The Woman At The Well

 III Lent, A

It’s plain enough that the readings today invite us to reflect on the symbol of water. In the first reading Moses gives water from the rock to God’s people in the desert – and as St. Paul says, the rock was Christ. (1 Cor 10:4) In the gospel Jesus leads the Samaritan woman through a process of enlightenment so that she might discover in herself the living water that becomes in us, as Jesus says, a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

It is very fitting that we reflect on this living water because the purpose of this season of Lent is the Church’s accompaniment of those who are preparing for baptism at Easter. And we too, who are already baptized, are preparing ourselves for the renewal of the grace of our baptismal promises.

In order to appreciate well the depth and beauty of this gospel that we have today, that of the Samaritan woman, there are certain things to note.

But I Say To You

6th Sunday, A

Well. We have a lot of stuff in the gospel today. It’s a collection of the moral teachings of Jesus that makes up part of the Sermon on the Mount in the gospel of St. Matthew.

I don’t think it would be possible to say something about all of it adequately, but perhaps we can find a thread that unites all these sayings of Jesus.

Let’s begin with the refrain with which Jesus introduces these teachings: “You have heard that it was said to your ancestors … but I say to you.”

Thinking As Human Beings Do

 24th Sunday, B

Today we have St. Mark’s account of Peter’s great confession of faith, the definitive answer to the question Jesus puts to all his followers, 

“Who do you say that I am?”

Peter, first among the Apostles, answers with the confession that includes within it the whole of our Catholic faith,

“You are the Christ.”

But then, as we heard, something goes wrong. Once Peter makes this glorious statement, Jesus begins to explain to him what being the Christ will mean, and Peter has a hard time accepting it.

The Most Holy Trinity

(Trinity Sunday, C)

Trinity Sunday is absolutely one of my favorite days to be a priest. Why? Because I don't have to listen to any Trinity Sunday homilies! In the fifteen Trinity Sundays from my baptism to my ordination, I heard a good homily pretty rarely.

It usually goes like this: 'O.k., it's Trinity Sunday. God is a Trinity. He's three, he's one, you can't really understand it, but that's how it is. Please stand for the Creed.' Maybe if you're lucky you at least get the amusement of some limping analogies, or the excitement of a little heresy, usually modalism or Arianism.

I always wanted to stand up and say no! Let us not pass over the central mystery of the Christian faith with mystifying arithmetic or the dullness of obnubilating analogies!

Here's the thing: We can have an understanding of the Blessed Trinity. Not a comprehension, mind you, but some understanding. This is so for two reasons. First, that we are made in the image and likeness of God, and second, God reveals himself as Trinity in the Scriptures.

Let’s start with ourselves. If we are created in the image and likeness of God, and this is what is distinctive about us human beings among all God’s creatures, and if God is a Trinity, then we are created in the image and likeness of the Blessed Trinity. Therefore, if we look at ourselves when we are most happy and most the creatures God made us to be, we should see in ourselves some vestige or reflection of the Blessed Trinity. And when are we happier than we are in love? Indeed, love makes us happy because God himself is Love, and our experiences of love are a taste of divine joy. But there is no such thing as a love that doesn’t love someone; love is always specific—we fall in love with this particular person, or place, or ideal. So for God to be Love itself, God must be at once Lover and Beloved. Indeed, this is what we are talking about when we reflect on the Blessed Trinity. From all eternity, the overflowing Love we call God self-expresses into a perfect and complete reflection of Himself. God is Lover and Beloved, Father and Son, Source and Eternal Word, or, as we hear in the first reading today, Lady Wisdom at play with the Creator at the beginning of time.

There you have it. God is not some static ‘supreme being’ sitting on a throne somewhere far away. God is a super-creative set of loving dynamisms. Lover, Beloved, and the Love they share, Father and Son with the Holy Spirit, this is who God is. But here’s the really good news: because God is a set of loving dynamics, “persons,” as we say in theology, it means that God is a reality that can be stepped into.

In fact, this is what we celebrate by our Christianity. In Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit has stretched the love of God the Father and God the Son into the world, that we might have the opportunity to be included in this original Love. This is what we mean in the Creed when we say that Jesus, the Word made flesh, was conceived ‘by the power of the Holy Spirit.’ The Spirit—the Love between Father and Son—has made a home for that love in our humanity through the mystery of the Incarnation. In Jesus, our humanity has the opportunity to be caught up into the eternally creative, utterly delightful, and perfectly happy divine Activity we call the Blessed Trinity. As St. Paul writes in the second reading today, Jesus is our “access” to the grace of God.

This is the joy of the Holy Communion we receive here at Holy Mass—we receive the sacrificed Body of Christ into our bodies, and so are caught up by the Spirit into the love of God the Father and God the Son. We begin to live in God. This is the good news Jesus announces in the gospel today: The Spirit will guide us “to all truth.” This Truth is God himself, the Blessed Trinity himself, in whose image we are created, and whose divine life is our destiny in heaven. As we are caught up anew into the Blessed Trinity through our Holy Communion today, let us give thanks for the chance to begin to live the life of heaven while we are still on the pilgrimage of this life.

This Is The Night

(Easter Vigil, C)

“This is the night.” That’s the refrain and the slogan of our joy at this Vigil. “This is the night when Jesus Christ broke the chains of death and rose triumphant from the grave.” This is the night. Notice that we are in the present tense, and in this little bit of grammar, we see the good news for us, for the world, and especially for you, dear Elect and candidates.

When we think of the Resurrection of the Lord, of the fifty days of Easter we are about to celebrate with greater joy than ever, we are not recalling to ourselves some bit of history, some event from the past. The Resurrection, because it is a matter of God's eternity is not yesterday or tomorrow, but always right now. This is the night. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the invasion of eternity Itself, of eternity Himself into our lives and our world of space and time. For Jesus Christ, though he could die in the humanity he borrowed from us through our Most Blessed Mother, could not be held by death in his identity as the eternal Son of God. So, after resting in death through this greatest of Sabbaths, the Risen Lord bursts forth once again, destroying from the inside the bodily corruption and death we have brought into this world with our sins.

