Tag: St. Matthew

  • The Generous Harvest Without Cost

    The Generous Harvest Without Cost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    It’s an excitement for a plentiful harvest.

    Wait, what?

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

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

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

  • The Mystery, As We Live It

    Friday in the 1st Week of Advent: Isaiah 29:17-24, Matthew 9:27-31.

    Today’s readings juxtapose more of Isaiah’s brilliant prophecy of Christ’s entrance into human history with St. Matthew’s deceptively concise illustration of how we can meet this great mystery in our lives: the healing of two blind men. In many ways, I feel that we are more aligned with blind men today than the Jews and Gentiles in the Apostolic Age. We encounter endless perspectives, philosophies and ideologies today, and a high cultural premium is attached to “choosing” an ideology to define oneself (at least for a time). In fact, Pope Francis just published an op-ed in the New York Times about who we are in the time of the COVID pandemic and he writes, “It is all too easy for some to take an idea — in this case, for example, personal freedom — and turn it into an ideology, creating a prism through which they judge everything.” Thus, not only do we resemble blind people groping about in life for something solid, for an identity, we also turn our very personal freedom to choose into an ideology that rules us, further divorcing us from encountering the mystery of God. In this vein, I think St. Matthew’s concise gospel story has much significance today.

    Let’s remind ourselves of this three-verse story:

    As Jesus passed by, two blind men followed him, crying out,
    “Son of David, have pity on us!” 
    When he entered the house,
    the blind men approached him and Jesus said to them,
    “Do you believe that I can do this?” 
    “Yes, Lord,” they said to him. 
    Then he touched their eyes and said,
    “Let it be done for you according to your faith.” 
    And their eyes were opened. 
    Jesus warned them sternly,
    “See that no one knows about this.” 
    But they went out and spread word of him through all that land.

    “Healing of a Blind Man,” detail from the bronze Bernward Column in St. Mary’s Cathedral, Hildesheim, Germany, around 1020 | Photo taken by Genevra Kornbluth.

    This episode occurs in the immediate eddy of the raising of Jairus’s daughter from the dead. Recall that a sequence of important events happen in chapter 9 of Matthew’s gospel: He heals a paralytic by forgiving his sins; He calls Matthew as a disciple then dines with sinners and tax collectors; a leader of the synagogue, Jairus, asks Him to resurrect his daughter, and on the way a woman with 12 years of hemorrhages was healed by touching his cloak; He raises the daughter of Jairus; He heals the two blind men; He heals the mute man; and finally He sets about in all the villages doing this work and telling His disciples, “the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.” This may seem like a laundry list of miraculous miscellany, but there is a deep logic to these events that Matthew presents to us. God is the Creator who orders all things. This includes the mystery of Christ-come-to-earth as it unfolds. This chapter speaks to the inherent ordering of the work of Christ in marrying Himself to us in the Church. The Spirit truly guides the hand of St. Matthew as he relates these events. Just for the big perspective’s sake, let’s consider the step-wise establishment of Christ’s mission in just this one chapter:

    • healing the paralytic ⇒ enabling the movement of the Spirit in our lifetimes where there was once inactivity.
    • calling Matthew ⇒ establishing Apostolic Fathers of the Church
    • dining with sinners ⇒ the feast of the Bridegroom with his Bride the Church
    • Jairus comes to him ⇒ the Jewish nation, God’s Chosen People, accept Christ as Messiah
    • hemorrhages healed ⇒ the long-time rift between humanity and God is healed through Christ
    • Jairus’s daughter is raised ⇒ death is finally overcome by Christ
    • blind men are healed ⇒ the life of faith in a nutshell
    • mute man is healed ⇒ our mouths are open to spread the Good News of Christ

    Seen at this 50,000-foot level, this is pretty remarkable. The evangelists needed to somehow encapsulate the miraculous mission and works of Christ, which must have ranged in the thousands of examples. With the guiding hand of the Holy Spirit, they not only gave us startlingly intimate stories with precise details, but infused the work with a subtle but persistent meta-narrative of salvation history unfolding through Christ’s emergence on earth as a man. As Fr. “Simeon” Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis writes, “Jesus does not just perform isolated ‘miracles’ for the undeniable benefit of individuals. At each step of his journey, the Word is building up his Church” (Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. I, 485).

    For today’s reading of the blind men being healed, I’d like to use Fr. Leiva-Merikakis as our guide as we look at this miniature masterpiece detailing the life of faith. Formerly a professor of Literature and Theology at the University of San Francisco and now a Trappist monk, Leiva-Merikakis is someone I greatly admire and a person I’ve quoted at length previously in this blog. He meditates on the gospel of St. Matthew, verse by verse, in his three-volume Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word. I will be drawing from the first volume of his work here.

    The Raising of Jairus’ Daughter (1889), Edwin Longsden Long | Image from iconsandimagery.blogspot.com.

    So, how does it start? Truthfully, it follows immediately after the raising of Jairus’s daughter: “he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl got up. And the report of this spread throughout that district. As Jesus passed by, two blind men followed him, crying out.” It’s important to recall that news of His miracle working was already running ahead of him like wildfire. And not just any miracle working, but actual resurrection from death. This is something only God-among-us could accomplish and we can just imagine what thrill and awe swept through Capernaum as the footfalls of God graced the streets. Leiva-Merikakis conjures the imagery of the Benedictus (the Canticle of Zechariah from Luke’s gospel), which we sing during Morning Prayer each morning: In the tender compassion of our God, the dawn from on high shall break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace (Lk 1:78-79). He elaborates: “Jesus traversed the streets of Palestine on human feet with the same tireless exactitude and fecund splendor with which the fiery sun pursues his daily circuit. … Like a pair of light-hungry sunflowers, the two blind men follow Jesus’ orbit in unison” (477). I love the way Leiva-Merikakis brings his rich faith to his gospel reflections, fleshing out the concise words of the evangelist with the great mystery of Christ alive on the earth. In even this simple sentence of reportage, “As Jesus passed by, two blind men followed him,” Leiva-Merikakis teaches us that much more is going on. He elaborates: “Like a thermosensitive plant in the night, stretching out its tendrils to the imminent sun, they begin to follow Jesus in the late afternoon” (479).

    Is this not how each of us is awakened to the light of faith? The Spirit draws us with a palpable warmth to follow where it leads. We learn that it dwells in Christ, and we follow Him, seeking meaning, seeking more than just sin and death on this earth.

    Next, we read that the two men shout “Son of David, have pity on us!” This is the moment of acknowledgment. And it’s a bit odd that our lectionary translates this as “pity” because the original Greek is Ἐλέησον (Eleison). These are the words the Church will echo at the beginning of the holy liturgy for centuries to come: Kyrie Eleison! It serves a similar purpose for us in the Mass as it does for the blind men: an acknowledgment that Christ is indeed the Son of God, the anointed one, and in reverence and obeisance we ask for His mercy. Leiva-Merikakis describes the import of them calling Him Son of David:

    To proclaim Jesus to be the Son of David amounts to broadcasting God’s accomplished fidelity to his promise to have mercy on David and his line of descendants forever. … The whole Gospel stands or falls, not only on the truth of Jesus’ divine sonship, but likewise on the truth of his royal, fleshly descent from David. If Jesus is the Son of David, then the messianic era prophesied by Isaiah has already dawned, and even before the Passion and Resurrection his presence in the world must begin to bear the fruits of God’s burning mercy. (481)

    The Gospel insists on Christ’s earthly lineage through the line of David not for simply historical believability, but because it reveals how God kept His promise. Jesus isn’t just another miracle worker, model human or spiritual guru. The physical historicity of Christ as coming from the line of David is proof of God’s fidelity to His Chosen People. When the blind men acknowledge this, they have opened themselves to the truth and reality of salvation history. This is an important part of our faith journey, too.

    Next, Jesus enters the house and they approach Him there. Simple, right? Well, this building, presumably the one where He dined the night before with tax collectors and sinners, is one that He has already sanctified. That episode the night before can be likened to the wedding feast of the Bridegroom and His Bride, the Church. So, this is no ordinary following of a man into a building – it is two men of faith entering a church to encounter Christ. They follow the warmth and radiance of the Son of God, and, as Leiva-Merikakis writes, “God reciprocates such keen expectation by leading them into the house of the Church, where their eyes are opened at the very threshold, reminding us that φωτισμός (‘illumination’) was the other name for baptism in the early Church” (485). Leiva-Merikakis continues by examining the “liturgical flavor” of the episode, specifically the ritual movements of the blind men, following the great High Priest after the Kyrie eleison profession. This connection makes a lot of sense to me and again is an integral step in our faith journey as Christians – sacramental baptism and the importance of the sacred space.

    The liturgical call-and-response intensifies in the exchange where Christ asks “Do you believe I have the power to do this?” and they respond “yes.” The parallel to our Eucharistic sacrament is clear: The Body of Christ – Amen. This is the same question and assent in which we participate at every Mass. As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger writes in Introduction to Christianity, “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” (76) – I’ve previously explored the deep connection between the Logos and Amen in the post Amen, The Logos is the Great I AM. The broader implications of the blind men assenting to Christ’s power to heal and save is that it is the archetype for our faith life. All Christians enact this same assent, stand on this same firm ground, over and over as we invite Him into our beings to heal and transform us.

    St. Bruno (1764), Jean Bernard Restout | Creative Commons, courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

    Then, we encounter the detail that “he touched their eyes.” This is not a ritualistic magic or witchcraft. He does not necessarily need to touch their eyes in order to heal them, but he does. And this emphasis on touch – He takes Jairus’s daughter by the hand, the woman with hemorrhages touches His cloak, and here He touches their eyes – reminds us that God is, in fact, incarnate. Here God walks with feet that leave impressions in the ground, He can be touched and can touch others. The irrefutable carnality of our Messiah is something we cannot avoid. We are asked not just to embrace Him as an idea and a lofty spiritual Savior, but to eat His Flesh and drink His Blood. This means that Christians cannot dissociate ourselves from our bodies and this world. We are called to live in it while we are here, and live with Christ as our guide for how to be a human. He was real so that He could show us the path to salvation while also being flesh and blood ourselves. 

    Jesus tells them, “Let it be done for you according to your faith.” On the heels of yesterday’s reflection, we can recall that faith more properly means fidelity to God, faithfulness to His Word and law. Again, it is not the modern meaning “believing in something where there is no proof.” These blind men have demonstrated their faith by following the Spirit and Person of God the Son into the house of the Church, by proclaiming Him to be the fulfillment of God’s promise to the line of David, by asking for His mercy and by assenting to His sacramental, transformative power. This is their faith, not a collection of vague ideas in their head. Again, we can see here the same life of faith in which we participate and Christ’s response to us. If we truly believe in the promise of God that is present in Christ, we follow Him into His Church, give Him reverence, and ritually assent to His power, then His healing touch is the response. This same touch stanches flowing wounds, opens eyes, heals disease, and dispels death. 

    Once again, St. Matthew seems to give us a reporter’s account of what happened: “And their eyes were opened.” But there is genius in Matthew’s concise and precise prose. It might be tough to get through a gospel that was endlessly poetic with the eschatological reverberations of every moment during Christ’s ministry. Matthew gives us words that are pregnant with significance, and it is our prayerful study of scripture that allows the Word of God to speak to us. In this instance, we have the levels of physical healing, spiritual healing, and new life as a being seeing the world anew. St. Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians comes to mind: “But you, beloved, are not in darkness, for that day to surprise you like a thief; for you are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness” (1 Th 5:4-5). This is fundamental to our understanding of our life of faith: Christ re-creates us (He is a Person of God, the Creator, always), He transforms us in the sacraments and grace He gives us. Do we realize that we are renewed “children of light” when we finish each Mass? More importantly, do we act in a way faithful to God, in Whom we have put our trust? Is our faith demonstrated to Christ in a way that is hand-in-hand with our assent to have Him transform us? These are questions far more important than whether we take Eucharist by hand or by mouth, how many Hail Marys we say each day, or (especially!) for which candidate we voted.

