Tag: truth

  • In Praise of St. Augustine

    In Praise of St. Augustine

    Feast of St. Augustine, Monday of the Twenty-first Week in Ordinary Time, Year A: 1 Thes 1:1-5, 8b-10, Mt 23:13-22.

    Apart from St. Paul, it’s hard to think of a more pivotal early figure for the Roman Catholic Church than St. Augustine of Hippo. Even in the heady time of the late Patristic Age. Just consider the list of Church Fathers from this period!

    • Gregory of Nazianzus (329 – c. 390)
    • Basil of Caesarea (c. 330 – 379)
    • John Chrysostom (347–407)
    • Ambrose (A.D. 340–397)
    • Jerome (347–420)
    • Augustine of Hippo (354–430)
    St. Augustine (1645-1650), Philippe de Champaigne | Wikimedia Commons.

    His corpus of writing is immense and highly influential: more than 100 separate titles, including Confessions, City of God, and On Christian Doctrine. It wouldn’t be until St. Thomas Aquinas came along 800 years later that the Western Church would produce such a philosophically deep and theologically important writer.

    Any facet of his life or works would serve to occupy us for days at a time. Today, I want to focus on something that might surprise you to discover: St. Augustine wrote the oldest known monastic rule in the Western Church. Yes, 150 years before St. Benedict of Nursia wrote the longer Rule of Saint Benedict, St. Augustine wrote his rule in 397 AD. We might not think of St. Augustine as particularly “monastic.” We might know of his early life as a successful rhetorician and promiscuous Roman gentleman on his way to being a provincial governor. Alternatively, we might recognize that his major vocation was as Bishop of Hippo, a position also not associated with the observance of a rule of common life. But that major turning point in his life when he was stationed in Milan (then, the most powerful seat of the Roman empire) brought him into intimate contact with the strong, orthodox St. Ambrose. He also knew other figures such as the cantankerous St. Jerome, who was translating Greek and Hebrew sources to compile new Latin texts (and picking fights with friends and enemies alike). All three men were successful Roman citizens, dedicated to secular upward mobility until they had their respective conversion moments and adult baptisms. All three men experienced that something electric in the 4th-century air that was appealing to adult converts ready to devote themselves to God. This electricity took the form of ascetical practices like virginity, voluntary poverty and other self-denials that had made their way into Christian minds from the Desert Fathers.

    Let’s recall the history of the Church in the 4th century. Under the emperor Diocletian, this century opens with one of the most severe (and final) persecutions of Christians throughout Europe, north Africa, the Levant, and the East. Royal edicts banned Christian worship, confiscated books and sacred vessels, legally destroyed churches, arrested all clergy, released apostates, and made sacrifice to pagan gods compulsory. Christians began the century in the same state of putting their lives on the line for Christ that had occurred sporadically in the previous three centuries. Martyrdom remained the very real standard for which Christians strived.

    But then along comes Emperor Constantine who surprises everyone. Christianity is made legal by the Edict of Milan in 313 and Constantine is the one who convenes the Council of Nicea in 325 to get the 1,800 bishops to agree upon and articulate their official doctrine. Imagine going from underground house churches to formal, state-sanctioned religion in the matter of a few decades. Christians who saw themselves as ready at any moment to sacrifice their lives for Christ were now surrounded by an influx of new Christians who saw it as a safe and sanctioned religion. As Henri Marrou writes in The Christian Centuries: The First Six Hundred Years, “From the spiritual point of view, of course, this progress was not wholly beneficial. The calm enjoyed by the Church deprived it of the sieve of martyrdom and on the whole lowered the quality of recruits; there is evidence of contamination, compromise, and some infiltration from the surrounding paganism, and we are no longer aware of the early fervor of the Church of Saints” (226). 

    It’s no wonder that the next several hundred years were very concerned with rooting out heresies. 

    The Four Doctors of the Western Church, Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430) | Gerard Seghers, between 1600 and 1650, Wikimedia Commons.

    While the martyr-as-model became a rarity, the Holy Spirit had been building a new model of Christian life: the monastic. In the second half of the previous century (the late 200s), men and women began to voluntarily remove themselves from “civilized life” to the desert just outside the cities in Egypt and later the middle east. These early monastics, sometimes completely alone, sometimes in loose communities, pursued a life more “pure,” away from the temptations and irrelevancies of secular life. Their personal habits ranged from severely to loosely ascetical. Christianity found a new role model in the desert monastics.

    By the time St. Anthony the Great (the “founder of desert monasticism” although not the first) dies in 356, thousands of monks and nuns were flocking to the deserts for this lifestyle. And by the time Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine were being baptized (respectively, 365-ish, 374, and 387 AD), the monastic lifestyle was widely upheld as the new standard of Christian behavior. All of this explains why Augustine developed his Rule in 397 – it was his ideal to continue to live in community with like-minded Christian men.

    The Rule of Saint Augustine clearly holds up the early Apostolic Church as the model for living in an intentional community. As it states, “The primary reason for your sharing life together is to live harmoniously in the house and to have one heart and one soul in seeking God. Do not call anything your own; possess everything in common … For thus you read in the Acts of the Apostles, that all things were held in common among them, and distribution was made to each one as needed” (from the text received by the Order of Preachers, as appears in the second reading of today’s Office of the Readings according to the Propers for the Order of Preachers). Thus, Christians have a lineage from apostle to martyr to monastic.

    A thousand years later, St. Augustine’s rule was just as important as St. Benedict’s. By the fifteenth century there were over 4,500 houses in Europe following the rule (from The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism). Of particular interest to me, St. Dominic chose the Rule of Saint Augustine as the rule for his newly formed Order of Preachers. This shouldn’t surprise us since Dominic was drawn to the same Apostolic mission that appealed to St. Augustine: living simply in accord with one another while preaching the Gospel. In today’s Office of the Readings according to the Propers for the Order of Preachers, Blessed Humbert of Romans (fifth Master General of the Order of Preachers, 1254-1263) tells us how appropriate the rule is for preachers, particularly in its simplicity and emphasis on apostolic life. He writes:

    There are many rules that lay down many bodily disciplines. The rule of Saint Augustine consist of more regulations regarding spiritual actions, so that there may be the love of God and neighbor, the unity of hearts, and the harmony of lives. Who does not know that spiritual exercises are more valuable than bodily ones?

    So while St. Augustine gives the Church the most thorough synthesis and re-working of Neoplatonism within Christianity, while he gives us incredible understanding and articulation of the Trinity and other supernatural concepts, while he details exacting problems with heresies like Manicheanism and Pelagianism, he holds onto this core of simplicity in the apostolic life. His life shows us that a simple, apostolic way of living puts us on the Way to the Kingdom and reveals to us the treasures of wisdom that God is delighted to give us.

    The earliest known portrait of Augustine in a 6th-century fresco, Lateran, Rome | Wikimedia Commons

    More particular to today’s readings in the Mass, St. Augustine is a thorough foil to the scribes and Pharisees who Jesus warns in the gospel reading. Jesus calls them “blind guides” and “blind fools.” He points to their inability to see the forest through the trees: “And you say, ‘If one swears by the altar, it means nothing, but if one swears by the gift on the altar, one is obligated.’ You blind ones, which is greater, the gift, or the altar that makes the gift sacred?” Jesus is pointing out that in their tiptoeing around their many rules (case in point: do not swear by the Lord’s name), they create ridiculous new rules that have corrupted the very heart of God’s revelation to humanity. How could they ever utter the phrase, “if one swears by the altar, it means nothing”? This is the path of people who have forgotten the truths about God and instead of constantly conforming their hearts to God they conform their lives to a succession of trivial rules they make up to avoid trivial sins.

    Jesus strongly states just how off-base they have become: “One who swears by the altar swears by it and all that is upon it; one who swears by the temple swears by it and by him who dwells in it; one who swears by heaven swears by the throne of God and by him who is seated on it.”

    At stake in this gospel passage is the concept of taking oaths – that is, declaring one’s commitment to something. The scribes and Pharisees have invented some sayings that exploit loopholes in Jewish strictures, but they’ve completely lost the point along the way. They should know that the first, and really only meaningful oath they take is to God Himself, and the altar and temple are His, not theirs. As Jesus says later in this episode, “You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!” (Mt 23:24).

    Are oaths that important? Absolutely! We receive baptism, we receive our faith, we receive confirmation and the gifts of the Holy Spirit; but at some point God wants us to actively swear our lives to Him. He wants us to stake our lives in Him, to have Him be the basis upon which everything else in life is measured and committed. Thus, if He is the measure of absolute commitment, the seriousness of our oaths and commitments to other things in life can be made in reference to Him.

    But doesn’t Jesus tell us elsewhere, “But I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool” (Mt 5:34-35a)? St. Augustine himself replies to this when replying in a letter to “Honorable Publica” (thought to be a North African Jew in the process of converting to Christianity). Augustine writes that Jesus’s words are “in my opinion spoken, not because it is a sin to swear a true oath, but because it is a heinous sin to forswear oneself: from which crime our Lord would have us keep at a great distance, when He charged us not to swear at all” (Letter 47, 398 AD). Augustine knows that in the context of commitment to the faith and to each other, oaths serve a very great purpose.

    His religious rule continues to elicit oaths of faithfulness to this day, 1600 years later.

    So, today I thank God for the life, writings, example, and rule of Saint Augustine. May we continue to plumb the depths of his writings and wisdom throughout our days here on earth and maybe even praise God in heaven alongside him. 

     

  • The Unexpectedly Common

    The Unexpectedly Common

    Monday of the Third Week of Lent: 2 Kings 5:1-15ab, Luke 4:24-30.

    You’ve likely heard the adage that God works in mysterious ways. Today’s readings put a finer point on this: God ways are mysterious because they paradoxically appear to be common. Another way to say this is that God uses the things and people we know (or think we know) to enact his will in the world. This is unexpected because we expect something more flashy, more glorious.

