its head and released into the desert as an offering to Azazel (a fallen angel, much like Satan). In today’s readings, we encounter sheep at the Sheep Gate — literal sheep, the infirm who are the pitiful sheep lost to their people, and the Lamb of God Himself. The Lamb of God replaces all of these sacrificial sheep and he saves those lost sheep.
Christ Healing the Paralytic at the Pool of Bethesda (1667-1670), Bartolomé Esteban Murillo | Creative Commons, courtesy The National Gallery (UK).
Yesterday’s Office of the Readings also gives us Origen’s commentary (quoted earlier). Here is another important link from Origen:
“God taught the people of the old covenant how to celebrate the ritual offered to him in atonement for the sins of men. But you have come to Christ, the true high priest. Through his blood he has made God turn to you in mercy and has reconciled you with the Father. You must not think simply of ordinary blood but you must learn to recognize instead the blood of the Word. Listen to him as he tells you: This is my blood, which will be shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.“
Once again, we encounter Christ in all his fullness today, enacting his saving mission with every word and deed. We must strive to see the mystery hidden deep within each passage from the Word of God. Jesus gives us a profound understanding of the water that flows from the new temple: it is him, it restores our humanity and enables a new communion with the divine.