    The penultimate action in this episode is the seemingly incongruous warning from Jesus. “Jesus warned them sternly,
    ‘See that no one knows about this.’” What are we to make of this abrupt change of tone? We know that Jesus wasn’t bipolar, so something else must be going on here. Part of the problem, I think, is the troublesome translation of the Greek. The verb that is translated as “warned them sternly” is ἐνεβριμήθη (enebrimēthē), which comes from the main form embrimaomai. I have reflected previously at length on this term (in the post, See the Glory of God) as it is used right before Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. In short, I believe it has a meaning closer to “a gut-like surge of divine passion.” Other translations state “strictly charged” or “strictly instructed” instead of “warned them sternly.” Again, the strictness or sternness of this verb is attached to divine works and belief in the Gospels. It seems that Jesus is stirring a certain reverence in them about what has happened. So why stir up a warning of reverence? Leiva-Merikakis provides an answer: “To retain from this rich texture of converging mysteries only the material fact of the physiological healing would be tantamount to ‘giving a holy thing to the dogs’ and to reducing Jesus’ recreative power as Word to that of a magician, and his disciples’ faith to a conspiracy of mercenaries, anxious to ‘market’ their ringleader’s powers. It is against this tendency in man to reduce the divine that Jesus is thundering” (501). I like this explanation – it is very consonant with our scriptural understanding of God to protect the sacred, and Christ’s passionate instruction is that they do not cheapen their life of faith by spreading words simply about physical healing.

    Jesus Healing the Blind Man (2008), Brian Jekel. | Image from christian.art.

    The actual warning, too, loses much in translation. There are simply three emphatic words in the Greek: Ὁρᾶτε μηδεὶς γινωσκέτω (Horate mēdeis ginōsketō), which more correctly translated would be “See! And let no one know it.” Leiva-Merikakis explains, “[These words] have the ring of a ritual formula. And they contain a serious pun: ‘See!’ is the perfect liturgical command to accompany the enlightenment of faith and the gesture of touching the eyes” (502). But does he really want to stifle the work of evangelization? Just verses later Matthew reports that He encourages His disciples in spreading the Good News: “the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.” Let’s remember that his passionate instruction is one that is concerned with a facile, cheapened message of physical healing in the face of something much deeper that is going on. Thus, “let know one know” can be interpreted as a warning against a shortcut in a faith life, a warning not to spread a type of false “knowledge.” His instruction is to “See!” which is a type of inner transformation. How does one share inner transformation? This is beyond words. “This living contact comes first; then the healing; and last of all the knowledge; and nothing can short-circuit this structure of the total act of faith” (502), writes Leiva-Merikakis.

    So, how do we take the final sentence, “But they went out and spread word of him through all that land”? Did they disobey him? The little conjunction “But” seems to imply this. Leiva-Merikakis dissents from this reading, however: “The explosion of thrill and joy conveyed … implies that the two men exactly abided by the intention of Jesus’ command. They did not go out and coolly ‘inform’ this interested party or that about what had happened, cluing them in to Jesus as a potential reservoir to be tapped. Rather … the indiscriminate energy of their new way of life bespeaks a joy at now being in the light and an inability to hide that light under a prudent bushel basket” (504). Leiva-Merikakis imagines them praising God rightfully as they dance through the streets with their newfound sight, encouraging others to go find Christ and begin their own life of faith. Let’s also note that what happens next is that a demoniacally possessed person who is mute is cured by Christ. This bolsters Leiva-Merikakis’s reading that Christ is, in fact, looking for rightly aligned speech, not necessarily silence. First, a person must be sanctified and healed by Christ, and then they can speak rightly, proclaiming the Good News.

    In closing, today’s gospel is simply astounding when read deeply, in the light of faith. I am so glad to have found spiritual teachers like Fr. Leiva-Merikakis, Fr. Jacques Corbon, and so many popes and saints to help me in my journey of lectio divina. We are blessed by the Spirit to have two thousand years of holy writings helping us plumb the never-ending depths of our sacred scripture.

  • An Eternal Rock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • On Feasting, Being Saved, and Recognizing

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

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

    Today’s reading from Isaiah points out three aspects of the Reign of God: He will provide for us rich sustenance, He will remove a “veil that veils all peoples,” and we will recognize and praise Him. Let’s take these in turn. First, while this sustenance might be spiritual, the image used by Isaiah is rich and abundant food: “A feast of rich food and choice wines, juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines.” I love the repeated sentence here, with an intentional emphasis pointed out by the adjective “juicy” for the rich food and “pure” for the choice wines. So, not just base sustenance but a feast of the very finest things. Psychologically, for Christians this is a nice counterbalance to the ascetic life that shuns fleshly desires, as insisted upon by St. Paul, the desert Fathers, the saints of the medieval period and so many more of our Doctors and saints in the Church. They would certainly agree with Isaiah and his description here, but would say that restraining ourselves from desires while on the earth is necessary to forge our spirit in Christ’s image; plus, it will make the great heavenly feast of the kingdom all the more richly appreciated. Yet we must admit that the enjoyment of feasting is something not altogether bad, or else God would not be employing this image to describe His Kingdom. One might argue that a Christian might properly enjoy moments of feasting in this lifetime, especially if a person is living morally under God’s law and focused on God’s providence and grace.

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

    The second promise from Isaiah is that God will remove something that ensnares humanity: “he will destroy the veil that veils all peoples, The web that is woven over all nations; he will destroy death forever. The Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces.” In a phrase, Isaiah is talking about the fallenness of the world and our natures. He calls this death, and indeed it is, but the ancient, scriptural understanding of death is deeper than we usually consider it in our analytical, scientific age. Yes, death has a technical meaning as the loss of life, measured perhaps in the absence of a heartbeat and the lack of measurable brain activity. But death also has a larger philosophical meaning. When there is nothing ahead of us but death and a hole in the ground, then death reigns in a real psychological and even existential way. As we’ve amply seen with writers from Nietzsche onward, disbelieving in God goes hand-in-hand with the reign of death (one logically flows to the other). The reign of death is more than physical – it is spiritual, the death of the spirit. Any atheist will proclaim that nothing awaits us beyond this world, and the implications of this are diverse, but often include a softening of moral thought (i.e., if there is no larger or eternal repercussion for doing something right vs. something wrong, then why worry about making sure you’re doing things that are right? Even further, in this worldview, moral “right” is completely made up by people rather than emanating from the source of all goodness). When moral thought and action are brought low, we Christians are taught that this is the devil at work in the world. Thus, the devil’s influence and the reign of death are tightly linked. This brings us back to our origin as recounted in Genesis: Satan – the serpent – is the cause of our temptation; and he is cursed as is humanity when cast out of the garden into the world where death reigns. Eons of weeping, blood, and sin ensue. We now live apart from God, unable to be in His presence, unable to see the truth and light clearly. St. Paul tells us, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face” (1 Cor 13:12). So, when Isaiah promises that “he will destroy the veil that veils all peoples … he will destroy death forever,” we can understand that this is a full reconciliation with Him, a return to the garden. It is again St. Paul who helps us locate the promise of Isaiah in the Reign of Jesus Christ: “but when one turns to the Lord [Jesus Christ], the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor 3:16-17). The freedom offered by Christ is a freedom from the reign of death, a removal of a veil that has ensnared us, and a reconciliation with God thanks to Christ’s great sacrifice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • The Church’s Mission Statement

    Monday in the 1st Week of Advent: Romans 10:9-18, Matthew 4:18-22.

    What an interesting start to Advent! Yesterday, Christ admonished us, “Be watchful! Be alert! You do not know when the time will come.” This should be a familiar refrain, a reminder that Advent is a time of waiting for both the Incarnation of Christ and the Final Judgment. This vigilance will be marked by prayer and anticipation until we celebrate the Birth of our Lord. But what do we get today, the second day of Advent and the Feast of St. Andrew the Apostle? We receive a concise exposition on eternal salvation being realized and the mission of the Church herself. This may seem incongruous with the initial message of waiting and vigil, but I think the Church, in her wisdom, places these readings and this feast at the beginning of Advent for a reason. Today, we acknowledge that the Christ Event has changed the world irrevocably and, although Advent commemorates and celebrates a time of waiting, we cannot “pretend” that the keys to the kingdom are not yet here. Christ has already brought the end times, and our active work as the Church is happening even as our liturgical calendar revolves in memorials and feasts.

    Icon of Christ, King of Kings (Greece, c.1600) | Wikimedia Commons.

    Let’s unpack today’s startlingly concise mission statement for the Church, brought to us by St. Paul. He writes to the early Christian Church in Rome: “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” While this seems simple (almost too simple!), it belies a depth of personal commitment that we might not notice at first. I’d like to take a small detour here into the issue of a person’s good works and faith and how these impact one’s salvation. The second part of Paul’s sentence quoted above, that is, “faith provides salvation,” has been surgically taken out of St. Paul’s overall corpus of writings to justify misunderstandings and heresies since the Apostolic Age. The Gnostics (many different sects) spread beliefs along the lines that faith in Jesus and other spiritual gifts were separate and more important than acts of the world and the body. This separation is dangerous because it erodes the connection between faith in Christ and moral acts here in this world. This heresy was taken up by Martin Luther and John Calvin in the 1500s, and sadly the foundation of the Protestant churches is a misunderstanding of this passage, that if you have faith alone (“belief in your heart”) in the mystery of Christ’s death Resurrection, you will be saved.

    This statement is taken out of the context of St. Paul’s full writings. We must understand that for St. Paul, “believing in your heart” the mysteries of the Christ event is a transformative thing – a person not only thinks differently, but a person also acts, speaks, and worships differently. He writes clearly to the Galatians: “the faith that finds its expression in love is all that matters” (Gal 5:6b, emphasis mine). He also tells the Corinthians: “I may have utter faith, so that I can move mountains; yet if I lack charity [do not have love], I count for nothing” (1 Cor 13:2b). Clearly, he is not telling the Romans that faith without works is salvation. For Paul, and for all Christians, faith is inextricably linked to charity, love, and good works. This is because the particular faith we have is in God who becomes man to show us that love, peace, and charity are more important than power and worldly knowledge. When we have faith in Him, we seek to embody His teachings and His example. His greatest commandment, to love God first with our whole being and then our neighbor as ourselves, unites this lesson that faith cannot be separated from moral actions here on earth.

    But this post isn’t about Catholicism vs. Protestantism. St. Paul tells us in today’s first reading that two things, faith in the Resurrection and confessing that Jesus is Lord, bring us salvation. We’ve explored how “faith in the Resurrection” is a kernel of wisdom that means faith in all of the mysteries contained in the Christ event exploding upon human history, and allowing that faith to change us, to transform us in the image of our Lord. The second bit flows from this transformation: we Christians do not sit silently in our faith. We are not lamps hidden under the bushel basket. We are called to be evangelists in our work and in our mouths. We must proclaim to everyone who will hear.

    And here we have, in a nutshell, what the Church is all about. We don’t hoard salvation to ourselves. We are not a secretive society of the select (again, Gnostic heresy). The Church is always “two or more gathered in my name” – always plural people, not a singular person. As we have faith in Christ and all that He revealed, we are transformed by God into something greater. This is grace, this is justification. And by the grace of God, we can begin to aspire to be like Christ, that is, to love everyone unconditionally, to see our Father in everyone and everything, and to ardently desire to save souls and bring them to our Father’s kingdom.

    The Calling of Peter and Andrew (1308-1311), Duccio di Buoninsegna | Wikimedia Commons.

    I, like many Catholics I know, am a little scarred by the televangelists of the 80s and 90s who co-opted many fine Biblical sayings, shouting the meaning out of them. It’s hard in some ways to read “confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord” without hearing a Jerry Fallwell-like voice and thinking of intolerant American fundamentalism. But we must recover what the Apostles and Christ bestowed on the Church in our sacred scriptures. Our great saints proclaimed with their mouths the Truth of Christ and Wisdom of God long before our contemporary cult-of-personality evangelical preachers twisted these words to suit their purposes. I’m not saying that evangelicals are all wrong, but they are not representatives of the one, true, universal Catholic Church. In particular, we must reverse the notion that Christian evangelization is linked to intolerance and that not everyone is welcomed by God. As the Second Vatican Council’s document on evangelization, Ad Gentes, states: “The members of the Church are impelled to carry on such missionary activity by reason of the love with which they love God and by which they desire to share with all men the spiritual goods of both its life and the life to come” (7). In other words, what drives us is not to perfect the world in the image we think is in God’s mind (much less drive out sin like zealous crusaders), but our driving force is the same love with which we love God. We are driven by a desire to share with everyone spiritual good. Love and sharing. This is a topic for another post, but evangelism for Christians must be an invitation to know God through Jesus Christ done out of love for our fellow humans.