    Oddly, we see people in both the Old and New Testaments reacting with anger when they are faced with this unexpectedly common appearance of divine will in the world. Isn’t that a bit odd? To get angry? I’d like to explore the significance of this instance of God’s plan and our reactions to it.

    God the Father with Angels, medallion, ceiling of the Stanza dell’Incendio di Borgo, Vatican City (c. 1510),
    Pietro Perugino | Wikimedia Commons.

    I particularly like the reading from the second Book of Kings because it reveals that our God is truly a God of all Creation, blessing people other than the Israelites. We might get a skewed conception of God, given our scriptural lens into God’s actions with his Chosen People. Yes, the story of humanity’s salvation lies in the Jewish people and then Christianity, but we can never allow our understanding to delimit God in any way.

    Jesus tells us that no one knows the Father except the Son, and many Doctors and saints have affirmed that God is unknowable. St. John of Damascus puts it well: “God is infinite and incomprehensible and all that is comprehensible about Him is His infinity and incomprehensibility” (On the Orthodox Faith).

    In my mind, it’s a good little jolt of remembering not to limit God when we read today that he “had brought victory to Aram” through the military commander Naaman. His reach is limitless, his love is limitless, and those outside of the Jewish nation have undoubtedly played a big role in revealing God to all the nations (as Jesus points out in the gospel reading).

    After hearing how the holder of secular power, the king of Israel, is sent into a paranoid fit at the appearance of Naaman from his powerful neighbors, Naaman finds his way to the true spiritual power of the Chosen People: the prophet Elisha. Here is the crux of the meeting: “Naaman came with his horses and chariots and stopped at the door of Elisha’s house. The prophet sent him the message: ‘Go and wash seven times in the Jordan, and your flesh will heal, and you will be clean.’”

    Note the scene: a big entourage of military might arrives at the prophet’s house and Elisha doesn’t even come outside to greet them. Elisha “sent him the message,” likely via a servant, and the message is almost offhand: “go dunk in the local river Jordan.” We can start to understand why Naaman got angry. It’s a problem of appearances.

    Naaman feels disrespected because Elisha doesn’t even appear before him. There is no ceremony, no waving of hands and calling out loudly to the Lord for healing. And the river Jordan isn’t a crystal clear mountain spring or even very big and mighty. All “signs” point to disappointment. Naaman typifies the angry disappointment of humanity facing the lack of a flashy and mighty God-on-earth.

    God is asking Naaman to accept him in humility. This is always an important step in our encounter with God. We are asked to put away our way of knowing in favor of his way of knowing. Humility (and humiliation) are our path to putting aside our own preconceptions and stubborn “knowledge” of how things work.

    Thus, God acts again through humble messengers: Naaman’s servants. They plead with the great military commander to do what was asked. Their logic is interesting. They say, you would have done something much more difficult if the prophet had asked it of you, so why not do the easier task? This reasoning resonates with him; he goes to the Jordan under the logic of a servant, finally ready to do what is asked of him.

    This is the baptismal sign under which God consecrates us to him, the same sign he gives to Noah and the earth and the same by which John the Baptist prepares us for Christ. For Naaman, “His flesh became again like the flesh of a little child, and he was clean.” We can thus understand his leprosy as a sign of his pride and reliance on his own powers of knowing rather than being open to God’s way of knowing.

    Once he humbles himself and does what he is asked, he is clean. The child-like condition of his skin mirrors the child-like openness of his soul, something Jesus asks of us: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 18:3).

    Medieval enamel and bronze altarpiece of Naaman washing in the Jordan (1150-1160), unknown artisan | Creative Commons, courtesy the British Museum.

    The final piece of the account is that Naaman returns to Elisha’s house and praises God, not the prophet. He has been truly converted to God, he has understood his humble relationship to the Creator and rightly praises Him: “Now I know that there is no God in all the earth, except in Israel.” He has changed his entire understanding of this journey — it wasn’t a journey to meet with a prophet and be cured by a human with powers; it was a journey to encounter God himself, who works through the common fabric of humanity that he loves.

    Like Naaman, the Nazarenes in the gospel reading are asked to accept the words of a prophet delivered in an unexpectedly common way. This scene from the Gospel of St. Luke occurs at the very beginning of Jesus’s ministry after he returns from his 40 days in the desert. He comes to his hometown of Nazareth and reads a famous passage from Isaiah in the synagogue: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor …” (Is 61:1). This is the message of deliverance in the Book of Isaiah.

    Jesus then proceeds to proclaim, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Shock of shocks! This son of Joseph, whom they all know since childhood, is claiming to be the Anointed One of God, ushering in a new era for the nation of Israel! They are incredulous; after all, they know him, he is common, and surely the Messiah won’t be the son of a common carpenter, much less that Jesus we’ve seen so many times we forget he’s even around.

    In response, Jesus begins, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum’ (Lk 4:23). The proverb comes from a place of disbelief and contains an implicit “prove it to me first before I believe you” (that is, show that you’re in top shape before trying to heal me).

    Jesus knows that they want to test him, make him prove himself as the Messiah by working miracles in their midst. His answer is the same one that Naaman receives. The prophet won’t be made to perform or do circus tricks for the demanding audience. That’s not how God’s will is accomplished. He works through common, humble humanity — nothing proves this more than this moment when the Son of God acknowledges that he is also just a son of a humble carpenter named Joseph and this does not diminish in any way the power, glory, and majesty of his being the Messiah.

    Jesus sums up his poor reception among his childhood neighbors thus: “Amen, I say to you, no prophet is accepted in his own native place.” Human expectations of the miraculous and divine are too concerned with style and not concerned enough with substance. We, like Naaman and the Nazarenes, want something special, electric, and obvious to appear and wow us. Once we’ve made up our minds about people we know, we cross them off the list of potential sources of God at work in the world. We think of this as wise, worldly and mature, but God again and again tries to show us that the Spirit works through any and all according to God’s will — we can’t predict it with our intelligence, much less categorize things as likely or unlikely based on how well we know someone.

    This why Jesus’s words to “change and become like children” are so important. Children don’t carry the burden of preconceptions fossilized into place after years of experience. They are open to be amazed at the things around them, open to the wonder inherent in their parents, siblings, and friends. This is also why death to self and rebirth in the Spirit is such an important concept in the sacrament of Baptism.

    Christ in the Synagogue (1868), Nikolai Ge | Image from wikiart.org.

     Jesus goes on to give us another level of significance to Naaman and Elisha in the gospel reading. On one hand, the Nazarenes are just like Naaman in their expectations that the prophet will be flashy and commensurate with their expectations of grandeur. But on the other hand, Jesus points out that in the scope of salvation history they are the opposite of Naaman because they are the Jews, stubborn and unconverted in heart, while he is the Gentile outsider who displays a true conversion.

    Jesus sharpens the point of the Gentile miracles found in the scriptures. He says that this is not coincidence but instead God’s plan because human nature is what it is: “there were many lepers in Israel during the time of Elisha the prophet; yet not one of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.” Jesus is saying that these Gentiles were chosen by God, like the Jewish prophets were chosen by God, and together they reveal the greatness of the Lord.

    The Jews take this as a great insult: “When the people in the synagogue heard this, they were all filled with fury.” Luke reminds us that this exchange takes place in the synagogue — the place where the Chosen People set themselves apart in their worship of their God. The weight of thousands of years of Jewish exceptionalism is felt in this moment. They were the Chosen People, special to God, with whom He makes his Covenant. They have crafted for themselves an identity in a hostile world that hinges upon their special relationship with God and here is a common man telling them — in their holy synagogue — that unlikely people and outsiders are in fact chosen by God over them, his People. It’s an outrage to them.

    They have missed Christ’s lesson. They could have reasonably reflected upon his words and allowed humility to enter their hearts like Naaman did at the prompting of his servants. Instead, in their rage, they drive him to the outskirts of town with the intention of killing him. This is not a conversion-to-God scene. Worse than missing his lesson or the opportunity to humble themselves before God, they have missed recognizing the Messiah in their midst. They are proving Jesus’s words to be true, that “no prophet is accepted in his own native place.”

    And in a sentence illustrating the massive significance of how they missed knowing him, “he passed through the midst of them and went away.” They miss recognizing Jesus, his lessons, and his new era of living in the light so profoundly that he can just pass through the midst of them. They are literally blind, groping angrily in spiritual darkness, unable to even remember who it was who they are angry with, why they are angry, or what they are doing with themselves there at the edge. (I reflected on a different aspect of this moment last year, considering the Spirit-like movement of Christ out of their midst. Read that reflection in A Prophet in his Own Land.)

    In Lent, we are called to prayer, fasting, and acts of charity (i.e., caritas or agape love). As we turn our attention to the vulnerable, the poor, and the needy, we should find ourselves reaching out to help them in some form or another. We are taught that we participate in God’s love when we act in charity and love, but let’s consider the mindset with which we approach our acts of charity and how that might impact whether we truly participate in God’s love.

    If we do good deeds with an eye on reaping eternal rewards, then this is self-serving.

    If we do good deeds simply because we are convinced it is morally right, without encountering God in the other, then we are spiritually frozen.

    If we do good deeds in an honest way but harbor a hidden feeling of the uncleanliness or lowliness of those we are serving, we are missing Christ in the same way the Nazarenes did.

    We have to become like children, ready to be filled with wonder as we notice God everywhere in creation. We cannot harbor a feeling of superiority, even if we push it down and don’t let it show. We have to humble ourselves before God, embrace our baptism and rebirth, and see that common, unexpected person as likely even more chosen than we are.

    A Shy Peasant (1877), Ilya Repin | Wikimedia Commons.
  • Truth Speaks in Silence

    Truth Speaks in Silence

    Memorial of Saint John of the Cross, priest and doctor of the Church, Monday in the 3rd Week of Advent: Numbers 24:2-7, 15-17a, Matthew 21:23-27.

    Today (in the year 2020), we celebrate the memorial of one of our great mystics and doctors of the Church, St. John of the Cross. He cultivated an intense personal and internal relationship with God and wrote beautifully on the Divine Essence as well as the paradoxes he experienced in having God so close yet so immensely far and silent. I find that today’s readings, in all their seeming obscurity, help us explore alongside St. John of the Cross the loudness of truth that God so often presents to us in His silence.