In Jesus Christ we have a marriage of heaven and earth, a fertile union of our humanity with God. The power of this union comes to be with us tonight. Through the Resurrection, which is the indestructibility and infinite creativity of God’s own Eternity, we are blessed and re-created. This is because for us Jesus Christ is risen into the faith of the sacraments handed down to us by apostolic Tradition. That is why, in the sacraments we celebrate at this Vigil, this is the night of the Resurrection. Does this surprise us to say that Jesus Christ is risen into the sacraments? If we were to offer Mass tomorrow night we would hear the beautiful passage from St. Luke in which the risen Jesus offers the Eucharist for his disciples: “He was made known to them in the breaking of bread.” By our Communion with Jesus Christ, his Risen and Eternal Life comes to make a home in our humble humanity.

This is the night. In these sacraments of initiation, we are witnesses to the Resurrection just as much as the women at the tomb on that first Easter morning. In the gospel we heard of the three women who were the first witnesses to the Empty Tomb: Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James. Tonight those three women are Veronica, Sujeiry, and Nicole. It is you who draw near to the mystery of the Empty Tomb, and who are about to meet the transforming power of the Resurrection in your baptism. That is why you, Elect of God, are our greatest joy tonight; you are the women who stand in the tradition of the women at the tomb and who will become for us the first newborn witnesses of the Resurrection. This is the night.

In the sacramental initiation you receive tonight, the eternal and indestructible Life and Creativity of God come to make a home in you. It will grow as God’s own Blessed Delight through the rest of your pilgrimage in this world, and bear its greatest fruit in the eternal life of which you are now heirs. You candidates who will complete your initiation with the sacrament of Confirmation share in the same joy, as do we who renew tonight the promises of our own baptism.

Let us rejoice with these women who have traveled to the tomb to be transformed by their witness to the Resurrection. May the eternal life showered upon us in the Resurrection well up in every heart to God the Father’s everlasting delight. This is the night.

Priesthood

(32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, B)

(Follow this link for my introduction and apology for this homily.)

For the past five weeks we have been hearing the letter to the Hebrews in the second reading here at Sunday Mass. Since we finish the lectionary’s selections from Hebrews today, I thought it might be good to stop and reflect upon its teachings. On these Sundays in Ordinary Time, the readings from the gospels and the first reading from the Old Testament are selected to match and complement each other, while the second reading proceeds on its own cycle. Because of this, preachers sometimes don’t pay a lot of attention to the second reading during Ordinary Time. Hebrews is worth our time, however, and the readings given by the lectionary lead us into a reflection on the priesthood of Christ. This priesthood matters for us, because we all have a share in it. In some ways, it is the good news of our whole religion.

When we think of the priesthood, we often think just of the ministry of ordained priests in the Church. That’s too bad, because for us Christians priesthood is much more than that. In the simplest terms, a priest is someone appointed to offer sacrifice to God. Since the earliest times, indeed since Adam and Eve’s sons Cain and Abel first offered sacrifice to God, the loving relationship between God and his people has been ratified, exercised, and bonded by sacrifice. Under the old covenants sacrifices of all kinds were offered to God, day after day, year after year. The Temple of Jerusalem, the preeminent place to offer sacrifice in God’s Presence, became the center of the world for the people of God.

The New Covenant ratified in the Precious Blood of Christ reveals all of these prior sacrifices to be foreshadowings of his own sacrifice of himself. Jesus fulfills, ends, and goes beyond all of these sacrifices of religion by offering himself as the perfect, eternal sacrifice, once and for all. In his Passion Jesus takes upon himself everything we are at our worst, even to our dismissing, torturing, and killing each other. On the Cross Jesus enters into the deepest misery and suffering that we have brought upon ourselves and each other with our sins, up to and including the searing alienation from God our modern world knows so well, to the depths of losing even our consciousness of our Creator and the Ground of our being: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me.”

But though Jesus could suffer and die in the humanity and human body he borrows from us through our Most Blessed Mother, death could not hold on to his divinity. The divine Son of God bursts forth from the death we have brought upon ourselves and brings our humanity and human body with him into the new life of the Resurrection. This is what we call the Paschal Mystery of Christ, his passing over through our death into what can now be our new life.

This is why Christ is our High Priest; he is the one who offers the perfect sacrifice to God, and indeed, within God. So in Christianity, there is really only one priest, Jesus Christ, because there is only one Sacrifice. This priesthood of Christ is the priesthood of the Church, because the Church is the assembly of those who have baptized into the death and Resurrection of Christ, and who become his broken body and blood poured out in the offering of the Eucharist.

What this means is that each of us who is a Christian, a member of the mystical Body of Christ, shares in the priesthood of Christ. Each of us is a priest, because the communion each of us enjoys with Christ enables us to offer our own sacrifices and have them drawn up into the one, saving sacrifice of Christ.

This isn’t necessarily some big or glamorous thing. Many of the sacrifices we make in our day to day lives are very small. We give someone our ear or some of our time when we don’t want to. We let go of some our feelings or plans and enter into the messiness of someone else’s life so as to give them some mercy and comfort. Not that there aren’t immense sacrifices that people often make in life, such as the many ways ordinary people give up possibilities and opportunity in order to care for or give to others. The good news for us who share in the priesthood of Christ, is that God raises all of our sacrifices, large and small, to a certain divine dignity. By our baptism and our Communion with the sacrificed Body and Blood of Christ, God draws the sacrifices of our individual lives into the one, perfect, and eternal Sacrifice of the Son of God. Our sacrifices become part of the Sacrifice that saves and renews the world, leading us all from the meaningless of death to the hope of Resurrection. Each of us is a priest of the New Covenant, a sharer in the one Priesthood and one Sacrifice of Christ. This is our dignity and our joy as the priestly people of God.