    The reason we have to return evangelization to its original dignity: it is the very first thing Christ promised His Apostles. Today’s gospel reading from St. Matthew tells us of the iconic calling of Peter, Andrew, John, and James. Christ says, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.” This is the evangelical promise He gives them: they will catch men instead of fish; they will harvest humanity for God. Note that there is no hesitation: “At once they left their nets and followed him.” Again, with John and James: “He called them, and immediately they left their boat and their father and followed him.” The Voice of God speaks to them and they do not hesitate. But, no, more than the voice – the very Word of God in human form speaking corporally to them and beckoning them to be transformed into a new thing: a fisher of men. This irresistibility is an effect of the miracle of the Incarnation, which we anxiously await in Advent. With the gravity of a million suns, Christ walks the earth, pulling people to Him. That spiritual gravity cannot be overstated; it is God Himself taking His own incomprehensible, immeasurable being and distilling it into a baby. This tiny being will then draw humanity to himself, teach them in word and in deed what it means to love, and thereby give us the salvation that St. Paul speaks of.

    This is the Christian mystery of salvation and let’s note that God intends for us to be active participants in this plan. The Church, through the Apostles, is created to put on full display and shout from the mountaintops the glory of Christ. This action is and has always been evangelical. Furthermore, is it a coincidence that “evangelist” contains the word “angel”? No – the Greek word used in the gospels, εὐαγγελιστοῦ (euaggelistés), means “bringer of good news,” and the Greek word for angel, ἄγγελος (aggelos), means “a messenger.” Being an evangelist means participating in the same action of the angels as messengers of God. We are participating in announcing the kingdom of God just as the angels do. (NB: In a very specific way, we meet the angels here on earth. The Mass and Eucharistic celebration is the moment when the kingdom of heaven meets the action of the faithful on the earth and we celebrate with the angels the mysteries of our faith and gift of Christ as food for us.) In other words, God has invited us to his heavenly feast here and now, recognizing and blessing our souls as holy like the angels, and inviting us to carry out the same work as the angels. 

    Cutting from an Italian choir book (Lombardy) – Historiated initial ‘D’ of the Calling of Peter and Andrew (c. 1475-1500) | Image Courtesy the British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts.

     

    Let’s return to the opening thought: what a fascinating start to Advent. Advent brings together two events that historically seem very far apart: Christ’s birth to Mary and Christ’s return at the end of time. But today’s reading shows us that these two events are in fact united (in kairos time), that the inexpressible mystery of God coming to humanity cannot be contained in a historical figure. Christ will always be more than just the historical figure who the Apostles met on the shore of Galilee. As God, he transcends time and mortality – he existed before time and outside of history (hence the misguided attempts to “know” Jesus Christ simply through a historical lens). So when He is made incarnate, human history is ruptured and ripped from a linear trajectory. The center of the universe isn’t the sun or a terrestrial body but the Body of Christ, which rises and takes its rightful place in the heavenly realm. We now orbit this spiritual truth that carries us through our lives with a centrifugal force much different than the passing of the earth around the sun and the march of time. The liturgical calendar attempts to reflect this new ordering of our lives, and Advent is a season where we approach the unification with God from both sides: as those waiting for the babe and those waiting for the judgment and final unity. But the same reality is achieved in both events: God offers us real, corporeal salvation. In one, that salvation is the form of the Savior, in whom our faith and actions carry us through this life while we await the second, in the form of that same Savior, carrying out his same saving action.

    This is how the Catechism can claim “To fulfill the Father’s will, Christ ushered in the Kingdom of heaven on earth. The Church ‘is the Reign of Christ already present in mystery’” (CCC, 763). At the same time, it teaches “Though already present in his Church, Christ’s reign is nevertheless yet to be fulfilled ‘with power and great glory’ by the King’s return to earth” (CCC, 671). The Church that Christ established is brought into clear focus, started the calling of the Apostles to become fishers of men and bringers of Good News, and continuing with us in prayer, action, and spirit.

    Finally, we can look back at the first reading from St. Paul and understand the fullness of his words. When he writes, “one confesses with the mouth and so is saved,” we can see that this evangelical act is the sharing of love that the Church was established to accomplish. We can see that our confession of Jesus Christ as Lord – as an act meant to lovingly draw people to the truth – is what makes us part of the Church, “the Reign of Christ already present in mystery.” Of course we are saved in this moment! We are fully participating in God’s plan, in the universal Church, in the Reign of Christ.

  • Laborers for the Harvest

    Laborers for the Harvest

    Thursday of the 14th Week in Ordinary Time: Hosea 11:1-4, 8e-9, Matthew 10:7-15.

    All week, we are reading St. Matthew’s account of the great sending of the Apostles, the “Mission of the Twelve.” Today’s readings delve into the heart of the matter: these chosen 12, symbolic of the new tribes of the nation, are to institute a new reality of mercy made possible by God-become-man, Jesus Christ. Importantly, we receive the image that they are to be laborers for the “Lord of the harvest.”

    Jesus Sends Out the Twelve Disciples (mid 1800s), Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld | Creative Commons, courtesy the Pitts Digital Image Archive at Emory University.

    The first reading from Hosea provides the necessary backdrop for what is an incredible deputization of the Apostles. Through Hosea, the Lord shares His troubled heart as a Father to wayward children: “When Israel was a child I loved him, out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the farther they went from me.” What parent cannot identify with this? Children, wanting to establish their independence, are headstrong in their ideas and don’t want to be told what to do by their parents. At some point (pre-teen? teenager?), it seems that absolutely anything a parent might say is shunned and thrown back at the parent. God speaks in such an intimate, vulnerable, fatherly way here. When the Israelites embraced other gods, He registers a note of disbelief in their infidelity: “Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, who took them in my arms,” as if to say, “how could they possibly look to another?” He goes on to say, “I fostered them like one who raises an infant to his cheeks; Yet, though I stooped to feed my child, they did not know that I was their healer.” Here He reveals just how much love and care He has poured into His Chosen People to bring them up as a model for all nations. And what He receives in return is their lack of acknowledgment of His works and love, even of Himself as the One and Only God.

    How to react? This is the Old Testament, right? That means fire and brimstone! Well, we should be attentive, because the unrelenting message of the Old Testament is in fact God’s mercy. Yes, God’s justice, too, which He sends down upon enemies of the Chosen People and the People themselves at times, for the stakes are high! Nothing less than our redemption and salvation, our way back to Him in order to share eternal life, hangs in the balance. He is preparing the world for His Son and a new age of work and love to precede the end times.

    But here, He gives us the example of being a true loving and forgiving Father. By recalling how He has been loving His People, He stirs that love within Himself once again. Recalling their infidelity and any anger this might stir up cannot hold a flame to the love that rises within Him. “My heart is overwhelmed, my pity is stirred,” He admits. “I will not give vent to my blazing anger.” Can we see ourselves in this? Can we will ourselves to react in this way, to live up to the model of Fatherhood given to us to many millennia ago?

    God the Father (Padre Eterno), c.1640-50, Il Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) | Image from fineartamerica.com.

    It seems impossible at times, doesn’t it? That’s why God says, “For I am God and not man, the Holy One present among you; I will not let the flames consume you.” There is such comfort in these words. First, we can be comforted by the presence of someone ultimately better than us in our midst, someone who can always overcome anger with love. Second, our God promises not to let us be consumed by flames, even when those flames are deserved. This is divine forgiveness. If ever there was a reason to use #Blessed, it is because our God loves and forgives us.

    This is an important backdrop for the gospel reading because it provides the reason why such incredible things are happening; why Jesus tells His Apostles to go “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Mt 10:6). The mission of the twelve happens in a direct line of action from God’s instructions to Abraham, Moses, David, and the many prophets. All of these interventions into the history of humanity, specifically with the Chosen People, are acts of love and forgiveness from God the Father, specifically to those who have sinned against Him. Remember the words we explored in the last reflection, what Jesus tells the Pharisees who criticize him for dining with tax collectors and sinners: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mt 9:12-13). From a healing perspective this makes perfect sense, but let’s overlay the dimension of redemption history and realize that this is the loving Father speaking through His Son, the One who pities His people even while they turn their backs on Him. Thus, the middle sentence in the quote, “go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’” is Jesus’s way of reminding them of the will and Person of the Father. He desires mercy in the world (for the sinners and those who disobey), not sacrifice (that is, blind adherence to ritualistic religion without one’s heart being converted). Jesus is the Father’s instrument in the world, doing this work of mercy and forgiveness. 

    The moments leading up to Jesus’s sending of the apostles on this incredible mission are these: “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest’” (Mt 9:36-38). What a metaphor! Jesus looks at the sick, the lame, the sinners, and the possessed and He is not gripped with sadness but instead with joy and determination for an abundant harvest. The harvest is plentiful — could there be a more joyful image for humanity in a pre-industrial society, utterly dependent on agricultural harvests? Jesus sees that work must be done, the very work He has been sent to do. But salvation requires work, labor. And here is the crux: we, the disciples of Christ, are called to be the Lord’s laborers. 

    As Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis writes, “Man is not an inert bit of clay: for him to be restored by the Word means, in part, that he must help the Word restore him and all others like him” (Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol I, 534). This is an important response to those who wonder why God doesn’t just magically forgive everything and redemption is accomplished. One of the mysteries of our faith is that God desires our hearts, our active, freely chosen participation in the love and mercy He offers to the world. This is the juncture of faith and works, and sometimes we get lost here. His message is clear: He wants us to love Him and believe in Him, which is the faith part. But for those who stay here, just relishing their individual faith in God and waiting for salvation, they’re missing the point of this week’s gospel readings. He wants us to labor in the world. Jesus tells his Apostles: “Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, drive out demons.” This is work among our fellow humans, and it is important because Jesus comes to build a Church that is a community of faith. Leiva Merikakis explains, “Jesus is redeeming man, not as a series of isolated individual ‘souls’, but as a community” (Fire of Mercy…, 536).

    But another way to get lost at this juncture of faith and works is to over-emphasize the works at the detriment of the faith. Social works and social justice are integral to the Christian life, as Pope Francis is keen to point out. But beware a few things: social works done without God front-and-center are, I would argue, nothing but a continuation of the idolatry committed by the Jews. While the goodness of the actions undoubtedly contain the seed of God and godliness, by not acknowledging God as the bearer of mercy, forgiveness, and all goodness, we — knowingly or unknowingly — are seeking to remove God from the world. Remember what we hear in Hosea today: “Yet, though I stooped to feed my child, they did not know that I was their healer.” With the millennia of revelation and the great surge of Christianity around the world, we have no excuse not to know that He is our healer. Furthermore, the point of social works and social justice can never be to simply improve another’s life here on earth. Dignity in life and in one’s living and working conditions are important, but if that’s all we care about, we’ve forgotten our entire faith. Why do we believe in Jesus? Why was He sent by the Father? He tells us, “And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all those he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day” (Jn 6:39-40). The work that we are to do must have redemption and reunion with God at its heart. Faith must imbue our works with the Spirit of God, seen not hidden! “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden” (Mt 5:14). This light of good deeds that we bring to the world must always point directly to God: “let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Mt 5:16).

    With these important reminders of the character of the work that we are called to do, let’s return to today’s gospel reading. Jesus calls his chosen twelve together and gives them extraordinary powers and extraordinary commands. He begins by proclaiming that “the Kingdom of heaven is at hand.” This is also translated closely as “the Kingdom of heaven has come near.” What might this mean, to say that the kingdom has come near, not that it is here already? This is fertile ground for theology, where we might begin to wonder what distinguishes the Kingdom of heaven from Christ Himself, a state of union from the presence of God. For Leiva-Merikakis, what Jesus means is that the Apostles “must literally be bearers of the Kingdom: they must make it happen there in the midst of men … A great deal depends on what the apostles do or do not do” (Fire of Mercy…, 537).

    Appearance on the Mountain in Galilee (panel 6 of the Maestà), 1308-11, Duccio di Buoninsegna | Creative Commons, courtesy Web Gallery of Art.

    And what are they commanded to do? “Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, drive out demons”! How extraordinary that Jesus is giving forth the power God the Father has given Him. This tells us much about the character of Jesus and the power itself. As we have noted in other reflections, all is found in the energy of the gift. God’s grace and mercy are not meant to be held onto or hoarded. They are always meant to be shared. This is overwhelmingly evident in Christ Himself, who not only pours His saving power on the world while alive, but gives us His Person in the Eucharist forever and His Spirit active in our lives. Thus, He tells the Apostles, “Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give.” Those powers of redemption are not theirs, they’re God’s, and they’re just using them to accomplish His work. Again, they are laborers for the Lord of the harvest. 