    The first thing I thought about the first reading was, “wait, who is this Balaam, son of Beor?” I had to read up on him, and it turns out he was a non-Jewish seer/prophet, well-known throughout the Levant, graced with the actual truth and Word of our Lord. He lived when the Israelites were finishing their 40 year desert wandering and having great military successes, winning their place in the region. They had defeated Sihon, King of the Amorites and Og, King of Bashan, and so the other rulers in the region were getting very nervous.

    Balak, King of Moab, sends for Balaam, asking him to curse the Israelites. Over three chapters in the Book of Numbers, we read this interesting story about Balaam, who seven times lives up to his words: “Although Balak were to give me his house full of silver and gold, I could not go beyond the command of the Lord my God, to do less or more” (Nm 22:18). There is an interesting sequence of events where God tells Balaam not join Balak and not curse the Israelites because they are blessed, and Balaam sends back Balak’s men.

    When Balak sends messengers a second time, Balaam waits for God’s instructions and God says he can go as long as he will “do only what I tell you to do” (Nm 22:20). But next God sends an angel apparently to stop Balaam on his journey, who tells him “I have come out as an adversary, because your way is perverse before me” (Nm 22:32). What actually ensues is a physical resistance battle between Balaam and his mule, who is trying to obey the angel Balaam doesn’t see. Finally, the angel admits him passage, saying, “Go with the men; but speak only what I tell you to speak” (Nm 22:35). Indeed, over the course of seven prophecies in the presence of King Balak, Balaam has nothing but praise for Israel, even prophecy of their Messiah.

    Balaam and the Angel (1836), Gustav Jager | Wikimedia Commons.

    What to make of this curious treatment of the Gentile prophet? It’s not that God changes his mind a lot (this is contrary to God’s nature), but instead Balaam’s internal struggle with hearing God’s truth and setting out on a mission contrary to this truth. He is serving an enemy of God’s Chosen People; he has yoked himself, as it were, to an evil force contrary to God. He is the example of someone who is trying to serve two masters at once, which is never tenable.

    So why does God permit him to go on this mission for Balak? Perhaps so he can provide all of us who read the scriptures an example and valuable lesson. We learn that leading such a life is a tortuous process, where both of your masters are unhappy and unfulfilled with your service. We also learn that in the end, the Lord our God will always be vindicated and triumph. This leads us to today’s reading.

    In today’s reading, we hear of Balaam’s praise of Israel and prophecy of the Messiah. What we don’t hear is the consternation of his earthly master, Balak: “What have you done to me? I brought you to curse my enemies, but now you have done nothing but bless them.” Balaam answered, “Must I not take care to say what the Lord puts into my mouth?” (Nm 23:11-12). It seems that Balaam is completely at the mercy of God’s will, even with an angry earthly king breathing down his neck.

    It’s not clear whether Balaam is concerned for his own safety here or wishes he could just say something to please Balak. But when it comes time for him to prophesy, he is gripped by the Holy Spirit: “the spirit of God came upon him, and he gave voice to his oracle.” Things truly seem out of his hands. To the Jews, this was proof that even Gentile prophets could not disobey the overwhelming power of the God of Abraham. God’s truth is undeniable to those who are graced to receive it.

    One last thought on the first reading: it is remarkable that this early in the Jewish tradition, before they have crossed the Jordan in their military might, before they have built Jerusalem and the great temple, we hear a prophecy of the future Messiah: “I see him, though not now; I behold him, though not near: A star shall advance from Jacob, and a staff shall rise from Israel.” Most translations actually translate “staff” as “scepter.”

    The Hebrew word שֵׁ֙בֶט֙ (shebet) is alternatively translated as rod, scepter, staff, or tribe; it essentially means a ruling authority. So Balaam gives us a very Advent-sounding prophecy of a star that rises and a new reign arising from Israel. We Christians clearly interpret this to be Jesus, the Morning Star, and the Reign of Christ.

    Detail from Christ the Morning Star (contemporary), Chris Koelle | Image from pinterest.com. See more of Chris Koelle’s work.

    In the gospel reading, the question of shebet seems to come up again. The Jews are seeing Balaam’s prophecy come true in their time: a shebet has arisen from Israel in the form of this man Jesus. Remember, the Book of Numbers is the fourth of the five books of the Torah, their most sacred texts. The books of the prophets are also replete with references to the Messiah that seem to be fulfilled in Jesus as well — Jesus’s works and words are striking a chord deep in the Jewish psyche and memory.

    Thus, “the chief priests and the elders of the people approached him as he was teaching and said, ‘By what authority are you doing these things? And who gave you this authority?’” Jesus’s reply is a counter-question that points back to the voice crying out in the wilderness, John the Baptist. As we reflected yesterday, he is the ultimate testament to Christ’s divinity as he fulfills Isaiah’s prophecy of the announcement of the Messiah. Jesus has come for those who long for God, who have listened to John and prepared a way for the Lord in their hearts. He is asking the chief priests and elders if they have prepared the way.

    Instead of answering him clearly, we see exactly the type of tortured mentality we encountered with Balaam. They are serving a worldly master — their fears of the crowd and their political machinations — while attempting to encounter God’s truth. This is untenable, as Balaam showed us so long ago. They have clearly not prepared the way for the Lord in their hearts. They are not filled with the burning yearning for God, otherwise they would see Christ for who He is.

    Jesus cannot invite them to the wedding feast of the Lord while they vacillate between the pull of the world and the pull of God. He brings not peace but the sword to people like this (cf. Mt 10:34) — they must choose God or the world, not both. And there are consequences. 

    Conversely, St. John of the Cross is a master of preparing the way. If I had to imagine his heart in Isaiah’s terms, I would imagine a broad plain, as fertile as it gets, blossoming with the fruits of God’s Word and grace. This master of contemplation writes extensively on encountering God, and a key to understanding St. John of the Cross is to understand his conception of God’s omnipresence and simultaneous indwelling in our souls. At the risk of tackling something that is difficult in just a short amount of space, I want to quickly explore this because it can shed light on today’s readings’ tortured figures. 

    One theological point that we must understand before encountering St. John of the Cross is this: God is immense and omnipresent (not able to be pinned down to a specific “location”) but also makes Himself present to our souls in a special, intimate way through His grace. Fr. Donald F. Haggerty writes in Faith and Reason (Fall 1991 issue) a nice primer on the theological intricacies of St. John of the Cross. He writes, “God inhabiting the soul can now become the intimate object of a knowledge and love that unites the soul with God in the bond of grace. The divine Persons give themselves to the soul so that it might possess them in a real and substantial manner.” This means that God is closer to us than we are to ourselves! (Our mind tries to mediate with our soul whereas He has direct presence with our soul).

    Haggerty continues: “Any notion of a distant or impersonal God dissolves when He is understood to be the Guest of one’s own flesh. … Paradoxically it would seem, [St. John observes that] the more God is experienced as the source of one’s own life of the spirit, the more powerfully transcendent, incomprehensible, and inaccessible His divinity becomes.” This makes sense to me as a novice to contemplation; the more I consider how God and grace might exist within, without and through me, the more I realize how fantastically other He is, how I would love to know Him better but how impossible that seems, how communion with Him is indescribable, literally silent because my words as a created being fall so short of the type of communication that is God in my soul.

    Christ of Saint John of the Cross (1951), Salvador Dalí | Image from fineartamerica.com. I’m not a huge fan of surrealism, but it seems particularly appropriate for the silent, inward-yet-outward contemplation of St. John of the Cross and his close-yet-far theology. The perspectives on Christ that his contemplations must have garnered him seemed to be highlighted by Dalí’s emphasis on position and size of the crucified Christ over the fishermen (evangelists).

    This is where we pick up St. John of the Cross. He has so many amazing nuggets in his prose. Here’s one that’s made-to-order for Advent: “What we need most in order to make progress is to be silent before this great God with our appetite and with our tongue, for the language he best hears is silent love.” I love this idea of finding a language by which we can communicate with God because this is striving to bring the mind in concert with what the soul is able to experience without mediation.

    And here we have St. John’s recipe: silencing our worldly appetites and our tongue; communicating in silent love. Whew! If only I could still the craziness of my media-soaked head enough to get there. Thank God for retreats at Benedictine monasteries! In any case, it does seem that this is something the penitential Advent season calls us to try: more silence, darkness lit by three (next week, four) candles, and love for our God that fills our hearts and souls.

    Finally, I’d like to just reflect back on the issues the figures in today’s readings encounter. Balaam does communicate with God and hear His truth — he must have a solid fear of God — but the inability to silence the world and his desires seems to be his downfall. The chief priests as well seem very far from a contemplative experience of God. They have no stillness in their souls, no honest response to the indwelling of God that might help them recognize the very presence of God in their midst.

    It’s a great challenge for us. Thankfully we have our entire lives to grow into this communication of silent love so that we can become more and more receptive to God’s truth within and without.

  • What is Truth?

    What is Truth?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Courage and Cowardice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Amen, the Logos is the Great I AM

    Amen, the Logos is the Great I AM

    Thursday in the Fifth Week of Lent: Genesis 17:3-9, John 8:51-59.

    Today’s readings compare God’s foundational covenant with Abraham and the New Covenant he offers through Christ. The terms of the covenants change, both the scope of God’s promise as well as the requirements from humanity. The constant, however, is the Word of God, providing the providential ordering of our lives.

    What stands out for me in the first reading is the earthly terms of the covenant God establishes with Abraham. Note the earthly elements: making him “exceedingly fertile,” giving him “the land in which you are now staying, the whole land of Canaan, as a permanent possession,” and changing his name from Abram (“Exalted Father”) to Abraham (“Father of Many Nations”). God’s plan seems to be one of choosing the patch of earth and people that he will till and tend, waiting for the fruit that it will bear. This fruit, of course, is Mary, and in turn, Christ.