As we offer our humble gifts at God’s altar today, let each of us offer the sacrifices of our own lives, uniting them to the Sacrifice of Christ we make present in this Eucharist, and let us be grateful to the God who makes us a priestly people in the Blood of Christ.

The Hard Saying

(21st Sunday in Ordinary Time, B) For the last four Sundays, we have been reading the section of St. John’s gospel called the ‘Bread of Life discourse,’ and we have heard all the sublime and beautiful teaching of Jesus about how he gives himself to the world as the food of salvation we receive here at Mass. Today we arrive at the end of the discourse and its jarring and anti-climactic conclusion. After all of this encouraging and beautiful teaching, “many of his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him.” They said, “This saying is hard; who can accept it?” So it was with the first disciples of Jesus, as it was with the first hearers of the gospel of John, and so it is now. Our Lord’s gift of himself as the Bread for the life of the world, kept for us in the Church’s teaching on the Eucharist down through the centuries, remains a ‘hard saying.’ The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: “In the most blessed sacrament of the Eucharist "the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ and, therefore, the whole Christ is truly, really, and substantially contained.” (§ 1374) From the early Church until today, unbelievers have mocked, despised, and disregarded our Catholic teaching on the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Even among us Catholics, public opinion polls have suggested that many of us don’t even really believe what the Church teaches about the Body and Blood of Christ we receive here at Mass. Not that they’re really to blame sometimes, because there is a lot of bad or at least incomplete doctrine and preaching out there. I remember one of my own teachers, a Catholic priest and professor of theology, taught us a certain analogy for understanding the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. It seemed kind of fishy to me at the time, so imagine my surprise and vindication when I came across the same analogy—in the works of the protestant reformer Ulrich Zwingli! That Jesus Christ, broken on the Cross and rising to new life as the first fruits of the Resurrection to come, should give that same broken and risen body to us as the Bread of Life here at Mass, remains a ‘hard saying,’ and even us who are believers can admit it. To me, I think this is a hard teaching on two levels. The first level seems hard at first but really isn’t, and the second level we don’t always think about, but it’s the one that is actually the hardest. To believe that the bread and wine we offer here at Mass become the Body and Blood of Christ is perhaps not too hard. Since there is nothing to see, no observable change in the elements—God being way too humble a character for that—our belief is basically just an intellectual assent. But it’s also an assent we come to by our concrete experience. If we receive Holy Communion each week as devoutly as we can, making use of the sacrament of confession when we need to, we will see the fruits of the Presence of Christ we receive in our lives. We will be changed and set each day more on the path of spiritual freedom and sanctity. Thus we will come to believe more fully that we have actually received the Presence of Christ into our lives and we will have an ever easier time consenting to the truth of his Presence in the Eucharist we receive. The really hard thing is to encounter the kind of God who wills to be revealed in this way. This, to me, is the truly difficult teaching, the ‘hard saying’ of Christianity. When God reveals himself to the world, what appears? On the one hand a newborn, vulnerable child, born of young, poor parents away from home. On the other hand, God reveals himself as a condemned criminal, tortured and in the midst of his execution. These are the mysteries of the Nativity and the Passion, the revelations of God in the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ, and they reveal a God who is sublimely humble. Far from lording it over the world like a god we might create in our image, our God is one who places himself below us as our Suffering Servant. This is not a god sitting on a lofty throne dispensing blessings to his friends and punishments on his enemies. This is not the landlord god who allows us to live in a state of grace as long as we behave. This is not a god who delights in controlling his creation. No. This is the living God who reveals himself in the humility of a vulnerable baby, in the humiliation of a tortured criminal, and who continues these sublimely humble and humbly sublime Presences among us by giving himself to us as our Nourishment. So let us receive the humble God into our bodies and our lives as devoutly as we can, and so become the mystery of humble service to the world that we receive in the Bread of Life.

The Body and Blood of Christ

(Corpus Christi, B)

Today we celebrate the solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, more commonly known as Corpus Christi. This day is traditionally observed on the second Thursday after Easter, sixty days after Holy Thursday, in order to make the connection with the institution of the Eucharist at the Mass of the Lord’s Supper. But, as seems to be the sometimes unfortunate trend, our great moveable feasts migrate to the nearest Sunday. In any case, however, today is a day set aside to reflect on, appreciate, explore, and worship the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Here at Holy Mass we stand and kneel before, and even receive into our bodies, the true and real Body of Christ. This is Christ’s great gift to us, and it’s worth our attention and prayer.

When we talk about the Body of Christ, we mean first of all the historical, human body of Jesus of Nazareth, who is the Word of God made flesh. His human body and human soul were perfectly joined to the divine life of second Person of the Blessed Trinity, breathed forth from the Father from all eternity. We know from our most basic confession as Christians that the destiny of his human body was to be broken as a sacrifice on the Cross. But we also know that the breaking of his body and the extinguishing of his human life were not the end of the story. The same Body of Christ returned from the dead in the revelation of the Resurrection. The Scriptures are pretty insistent on this point: the historical, human body of Jesus of Nazareth is continuous with the Risen Body of the Resurrected Christ.

The Eucharist fits into this through its institution at the Last Supper. As we hear in the gospel today, on the eve of his Passion and death, Jesus identified his own body, soon to be broken in sacrifice, and his own blood, soon to be poured out on the Cross, with the bread and wine of that meal. In this, Jesus establishes both an eternal commemoration of his own self-sacrifice, and passes his own Presence as Risen Lord into our offering of that same commemoration. This is the mystery of the Eucharist for us: The Real Presence of the Resurrected Jesus, which we know is continuous with the physical body of the Incarnate Son of God, has passed into the consecrated bread and wine of Holy Mass.