    As if a reminder of their utter dependence on God’s grace and power to do this incredible work, Jesus gives them a series of restrictions: no money, no sack, no extra tunic, no stick, not even sandals! What is the point here? I think it is in part a reminder of humility, that they are not to raise themselves up in the eyes of those they serve. Another aspect is undoubtedly a reminder of their dependence on God, not earthly things. Another piece may be the reminder of the fact that they are to labor, grinding the soles of their feet in the dust and cutting them on the rocks, much like Christ will be ground and cut on His way to the Cross. Suffering is part of the journey, but it does not define the journey in the least; quite the opposite: the joy of the abundant harvest dominates all. Finally, as Leiva-Merikakis notes, Jesus is teaching that “for the apostles, the mission is itself its own reward … Such a vocation and mission is nothing less than the realization on earth between Lord and apostle of the same relation existing between Son and Father in eternity” (Fire of Mercy…, 540).

    He dispels their worry with the simple phrase, “The laborer deserves his keep.” In these words is the unshakable faith in the goodness of their mission and the will of God. There is so much good at the heart of their work that their needs will be taken care of; food and housing manifesting like metal drawn to a magnet.

    John Sends Two Disciples to Jesus (late 1500s, published posthumously in 1593), Jérôme Nadal (one of the first ten Jesuits) | Creative Commons, courtesy catholic-resources.org.

    This good is so overwhelming that the second half of today’s gospel finds Jesus speaking about it. He commands them to “look for a worthy person” in whatever town they enter. On the surface, this is quite presumptuous of an unknown traveler, and perhaps even oddly smacks of arrogance. Leiva-Merikakis sets us straight on this. He claims that this “becomes an act of simple humility on the part of one radically stripped of personal interests: ‘Who is worthy of receiving the presence of the One I bear?’” (Fire of Mercy…, 542). Again, the orientation must always be the Father; the free gifts born by the laborer are not his but something of incredible value, something one hopes to be worthy of receiving. This worth, then, is like a readiness of heart to receive God’s redemption and message. 

    Thus, Jesus continues, “If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; if not, let your peace return to you.” When I imagine the Apostles on their mission, doing this work, I see a nimbus of light and power accompanying them. I think of this as the peace coming upon a house where they are welcomed. I begin to see the need for depicting holy ones with halos in sacred art. How else to depict this tangible yet invisible power, peace, and touch of divine glory?

    This is God come down to earth, investing the Son with His power, and His Son in turn investing His Chosen with that power. God’s power roams the world, healing, curing, raising people from the dead! And this is being done among Jews who God has been preparing for millennia to receive it. Whoever turns their back on this, well, this is not OK. As Jesus says, “it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town.” Such a harsh indictment in this case is simply justice. God has offered them mercy and justice over and over, now in the form of His very Son. At some point, we humans must accept His mercy and begin to do His work. We should rejoice to be laborers for the Lord of the harvest!

    One last point worth mentioning as one who is discerning to enter the Dominican Order: this part of Matthew’s gospel had a profound effect on St. Dominic. It is perhaps more well-known that this passage was embraced by Dominic’s friend and fellow saint, St. Francis of Assisi. On St. Matthias’ day in 1208, Francis heard this gospel reading and exclaimed, “That’s what I want! That’s what I have been looking for,” and immediately he took off his shoes, abandoned his staff and confined himself to a single tunic, and set himself to fulfill the words of the gospel literally (paraphrased from First Life of St. Francis, by Thomas of Celano, 1230 AD). And St. Francis indeed founded an order radically devoted to the literal life as described in Christ’s mission for the twelve.

    Yet, we can reasonably claim that Dominic, too, heard Christ speaking to him through this gospel and defined the destiny of the Order of Preachers in many ways according to it. Dominic’s focus was the heart of this mission rather than the literal deprivations Christ commands his Apostles. His early experiences with countering the Albigensian heretics in Southern France in 1206, ten years before founding the Order of Preachers, shows that this gospel was already ingrained in his approach. He was working with his superior, the bishop Diego of Osma, who explained to the Cistercians who were trying to argue against the heresies that they should abandon the expensive trappings, pomp, and dignity of their papal mission and instead follow the strategy of the apostles. In fact, the Albigensians were doing this and having a much better time gaining the respect of the people. This meant traveling on foot, without resources, and begging for food as they went. Diego and Dominic proceeded to demonstrate for the Cistercians how to do this and Dominic returned to spend years living in this way.

    St. Dominic and St. Francis (early 1600s), Angelo Lion | Wikimedia Commons.

    So while Francis sees a way to fundamentally change himself and save himself through this apostolic way, Dominic sees the way to serve and save others. Fr. Simon Tugwell tells us, “As early as 1220, at the first General Chapter of the order, presided over by Dominic himself, they solemnly wrote it into their constitutions that ‘our order is known to have been founded originally for the precise purpose of preaching and the salvation of souls, and all our concern should be primarily and enthusiastically directed to this all-important goal, that we should be able to be useful to the souls of our neighbors’” (Ways of Imperfection, 139-140). And so we can hear the echo of today’s readings in the foundation of the Dominican Order: “he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. … The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest … As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’”  

    And let us not forget that St. Dominic himself lived this life, traveling constantly, sending out the brothers of his newly founded order immediately to the learning centers of Europe, often without money or pre-arranged housing. And my favorite, as related by Sister Mary Jean Dorcy, OP: “Dominic always traveled on foot with a little bundle on his shoulder and a staff in his hand. As soon as he was a little way out of the towns through which he passed, he would stop and take off his shoes, performing the rest of the journey barefoot, however rough and bad the roads might be. If a sharp stone or thorn cut his feet, he would turn to his companions with that cheerful and joyous air which was so peculiar to him and say, ‘This is penance!’ Such kinds of penance were a particular pleasure to him” (Saint Dominic, 57). Truly, this was a man who looked at the journey to the “harassed and helpless” as divine labor bringing in a plentiful harvest.

     

  • Espousal to Christ

    Monday in the 14th Week of Ordinary Time: Hosea 2:16, 17c-18, 21-22, Matthew 9:18-26.

    Today’s readings broach a subject dear to the heart of the Church: the espousal of the Church to Christ, her Bridegroom. Perhaps it’s my gender, perhaps the era in which I grew up, but this image never sat squarely with me. It’s taken a while for me to appreciate it. This image is powerful because it conveys not just the sacred bond — the covenant — with God, but also the intimacy and selfless love that are present in marriage.

    It is the reading from Hosea, a prophet from the reign of bad King Jeroboam II, some 750 years before Christ’s birth, that brings us God’s promise of making a bride of Israel. God sets Hosea on an interesting course so that he can share in God’s own experience with the Jewish nation. God instructs Hosea, “Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord” (Hos 1:2b). To make this living lament clear in its intention, God tells him again, “Go, love a woman who has a lover and is an adulteress, just as the Lord loves the people of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love raisin cakes” (Hos 3:1). Hosea, in fact, does just this and the Lord instructs him to name his children Jezreel (“God comes”), Lo-ruhamah (“not-pitied”), and Lo-ammi (“not my people”). Again, Hosea does as instructed.

    Hosea and Gomer in an Embrace (1372), from a manuscript known as Bible Historiale | Wikimedia Commons.

    All of this sets the scene for God to reclaim and redeem Israel, his wife who has become a whore in her love for foreign gods like Baal. First, the Lord explains that she must make her way back to Him: “She shall pursue her lovers, but not overtake them; and she shall seek them, but shall not find them. Then she shall say, ‘I will go and return to my first husband, for it was better with me then than now” (Hos 2:7a). This is important, for God gives us free will, and while He wants us to return to Him, we must desire this within ourselves. But, in our unfaithfulness, do we owe God something? Anyone who is familiar with the sacrament of Reconciliation understands that the answer is yes. First, we owe our contrition, a “contrite heart” that pleases the Lord. And then there is penance (seemingly very easy these days as doled out by priests in my experience). God explains to Hosea, “I will uncover her shame in the sight of her lovers, and no one shall rescue her out of my hand. I will put an end to all her mirth, her festivals, her new moons, her sabbaths, and all her appointed festivals” (Hos 2:10-11). God points to what a person who admits guilt and lives in the light will experience: only He accepts unconditionally while those unworthy ones with evil in their hearts (“her lovers”) turn from the uncomfortable light of truth. There is an “end to all her mirth” because she, Israel, must die to sin, must no longer celebrate death (that is, worship of the worldly). This constitutes the punishment: “I will punish her for the festival days of the Baals, when she offered incense to them and decked herself with her ring and jewelry, and went after her lovers, and forgot me, says the Lord” (Hos 2:13).

    But here God pivots. And wonderfully so. He never wants to leave us in perpetual punishment. He wants us back in our rightful place of intimacy with Him. As we read in today’s reading, “Thus says the LORD: I will allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak to her heart. She shall respond there as in the days of her youth, when she came up from the land of Egypt.” He allures us. How? I am struck with the same response I have when people ask how they can hear God’s voice: through the wonders of the natural world He created, in the silence of our hearts and minds that give space for the spirit to soar, in His Spirit that animates us to care for others, and so much more. God is so infused in the world that everything speaks of Him and about Him. Note that God says He will “lead her into the desert and speak to her heart.” Consider the deep tradition here of the desert being a place to meet God (like Moses does in the burning bush) and a place to prepare oneself in isolation, in abandonment to Him. Of course, Jesus’s 40 days in the desert after being baptized by John come to mind. Jesus, the ultimate proxy for all of humanity, prepares Himself in the desert and in so doing prepares all of us to re-convene that journey back to God, once and for all.

    The transformation God promises is a willing return to Him as a loving husband: “On that day, says the LORD, She shall call me ‘My husband,’ and never again ‘My baal [master].’” Israel, and later all of humanity, re-discovers the love that God offers when in the desert with Him, allows this love to transform her, and no longer sees a heartless master, but a loving husband. God continues, giving us the full import of His marriage to humanity: “I will espouse you to me forever: I will espouse you in right and in justice, in love and in mercy; I will espouse you in fidelity, and you shall know the LORD.” Note that He is the One who enacts the marriage, who brings the right, justice, love, mercy, and fidelity. Importantly, this comprises the revelation of His very self. This is our Judeo-Christian definition of God, and here we see how it comes directly from His own revelation of self to the prophets like Hosea. He is all-good. He is justice, love, mercy, and fidelity. These are also fundamental aspects of Christian marriage, again, as defined by God Himself.

    Here’s the power of God using the image of espousal: it enables us to better understand our God as someone with whom we are called to have an intimate, loving relationship. This is drastically different than the other gods in other cultures from antiquity. It also sets the stage for what we will encounter in His Son, Jesus Christ (and the espousal of the Church to Christ, which we will explore below). In addition, God is sanctifying the sacrament of human marriage by entering into this relationship with us. He is defining for us concepts that we invariably fall short of living, namely love, mercy, and fidelity. This whole revelation to Hosea is an example of His endless mercy for a wife (Israel) who has whored herself out to others. It is an example of fidelity to an intimate bond that we can hardly imagine. This is why He instructs Hosea himself to marry a woman who was a prostitute, so that he can literally live out the same type of love, mercy, and fidelity that God is living out for Israel. 

    Resurrected Christ and Virgin (c.1480-1490), Prayer Book illuminated by followers of Willem Vrelant of Bruges | Creative Commons, courtesy thedigitalwalters.org. This is Walters Manuscript W.438, fol. 229v. I use this beautiful illumination to point out that Christ as the Bridegroom was taken quite personally and literally in the Middle Ages, particularly by saintly virgins like St. Catherine of Siena. This is not exactly the type of espousal I’m discussing here. Rather, I’m reflecting on the more general espousal with the Church, the Body of Christ.