    God’s Promise to Abraham (1866), woodcut by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld for the “Bibel in Bildern” (Bible in Pictures) | Wikimedia Commons.

    Even the terms of the covenant placed upon Abraham and his offspring are very earthly. Genesis reports God’s command in the verses after today’s reading: “Every male among you shall be circumcised.” Symbolically and bodily, this is very important. The very organ for procreation, the method for being “exceedingly fertile,” will be marked for God. It will be exposed in a symbolic opening of one’s heart to be a servant of God. This is a permanent mark of a tribe, more permanent than pagan piercings, more indelible than tattoos. There is no hiding or turning back from this bodily mark in this world. 

    Circumcision lays the foundation for Moses and the generations after him when God presents them with a multitude of laws. The Abrahamic nations needed to live with the incontrovertibility of circumcision so that later generations could accept more prescriptive laws intended to keep them pure in body, mind, and spirit. Into this people, Mary was born miraculously without sin via the Immaculate Conception. And the prescriptions on purity and a cultural willingness to accept God’s law prepared her to accept the Incarnation of Christ in her womb.

    Returning to our reading, let’s dwell for a moment on the opening verses: “you are to become the father of a host of nations. No longer shall you be called Abram; your name shall be Abraham.” This is the essence of the Word of God: to create, to name, to make manifest his plans. No other “word” operates in this way. I might name my dog “Thunderbark,” but that doesn’t make his bark actually sound like thunder. In fact, our act of naming things often describes what we see, hear, touch, smell, or in some other way process through our senses. God’s Word, on the other hand, is creative and generative in that reality conforms to his Word rather than his Word describing what already exists. He is the Creator — he makes it exist. 

    We know from St. John that Jesus Christ is the Word of God, specifically the Λόγος (Logos). In the prologue to his gospel, he gives us the most influential Christian text on the Logos: “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. … All things came into being through him …  And the Logos became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (Jn 1:1, 3a, 14). Logos, as I have noted in a previous reflection (The Life-Giving Word) is only partially defined by the English “Word.” It does literally mean “word,” “discourse,” or “account,” but by the time John writes his gospel, it had about 600 years of philosophical meaning attached to it as well. There are several threads that likely would have influenced John:

    • The writings of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (c.535-475 BC) and his followers, who took the word logos that was already in common use and gave it more of a philosophical meaning, that of the reason or truth inherent in the world. From here we can see how Aristotle formulates logos as “reasoned discourse,” one of the three modes of persuasion.
    • The writings of the Greek Stoics (c.300 BC – 200 AD), who spoke of logos as the active reason pervading the Universe. They used the term λόγος σπερματικός (logos spermatikos) to mean the generative principle of the Universe that creates and takes back all things. This sounds a lot like God, which they intended, since logos for them was a type of spiritual or supernatural “ordering essence” in things.
    • The writings of the Hellenized Jew Philo of Alexandria (20 BC – 40 AD), who takes the Stoic philosophy a bit father. He calls Logos “the first-born of God,” and writes, “the Logos of the living God is the bond of everything, holding all things together and binding all the parts, and prevents them from being dissolved and separated.” But for Philo, the Logos is an intermediary divine being, a demiurge that is God’s instrument of creation, and this is soundly rejected by the developing Christian Church that upholds the equality and consubstantiality of the Son and the Father in the Trinity.
    The oldest known icon of Christ Pantocrator, 6th-century encaustic icon from Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai | Wikimedia Commons. This famous icon represents the perfect union of the human and the divine in Christ. The features on his left side (the viewer’s right) represent the qualities of his human nature, while his right side (the viewer’s left) represents his divinity. His right hand is shown opening outward, signifying his gift of blessing, while the left hand and arm is clutching a thick Gospel. Below is a mirrored composite of this image (made in Photoshop) that illustrates how the divine essence (left) is pure and perfect while the human nature (right) is painted in shadow with all of the “weathered” nature of the body and the earth.

    John’s Logos is not a synthesis of these definitions, nor does he simply “borrow” from these more developed and earlier systems, which many scholars want to claim. I think that is a condescending and belittling statement that discounts the true divine revelation at work in John’s Christology. Certainly, he did not invent the word Logos, but he instills the particularity of Jesus’s person that other philosophies employing Logos simply do not contain. Much like Christ reformulates our understanding of the terms life, death, and father, he gives new meaning to the word Logos. That being said, I think we must consider the vibrant meaning this word already contained by the time John uses it. It does translate to “word,” but it’s fair to say that John also understood it to mean reason, a generative principle in the universe, and an ordering essence.

    By insisting that Jesus Christ is the Logos of God and the Son of God, he says that this particular Jew who died on a cross around 33 BC was the ordering essence of the Universe, reason and truth incarnate. Thus, when Jesus speaks, the generative Word of God, the Logos is brought to bear in the world. That same Word that gave Abraham his name and established circumcision to prepare the fertile soil that would bring forth Jesus Christ as its fruit is, in fact, dwelling in Christ. Every time Christ speaks in John’s gospel, he brings forth real truth, and he is sure to remind us that he is sent from God and is speaking God’s Word, not something he generated himself as a man. We hear of no one else in sacred scripture who makes this claim.

    Jesus Among the Doctors (1862), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres | Wikimedia Commons.

    So, the question is, how can you resist the Word of God, the Logos of the universe? How can you doubt it, not trust it? A few verses before our gospel reading today, Jesus asks this very question: “If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me?” (Jn 8:46). He then answers his own question for them: “Whoever is of God hears the words of God. The reason you do not hear them is that you are not of God.” This is a continuation of yesterday’s gospel reading and reflection; Jesus is trying to remind them of who their spiritual father is, namely God the Father. He points out that their disbelief in him stems from their fundamental distance from God the Father. They reject him because they have already rejected the Father in spirit.

    The exchange in today’s gospel, the remainder of chapter 8, displays just how much they have rejected the Father and, in turn, how far they are from accepting Jesus and the Kingdom he offers. Their response to him (just before the reading picks up) is “Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?” They have devolved into name-calling, certainly not the sign of people who hold God dear to their hearts.

    Then, they take up jeering: “Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died? Or the prophets, who died? Who do you make yourself out to be?” They are not open to hearing the content of his words in the least. They are just picking out phrases he says to throw them back and wound him. Their rejection is complete when they pick up stones to throw at him; since their barbed words seem not to work, they try to carry out the violence physically. All of these words and actions come from a sinful spirit, a soul being fed by Satan and not God.

    What exactly is Jesus trying to say to them that garners this barrage of insults? The text sounds like Jesus desperately wants to break through to them, saying, “Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever keeps my word will never see death.” This sentence is worth examining. The first half of the sentence occurs so often throughout the gospels (John writes “Amen, amen,” while Matthew, Mark, and Luke use a single “Amen,”) that it is the most characteristic thing about his speech patterns. Jesus is the only one to use it at the beginning of his statements rather than the end of a prayer or as a confirmation of some other saying. And all of these writers have chosen to keep the Hebrew word “Amen” even though Greek has a word for “truly”: ἀληθῶς (alethos). So, “Truly I tell you” and “Verily I tell you” are not good translations here. There is no reason to translate a word that we regularly use in all of our prayers.

    To get at what “Amen” means other than “truly” “or “verily,” let’s turn to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s fantastic Introduction of Christianity, where the entire first chapter delves into this question: “‘Amen’ simply says once again in its own way what belief means: the trustful placing of myself on a ground that upholds me, not because I have made it and checked it by my own calculations but, rather, precisely because I have not made it and cannot check it” (75). This Hebrew word expresses that one’s being is grounded in belief and faith. It marks the rootedness of oneself in the faith of our singular God. It could easily be translated as “I believe” when used at the end of a prayer or when receiving the Eucharist. Ratzinger goes on to write:

    The Christian attitude of belief is expressed in the little word “Amen”, in which the meanings trust, entrust, fidelity, firmness, firm ground, stand, truth all interpenetrate each other … The indivisibility of meaning, ground, and truth that is expressed both in the Hebrew word “Amen” and in the Greek logos at the same time intimates a whole view of the world. … For to believe as a Christian means in fact entrusting oneself to the meaning that upholds me and the world; taking it as the firm ground on which I can stand fearlessly (76, 73).

    So what is “Amen” when it is used by Jesus not as a confirmation of belief but as an introduction of something he is saying? I believe he is affirming that he is the firm ground on which we can stand. He is the source of the Amen, the Logos that is truth and meaning. And I don’t think this is just a clever rhetorical trick he uses to establish authority. It pours out of him 50 or so times in the New Testament, part and parcel of the truth he gives as a gift to humanity.

    After he says, “Amen, Amen,” He says λέγω ὑμῖν (legō hymin), which translates to “I say to you” or “I am telling you,” but legō just as correctly translates to “teach” or “command.” Thus, we can just as truthfully translate the first half of his statement, amēn, amēn, legō hymin to be: “The truth is here, I am teaching it to you.”

    The Sacred Heart of Jesus (Serce Jezusa), 1911, Józef Mehoffer | Wikimedia Commons.

    The second half of his important statement is “whoever keeps my word will never see death.” As you might imagine, there is more depth here than first appears in our English translation. The verb “keeps” (τηρήσῃ / tērēsē) means to “watch over,” to “guard,” and to “observe.” And, lo and behold, “my word” is logon (from logos). As we have detailed, since Christ is the Logos, when he says “observe my logon,” we can understand this to mean “whoever upholds the truth I bring to the world.”

    The entire statement has the lyrical feel of a proverb because the next verb “see” is θεωρήσῃ (theōrēsē), so we have some alliteration and rhyme between two verbs of beholding: tērēsē and theōrēsē. And let’s not think he means “experience” death when he says “see death.” This verb theōrēsē means to see in the sense of “to observe (as a spectator)” or “to contemplate (as in the mind)” and thus is much more consistent with the meaning of death as a type of sleeping, an inferior force in the world compared to the life from the Logos, as we discussed in the reflection on Lazarus, See the Glory of God.