In the Eucharist we see and touch Jesus risen from the dead just as the disciples did when the Resurrection was first revealed. And this shouldn’t seem so weird to us, because the wonder of the resurrected Jesus—which we have contemplated through this past Easter season—is the same as the wonder of the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. For example, we know from the Scriptures that the risen Jesus had a body that could be touched, and yet he also appeared in locked rooms and does not seem to have been confined by space and time. And so it is with the Most Blessed Sacrament: it is the Real Presence of Christ, but it is a Presence not limited in location. The risen Jesus, though it was really the same Jesus the disciples had known in his earthly life, was sometimes not immediately recognizable. Remember how Mary Magdalene didn’t know who he was until he called her by name? She thought he was the gardener! So it is with the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Jesus is truly risen into the bread and wine we offer, and his Real Presence abides in them for our worship, but this isn’t something we can see with our physical eyes. We see the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist with our spiritual eyes. As with Mary, these eyes are opened when the Lord calls us by name through prayer. So let us always be praying in the Presence of the Most Blessed Sacrament, that the Lord may open our eyes to see him among us.

The Blessed Trinity

(Trinity Sunday, B)

When it comes to our reflection upon and appreciation of the Blessed Trinity, so many times we give up so fast! We say, ‘Who can understand it?’ People like to say, ‘Well, it’s a mystery.’ That much is true. The Blessed Trinity is a mystery. In fact it is the Mystery. But though we can never comprehend this Mystery completely, this doesn’t mean we can never have some appreciation and understanding of what it means.

Even in theological school people give up on having a practical understanding of the Blessed Trinity. Every seminary student is taught the old ‘5,4,3,2,1,’ mnemonic for remembering trinitarian doctrine: In the Trinity there are five notions, four relations, three persons, two processions, one nature, and then, as is always added in comedic desperation, zero understanding.

It’s funny, but to me it’s a little sad. Let’s not give up on having some understanding of the Trinity! We can, brothers and sisters, come to an appreciation of Who the Blessed Trinity is and what He means for us. Not a grasp, a comprehension, mind you, but an appreciation. We can do this for at least for a couple of reasons. First, we are created in the image and likeness of God, so if God is a Trinity, so we can look for the image and likeness of the Blessed Trinity in ourselves. That’s the approach I took last year with the homily for today. But also, we must always remember that Sacred Scripture is the revealed Word of God. So if God is a Trinity, we can expect the Sacred Scriptures to reveal the Blessed Trinity. And so they do, but we have to look carefully.

In the first reading from the book of Deuteronomy, Moses recalls to the people their great privilege of having God reveal Himself to them: “Did a people ever hear the voice of God speaking from the midst of a fire, as you did, and live?” How was God revealed to the people? God was in the voice and the fire. You recall the powerful scene from the book of Exodus that the Scriptures point to here, when God spoke to Moses in the burning bush. This is one of the most complete revelations of the Blessed Trinity in all of the Scriptures. For we believe that God is a superabundant love, and from all eternity God overflows into a perfect expression of Himself that we call the Word or the Son. The Word is ‘begotten, not made” as we pray in the Creed. This is the second person of the Blessed Trinity, the Word that is spoken from the burning bush, the Word through whom God creates the universe—“God said…and so it happened”—and the Word that became flesh in Jesus Christ.

The fire out of which the Word was spoken, the breath of God that carries the Word, this is Who we call the Holy Spirit. So there you have the Blessed Trinity. A dynamic overflowing of Love in which from all eternity there is Lover, Beloved, and the Love that binds them. But even in this, we haven’t reached the fullness of the good news and wonder for us.

Because God is a set of dynamic relationships—indeed, this is what we confess by our belief in the Blessed Trinity—this means that there is a way into God. Just as the love of husband and wife overflows creatively to include the new life of children, so in the human birth of Christ, the dynamic love of the Blessed Trinity expands to include us. This is what St. Paul is talking about in the second reading when he talks about “the Spirit of adoption.” By our baptism into Christ, by our faith, and by our communion with his humanity here at Mass, our lives are folded into the blessed life of the Trinity. We become daughters and sons in the Son.

With that in mind, think back to the burning bush for a moment. Recall what was amazing about the burning bush, that it was not consumed by the fire. And so it is with our adoption by the Holy Spirit into the Love of the Father and the Son. The life of the Blessed Trinity comes to dwell in us in such a way that it does not consume or displace our humanity. The gift and good news we have in Christ is that the dynamic Mystery of Love we call God has come to include us in its own life, in such a way that the Love of God delights to live in us as our love for each other.

I Have Given You a Model to Follow

(Holy Thursday, Mass of the Lord's Supper)

Tonight, brothers and sisters, we encounter one of the great twists of the Sacred Scriptures. In St. John’s account of the Last Supper, we find no explicit account of the institution of the Eucharist. This is perhaps surprising because the Gospel of John is wholly permeated by the truth of Jesus’ identification with the Eucharistic food we receive in this sacrament. After all, it is in John that Jesus proclaims himself “the bread of life,” and proclaims to his astonished hearers that “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.”

So how come when St. John comes to the Last Supper, there is no explicit Eucharist, but this funny business about washing feet instead? Certainly John knew about the institution of the Eucharist; St. Paul, writing at least a generation before the Gospel of John, recounts the tradition quite clearly in the second reading we hear tonight. And yet, after all the build up of the famous “Bread of Life Discourse” in the Gospel of John, and the “hard saying” that we must eat Christ’s body and drink his blood if we are to have eternal life within us, we get this touching account of the washing of the feet instead of the explicit tradition of Jesus forever identifying himself with the bread and wine transubstantiated through his divine blessing.