    What gift does a bridegroom give his bride? The greatest act of love, mercy, and fidelity that God gives his people is His Only Son, all the moreso because this gift costs Him. His will is that His Son be sacrificed ignominiously on the cross. But God wills this because it ushers in the Last Times, when His intimate relationship with us is quickened and intensified in the Real Presence that inhabits the Liturgy. It is for us that God wills His Son to take up the Cross. It is for us and for His Father that Jesus willingly makes this sacrifice. This is why St. Paul can give the Ephesians the example of Christ as the Bridegroom for the Church as a way to order our own marriages here on earth: 

    For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which he is the Savior. Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word, so as to present the church to himself in splendor, without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind—yes, so that she may be holy and without blemish. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hates his own body, but he nourishes and tenderly cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, because we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church. Each of you, however, should love his wife as himself, and a wife should respect her husband (Ephesians 5:23-33).

    There is nothing wrongly submissive about a wife being subject to her husband just as the church is subject to Christ. This is trusting adoration. Likewise, there is nothing askew with a husband loving his wife so much as to give himself up for her. This is the definition of ultimate love. I’ve too often heard contemporary people shudder over this reading and offer a caustic remark that this is the problem with the Church — men dominating all power relationships. Ugh, please. It takes a seriously blind person not to understand the full meaning here. Neither person in a Christian marriage should wield power against the other. Both follow the example of Christ and give of themselves, adoring the other. Marriage and fidelity are defined by God, not by us, because the qualities that make up the intimate, sacred union of marriage are perfect only in God. To think that we define marriage is like allowing the cat to dictate the rules of your household. We can’t even comprehend what it takes to be as good, true, merciful, and loving as you need to be in a marriage without the example of Christ.

    So God employs the image of marriage from the early days of His relationship with the Jewish nation. It is a form of being with Him that is sacred and intimate, and it is something they can strive to replicate with one another. 

    Jesus employs the image of the bridegroom several times in the gospels. In fact, in the verses just prior to today’s gospel reading, Jesus uses the bridegroom image to explain why his disciples are not fasting: “The wedding guests cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast” (Mt 9:15). Clearly, He is the bridegroom, and hearkening to the ancient Jewish tradition of a 7-day feast following a wedding, His time on earth is the time of feasting and celebration.

    Let’s remember this scene in all of its intensity because St. Matthew presents these moments one after another in rapid succession, and their depth is easily missed. Today’s reading begins, “While Jesus was speaking…” Where was he? He was at the home of Matthew, the tax collector, whom He had just chosen as an apostle, stunning the righteous Jews around Him. He is reclining at dinner with Matthew and his tax collector group of friends (i.e., sinners, impure Jews). The Pharisees complain and Jesus answers, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. … For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners” (Mt 9:12b, 13b). These words reveal much. Not just about Christ and His attention to those in need, but also about who is most ready for Him. Sinners live out of sync with truth and light, in a rawness that wears their spirit and can make them understand in their core the need for conversion and healing. These are the ones living on the edge of the spiritual desert who cling to the glitter of the world but whom God wants to abandon themselves to the desert so that He can meet them there and allure them. He wants to offer them their much-needed healing and absolution so that they can return to Him like a pure and faithful bride, to use the image from Hosea.

    The Calling of Matthew (Die Berufung des Matthäus), 1536, Jan Sanders van Hemessen | Creative Commons, courtesy Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen – Alte Pinakothek München.

    We get a clear picture of the Pharisees’ frustration with this man who seems not to uphold the rules, prohibitions, and rituals in the way they think is important. Their next question to Him as He reclines at dinner with Matthew is the one about fasting, and this just seems nitpicky and small of them. Christ responds with the image of the Bridegroom, something that surely would have raised eyebrows. But before they can retort, we get to today’s reading, when, “While Jesus was speaking, an official came forward, knelt down before him…” Here is a “leader of the synagogue” (the NRSV translation) who suddenly appears and attests to Christ’s position as the eschatological Bridegroom. He kneels in supplication, out of nowhere, acknowledging his Lord’s supremacy and his powerlessness before Him. Nothing could have been a better response to the high-and-mighty Pharisees than this respected official, on the same social level as them, coming in and showing obeisance to Jesus. 

    And here we also see the boldness of the official, who St. Mark tells us is named Jairus. He rushes up to the Lord in his desperate grief over his daughter’s death. Rather than staying and mourning at home with the others, his faith carries him to Christ. Yet what is more stunning, that Jairus would interrupt this dinner Christ is having, saying “My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live,” or the fact that “Jesus got up and followed him, with his disciples”? It was just prior to this day that Jesus gave his Sermon on the Mount where he says, “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.” And this day or so later we see Him bear this out. Jairus boldly, in faith, asks. Jesus, without hesitation, gives.

    As if the unfolding drama was not enough to take in, Jesus walks through the crowds towards Jairus’s house and a “woman suffering hemorrhages for twelve years ” approaches Him from behind in another “search and you will find” moment of faith. Again, it’s so amazingly concise that we might overlook it’s depth and importance. Why would the Holy Spirit inspire St. Matthew to include the fact that she was bleeding for 12 years? Twelve is important because it signifies the whole of Israel, the 12 tribes. There are also 12 apostles, marking the new Israel they will start in the Church. Her bleeding signifies the impurity, the sinfulness of the tribes in need of purification by their Messiah. The weight of redemptive history is multiplied through her person as we consider what it means to approach Jesus from behind and not see His face. On Mount Sinai, when receiving the Ten Commandments, “Moses covered his face, for he was afraid to gaze on God” (Ex 3:6). This woman, too, understands her lowliness in the face of the Almighty

    Christ and the Woman with the Issue of Blood (1509), Urs Graf | Creative commons, courtesy New York Public Library Digital Collections.

    St. Matthew relates her inner thoughts: “If only I can touch his cloak, I shall be cured.” She reaches up and touches the tassel on his garment. The tassels on Jewish clothing were prescribed by God in the Book of Numbers to be worn as a reminder to keep God’s commandments. They serve as a visible locus of the covenant — a reminder that God loves and cares intimately for us and that we are called to maintain our fidelity to Him. The Holy Spirit is guiding her mind and her hand to the tassels on Christ’s garment, the tassels worn by the Living Word and Wisdom of God. They are not only a symbol of fidelity but a symbol of perfected fidelity within the Trinity. What greater object of attention, affection, and caress could we possibly have? All of this in a small, easily overlooked detail of St. Matthew’s gospel.

    At her touch of His garment, “Jesus turned around and saw her.” Again, Matthew’s economy of language here belies a staggering moment in the life of this woman who, in great humility yet great courage, wants to only touch the tassels on His garment, not see Him face-to-face. St. Mark gives us a bit more detail in his gospel: “Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ (Mk 5:30). In both instances, we are made aware that something important has happened on the spiritual plane. The impure, hemorrhagic woman crawls from her spiritual desert towards the God who allures her, she reaches out in faith and humility to Him, her one and only true spouse. How can He not but turn to her as well? The Father reveals to us that He is the definition of fidelity and mercy, and, in Jesus, God has turned toward man too decisively for just a healing-by-touch moment to suffice. In this moment, Christ reveals that He is God, the one Bridegroom who loves beyond our comprehension. He sees her. And as their gazes connect, He reassures her with the intimacy and healing that only God can provide: “Courage, daughter! Your faith has saved you.”

    In the words of Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, “Jesus calls out to the woman, using the same term of intimate relationship that the stricken father had used a moment before to refer to his biological daughter … As divine Word, Jesus has no less and urgent concern for her welfare than, at his level, Jairus has in his anguish over his daughter’s death “(Fire of Mercy, Heart of the World, Vol I, 467-468). As we read this expansion of spiritual daughterhood to the nation stuck in sin (in the form of this woman), we also see how Christ will expand redemption from the Jewish nation to all of humanity. The fancy theological term for this is divine filiation.

    Next in the gospel reading, Jesus arrives at Jairus’s house and meets a crowd of mourners causing a commotion. I can hear the shrill wails of the women and low moans of the family mixing with the mournful sounds of the flutes in a cacophony of misery. This is the culture of death. This is why Christ forces them out. And they ridicule Him when He says she is only sleeping, showing that they are deaf to the Words of Life and bereft of faith in the face of the Savior. Leiva-Merikakis presents a great gloss of this moment: “By their mockery of Jesus’s presence and prophetic words … the mourners show themselves to be resigned to the cult of death. They have become so accustomed to the darkness of death that they are professionals of despair, enemies of the promise of life” (Fire of Mercy, 470).

    St. Matthew ends the episode simply: “When the crowd was put out, he came and took her by the hand, and the little girl arose.” This gesture, of course, speaks volumes. The strong arm/hand of God is a recurring theme in scripture. Here, we encounter the hand of our Lord not wiping out armies but intimately taking the hand of a girl and raising her up. It is a gentle gesture but contains within it the ultimate power of God: bestowing life through fidelity, love, and mercy. Leiva-Merikakis tells us: “The gesture of Jesus’ hand strongly grasping the girl’s is that of the Bridegroom-Deliverer: ‘You will know that I am the Lord when I open up your tombs and lead you out of your graves’ (Ezek 37:13)” (Fire of Mercy, 472-473). 

    The resurrection of Jairus’ daughter (Die Auferweckung der Tochter des Jairus), 1880, Albert von Keller | Wikimedia Commons. As I looked for historical paintings of this scene, this one struck me immediately in terms of its fine craftsmanship. The faces and poses of the mourners show an array of amazement, happiness, and even resignation (i.e., self-absorption). I was at first hesitant to choose one that shows a young girl with a naked torso, but two things about the way von Keller paints her and Christ dispelled any doubts. First is the intimacy, trust, and innocence inherent in their embrace, for which the virginal nudity seems appropriate. Second is their positioning as if bride and groom, which suits this post perfectly.

    And so we encounter again the theme of espousal to God. As Leiva-Merikakis writes, the girl has symbolically ceased being her father’s natural daughter and has become the child of the Father in heaven and the bride of Jesus. This, for me, makes the idea of Christ as the Bridegroom more intelligible: because His redemption of us is so intimate, loving, and full of fidelity like the perfect marriage, He is the ultimate Bridegroom for the Church. It is the character of His love and the eternal life He offers that makes the image of espousal a potent one. 

  • What God Does with His Omnipotence

    Tuesday in the 13th Week of Ordinary Time: Amos 3:1-8, 4:11-12, Matthew 8:23-27.

    The definition of God — really any god in any tradition — contains within it an amount of power far beyond human abilities. In Greek mythology, Hermes has the power of speed so unimaginably fast that he acts as the messenger of the gods; there is a Greek pantheon of gods with differing abilities, culminating in Zeus, whose thunderbolts are legendary. But pagan gods are infamously mercurial in their use of power and have humanlike flights of fancy and anger, perhaps as a way to explain evil in the world.

    Then there’s our God, the triune Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who is omnipotent, containing all of the powers of the Greek gods plus more since He is also the Creator of all that is visible and invisible. What does our God do with his omnipotence? And why? Is He driven to flights of rage and fancy like pagan gods?

    Today’s readings give us insight into how and why God uses His omnipotence, as well as the fact that He has been revealing these things to us over the ages according to His great plan. God works differently in the world over our historical, linear understanding of time. And yet God doesn’t change: He is the same source of all goodness, truth, light, and love. Jesus Christ, the Son sent from the Father at a specific moment in history, expands and perfects our understanding of how God operates, how He uses His omnipotence, and yet it does not diminish the revelation of the prophets like Amos who came before Him.

    The Prophet Amos (1866), Gustave Doré | Wikimedia Commons.

    The first reading comes from the Book of Amos, a prophet from the reign of Jeroboam II in Israel (790-753 BC), and around 50 years before Israel is to be defeated by the Assyrians. Amos, a shepherd and fig grower from the southern kingdom of Judah, is sent by the Lord to prophesy to the rich and powerful northern kingdom of Israel. We must acknowledge some powerful parallels between Jereboam II’s Israel and the contemporary United States. Jeroboam II was very successful militarily, conquering Damascus and expanding Israel’s borders back to their fullest extend (2 Kings 14: 25, 28). Yet this time saw a succession of prophets warning about the lack of sincerity and excesses of the elite in Israel: Hosea, Joel, Amos, and Jonah. In addition to father and son laying with the same woman Amos tells us that “they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals—they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way … they lay themselves down beside every altar” (Am 2:6-8). Add to this the fact that they made their consecrated priests drink wine and commanded their prophets not to testify, and we have a picture of a people dominated by love of money, position, and enjoyment while not caring for the poor and needy nor living up to God’s commandments. Is the situation much different today?