    ‘Amen’ simply says once again in its own way what belief means: the trustful placing of myself on a ground that upholds me, not because I have made it and checked it by my own calculations but, rather, precisely because I have not made it and cannot check it.

    – Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 75.

    I know that this has been a long examination of a simple sentence, but where have we arrived? I think this changes the tenor of the statement to be less of a desperate “listen to me!” to more of a confident declaration of his truth and revelation of his being. “Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever keeps my word will never see death” can be also translated (in the context of this discussion), “The truth is here, I am teaching it to you; whoever upholds the truth I bring to the world will never be held in the thrall of death.” 

    Christ in the Desert (1933), Nicholas Roerich | image from arthive.com. I like this painting in that death is pictured in the shadows and could be mistaken for a black mountain if not for Christ’s patient, pervasive light that illuminates his grotesque charade.

    To tie this back to our opening observation about the contrast between the Abrahamic covenant and the new covenant given by Christ, God’s promise is no longer earth-bound. In fact, it’s about transcending the scope of earthly concerns, specifically death, and accessing the divine. For our part, our requirement is almost absurdly simple: uphold in our hearts the truth Christ brings into the world. Of course, in practice, this turns out to be harder than it sounds.

    Jesus’s final statement in today’s reading also speaks to the revelation of his being, and this one really throws the Jews into a fit. They scoff and ask how he can possibly know that Abraham saw his day and was glad. His answer: “Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM.”

    Whoa! We get his signature opening of truth and the statement that their spiritual and ethnic father was γενέσθαι (genesthai), that is, “brought into being,” and before that, he (Jesus Christ) “is” — a different verb, εἰμί (eimi), which means to exist, not to be brought into being. He affirms John’s prologue that he is the Logos made flesh, that he exists from the beginning, with God and of God. By telling them that Abraham was glad for his arrival on earth, he also affirms that he has existed throughout all time, has been with all of the prophets and is above them.

    As we say in the Liturgy of the Hours, “He is the first-born of all creation; in every way the primacy is his.” With this lens of comprehension on his statement, the argument that the Jews are attempting to have with him in the temple is almost laughable. As St. Paul says in his letter to the Colossians, 

    He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell  (Col 1:15-19a).

    What is the sum total of all these heavy theological concepts that come together in Jesus Christ? For me, if I am a Christian, I accept all that Christ reveals as Logos, as Truth, as God. What he tells us today is that when we accept him (“guard” his Logos in our hearts), we are accepting a reality of God’s providential plan for humanity.

    In his 1998 Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio, Pope Saint John Paul II writes, “The word of God reveals the final destiny of men and women and provides a unifying explanation of all that they do in the world” (81). Do we allow this to happen? Is our worldview fundamentally Christological?

    Do we interpret all of history through Christ or do we think that he’s just one voice among many holy voices? Do we think that has some truthful things to share with us or do we accept that he is the very truth and meaning that have ordered the universe from the beginning of time?

    These are important questions — he forces us to make a choice because only by accepting his truth can we transcend death. If we want sanctification, divinization, and salvation, we have the Way, the Truth, and the Life right here with us.

  • Slaves of Sin

    Slaves of Sin

    Wednesday in the Fifth Week of Lent: Daniel 3:14-20, 91-92, 95, John 8: 31-42.

    Today’s readings give us a glimpse of what it looks like to be freed from the slavery of sin alongside the Son of God and also what it looks like to be stuck in our slavery. It’s clear that faith is the key ingredient.

    The first reading from the Book of Daniel is the other perspective of the reading we had two weeks ago (which we discussed in Mercy is the Master Principle). The young Jewish men named Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah were given Persian names by King Nebuchadnezzar’s chief official. As we hear, they are called Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego; it is a form of forced assimilation, as is the king’s decree that all must bow and worship the golden statue he has erected.

    But our young Jewish men refuse, and when called in front of the king to explain themselves, they profess their faith in the God of Abraham. Their speech is noteworthy:

    If our God, whom we serve,
    can save us from the white-hot furnace
    and from your hands, O king, may he save us!
    But even if he will not, know, O king,
    that we will not serve your god
    or worship the golden statue that you set up.

    Their faith does not depend on a display of power from God. They say “if he can save us, may he do so.” Importantly, they add, “even if he will not save us, know that we won’t serve your god or worship your statue.” Now that’s a refreshing display of faith. We’re used to hearing laments of how God can forsake his people, yet these three aren’t filled with fear, doubt, or anger.

    The story of Daniel and the Three Youths in the Fiery Furnace (1725-1750), Adrianoupolitis Konstantinos | Wikimedia Commons.

    The passage we read a few weeks ago provides Azariah’s great prayer, but today we hear instead the reaction of the king before they are cast into the fire: his “face became livid with utter rage,” he heats the furnace up “seven times more than usual” and has “some of the strongest men in his army” bind them and cast them into the fire. His over-the-top, emotional reaction is emphasized in his unnecessary measures like superheating the furnace and having his strongest men cast them in. This is the reaction of human, earthly power when it is defied.

    It’s a show of power that is truly impotent in the face of a power that comes not from this world. Contrast this with God’s patience and mercy when we defy him. Also, let’s contrast this with God’s wrath, which he has under control, does not use unjustly or emotionally (see The Purifying Fire We Call God’s Wrath).

    In all of his power, King Nebuchadnezzar becomes an archetype of someone who is a slave to sin. His power, extreme passions, and pride distort his soul and the breath of divinity God has placed in humanity. He cannot blossom in his humanity, which requires embracing love. In fact, he eventually goes mad (see William Blake’s illustration below):

    “He was driven away from people and ate grass like the ox. His body was drenched with the dew of heaven until his hair grew like the feathers of an eagle and his nails like the claws of a bird. At the end of that time, I, Nebuchadnezzar, raised my eyes toward heaven, and my sanity was restored. Then I praised the Most High; I honored and glorified him who lives forever” (Dn 4:33-34).

    God shows us that when we are enslaved to sin, we become no more than base animals. It is the spark of divinity in us that raises us up from that state. God frees us from the slavery of sin, a type of insanity and animalism.

    Nebuchadnezzar, the Tate impression (1805), William Blake | Wikimedia Commons. Nebuchadnezzar was part of the so-called Large Colour Prints; a series begun in 1795 of twelve color monotype prints. These were painted on millboard, after which the board was put through Blake’s printing press. After they were printed, Blake and his wife Catherine added ink and watercolor to the impressions. It existed in four impressions (copies), now in: Tate Britain in London, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and a fourth which has been missing since 1887.

    King Nebuchadnezzar is the figure who shows us slavery to sin but he is also the one who points out the state of being freed from sin and blessed by God. In today’s reading, he makes another notable comment. Upon seeing figures still standing in the furnace, he exclaims, “I see four men unfettered and unhurt, walking in the fire, and the fourth looks like a son of God.” This clear choice of words for “son of God,” לְבַר־ אֱלָהִֽין׃ (bar-Elahim), when read with the full view of salvation history provided by Jesus Christ, is a reminder that when we are blessed with eternal life, we live with the Son of God. Elsewhere, this figure is identified as an angel of God, but here, viewed through the white-hot fire intended to purify — the trial by fire that these young men have survived — this salvific figure is seen as the Son of God.

    This brings us to Jesus in today’s gospel from St. John. This is the third of four consecutive days we read from chapter 8 of John’s gospel where Jesus is displayed in a series of confrontations with dubious Jews in the temple area. On Monday, he schooled the scribes and Pharisees who attempted to bring him an adulteress for judgment, establishing that he was the law in letter and spirit. Yesterday, he made bold claims of his authority and parentage, noting that by disbelieving in his divinity, they will die in sin. Today, he turns to what should be a more trusting audience than the Phariseees, “those Jews who believed in him.” But even with these people, we find that their elevated notions of who they are get in the way of hearing his message.

    He tells them, “If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” What a lovely promise! And a quotable quote, as they say, for 21st-century thinking: the truth will set you free. Our contemporary problem is that we ignore that the truth comes only from the Son of God and we think some other “truth” that we will discover will set us free.

    The problem in Jesus’s time was the second half of the aphorism, the “set you free” part. They object: “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone.” Slavery was a very much a reality in these days. They object to the use of the word because it has real-world implications and a terrifying historical value for them.

    By the rivers of Babylon there we sat down yea we wept when we remembered Zion (1942), Saul Raskin | image from mutualart.com. This is Raskin’s illustration of Psalm 137 that he painted for an illustrated Book of Psalms. Enslavement has always haunted the Jewish mind, and Jesus’s words about slavery to sin were difficult to digest.

    But Jesus doesn’t budge. Much like he does in re-framing their worldview around death and life with the raising of Lazarus (see See the Glory of God), he is determined here to re-frame their understanding of slavery and freedom. He explains, “everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin. A slave does not remain in a household forever, but a son always remains. So if the Son frees you, then you will truly be free.” His point is an important one: we slaves cannot stay in the Father’s house, the Kingdom of God, of our own volition, good works, faith, or anything else we do. It is only when the Son frees us that we stop being slaves and can become adopted sons and daughters of God.

    How does the Son free us? He brings us the truth from the Father about how we must order our lives, and we must fully accept his Truth. He also brings a New Covenant, established on the Cross, that pours out the liturgy upon us, and we must participate as one Church in this everlasting liturgy of life in order to stay in the Kingdom and no longer be slaves to sin.

    Today’s reading continues as he urges them to do what the Father has said, “I tell you what I have seen in the Father’s presence; then do what you have heard from the Father,” but they continue to oppose His point of view and the truth He is giving them. They respond that their father is Abraham, sadly identifying themselves primarily through their human progenitor rather than their Creator whom they supposedly love and worship above all else. Jesus meets them here, however, and says,

    If you were Abraham’s children,
    you would be doing the works of Abraham.
    But now you are trying to kill me,
    a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God;
    Abraham did not do this.
    You are doing the works of your father!