John the Evangelist is writing perhaps sixty or seventy years after Jesus’ Passion and death. Our Christian faith was between its second and third generation. The celebration of the Eucharist and the reception of the eucharistized bread and wine were well established among Christians; this much is clear from the tradition we heard from Paul tonight. They knew that Jesus himself had become their saving Passover; just as the Hebrews were saved when the blood of the paschal sacrifice was seen on the doorposts of their houses, so Christians are saved by the blood of Christ on their lips.

So John, knowing that he doesn’t have to spell out a tradition that his readers would have already known well, offers another emphasis to help them understand more deeply what it is they were already doing. And it’s the same for us, brothers and sisters. We know the Eucharist very well; it is the center and source of our life as Catholic Christians. The Gospel we hear tonight invites us into a deeper reflection on what the Eucharist means for us and what it calls us too.

Jesus, in washing the feet of his disciples, takes the place of the servant among them. He who is teacher and Lord among them, puts himself humbly below his disciples—literally and spiritually—as one who washes and cleanses. The good news of tonight, brothers and sisters, is that in the blessed Eucharist and in the Holy Communion we receive, Jesus continues to do this humble ministry of washing us.

In the ancient world, when someone arrived from the dusty world to be seated at table for a supper, his feet had to be washed of the dirt and grime of the outside world. And so it is with us. Each time we come together for the Lord’s Supper in the Mass, we arrive with every part of our soul that touches the world just a little dusty and obscured by the sin and confusion of the world around us. But when we gather around this altar, Jesus again stoops down and places himself below us. He offers himself as our nourishment, and when we become one with him in the Holy Communion we receive he washes our feet once more. We receive his own divine life into our very bodies and we are cleansed of our sins, our anxieties, and our depressions, having our spiritual feet, the parts of us that touch the difficulties and problems of this world cleansed by the humble God who makes himself our servant.

So let us turn our attention again to this altar. Let us kneel in adoration before the Lord who kneels before us as a servant. And let us go forth from this place with renewed desire to imitate the sublime humility we receive. Let us renew our resolve to become humble servants of each other and of all who are weary or discouraged in this world. Let us become the Body of Christ we receive, the presence of Jesus that places himself at the feet of others so that he might cleanse and renew them.

Passiontide

(5th Sunday of Lent, B)

You will notice, brothers and sisters, that upon our arrival at this fifth Sunday of Lent, a shift has occurred. When we listen to the readings and pray the prayers that make up the Mass we offer today, we see right away that our attention is now directed much more explicitly on the Lord’s Passion. This shift was much clearer in the old calendar, before the reforms and changes that were made after the Second Vatican Council, when these last two weeks before Easter were called Passiontide. Perhaps you will remember how statues and sacred images were veiled in violet starting today. Even though this custom has become rare, these last two weeks of Lent still invite us to begin a more intense reflection on the Passion of our Lord.

“The days are coming” announces the prophet Jeremiah, when God will make a new covenant with his people. But this new covenant will be different than the previous covenants. It will not be something outside of us that we are supposed to follow, but will call upon us from within our humanity. Instead of giving us a code of external demands, God will place this new covenant within the hearts of his people.

This is exactly what is accomplished in the Lord’s Passion and is renewed in the Mass as its perfect commemoration. In fact, this is an important way to understand what the Mass is: the historical event of Christ’s Passion extended spiritually through time and space. In the Holy Communion we receive, God’s purpose is fulfilled as the new and everlasting covenant in Christ’s blood enters into our bodies and unites us to Christ.

Jesus proclaims in the Gospel today: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” Jesus himself is that grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies for us. But the “much fruit” the Lord speaks of is us, brothers and sisters. The fruit of the Lord’s Passion is the gift of eternal life for us. Jesus’ body is broken on the Cross and his blood is poured out. In this the grain of wheat falls to the ground. But in his Resurrection the wheat rises again into the Bread of this Mass as the unbloody manifestation of the one sacrifice of the Cross.

Here at the Eucharist we receive the broken Body of Christ into our bodies, and his Precious Blood is poured out over our hearts. This is the fulfillment of the prophecy of Jeremiah who looked forward to the new covenant written on the heart. This covenant is God’s promise to lift us up to eternal life with Christ, both now in the spiritual strength and consolation we receive in Holy Communion, and in our sharing in the Lord’s Resurrection in the life to come.

Cyrus and Jesus

(4th Sunday of Lent, B)

We arrive today, brothers and sisters, at the logical mid-point of our journey through Lent. As we begin, then, our ‘final ascent’ to the great mysteries of the Paschal Triduum, our proximity to those solemn days makes us rejoice. That’s the traditional name for this fourth Sunday of Lent, “Laetare Sunday.” It comes from the Entrance Antiphon for today’s Mass, Laetáre Ierúsalem, et convéntum fácite, omnes qui dilígitis eam…, “Rejoice, Jerusalem, and come together, all you who love her…” We rejoice today because we are drawing ever nearer to the New Jerusalem and to the saving works of the Anointed of God, Jesus Christ the Messiah.

But what does it mean that we call Jesus the Messiah or ‘Christ,’ as the term translates through the Greek of our New Testament? To help us understand what we mean by our confession of Jesus as the Christ, our first reading today goes a long way. Jesus of Nazareth was not first person in the history of the people of God to be called messiah. Indeed the second book of Chronicles relates to us the story of the messiah-ship of King Cyrus the Persian. So, understanding how Cyrus was a messiah can help us to understand how Jesus is the Messiah.