    The Word of God through prophet Amos’s mouth at the beginning of today’s reading seems to be contradictory: “You alone have I favored, more than all the families of the earth; Therefore I will punish you for all your crimes.” Is this a sign of favor, being punished?? As any parent may attest, sometimes the answer is yes. As we know from Jesus, His Father is exactly that: the ultimate father who provides all for us but also must guide and discipline His children as is necessary. His position as our ultimate Father is why we cannot say that the “God of the Old Testament” is somehow different from the one portrayed in the New Testament — He does not seek revenge or lash out in unexplained fits of violence. He punishes justly, as a father who loves his children and expects much of them. See how consistent Amos’s I-favor-you-therefore-I-punish-you is with what Jesus tells His disciples: “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded” (Lk 12:48). Through the mouth of both, God the Father is revealing the way He loves us, like a father loves his children.

    What appears next from Amos is an interesting series of circumstances-from-prior-causes taken from the world we live in: people walk together because they agreed prior, a lion roars because prey is near, a bird is snared because there is a lure, people in a city are frightened because a trumpet sounds. His point is that we live in a world where actions have consequences. Not only this, the logic underlying these consequences is defined by God Himself. He created this natural world. He endowed us with the abilities we use to navigate this world. The inexorable logic of any given action-begets-consequence is fundamentally marked with God’s fingerprints.

    Icon of the Prophet Amos (20th century), unknown artist | Image from the Orthodox Church in America website.

    Amos goes on to say: “If evil befalls a city, has not the LORD caused it? Indeed, the Lord GOD does nothing without revealing his plan to his servants, the prophets.” This final statement shows that God is active in the world in the same action-begets-consequence way that the other examples show. Of course He operates in this way, because He is not different or separate from the Logos He brings to the universe. But, Amos tells us, God first gives his servants, the prophets, fair warning. We know that He also stays His hand when the prophets ask. And thus both the warnings and the acts of mercy reveal that God sacrifices His own natural law in His love for us. What an interesting way to think of Christ, the sacrificed Logos! God’s omnipotence, we learn, is used to establish a spiritual law of love that supersedes the natural law that He imbues in the universe.

    The verses we read at the end of today’s reading (from chapter 4 of the Book of Amos) are the end of 6 examples and repetitions of “Yet you returned not to me.” God is showing how his work as a loving Father was done in the history of the Jewish nation, first in blessings, then in warnings, and yet the Jews “returned not to me.” This establishes both His patience and His mercy. But at some point, God’s plan requires an appropriate response from His people. They do not respond appropriately and — as we have heard — actions have natural consequences. Thus, God warns them with a note of finality, “So now I will deal with you in my own way, O Israel!”

    The final verse of chapter 4 that occurs after this (not included in the lectionary reading) adds a nice emphasis on what we’ve been contemplating: “For lo, the one who forms the mountains, creates the wind, reveals his thoughts to mortals, makes the morning darkness, and treads on the heights of the earth— the Lord, the God of hosts, is his name!” Today, just as in 750 BC, we have a hard time contemplating that this is the One who is speaking to us. It is much easier to put God in that mental compartment that contains Zeus than the place He really belongs, which is everywhere and nowhere. No human mental capacity can contain or explain this One who made the universe and commands all that it contains. Here is where appropriate awe and reverence must characterize our relationship with Him. And that awe and reverence were distinctly missing from Israel under Jeroboam II. The consequence of their actions: God delivers them into the hands of the Assyrian nation.

    The Storm on the Sea of Galilee (1633), Rembrandt | Wikimedia Commons.

    The gospel reading echoes this final verse from Amos where God tells us that He is the one who “forms the mountains” and “creates the wind.” It is a familiar reading, when Jesus falls asleep in the boat and his disciples become terrified by a storm that threatens to capsize them. Jesus “got up, rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was great calm.” Truly, this is the God who spoke through Amos! And to make this point, Luke tells us that the disciples marvel, “What sort of man is this, whom even the winds and the sea obey?”

    But it seems to me there is another message in this reading, for what does Jesus say before stilling the waters? He tells them, “Why are you terrified, O you of little faith?” This is all that we hear from Him during this passage, and His emphasis is (as usual) on their faith. What faith is He speaking about? Is it the faith that nothing harmful will befall them? I think not, given His insistence elsewhere that they must take up their own cross and follow Him and that many will persecute them because of His Name. What other faith might He mean? As in other places in the gospels, I think it is more likely faith in Him as God’s Chosen One, His Only Son. In the gospel of St. Matthew, Jesus tells us that faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains. Here, too, it seems He is saying that even just a little faith can still the seas. 

    What is the point of these statements about faith? Does it seem odd that Jesus is telling us that faith can have power over nature? I think this meshes well with our reflection on the reading from Amos. We learn from Amos that God uses His omnipotence in this very way, to contradict nature and natural consequences as a way to establish the supremacy of love and mercy. Maybe contradict isn’t the right verb; perhaps just “supersede.” Maybe it’s a way to establish a greater, more powerful set of consequences that operate on the spiritual level of love and mercy. Here, Jesus defines life as something with a spiritual dimension more dynamic and effective than anything in the physical world. Real life happens on the spiritual plane in concert with God Himself, and faith is the matrix within which we operate on this spiritual plane. Jesus stilling the waters makes us immediately wonder at one who wields such power in the world, but the point is about faith and the spiritual life, not about power on the physical plane. 

    Let’s return to the question reflected in the title of this post. What have we discovered about how God wields his omnipotence? He’s not the bystander, the deist god of Benjamin Franklin who created the world but lives apart from it. He’s not the old-world pagan god running amok in the world with sometimes terrible, sometimes wonderful consequences according to his unknown whim. And he’s not the only-gentle new world god who couldn’t possibly be associated with anything like being vanquished, conquered, or punished. Amos first reveals that God’s law and the resulting application of justice is woven into the natural law of the universe, in other words, it is the opposite of random or driven by whim. It is Logos. Amos also reveals that because God loves His people as a Father, He endlessly provides mercy and second chances at their request while at the same time thirsting for them to be a light to all nations (i.e., having very high expectations for them). Given the periodic punishments He enacts on His people (slavery in Egypt, Assyrian conquer, Babylonian exile), we encounter arguably more time when He stays His hand, when He gives them second chances, when He sends prophet after prophet to warn them. This is another way to look at how God uses His omnipotence: to stay and forestall the natural consequences and natural justice inherent in His own Logos of the universe. By so doing, God reveals this is the essence of divine mercy, a power even greater than that in the physical world.

    The Universe Surrenders (2019), Christopher Lyter | Image from singulart.com.

    So, why doesn’t God wield his omnipotent power to still tidal waves and save thousands of peoples’ lives? Why doesn’t He cure all the cancer and stop all the war? I could offer reasons like divine punishment from a Father to his children or perhaps the crucible of the cross that forges a stronger soul and spirit more aligned to Him, but I think we need to make a major pivot from these questions given today’s gospel reading. Not just this physical vs. spiritual power shift Jesus teaches us in the reading but the fact of the greatest sacrifice of all, a divine Son on a detested cross in order to bring us into a new age and crack open the river of liturgy in our lives. What these immense displays of omnipotent power tell us is that we need to stop thinking so myopically about God and His power, as if our concerns during this blip of cosmic time are the be-all and end-all. God’s saving plan, already so very far in motion, have a scope and power in history so far beyond anything we can imagine. We have a small window into His intelligence and omnipotence, and that window is showing us a spiritual plane where the logic of love and mercy occupy the topmost place.

  • Faith in the Face of Pain

    Saturday of the 12th Week of Ordinary Time: Lamentations 2:2, 10-14, 18-19, Matthew 8:5-17.

    Today’s readings combine a first reading from the seldom-used Book of Lamentations with what is for me one of the crucial texts for my experience of the Mass. They combine to shed even more light on the depth of the unearned generosity and mercy of God. 

    The Book of Lamentations is used exactly zero times for Sundays and major feasts in our Catholic Lectionary. A reading from Lamentations is an option for funeral masses, however, and selections appear 8 times over the three-year cycle during weekday masses. Today is one of those days.

    I can imagine a few reasons why Lamentations is so seldom employed during the Mass. First, it’s a bit hard to take in. While poetically rich (four of the five chapters are acrostic, meaning they are structured according to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet), the tone is undeniably bleak and coveys overwhelming suffering. Second, there is the question of how it fits into our experience as the Church of the Risen Lord. We live in an age that has the fullness of Christ revealed to it, where we can partake in the overflowing font of love from the Trinity that is the liturgy. How is this a time of lament? It’s really not.

    But returning to the Book of Lamentations is important because it reveals not only our history but our present state as human beings. It underlines our desperate need for Christ in our lives. It helps us to appreciate the amazing gift the Father gave us in his Son, who took all of our sins upon his shoulders and on the cross, sacrificing them to the Father in order to take that burden from us. Where would we be without this unearned and undeserved gift? Well, let’s look at the Book of Lamentations!

    What strikes me in today’s reading is the very personal nature of the Book of Lamentations: “Worn out from weeping are my eyes, within me all is in ferment; My gall is poured out on the ground.” Many (if not most) of us have experienced moments of weeping that have completely wiped us out emotionally and physically. That sense of your insides being in a knot, bubbling “in ferment,” is also something I can relate to. And the “gall poured out on the ground” is an interesting way to imagine the acidic vitality of our insides — that which helps us break down and in a way “lord over” the plants and animals that we ingest — being spent and wasted. 

    Lamentations (1866), Paul Gustave Doré | Image from arthive.com.

    For the author (the Greek texts credit the prophet Jeremiah with the book even though the Hebrew texts do not), this very personal lament specifically references Jerusalem’s destruction and pillage by the Babylonians. His personhood is intimately tied up with being part of a Chosen People who have gone astray and now experience the seeming loss of their favor with God. He writes, “Cry out to the Lord; moan, O daughter Zion! Let your tears flow like a torrent day and night; Let there be no respite for you, no repose for your eyes.” The personification of Jerusalem as the daughter of the Lord is a particularly effective way to portray the suffering of the nation. The poet, the nation, and Jerusalem all cry together.

    When I say that the Book of Lamentations is hard, there is another reason for the modern reader: God is portrayed in a way we’re increasingly uncomfortable with. Today’s reading starts: “The Lord has consumed without pity all the dwellings of Jacob; He has torn down in his anger the fortresses of daughter Judah; He has brought to the ground in dishonor her king and her princes.” God consumes without pity, he has anger, he brings low the leaders in dishonor. This is not the late 20th-century version of the God of Love who makes everyone feel good. But let’s pay attention, because this is not a different God, no matter how these words might stick in your throat. This is the God of Abraham, Moses, and Elijah, the Father of Jesus Christ, our God.

    The way the author of Lamentations talks about God makes more sense if we place ourselves in the mind of true Jewish believers in God, people like Jeremiah. In their worldview, they know that everything comes from God. From success or loss on the battlefield to blessings or curses in life, everything comes from our personal relationship with God and the law He has given us. If we live according to His precepts, we eventually realize blessings. If we live our lives contrary to His Word, then we don’t know how or when, but there will be a consequence because evil and untruth simply cannot stand in God’s presence. Such consequences, such divine retribution, may not even come in a person’s lifetime — the Psalms have many passages where the psalmist bemoans the power and wealth that evil people amass and which seems to be unfairly bestowed upon them. But we don’t know God’s plan and can’t comprehend His relationship with time. Perhaps He is giving someone until the last seconds of their life to return to Him in their hearts. Perhaps He wants to provide a deeper lesson to us in the withering of the bad fruits that they have sown in the world. Who knows?

    Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem (1630), Rembrandt van Rijn | Creative Commons, courtesy the Rijks Museum, Netherlands.

    Today’s problem is that we think we know. Science, logic, and technology tell us that there’s practically nothing outside of our realm of knowledge and expertise. Modern commerce tells us that there’s nothing money can’t buy and get to you immediately. We satisfy all of our desires quicker and more thoroughly than ever before. To the modern mind, the notion that a divine power has ordered the universe in a way that we can’t know, we can’t change, and to which we must orient ourselves and be judged, well, that notion is deeply unsatisfying and must be rejected if we are to continue living in our comfort zone. It’s much easier to laugh off such a belief as superstition or the psychological neediness of weaker minds than it is to truly take the millennia of our faith tradition and God’s revelation in the world at face value.

    To believe it, even for just a day, reveals the deeply troubling state of the modern mind.