    Jesus will tell them even more about his relationship to Abraham in tomorrow’s reading. Here, he notes that they can’t be true children of Abraham because they are doing something he did not do; that is, Abraham listened to and obeyed God no matter how difficult his commands, while they are not. Note how subtly Jesus continues to reframe the conversation — he talks about Abraham as their spiritual father, the one who guides their moral choices, while he knows that they are talking about Abraham as their ethnic father.

    His final remark is to be read in this same spiritual vein: the work of their actual spiritual “father” (not Abraham) is to willfully not listen to the truth Jesus brings. What father does he mean other than Satan, the father of sin and prince of the world?

    They begin to meet him on this spiritual father footing, but retain a stubborn literalism in the ways of the world they think establish their own worth. They say, “We were not born of fornication.” They seek to legitimize themselves (we’re not bastards! we have a true father!), although Christ continues to push on the point that the only legitimizing source is God in heaven. They add, almost sullenly, as if finally conceding what he’s saying, “We have one Father, God.”

    Aha! They finally arrive to the place he was leading them. So Jesus can begin to make his logic heard: “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and am here; I did not come on my own, but he sent me.”

    The Sacrifice of Jesus Christ, Son of God, Gathering and Protecting Mankind (1562), Frans Floris I | Wikimedia Commons.

    This conversation continues in tomorrow’s gospel reading, but today’s reading displays for us the slavery of sin in a very interesting way. Just as shackles hold one down, hold one back from free movement, we see the Jews being held down from spiritual growth, even mental opening to the possibility of Christ. Nothing is holding them down but their own stubbornness, their own attachments to definitions made in the world (ethnicity, legitimacy from human ancestors), and their unwillingness to let go of the comfort of their self-assuredness.

    This is why Jesus preaches so energetically about the need for humility throughout his ministry. Pride is the veneer we build up over our eyes so that we will not notice our own enslavement to sin. We must dissolve this pride and open ourselves up with humility so that we can grow into the truth that Christ gives us.

    This demands a vulnerability, a willingness to say that our Father is the invisible one who we can’t prove exists but in whom we believe more solidly than the ground beneath our feet.

  • Hung Up on Our Notions of Jesus the Man

    Hung Up on Our Notions of Jesus the Man

    Friday in the Fourth Week of Lent: Wisdom 2:1a, 12-22, John 7:1-2, 10, 25-30.

    I don’t know about you, but I get a clear sense of inertia drawing us towards the Passion and Holy Week in today’s readings. I’ve always found the rejection Jesus experiences in St. John’s gospel to be palpable, and when joined with the reading from the Book of Wisdom today, it creates a profound and sad condemnation of the people in his time.

    Worse yet, we might be more implicated in this sad commentary than we realize.

    The passage from the Book of Wisdom sounds like a real-time response from the skeptics listening to Jesus, yet it was written some 80 years earlier. The wicked people in the passage complain that “he is obnoxious to us … He professes to have knowledge of God and styles himself a child of the LORD. To us he is the censure of our thoughts; merely to see him is a hardship for us.” This sounds very much like the internal mental script of the chief priests and scribes who attack and test Jesus.

    What’s more, we hear truly wicked, devilish thoughts: “With revilement and torture let us put him to the test,” “For if the just one be the son of God, he will defend him and deliver him from the hand of his foes.” These last bits of blasphemy and mockery actually did occur while Jesus hung on the Cross:

    Those who passed by derided him, shaking their heads and saying, “You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.” In the same way the chief priests also, along with the scribes and elders, were mocking him, saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him. He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he wants to; for he said, ‘I am God’s Son’” (Lk 27:39-43).

    The Mocking of Christ (1616-1617), Gerard van Honthorst | Wikimedia Commons.

    Such similarities emphasize the wickedness of the people who mocked Christ; their words are nearly identical to those called out in the Book of Wisdom decades earlier. However, as we look at this entire chapter of the Book of Wisdom from which this passage comes, we see that this wickedness refers to a larger group of people than just those who mock Christ. The chapter starts by identifying these people as those caught up in existential angst: “Short and sorrowful is our life, and there is no remedy when a life comes to its end … For we were born by mere chance, and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been … reason is a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts; when it is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes” (Wis 2:1-3). These people have rejected God and the teachings of the Jewish fathers, that he intentionally created us and has given us his covenant.

    This rejection is even deeper in that they reject the Spirit that is in each of us when they say that “reason is a spark” that comes just from our biology, and when that spark is extinguished, nothing is left but ash. This is a full denial of the spirit and the soul. It is secularism, atheism, scientism.

    What to do with this existential angst? The response of these wicked ones is to live life voraciously while they can. They say, “let us enjoy the good things that exist … Let none of us fail to share in our revelry; everywhere let us leave signs of enjoyment” (Wis 2:6, 9). When there is nothing to our existence but the world we see in front of us, there is also no basis for moral considerations. There are no repercussions beyond this world.

    Therefore, they say, “Let us oppress the righteous poor man; let us not spare the widow or regard the gray hairs of the aged. But let our might be our law of right, for what is weak proves itself to be useless” (Wis 2:10-11). By rejecting God in their flawed understanding of their own existence, these people have lost their moral bearings. Everything looks to be ripe for the picking, for the using and for the abusing.

    Thus, the final indictment against the thoughts and words of these people that we read today can be extended to all those who are amoral, who reject God, and who employ Social Darwinism in their worldview. It reads: “These were their thoughts, but they erred; for their wickedness blinded them, and they knew not the hidden counsels of God; neither did they count on a recompense of holiness nor discern the innocent souls’ reward.” The “recompense of holiness” and the “reward” is eternal salvation itself, the greatest testament to God’s being. The fact that God is there and offers us recompense and reward drives the need to order our lives according to his Word.

    This criticism is just as important today as it was 2,000 years ago. Our culture and economy are almost entirely devoted to consumption and living life voraciously. Our politics are infused with an evil streak of Social Darwinism where “might is right.” The root of the problem is the same: a rejection of God, a disavowal of the spirit and soul, and a blindness to the revelation of the Lord in history that points to a greater life beyond this one.

    The frightening implication is that when we descend into materialism or scientism, in a way we are participating in the mockery of Christ. They are logically and inexorably connected.

    Let’s put this more plainly. When all we can think about is that new car, new dress, new thing we want to buy; or when we think that the world is made of only explainable natural phenomena; or when we feel that it’s our right to get what we want, well, that’s when we’ve shut ourselves off from the source of life, from accepting the mystery, from living in the humility of a creature in God’s presence.

    And joined with these perspectives is a gut reaction that someone righteous telling us otherwise “is obnoxious to us.” In these moments, we are much further down the road of mocking Christ on the Cross than we might realize.

    Christ Carrying the Cross (1510-1535), Hieronymus Bosch or follower | Wikimedia Commons. Bosch is a master of grotesque human expression, and this piece is no exception. It strikes me to see the variety of ways evil is personified – that is, made personal by various people – and how the power of Satan twists and distorts us, obscuring what is good in us. The other striking thing about this painting is the serenity and prayerful visage of Christ in the midst of this miasma. 

    In the gospel reading, Christ struggles with Jews who have turned themselves away from hearing and seeing God. The reading opens by tracking the movements of our Lord almost as if he is under siege: “he did not wish to travel in Judea, because the Jews were trying to kill him.” In the full text of Chapter 7 in John’s gospel, we hear him encourage his brothers to go to Jerusalem without him during the Festival of the Tabernacles. Then he also goes, but secretly.

    Then, “About the middle of the festival Jesus went up into the temple and began to teach” (Jn 7:14). It seems that God’s will is that his incarnate Word be present and be heard at the festival. The Festival of the Tabernacles is symbolically important because the Jews commemorate their time “on the move” from Egypt to Israel when they lived in temporary accommodations (the title of the Festival, Sukkot, is translated as “tabernacles” or “booths”). Thus, they are commemorating their temporary status, and Jesus is there to move them to a new place spiritually.

    The Jews are “astonished” by his teaching and say, “How does this man have such learning when he has never been taught?” His answer is that the teaching is not his but “his who sent me.” Today’s reading focuses on this concept: hearing God through Jesus, seeing the invisible in the visible, encountering the unknown through the known. The question is if the Jews (and, by extension, we) can overcome our earth-bound notions to do so.

    But We Know Where He is From

    The Jews are hung up on a single fact: “But we know where he is from. When the Christ comes, no one will know where he is from.” They reference a belief, possibly from a passage in Isaiah or Micah, that people will not know from where the Messiah comes. Ironically, they are about to prove this belief as correct, since they do not comprehend from where Jesus comes.

    Jesus acknowledges that they might know he’s from Nazareth, in Galilee, but that’s not the whole story. He says, “You know me and also know where I am from. Yet I did not come on my own.” The Greek word translated here as “on my own” is ἐμαυτοῦ (emautou), which is translated in other editions as “of my own initiative,” “of my own accord,” and “on my own authority.” He adds, “but the one who sent me, whom you do not know, is true.” I prefer the ESV Bible version of this last sentence for clarity’s sake: “He who sent me is true, and him you do not know.” This establishes Jesus’s relationship as an ambassador for God, and the fact that the Jews do not know God in the way they should.

    He doubles down with his final sentence: “I know him, because I am from him, and he sent me.” He accomplishes several things in this sentence, establishing his own knowledge of, proximity to, and mission from God the Father. Note that Greek words used to say “from him” are παρ’αὐτοῦ (par’autou), and English doesn’t quite convey the close proximity that is connoted here. It properly means “close beside,” “in the presence of,” or “from the side of.”

    Jesus thus makes a series of explicit statements in this compact exchange:

    1. You indeed know me and that I come from Galilee
    2. But I haven’t come to you on my own authority
    3. The one who sent me is not made up, is real and, in fact, the source of all truth
    4. What’s more, you don’t know this source of truth, who happens to be your God
    5. Finally, I am the one who knows Him, I am from close beside Him, in fact He sent me specifically to you

    I find it interesting that we are told Jesus was astonishing the Jews in the temple with his learned and perfect teaching, but John doesn’t give us any of his words of teaching. Instead, we get this passage that he “exclaims” or “cries out” as he is aware of the doubts in the crowd. John is more concerned with showing us the drama of the Jews accepting Jesus the man joined with the divine Word of God. It’s interesting because this has hung up believers for millennia. The heresies of Adoptionism and Arianism reared their heads as early as a few hundred years after Christ and continue into the present day. The heart of these heresies (and of the Jewish doubters in the crowd) is that notions of Jesus as a man rule out other, mystical truths.