In the earlier part of the sixth century BC, Jerusalem was under siege by the Babylonians. The city and its Temple were eventually destroyed, and, according to their method of conquering other peoples, the Babylonians deported the leading classes back to Babylon. Thus the people of God were ejected from the land that God himself had given to them, and the reading tells us that this destruction and calamity came upon them because of their unfaithfulness. Thus began what is called the Babylonian Exile or Captivity. Now, as often happens in the history of this world, one superpower comes to replace another, and two generations after the deportation, the Persians replaced the Babylonians. Cyrus, the king of the Persians, was more tolerant toward other cultures and religions, and for reasons that are a little mysterious, decided to allow the Jews to return to Jerusalem and even to help them rebuild the Temple. This Temple, though it was almost completely renovated by Herod the Great shortly before the birth of our Lord, was the one that Jesus would have known.

So, let’s notice that pattern of what it means to be a messiah revealed in King Cyrus. He reverses the just punishment and deportation that the people of God had received for their unfaithfulness, returns them to the Promised Land, and even helps them to begin to restore their religious life centered, as it was, on the Jerusalem Temple.

In a wider and much more universal way, this is the same work accomplished by Jesus the Messiah. The Israelites suffered exile from the Promised Land because of their unfaithfulness to the covenants. In the same way, we, because of our sins, suffer from alienation from God and from the joyful and perfected humanity that God wants to give us. In his saving Passion and death, and in the Eucharist he gives us to stretch and commemorate this one sacrifice through history, Jesus restores us to our true and best humanity and reverses the alienation from God we have earned with our sins.

This is why we rejoice today, because even in the midst of all the misery and injustice and depression we have brought upon ourselves and the world with our sins, God in his mercy sends us the Christ, that we might look upon him and allow ourselves to be restored to the joy and justice God delights to give to the world.

On Our Behalf

(3rd Sunday of Lent, B)

In the first reading today, from the book of Exodus, we hear one of the versions of the Commandments. The “Ten Commandments” as they are traditionally called are the imperatives God gives us as the basis of revealed morality for human society. We are meant to adhere to and follow the Commandments because they enshrine the foundations of personal happiness and the flourishing of human culture.

So, how are we doing? Now I now I haven’t, but is there anyone here who has kept all the Commandments perfectly since arriving at the age of reason? How about anyone who has kept the Commandments since, say, making good resolutions for the New Year? Maybe there’s someone who has kept God’s Commandments perfectly so far today?

See, brothers and sisters, this is the spiritual tragedy of our lives; we have not kept God’s Commandments, but have instead persisted in our idolatries, our vanities, our inanities, and our plain old sins. This is why, instead of being the joyful, happy, and free people God would delight to have us be, so many go through their days depressed, anxious, lonely, and fearful.

As it is in our morality, so it is in our worship too. We gather here in this church to pray together and to offer the holy sacrifice of the Mass. Yes, we’re fervent. Yes, the church itself is very beautiful. But do we think that our prayers and our worship are worthy of God? No. We could never be zealous enough or free enough from distraction and mixed motives for our worship to be worthy of the surpassing glory and holiness of the God we try to praise.

But here’s the good news. In his astounding mercy, God has made our very inability to follow his moral standards and the very inadequacy of our worship the starting point of our salvation. And this brings us to the gospel we hear today, of this incident of Jesus at the Temple for the feast of Passover. The Second Temple in Jerusalem was the greatest edifice for the honor and praise of Almighty God that human beings have ever constructed and used. But even the Temple, just like our prayer, could never offer worship that was fully worthy of God.

So Jesus proclaims that from then on, it is his he himself will be the Temple: “he was talking about the Temple of his body.” And on the Cross it is Jesus who will offer perfect obedience and worship to the Father as he becomes himself the one perfect temple, the one perfect priest, and the one perfect sacrifice.

This is the good news for us, brothers and sisters. In order to save us from the tragedy of our failure to live up to God’s commandments and our inability to offer God adequate worship, the Word of God himself has borrowed our humanity and done these things on our behalf in the Passion of Jesus Christ. On the Cross, Jesus offers to the Father the sacrifice of perfect obedience. And for us who have not yet learned to be perfect in our obedience and our worship, he has left this same sacrifice of the Cross as our food. This is what happens here at Mass. We receive into our very bodies the perfect sacrifice of Christ, so that we too might become empowered beyond ourselves to live God’s commandments and to offer God more perfect praise.

The Prophet Like Moses

(4th Sunday in Ordinary Time, B)

All of the gospels make significant use of the literary device of irony, but the ironies of St. Mark can seem like the starkest. Today we hear one of those very ironic passages. As Jesus teaches and heals in the synagogue at Caparnaum, we notice that the only one who gets what is going on is the unclean spirit. The people are “astonished” at this “new teaching with authority,” but they are still asking, “What is this?” They don’t really know who Jesus is, but the demon, the unclean spirit, knows right away when it cries out, “I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” This ironic pattern will continue in our reading of St. Mark’s gospel; the spiritual forces of evil recognize the identity and the import of the person of Jesus right away, while the human beings—including Jesus’ own disciples—continue to fail to get it. This human failure to recognize Jesus for who he really is goes on until the moment of his death on the cross. Then, finally, someone gets it when the centurion keeping watch over the execution proclaims, “Truly this man was the Son of God.”

Mark’s almost brutal portrayal of Jesus’ disciples’ failure to truly recognize him places an intense burden on us who call ourselves Christians. Each of us must have an answer to the question, “Who is Jesus, and what does he mean?” Do an experiment if you wish. Hang out at the bus stop or at the Palisades Mall and ask people who Jesus is. They will tell you a lot of different things. They might say, “The Son of God,” “My personal Savior,” “One of the prophets of Allah,” or “a prophet of the Second Temple period,” and who knows what else. And all of these answers are more or less true, but they aren’t the whole story of who Jesus is. In fact, we can never know the whole and full significance and meaning of Jesus Christ, because he is a reflection of the infinite meaning and significance of God the Father. Who Jesus is for us is not then another piece of knowledge that we can get to know and perhaps comprehend, but an infinite mystery to be walked into and lived.