    But the writer of the Book of Lamentations believes it wholeheartedly. Not in a fake-it-till-you-make-it way, or even a “Lord, help me have faith in these hard ideas” way, but in a way that he knows from his toes to his gut that something is true. It’s the way I wake up and know I live in Utah. I conform myself to the laws and expectations of the state and I don’t spend my days questioning if Utah truly exists. The writer of Lamentations understands God in a way that we have yet to approach if we hold that seed of doubt in our minds, if we put any kind of limit on what our God might do, think, feel, or want.

    So what does this crushed person who wrote Lamentations offer us? A taste of true faith, for one thing. And more: like Abraham, like Elijah, like Esther, and so many others, he offers us a way to comport ourselves when we realize that we have sinned and brought disaster upon ourselves, our people, and our Church. He writes, “Cry out to the Lord; moan, O daughter Zion! Let your tears flow like a torrent day and night; Let there be no respite for you, no repose for your eyes. … Pour out your heart like water in the presence of the Lord; Lift up your hands to him for the lives of your little ones Who faint from hunger at the corner of every street.” Is his point that we should always be ashamed and feel horrible? No, but that we should have true contrition (that is, sorrow for having offended God) and true repentance. What comes to mind for me is actually Christ’s beatitude, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” (Mt 5:4). God gives us mercy and comfort if we mourn our losses and our sins. Even moreso now, after Christ’s Paschal sacrifice, in the Sacraments of Penance and Eucharist. Perhaps He knew that we would become used to immediate gratification and needed something constantly available to lift us up. I particularly like the phrase to “pour out your heart like water in the presence of the Lord.” We are used to thinking of our hearts as being inviolably personal; someone might harm us but not touch our hearts; someone might think they know us but not know what’s deep in our heart. Medicine gives us 101 ways to monitor and care for our heart because, we are told, it is essential to life and to who we are. Now imagine pouring out everything in your heart like it was water — precious, yes — but freely flowing in the presence of the Lord. This is the appropriate way to look at ourselves and all we are, which comes solely from the Father and which amounts to but an infinitesimal speck in His presence. 

    At the Waters of Babylon (An den Wassern Babylons), c.1920, Gebhard Fugel | Wikimedia Commons.

    Let’s turn to the gospel reading and the centurion’s response, which we repeat just before receiving the Eucharist at Mass. Jesus offers to go to the centurion’s house to cure his servant, but the centurion replies, “Lord, I am not worthy to have you enter under my roof; only say the word and my servant will be healed.” This is the same humility at the heart of the writer of Lamentations who, no matter his own personal purity, understands that he belongs to the chosen nation that betrayed God. Jew and Gentile alike know that they are fundamentally “not worthy” in the presence of God. More: Jesus, born of the line of David in this same nation of Chosen People, comes to extend salvation beyond the nation to the entire world. Here He brings healing to a Roman centurion, and being “not worthy” takes on an additional meaning for those of us not of Jewish descent who are being offered salvation. If we don’t think we’re that much of sinners (and good people honestly aren’t), then take for your model the saints who strove for perfection so they would be suitable to be in God’s presence. Better yet, take the ancient words of the psalmist: “Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me” (Ps 51:5). We must have the humility to realize that even the best of us is but a child born into a world of sin and in need of God’s mercy and redemption.

    Relative amounts of worthiness are meaningless to Christ. He offers healing and salvation to everyone, with a special focus on social outcasts to remind us that we are all equal children in God’s eyes. He desires personal purity and adherence to God’s law, but more so, in the words of the psalmist, a contrite heart: “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (Ps 51:17). Is this not a suitable description of the writer of the Book of Lamentations: a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart? 

    We might ask, why a broken spirit, a broken heart? Many theologists have written on this topic, but a simple answer might be that the only way to overcome our original sin of betraying God’s trust by desiring to have His knowledge is to break that spirit of defiance and pride in ourselves. Perhaps God wishes for us to go through an amount of suffering that breaks our spirit of selfishness so that He can draw us to Himself and rebuild us in His image.

    And how interesting that we get a military analogy from the centurion in today’s reading. As most military systems work, the Roman one included, troops must learn early on to leave behind their own desires and thinking in order to follow commands unquestioningly. A good military could never have each person down the line of command questioning the orders from his or her superior. The centurion brings his broken and re-formed spirit to Christ. He explains that “I too am a man subject to authority …  I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and to another, ‘Come here,’ and he comes.” This life experience helps the centurion believe unquestioningly that if Jesus commands the servant to be healed, he will be healed. He pairs this with his own humility (which is itself a contrite heart for the sins of humanity) when he says, “Lord, I am not worthy to have you enter under my roof.”

    This broken spirit and contrite heart God indeed does not despise. “When Jesus heard this, he was amazed and said to those following him, ‘Amen, I say to you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith.’” Christ, energized by the faith shown Him by the centurion, goes on directly to heal Peter’s mother-in-law and many others brought to Him that evening.

    Christ and the Centurion (1726-1729), Sebastiano Ricci | Image courtesy The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.

    There are so many lessons for us in these readings. One is the insistence on a conversion of heart as our way to God. Even this phrase is misleading because “conversion” may imply that we are the authors of the action. By conversion of heart, we must understand that what we do is simply break ourselves away from the comfort zone of thinking we’ve got it all figured out and can do it on our own. God gives us endless opportunities to reach this point of a broken spirit, whether the death of a loved one, a lost job, a sickness, or what have you. After this, we must be contrite primarily for our hubris in thinking that we exist without God and have the power to control the world and our own destinies. Secondarily, we must be contrite for the actual sins we may have committed against God and our fellow human beings. Finally, we must offer this all to God, our hearts pouring out like water, and beg for his mercy. Then, the real conversion is out of our hands and in His. He has given us His Son and the Holy Spirit to fashion us into beings better than anything we could be on our own. We can be beings of light and charity in this broken world, but only if we acknowledge and give to Him the power and control of our lives. 

    Now, certainly living by God’s law and precepts is important, but without a truly broken spirit and contrite heart, being a rule-follower is nothing more than that. God wants our entire selves, and this starts with humbling ourselves before Him, not just ticking off the things we did according to the law.

    This brings me to a final point that I feel compelled to make. There is a current debate today as we try to avoid spreading COVID-19 in our churches: should we stop receiving the Eucharist on the tongue because of hygiene/saliva/respiratory droplet concerns? On the public health side of things, the evidence clearly points to this being risky in terms of spreading the virus. Yet I have encountered some parishioners in our church who have boycotted receiving communion because of this. One of them explained in a heated manner that it is not OK to receive the Eucharist in our hands because our hands are not consecrated like the priest’s hands are (indeed, there is strong support from the Doctors of the Church on this point, namely St. Thomas Aquinas and others). In other words, we sully the purity of the Eucharist by touching it with our hands. The claim is that the only way to receive the Eucharist cleanly and with appropriate reverence is to have it placed directly on our tongues so we can ingest it right away. This person was particularly concerned with the loss of reverence in the modern Catholic Church, which many people ascribe to standing and receiving Eucharist in the hand instead of kneeling and receiving on the tongue.

    I’ve investigated this issue a bit and the Church herself has vacillated on this topic. There is no mention of receiving Eucharist on the tongue in the New Testament (notably not in the Last Supper). We can reasonably guess that receiving a piece of bread at a meal was done by hand, even during the liturgy when the bread has been consecrated and become the Body of Christ. We have St. Cyril of Jerusalem clearly instructing catechists in 350 AD, “When thou goest to receive communion go not with thy wrists extended, nor with thy fingers separated, but placing thy left hand as a throne for thy right, which is to receive so great a King, and in the hollow of the palm receive the body of Christ, saying, Amen” (Catechesis Mystagogica V, xxi-xxii, Migne Patrologia Graeca 33). Some opponents of Eucharist-by-hand point to the Council of Saragossa (380 AD) and Synod of Toledo (400 AD), which threatened excommunication for taking the Eucharist by the hand, but these regional (Iberian Penninsula) meetings were convened specifically to counter the Gnostic-Manichean heresy known as Priscillianism wherein people took the Eucharist out of the church and ate it later. Nonetheless, the practice went out of style, presumably out of a desire for reverence for the Real Presence, and by the 3rd Council of Constantinople (680 AD), it was formally forbidden by the Church to receive the Eucharist in the hand.

    The Body of Christ in the Eucharist (contemporary), Jerry Bacik | Image from imagekind.com.

    But after Vatican II, bishops around the world began accepting this once again as a valid form of receiving the Eucharist, including the bishops in the U.S. in 1977. Today, according to The General Instruction of the Roman Missal, “the consecrated host may be received either on the tongue or in the hand at the discretion of each communicant. When Holy Communion is received under both kinds, the sign of reverence is also made before receiving the Precious Blood” (160). 

    So, by boycotting Eucharist-by-hand, these parishioners are making a political statement that contemporary, Church-sanctioned practice is not valid. That is a problem in itself, and I don’t welcome this type of act in the Holy Liturgy. The liturgy is for the faithful to commune with God, and as the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) states: “It is in keeping with the very meaning of the Eucharist that the faithful, if they have the required dispositions, receive communion when they participate in the Mass” (1187). Moreover, such a boycott of Eucharist-by-hand shows either an ignorance of or willful defiance of the great movement of the Mass as outlined to wonderfully in the CCC (1348-1355). Our Eucharistic celebration of the Mass at the dual tables of the Word and the Body has a logical as well as a mystical arc that helps us give appropriate prayer and preparation throughout the liturgical celebration, the summit of which is feeding ourselves with the Bread of Life. To take the analogy used by Christ and the apostles, not taking the Eucharist as offered to you by the priest and sanctioned by your bishop is like showing up as the bride to your own wedding, going through all the preparations and the entire ritual only to refuse to say your vows to your bridegroom, who in this case literally is Christ Himself!

    Ironically, this politicization of the form of reception of the Eucharist ends up being one of the more irreverent acts one can imagine, yet done in the name of demanding more reverence. While I absolutely agree that a deep sense of reverence is often lacking in our modern Church, I think it is far too simplistic to point to one specific ritualistic practice at the pinnacle of the Mass as the culprit. As mentioned above, that sense of reverence and focus on the Lord should be present from the beginning, the gathering, and all throughout the great liturgical celebration where we get to behold our Lord in Word and Body. The entire movement of the Mass demands our full participation — this does not diminish the value of the Eucharist but only accentuates it as we prepare ourselves in great anticipation for the meal.

    Mourners (1947), Pran Nath Mago | Image from renovatio.zaytuna.edu.

    But perhaps my greatest sadness over this act by some parishioners is something that we are clearly hearing in today’s readings. From Lamentations: “Let your tears flow like a torrent” and “Pour out your heart like water in the presence of the Lord.” Our reflection on the psalmist’s insistence that the Lord is most pleased by a broken and contrite heart, that is, our humility and willingness to be shaped by Him. And the centurion’s words that we repeat to this day: “Lord, I am not worthy to have you enter under my roof; only say the word and my servant [soul] will be healed.” The whole point here is that of course we’re not worthy of His grace, much less His very Body and Blood. Our hands are not worthy to touch the Eucharist but neither is our mouth! It is all a gift and beyond us to grant a greater or lesser measure of purity on one body part or another. Jesus accepts the sinner and prostitute as wholly as the pious person. What He asks of us is a broken and contrite heart, open to Him, a conversion of self that allows Him to pour His love in our hearts. Where is the broken and contrite heart in the act of boycotting taking the Eucharist in your hands? Where is the humility to gratefully accept what the Lord is giving you? He has been teaching us patiently for millennia the Way to the Father, and yet here we are fetishizing parts of ritual purity just as ridiculously as the Pharisees He criticized in His time on earth.

    My prayer for the Church and its members is that we all take to heart the lessons provided to us and we approach the Lord with the supplication, thanks, and humility that will lead us to greater and greater union with Him.

  • God’s Voice: Quiet, Insistent, Uncompromising

    Friday of the 10th Week in Ordinary Time: 1 Kings 19: 9a, 11-16, Matthew 5: 27-32.

    Today’s readings cap off a week of readings about Elijah and about Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. We explored earlier this week how Elijah’s life in exile harmonizes with Jesus’s lessons in the Beatitudes about the type of person God wants us to be: humble, obedient, and clean of heart. Today’s readings, on the other hand, reveal something about the nature of God Himself.