    Jesus Preaching in the Temple, c.1800, unknown Russian icon writer | Wikimedia Commons.

    This is an easy trap to fall into, especially these days as our way of knowing the world is dominated by the scientific method. I, for one, love history — imagining ages past and influences on people of different eras. But using a historical lens to interpret something fundamentally mystical — that is, the mysterious descent of the divine into the flesh of humanity — well, it leads to atrocious conclusions about Jesus like those found in Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Sadly, this book has been a #1 New York Times Bestseller and does nothing but present Jesus as a failed political zealot. Plus, it’s a tired, old argument of doubt. It’s so old that it happened exactly when Jesus was preaching astonishingly at the temple. It’s there in today’s reading.

    We must do better than this. We can’t ignore the historicity of Jesus, but we also can’t simply use the scientific/historical lens to look at Jesus the man. Pope Benedict XVI published Jesus of Nazareth (he was Cardinal Ratzinger at the time) as a more mature reconciliation of the facts of Jesus operating in a specific time and culture with the mystical reality of his Personhood in the Trinity. As he notes, “We are not meant to regard Jesus’ activity as taking place in some sort of mythical ‘anytime’” (11), so his historical person is important. But, he points out that his book “sees Jesus in light of his communication with the Father, which is the true center of his personality; without it, we cannot understand him at all, and it is from this center that he makes himself present to us still today” (xiv).

    This is what today’s readings are telling us: we cannot know Jesus without seeing how he dwells with the Father. Our notions of Jesus the man are simply inadequate in understanding him, the mystery of God, or the great Church that has emerged as his Body and Bride here on earth. 

  • Seeing with the Light of the Lord

    Seeing with the Light of the Lord

    Fourth Sunday in Lent: 1 Samuel 16:1b, 6-7, 10-13a, Ephesians 5:8-14, John 9:1-41.

    Today’s readings reveal to us how differently from us that the Lord sees, and how Jesus came to reveal the blindness in us and reverse it through himself. The dialectic of light vs. darkness is another way to understand good and evil, and allows us to examine our own senses in the process. Living “in the light,” we are told, is more a matter of the heart than sight. 

    In the first reading, the Lord sends Samuel to Bethlehem to anoint the new king he has chosen from among Jesse’s eight sons. He warns Samuel, “Do not judge from his appearance or from his lofty stature, because I have rejected [these ones].” God has more to say about seeing and judging, which we might call discernment: “Not as man sees does God see, because man sees the appearance but the LORD looks into the heart.” So we receive an important message, that God peers into the very hearts of people when he “looks,” something that we are unable to do. We require God’s help when it comes to true discernment.

    Today’s passage also gives us many ways in which David prefigures Jesus. In scripture, we often encounter the “house of David” and the “Tree of Jesse” from which Jesus comes. It’s fascinating to dwell on today’s verses where God has chosen David. As we listen to the Word of God, who will be born to Mary in Bethlehem, who will be the Good Shepherd for the world, it’s interesting to hear that Jesse dwells in Bethlehem and David is out tending the sheep when the seven other sons are presented to Samuel for potential anointing. The Word is implanting prophecy about His eventual arrival. In this way, David and the lineage of Jesse are a sign of the greater thing to come.

    Root of Jesse icon, provenance unknown | Creative Commons, courtesy iconreader.wordpress.com. In Russian icons this is also known as the Tree of Jesse. Its inspiration comes from Isaiah: “There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots” (Is 11:1). St. Ambrose of Milan writes: “The root is the household of the Jews, the rod is Mary, the Flower of Mary is Christ. She is rightly called a rod, for she is of the royal lineage, of the house and family of David. Her Flower is Christ, Who destroyed the stench of worldly pollution and poured out the fragrance of eternal life. As He Himself said, ‘I am a flower of the plain, a lily of the valleys.’”

    Transitioning to the second reading, I am always struck at how the Word of God works through St. Paul in marvelous ways. Remember that Paul never met Christ before his death; he became an Apostle through the Risen Christ appearing to him. And what an Apostle! We have inherited so much knowledge, encouragement, and theological understanding from him.

    His conversion to Christ is a great example of what we shall see in the gospel reading: the light of Christ opens his eyes. He was spiritually blind and this blindness was rendered literally for him. We are told, “Saul got up from the ground, and though his eyes were open, he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. For three days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank” (Acts 9:8-9). There is a sense of penance here, where Saul, on his way to becoming St. Paul, must go into the desert to fast and contemplate (like we do in Lent).

    But this is just the beginning for him, as he will soon pick up his cross and follow Christ in both suffering and spreading the message of salvation. The disciple Ananias is hesitant to cure his blindness as Christ bids him, but Christ tells him, “he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel; I myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name” (Acts 9:15-16). Oh, the penance will continue! To whom much is given, much will be required (Lk 12:48), says the Lord. At Ananias’s touch, the blindness falls from his eyes “like scales,” he is baptized, and he is on his new path. 

    In today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, he must have been thinking of his own experience when he writes, “You were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.” Note that he doesn’t say, you were once in darkness, but that they were darkness and now are light. He was, in fact, “darkness” in both spiritual sight and deed since he physically persecuted disciples of Christ before his own conversion. Thus Paul gives us another understanding of darkness and light not just being aspects of sight (either physical or spiritual), but also ways of being.

    He continues, “Live as children of light, for light produces every kind of goodness and righteousness and truth. Try to learn what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the fruitless works of darkness.” Note how he conceives of light as “producing” goodness, not just revealing it. And how darkness produces fruitless works. We see Paul building the Church, providing instruction for fledgling communities of those baptized in Christ. Through their Baptism, Christ has opened their eyes to spiritual light, and now Paul is deepening their understanding of that light. It is a light, he says, that is active and productive in the world. This is the Holy Spirit working through the Church, part and parcel of a Baptism in Christ, who is the gateway to the divine essence, an essence that continually creates goodness in the world.

    Conversion on the Way to Damascus (1600-1601), Caravaggio | Wikimedia Commons. There is much to say about this, one of Caravaggio’s masterpieces, from the striking use of light to the opening of St. Paul at the same time of blinding him, but let’s contemplate on what Caravaggio might be saying about the person Saul was at that point by giving us such a magnificent horse’s ass to look at!

    This is a light that doesn’t just reveal truth but transforms the person. Today’s gospel from St. John is a masterpiece of depicting this revelation in the curing of the blind man. This morning, Bishop Robert Barron presents a great exposition of the gospel reading in his live-streamed daily mass and mentions how St. John’s writing is akin to icon writing, where you can look at every detail in an icon and see how rich it is in symbolism and tells another aspect of the story.

    The first detail to note is that the man is blind from birth — not from cataracts or disease, but fundamentally blind since he came into the world. Why is this important? St. Augustine tells us: “that blind man is the human race; for this blindness had place in the first man, through sin, from whom we all draw our origin, not only in respect of death, but also of unrighteousness. For if unbelief is blindness…” (Tractate 44 on John 9, 1). Recall God telling Samuel “not as man sees does God see,” and here we are given a story about how man (in general) cannot see.

    Christ passes by this man, but when his disciples fruitlessly question who is at fault for the man’s blindness, he stops. He says, “Neither he nor his parents sinned; it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him.” Again, this clues us in to the universal application of the story to all of mankind. Jesus adds, “We have to do the works of the one who sent me while it is day. … While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” Jesus speaks here of the irresistible nature of the Spirit of the Lord, active in the world. He is compelled, he must do the works of God while here on earth. To that end, he sets about healing the blind man. He is not asked to do this, he does it gratuitously.

    As a child, I always wondered about this next bit of the gospel. With other miracles, we hear Jesus say, “your faith has healed you,” or someone is healed just by touching the hem of his garment. But here we see something that seems like a magician’s ritual: “he spat on the ground and made clay with the saliva, and smeared the clay on his eyes.” Is this necessary? How is spitting and making clay related to Christ’s mission on earth?

    Nothing Jesus does is meaningless, and he certainly doesn’t need obscure rituals to heal people. So let’s examine this act and what it signifies. St. Augustine tells us plainly, “The Word is as it were the spittle, the Flesh is the earth” (Sermon 85 on the New Testament [CXXXV. Ben.], 1). Just as “the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground,” (Gen 2:7), we see Christ initiate a similar act of creation using the dust on the ground. This act of (re-)creation for humanity comes in the form of the uniting of the Word (his spittle) and humanity (the earth); in other words, Jesus Himself is the clay that is the unity of the river of life (spittle) and the earth. Jesus spreads Himself on the eyes of the blind man.

    And Christ emphasizes the great mystical unity and energy that is the Trinity by telling him, “Go wash in the Pool of Siloam.” John helpfully tells us, “which means Sent,” so we can connect the dots. First, washing in the pool represents Baptism. What is the Baptism Christ offers us? St. John the Baptist tells us, “he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit” (Lk 3:16). So, Christ is pointing to the work of the Holy Spirit in this baptism in the Pool of Siloam.

    Second, the pool’s name means “Sent,” and Jesus has just said, “We have to do the works of the one who sent me.” Thus, the entire affair is done under the auspices of God the Father, who has sent Christ and sends the Holy Spirit. The life-giving water of the Holy Trinity, the overflowing love that characterizes the essence of our Three-in-One God, is the action that grants sight to the man blind from birth.

    Healing of the Blind Man from Birth, unknown provenance | Creative Commons, courtesy johnsanidopoulos.com.