So where to begin our journey of getting to know and stepping into the mystery of Jesus Christ? Well, there’s no better place than the Sacred Scriptures themselves. In this regard, the first reading we hear today from the book of Deuteronomy is particularly significant. In his great farewell speech to the Israelites, Moses promises that God will raise up for them a prophet like himself. This promise of the “prophet like Moses” is one of the great themes of the Old Testament; the people of the Old Covenant looked forward, and continue to look forward, the appearance of this new Moses. We Christians know that this prophet like Moses has appeared in the Incarnation of the Word, in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. This means that taking a look at Moses is one of the primary ways we come to understand Jesus.

So what did Moses do? First of all, as their leader, he connected the people to God. He went up the mountain to converse with God and returned to the people with God’s blessings and instructions for them. And so it is with Jesus; Jesus ascends the Cross for us to bring about, in his own blood, a new and indestructible connection between our limited humanity and God’s infinite and blessed divinity. Moses was a teacher; he gave the people God’s commandments and the gift of the Law that they might imitate the holiness of their God. And so it is with Jesus; he reveals the Kingdom of God and teaches us how we are to live as its holy citizens. But most of all, it was Moses who freed the people from their slavery in Egypt, and, bringing them safely through the waters of the Red Sea, set them on their way to the Promised Land. In this aspect Moses is a type of Jesus in the Lord’s most precious work, by which he frees us from sin, leads us through the waters of baptism, and sets us confidently on the journey through the wilderness of this life toward the Promised Land of heaven.

The Imitation of Christ

(26th Sunday in Ordinary Time, A)

In the second reading today, we hear the beautiful first part of the second chapter of Paul’s letter to the Philippians. Here Paul records a hymn to the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. In Christ, God “empties himself” in the perfect act of sublime humility. We heard this same hymn two weeks ago on the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, but today we get the fuller passage that includes Paul’s set up and interpretation of what the humility of the Incarnation of the Son of God can mean for us.

 We’re used to the idea that Jesus reveals God. In his humble birth, his preaching, his miracles, and most of all in his sorrowful Passion and glorious Resurrection, Jesus reveals to us the personality of the unseen and mysterious Source and Ground of all being we call God the Father. Most of the faith and practice of our religion is based on this, and rightly so.

 But it’s also good for us to look at the other side of the Revelation of God in Jesus Christ. For Jesus Christ—truly God and truly human—reveals not only God the Father but our humanity as well. The life and death of Jesus shows us God’s idea of what our human life is meant to be about; it’s as if you were to ask God, ‘How should I live? How can I be happy and be a better person?’ By way of an answer the Eternal Word of God borrows our humanity from our Blessed Mother and becomes one of us, in order to show us how to be human.

This is why it is so important for us as Christians to pay attention to the person of Jesus Christ as he comes to us in the Gospels. By noticing how he relates to and treats people, he models for us the way to be happy and peace in our relationships with each other. By meditating on his suffering, death, and Resurrection we learn how to let go of ourselves and come to true freedom and happiness.

The classic spiritual strategy of the imitatio Christi, the ‘imitation of Christ’ is so powerful because to model ourselves on Jesus is to make ourselves over according to God’s will and desire for true and perfect humanity. This is what Paul recommends to us in the second reading when he invites us to “participation in the Spirit” by being of “the same mind…united in heart, thinking one thing.” The word which we translate “participation” in Paul’s Greek is koinonia, the word the New Testament uses frequently for communion. It’s the same as the greeting of the priest at the beginning of Mass, “the fellowship—the communicatio—of the Holy Spirit be with you.”

The Holy Communion we celebrate and receive here at Mass is meant to make us into what we receive. By this fellowship with Christ, by our communion in his Body and Blood, our humanity, our lives, are taken up into his divine humanity. This will empower us to become like Christ, indeed to become alteri Christi, “other Christs” in the classic spiritual language. Here at Mass we celebrate God’s revelation—in Christ—of what it means to be a human being, to be called to that perfect humility that lets go of self in order to take the form of servants to one another. In the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, the communion of God with us in Christ, we are invited to do just as he did: to let our bodies become the Body of Christ and to let our hearts become homes for his Precious Blood. Then we find the true humanity of giving ourselves away for the sake of each other.

His Descent Is Our Ascent

(Exaltation of the Holy Cross)

Today we celebrate a contradiction, a paradox. Indeed, it’s the contradiction and paradox which is at the heart of our faith, at the heart of Christianity. It’s right there in the title of the solemnity we celebrate today: The Exaltation of the Cross. We exalt the Cross, meaning that we lift it high and make the Cross of Christ something we look up to. But what is this Cross which we exalt? It is one of the cruelest and humiliating means of execution known to the ancient world. It’s a sign of us human beings at our worst, at our least human, at our most evil.

So what does it mean to say that we exalt, that we lift up and venerate this sign of ourselves at our worst? Let us attend to the Sacred Scriptures we hear today. As Paul says in the great hymn of the letter to the Philippians, the Son of God, the Eternal Word, “emptied himself” of all that it should mean to be God, and “took the form of a slave, coming in human likeness.” In Jesus Christ we see God descending, letting go of all divine prerogative, and entering into the deepest and most horrible consequences of sin—the violence of us human beings torturing, humiliating, and killing one another.

This is the meaning of the Cross: God identifying with us in the pain and torment we have brought upon ourselves with our sins, even to the point of feeling ourselves alienated from God altogether: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me.” Behold the Cross and see God himself taking on the suffering that we earn for ourselves with our sins and violence against one another. This is an almost indescribable love and kindness, that the all-powerful God should empty himself and take on the burdens of our faults. But that’s the overwhelming Love we call God, a Love that is literally just dying to save us from ourselves.