    We join Elijah at the cave where he has hid himself, but it’s not just any cave. This is Mount Horeb, the Mountain of God where Moses was given the Ten Commandments. In all of scriptures, this is the only time we hear of a prophet or other major figure traveling back to Mount Horeb. That’s probably because it’s a heck of a journey southward, into today’s Saudi Arabia, across the Red Sea from Egypt. And why does he go there? We can glean from a few verses prior to today’s reading that God is trying to care for him in his despair. You see, King Ahab tells his wife Jezebel all that Elijah did in slaughtering her prophets to Baal, and she vows to do the same to Elijah the next day. He flees from the northern kingdom of Israel to Beer-Sheba in the southern kingdom of Judah, “and came and sat down under a solitary broom tree. He asked that he might die: ‘It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors’” (1 Kings 19:4). He has been effectively cast out of his homeland, God’s chosen nation of Israel, and he despairs. He believes himself to be a failure because the nation did not accept him and a new conversion to God.

    Elijah in the Wilderness (1877-1878), Frederic Leighton (1st Baron Leighton) | Wikimedia Commons.

    It’s worth understanding that this scene is a direct reference to a similar occasion long before in Jewish history when Abraham casts out his mistress Hagar and son Ishmael at the insistence of his wife Sarah. Note the similarities: “[Hagar] departed, and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba. When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot; for she said, ‘Do not let me look on the death of the child.’ And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept.” (Genesis 21:14c-16). We have Beer-sheba, despair, resignation to death, and a broom tree/shrub. Yet in both instances, God sends an angel to console His favored ones. For Hagar: “the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, and said to her, ‘What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him’” (Gen 21:17-18). And for Elijah: “Suddenly an angel touched him and said to him, ‘Get up and eat.’ He looked, and there at his head was a cake baked on hot stones, and a jar of water. He ate and drank, and lay down again. The angel of the Lord came a second time, touched him, and said, ‘Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you’” (1 Kings 19:5b-7). (The journey is 40 days and nights to Mount Horeb). The parallels for the Jewish audience hearing this text would be clear, that God shows mercy and favor on his chosen ones, regardless of their state in the world.

    Hagar and the Angel (1614), Pieter Lastman | Wikimedia Commons.

    This is the background to today’s first reading. We pick up when Jesus’s divine nature, the Word of God, tells him, “Go outside and stand on the mountain before the LORD; the LORD will be passing by.” This is astonishing — only Moses has met God, also here on Mt. Horeb, and he was transfigured by the experience, needing to wear a veil around the Jews because his face glowed so much. And this was from only being in his presence, facing God’s back. No one sees God face-to-face except the Son and those who are called to everlasting life with Him. 

    What follows is a fascinating series of signs: great wind, an earthquake, and fire. Yet God is not in any of them. This is an important message in a part of scriptures specifically dealing with idolatry. As Elijah points out to Ahab and Jezebel, we must not make statues and images to pray to, but here God shows that He cannot be found or encapsulated by any earthly phenomenon, no matter how great. God’s point is that He is beyond and before any of these things. So, how does He come to Elijah? “After the fire there was a tiny whispering sound. When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak and went and stood at the entrance of the cave.” A tiny whispering sound! How unexpected, especially in the Old Testament where we are used to hearing about God’s might, how no one can stand to be in His presence, how he slaughters the foes of the Israelites. Even unexpected here in the 1st Book of Kings where God’s fire had just immolated not only the bull offering but also the stones, water and dust; and His judgment upon the prophets of Baal was carried out to the extreme by Elijah. 

    Elijah recognizes God in that tiny whispering sound and hides his face with the appropriate fear, awe, and reverence due to God. The voice of God asks, “Elijah, why are you here?” Clearly, this is asked for Elijah to vocalize his own despair and failings, to go through confession, as it were. God knows why he is there, after all, God’s angel prepared him for the journey and set him out to Horeb. But Elijah must answer and we hear him give voice to anxieties and personal despair that we feel to this day. “I have been most zealous for the LORD,” he answers, “But the children of Israel have forsaken your covenant.” And he admits: “I alone am left, and they seek to take my life.” The first concern is akin to the problems we have with the Church today, that despite our zeal and devotion to God it seems that the broader Church and world have forsaken His covenant (e.g., sexual abuse scandals, clueless parishioners, shallow faith, divisive politics influencing Christians more than the precepts of faith, etc.). The second concern we experience less literally, especially here in our comfortable Amerian existence, but the feeling is familiar to some: isolation, anxiety, feeling threatened.

    Elijah in the Cave at Mount Horeb. Try as I might, I could not find the artist who made this painting.

    God’s response to Elijah is instructive: “Go, take the road back to the desert near Damascus. When you arrive, you shall anoint Hazael as king of Aram. Then you shall anoint Jehu, son of Nimshi, as king of Israel, and Elisha, son of Shaphat of Abel-meholah, as prophet to succeed you.” This no-nonsense instruction to do His will provides the direction and focus that Elijah needs. In this quiet voice, God shows that He cares for Elijah, that he’s not dismissing him, but God’s words also reveal to Elijah that anxiety and self-pity are useless feelings. God is not worried about the state of His people or of His plan on earth — we get the sense that His plan will unfold in due time and the concerns that we might have at any specific moment in time simply reveal how far we are from the divine perspective.

    But God does say more. Why it is left out of the lectionary might be another problem of letting contemporary sensibilities edit our experience of scriptures. He adds, “Whoever escapes from the sword of Hazael, Jehu shall kill; and whoever escapes from the sword of Jehu, Elisha shall kill. Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal, and every mouth that has not kissed him.” This is important because it shows that God cares about human devotion to Him and to the truth. He is telling Elijah that the nation of Israel is not utterly lost, that it will be purged of heresy (so that it can be pure soil for Mary to be born and become the Ark of the New Covenant), and that even though Elijah thinks he’s the last believer left, some 7,000 righteous ones remain, too. Killing heretics doesn’t jive with our sense of earthly justice here in the year 2020, but as I reflected in The Cycle of Salvation, we can see this as God’s prerogative in dealing out divine justice at the time and place He sees fit. It’s not up to us to judge His actions. 

    It also says something about the uncompromising nature of God. Ours is not a God who can be placed among idols — this applies to Baal and Asherah as well as the idols of money, scientific rationalism, power, prestige, entertainment, and pleasure. Some say that they don’t like this “idea” of God and it doesn’t jive with him being love. After all, love involves a sacrificial quality that is self-giving rather than uncompromising. I respond that perhaps we’re confusing the way God acts toward us with Who he is. God’s uncompromising nature is not an “idea” but a revealed reality. From Genesis through the gospels, God in the form of the Father and the Son reveals to us that there are things that do not bend, things that are uncompromising. Most central here is truth: truth does not change according to circumstance. And when we contemplate God with our very limited minds, the first thing that we must admit is that God is ultimate truth. There are no lies in God. So let’s pay close attention when God establishes the first commandment, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods beforeme. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God” (Exodus 20:2-5). He is telling Moses not just that He is ultimate and above other gods, but that His essence — ontologically speaking — is fully complete, and nothing can be added. In other words, when it comes to God, there is simply no other room for another god or idol. This is uncompromising. This is the same uncompromising point He is making with Elijah when He proclaims that all of the Baal worshippers will be killed. It has to do with establishing God’s nature, not other aspects of how we act and sin. Because at the same time we know that He is all-loving and all-forgiving. He acts with us, His beloved, in ways that are the opposite of uncompromising. How many times does He return to the Jews despite their infidelities? How many times does He welcome us back despite our sins and us turning our backs on Him? Infinite times.

    Sun Behind Clouds (contemporary), Kate Hodges | Image from deviantart.com.

    So we must have room in our conception of God for both an uncompromising ontological nature and a loving and forgiving performative nature.

    Jesus, throughout his ministry but particularly in today’s gospel reading, tries to help us synthesize this truth about God’s nature and realize what it means for our own lives. This is the part of St. Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus tackles the question of adultery and human sexuality. It is also an example of how He perfects the law given to the Jews. He begins with the law they know: “You have heard that it was said, You shall not commit adultery.” Then the pivot words that signal how He is perfecting the law: “But I say to you,” followed by his teaching: “everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” 

    My first thought: “Woe is me!” How counter-to-culture it is for a “hot-blooded man,” as the cliché goes, to not have a lustful thought when just browsing the news or walking past shop windows. We have glorified the female body (at least one skinny, large-breasted version of it) in our Western culture and at the same time liberalized sexuality as something freeing and freely shared. The result is a constant bombardment of skimpily clad beauties broadcast online, in print, and in person as young women, in particular, seek to come to grips with cultural expectations and still feel good about themselves. It is a difficult situation for women and men alike. Men, while ostensibly the “audience” for the liberalized female form (some might say voyeurs, exploiters, or aggressors here) encounter a serious challenge in Christ’s words today. I’m not even going to talk about porn, but this multi-billion dollar industry is the worst of the offenses to Christian life seen through this lens.

    So what’s the solution? Make women cover up like a repressive Islamic state? No! Christ is clear that the problem is internal to the one who lusts, not a problem of the one being lusted after. The solution was clearly stated by St. Paul and countless saints after him: self-control. He writes, “Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry)” (Colossians 3:5). Before we scoff at this, let’s recall that Paul dealt with the problem of taming the passions constantly with his fledgling communities. This was not something he was flippant about. He saw that a new baptism in Christ enables a person to truly be re-born and devote themselves to pure things. But self-control starts with yearning for God and it finds its lasting power in Christ. Without Christ, the whole idea of taming the passions makes no sense to Paul and is truly fruitless. But Christ lifts us to a higher plane. Hear his passion about this point: “Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!” (Col 3: 9-11). This isn’t a point about multiculturalism. He’s pointing out the radical newness of a life in Christ that unites us and helps us break free from old morés. 

    Let’s return, then, to Christ, and what exactly He says on this point. He says that looking at a woman with lust is committing adultery in your heart. He perfects the law by changing the notion that it’s simply a set of actions to avoid or to do. He points out that the law is meant to make an internal change, to purify one’s thoughts, heart, and soul. This is so much deeper than just avoiding certain actions. I think of when I used to justify some small sin I committed by saying, “well, at least I didn’t do something really bad.” But this is the wrong mindset. It’s not about weighing relative evil of actions but about avoiding all “occasions of sin” as we say in our Act of Contrition. The “near occasion of sin” is my next thought — will it be one that pleases God or one that is contrary to God? If we truly are re-born in Christ in our baptism, then we receive the gift of full purity given to humanity. While we might never be able to achieve perfection in this life, our goal must be to live up to the gift of the Son that the Father gave to us. We are given scriptures, the Church, the communion of Saints, prayer, miracles, the Holy Spirit active in our lives, the liturgy, the sacraments — all to aid us in this quest.

    Christ counters the undoubtedly stunned and disbelieving reaction of His audience (“that’s impossible!” they must have thought) with a few sentences about the continuum of punishments. Cutting off the hand of a thief was an actual thing, as was blinding as a punishment. They represent a certain type of justice (albeit less life-threatening), as does the eschatological judgment of being sent to Gehenna. His point is that He’s serious about His teaching, and the impulse to lust is on the continuum of adultery (like saying “fool” is a form of murder). He wants to draw a clear connection between one’s internal orientation and one’s external actions. He teaches that the internal orientation is just as serious as the external action. 

    A Dead Man Before His Judge (Le Mort devant son juge), 15th Century, unknown French Master, a miniature from the Rohan Book of Hours | Wikimedia Commons.

    This is not the way secular justice works. Just wanting to kill someone versus actually killing them is the difference between an innocent and a guilty judgment. But not so with God! Let’s sit up and take notice, Christians! We are called to a greater, more uncompromising standard. And here we get to the meat of Jesus’s teaching: as we seek our adoption as sons and daughters of the Father through our baptism in Christ, we are entering a new life with new standards and new realities. As we have explored, God’s nature is uncompromising in that He exists alone. His infinite enormity includes real truth, which cannot be altered or hidden from. As we become sharers in this truth that has been revealed in the laws and commandments of our faith, see just how deeply they have to become a part of our lives! We must assimilate these moral truths down to our core, beyond just our actions, deeper into our motivations and very thoughts. Our very core is meant to be transformed and purified in Christ.

    This is what it means to grow in Christ, to unite ourselves with God, to do His will. Every time we say the Our Father, let us remember this as we utter, “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” We are saying, “transform my very being, my very thoughts and impulses, just as you do in your existence as purity and truth in heaven.”