    Let’s think more about this pool named Sent. After the man is cured of his blindness, he is asked many times by his neighbors and the Pharisees how this came about. His answer is simple: “He put clay on my eyes, and I washed, and now I can see.” But the more he is interrogated, the more he must contemplate this action and the more he must be the light (to recall the second reading from St. Paul). This man finally takes on the role of teacher to the Pharisees, a startling reversal for one who was a beggar:

    “This is what is so amazing, that you do not know where he is from, yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if one is devout and does his will, he listens to him. It is unheard of that anyone ever opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he would not be able to do anything.”

    He answers them with the ineffable logic of the truth and the light. And so this man sets the stage for several millennia of Christians who — once they accept Baptism and the light offered by Christ — answer skeptics with clear logic. From St. Augustine through the medieval scholastics like St. Thomas Aquinas to contemporary popes, we hear similar explanations as they evangelize in the light of Christ.

    And so we can see how the man himself is sent from the pool by God, carrying a new message for the world. All of us who are baptized Christians both receive his mercy and love have been sent by God to give his mercy and love to the world.

    This inevitably means that we will be rejected by those living in darkness. Christ finds the man after the Pharisees kick him out of the temple and reveals his true nature to him. He tells him, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see might see, and those who do see might become blind.” Here we find the double-edged sword that is the Truth: it not only saves us from spiritual blindness, but it condemns those who cling to their flawed human “sight.” God’s plan is to unite us to Him, and those who choose darkness over the light will be condemned to live in perpetual blindness.

    The Old Guitarist (1903-1904), Pablo Picasso | Wikimedia Commons. Picasso painted this during his Blue Period, a time of depression and desolation after his good friend committed suicide. We see a resignation to death in this old, blind guitarist, clinging to life in the form of his guitar. When seen in the light of today’s gospel, we might see in this the blind clinging to their earthly concerns and ways of knowing, pushing away the light offered by Christ and soon to be condemned to dwell for all eternity in that darkness unless they accept Christ.

    This brings me back to St. Paul, who lived his life being sent by the Lord, being rejected by those in darkness. Yet he never failed in passing along this great impetus of being sent — his evangelization aimed to encourage others in spreading the faith, living the faith, being active, not stagnant. As he tells us today, “now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light.”

  • Salvation Is Based on Our Core Person, a Deep Adherence to the Law

    Salvation Is Based on Our Core Person, a Deep Adherence to the Law

    Friday in the First Week of Lent: Ezekiel 18:21-28, Matthew 5:20-26.

    Today’s readings are very much concerned with what is central to a person, as opposed to the actions they take on the surface. First from the mouth of the prophet Ezekiel and then from the mouth of the Lord Himself, we hear how God wants a relationship with authentically upright and loving people.

    Ezekiel writes in a particularly difficult time for the Jewish nation, in between the multiple sackings of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, when the Jews were forcibly exiled in waves. They must have been wondering what they did to deserve this, and he spends a section of Chapter 18, just prior to today’s reading, adjusting the common notion of being punished by God for your own father’s sins. God speaks through Ezekiel: “Know that all lives are mine; the life of the parent as well as the life of the child is mine: it is only the person who sins that shall die” (Ez 18:4).

    Today’s reading is a continuation of this theme of being personally responsibile for one’s sins, and it reflects back for the listener some truths about God Himself. We hear that God welcomes the repentant person: “If the wicked man turns away from all the sins he committed, if he keeps all my statutes and does what is right and just, he shall surely live, he shall not die.” It is God’s great message of hope that anyone can live in the light, united with Him if he or she repents and lives according to His statutes. One’s past does not matter as much as the state of one’s heart and soul in the present.

    Study for the Head of Saint Charles Borommeo (1658-1690), Carlo Maratta | Creative Commons, courtesy the Barber Institute of Fine Arts/ArtUK.

    Ezekiel affirms the opposite, that an otherwise virtuous person will die if he or she turns to wickedness. This is undoubtedly less-than-good news, especially for people who might believe their final judgment is weighed “in the balance.” God states unequivocally that it’s not an average of one’s lifetime of goodness vs. wickedness: “None of his virtuous deeds shall be remembered, because he has broken faith and committed sin; because of this, he shall die.”

    While this may not seem fair to those who subscribe to the “I mostly do things right” camp of salvation, God is telling us that he wants us to be authentically converted to him. He points out that if we’ve turned away from him and embrace wickedness, we have taken ourselves out of the light, we have accepted death over life. “When someone virtuous turns away from virtue to commit iniquity, and dies, it is because of the iniquity he committed that he must die.” It is our action of turning away that has, in effect, killed us.

    In Matthew’s gospel reading, Jesus elaborates on God’s desire to have us turn to him in heart and soul, with the very core of our being. He begins by doubling down on adherence to the law: “unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter into the Kingdom of heaven.” These fastidious practitioners of Jewish law — who could hope to be more righteous than them? To clarify what he means, Jesus says that while the law forbids murder, “whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment.”

    And so we get to the meat of the matter. It’s not just adherence to the outward details of the law, but adherence to the spirit of the law as well that makes one righteous. Jesus is pointing out that being angry with someone carries the same intent as murder. Our anger puts us in a position of opposing that person to such an extent that we wish to enact some type of violence — a verbal insult, public scorn, physical violence, etc. Each of these reflects an attitude of hate, not love, where we no longer consider that person a brother or sister but an enemy or an opponent. In this state of anger, we no longer abide by the spirit of the law. Murder is an extreme physical manifestation of the same spiritual low point.

    His next example is similar. Jewish law made it punishable to be judged by the Sanhedrin for saying the epithet “Raqa” (essentially, “I spit at you”) to someone. Christ counters “whoever says, ‘You fool,’ will be liable to fiery Gehenna.” This seemingly lesser crime contains within it the same seed of spiritual decay, however. The Greek word that Matthew records Jesus using is Μωρέ, which is also aptly translated as “idiot” (it is the root of the English word “moron”). To call someone a fool or idiot discounts them completely as someone with dignity. More than that, we are denying our brotherhood with them, denying their equal status given to them by God. Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection was accomplished for all of humanity. Through this earth-shattering event, he dwells in each of us. Thus, when we discount another person by calling them fool or idiot, we are discounting Christ as well. A grievous sin, indeed! 

    Fr. Simeon Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, PhD, states this clearly in his three-volume masterpiece on the gospel of St. Matthew, Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word: “Who am I to raise myself exaltedly above another and confine that child of God and brother of mine to the category of human debris?” (221). Central to our understanding is that God’s Law describes outward markers of actions that stem from a deeply planted spiritual truth. The deeply planted truth is that we are undeservedly loved by the origin of love Himself, who wants us to share this heavenly love with all of his creation. Everything stems from that, and the “spirit of the law” is how deeply this spiritual truth orients the core of our being. Our actions (which show whether we adhere to the “letter” of the law) are, in effect, the fruits of either a healthy spirit dwelling with God or an unhealthy spirit obsessed with self and dwelling with the devil. 

    Science and Charity (1897), Pablo Picasso | Creative Commons, courtesy WikiArt.org

    We must be careful not to simplify and misunderstand Jesus’s message to be “the spirit of the law is more important than the letter of the law.” Leiva-Merikakis states that the spirit is an “overabundance,” not a different/better thing: “If he is asking his followers to surpass the ‘justice’ of the Pharisees and Doctors of the Law, this ‘surpassing’ is an overabundance that transcends the Law interiorly, that deepens the sense of the Law and traces it back to its very source in the will and Heart of God … [transcending] in the sense of going deeper into it: an interior transcendence.” (216-217).

    The last words of Jesus presented in today’s gospel relate an urgency to keep our deeply planted spiritual truth healthy and in front of our own eyes. He says, “leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be reconciled with your brother.” We must not attempt to offer sacrifice to God, our ultimate display of obedience and honor, if we are dishonoring him by arguing with or discounting another child of God. We would be hypocrites, pretending to give ourselves to Him while at the same time being in a state of pushing Him away.

    Both readings today, therefore, display how God wants us to convert to him, fully and unreservedly. It’s easy for us to be tempted to sin and be out of grace, covering up that deep spiritual truth God has planted in us. But that’s why Lent is so important, so that prayer, fasting, and almsgiving can help us fight temptations and remain close to God, anxious to meet him face-to-face.

    As a final note on the passage from St. Matthew’s gospel and a plug for Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis’s amazing three-volume set, revel for a moment in his command of language and excellence as a scholar. Below is a more extended excerpt from the first volume of Fire of Mercy on today’s reading.

    There is a subtle progression in the verbs used by the Lord in these three verses (5:21-23). Just as his doctrine is proceeding from external to the interior, from the past to the present, and from the general to the particular, so too his language. He first addresses the crowd as such in the plural: “All of you have heard.” He then singles out individuals from the group before him, but somewhat hypothetically: “Whoever might say….” Finally, he completes his approach to the human heart and conscience of the specific person standing before him by using the second person singular: “When thou are taking….” Matthew’s scenography here is full of visual dramatic impact. We can see Jesus first looking over the whole crowd on the mountainside and then gradually beginning to move in on individuals, who are transfixed by the penetrating goodness of his eyes. In the end, the merely curious individual who found himself in the crowd just “to see” can no longer hide, for he feels Jesus address him, and no one else, with his words and glances.

    “When you are bringing your gift-offering to the altar.” The material gift offered to God to fulfill a ritual prescription suddenly becomes the symbol of the human heart, which is the real gift the external sacrifice intends in authentic religion. But the pious rite that is to be transacted between the individual and his God cannot be completed if the memory (μνησθῇς) of a rift with one’s brother intervenes. On the way to the altar, the gift must be dropped; not a minute more can pass; reconciliation cannot be left for later. The impediment to sacrifice, and hence to right relationship with God in worship — what had been objectified as ritual impurity before the coming of Christ — now becomes the impediment of the memory, of the consciousness of disharmony with one’s brother. You cannot present your heart to God as a gift-offering on the altar of sacrifice (θυσιαστήριον) if that heart is turned against God’s other children   (222-223).

    Buy the 1st volume here.