The good news is that this descent of God becomes our ascent out of the prison of selfishness and sin and into the new life of grace. Just as the Israelites were able to look up to the serpent in the desert and be healed, so we, if we turn our gaze to the Cross, God will reveal to us the path to new life.

That’s the secret. We have to look up to the descent of God. For God descends into our suffering and pain in order to rob it of its power from the inside. Jesus Christ, though he was able to die in the humanity he borrowed from us, could never die in his divine nature. And so he bursts forth from death, taking his transformed humanity with him, into the New Life we call the Resurrection.

Let us look up the humility of God, for God’s humiliation is our exaltation. Let us turn the gaze of our hearts and minds upward to the Cross of Christ, for the descent of God is the ascent of our humanity into freedom from violence and sin.

You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God

(21st Sunday in Ordinary Time, A)

The Gospel we hear today has always been very important to us Catholics, for it contains the scriptural origin of the Petrine ministry: the ministry of St. Peter of teaching and unity for all the churches, which we believe has continued through the years in the bishops of Rome down to our Holy Father Benedict XVI. In this famous exchange, Peter makes his great confession of faith, proclaiming his belief that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

In response to his confession of faith, Jesus gives this Simon, son of Jonah, a new name: Petros in Matthew’s Greek, a play on the word for rock, petra. Jesus then proclaims that Peter will be the Rock on which the Church will be built. But in what does this foundation consist? In other words, what is the “rockiness” of this man on which this church will be founded? It sure isn’t Peter’s leadership qualities or understanding; in the very next passage of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus calls Peter a skandalon, a “stumbling block” or hindrance, because he does not understand the prediction of the Passion. And we all we know the shame of Peter’s denial, the night before Jesus’ suffering and death, that he even knew Jesus.

No, Peter does not become the Rock on which the Church is built because he is a great leader or theologian, but because of his confession of faith. It is the confession that this Jesus of Nazareth is “the Christ, the Son of the living God” that is the Rock, the foundation of the Church.

But what does it mean for us, we who have inherited the apostolic faith that has been passed down to us? We confess that this man, this one human life, this Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew of the first century, is the Christ. By Christ we mean the anointed of God, elected by God to be priest like Melchizedek, prophet like Elijah, and king like his father David. In addition to all that, we confess that Jesus is the Son of the living God. Our faith and belief is that the Eternal Word or Wisdom of God, which is such a perfect reflection and self-expression of God that it is also God, became this human life, this Jesus of Nazareth.

Thus, we believe that Jesus is the perfect Revealer of God. In the preaching, teaching, and interactions of Jesus with people, we see, on our terms, the nature and the personality of the otherwise unknowable Source from which all existence comes, that Mystery that we perceive obscurely somehow behind and beneath everything that is. In his patient suffering, humble death, and glorious Resurrection we see the Eternity towards which we are all traveling as we make our way through this life.

This is the basic “good news” of Christianity; that this obscure reality we call “God,” this Mystery of existence that we only kind of perceive through or experiences of wonder or love, has been perfectly revealed. Even better, God has been revealed on our terms, in a way that is perfectly available to our human understanding. This is what it means to say that God became man, and that Jesus is the Son of the living God.

This is our confession of faith. And it is God’s desire to continue building his church on the solid rock of this confession in each Christian life. God will do this! In Christ, God is saving, reconciling, and sanctifying the world. If we allow this faith to be the foundation of our lives, God will make us part of the work. In our families, and workplaces and communities, we will truly be Christians, “other christs” through whom God is reconciling and sanctifying the world.

A Nation of Priests

(11th Sunday, A)

“Christian” is more than a label we put on ourselves. It is an identity, for sure, but it’s also a vocation, a mission, and a way of being in the world, of being in our families, our community, and our country. It is God who calls us and gathers us together for his mission in the world.

As we pray in the Eucharistic Prayer, “From age to age you gather a people to yourself, so that from east to west a perfect offering may be made to the glory of your name.” And what is this offering? It is the world itself, sanctified through our apostolic efforts and made acceptable to God. This is what it means in the first reading from the book of Exodus when God says that his people will be a “kingdom of priests.”

A priest, in the most basic sense, is someone charged with offering sacrifice to God. To sacrifice something, in the most basic sense, means to make it holy and offer it to God. Therefore our mission as Christians calls us all to a priestly life of offering sacrifice: we are to work to make ourselves and the world around us holy. Then we are meant to offer a sanctified life and world back to God as a sacrifice of praise.

This mission has its roots in Jesus Christ himself. As God made one of us, the Word of God sanctified and redeemed our human nature by his willingness to dwell within it as one of us. In the same way, we who are made into the Body of Christ by this Eucharist are meant to continue the sanctifying presence of Christ in the world. It is our job and our joy to make the world around us holy.

To get a sense of what this will look in practice, we turn to the Gospel we hear today. Jesus sends the twelve with authority to heal the sick, raise the dead, and to drive out demons. This is our job in the world as successors of Jesus’ first followers. We Christians are called to be a healing presence in the world, to show our society the possibility of a way out of the cycles of violence that plague and injure our world. We are called to raise the dead in the sense that we can show people a way out of the deadness of sin and the misery of living in a world with no meaning or purpose. It is the duty and joy of us Christians to be empowered by Christ to drive the demons of injustice, of prejudice, of violence out of this world and thus make a redeemed and sanctified world an acceptable offering to God.

Jesus looked out at the people of his own time and saw that they were “troubled and abandoned, like sheep without a shepherd.” The people of our time aren’t much different, led astray by the false promises of our culture of materialism and made tired and depressed by this world’s glorification of selfishness and sin. God is depending on us, the priestly people he has called to himself, to denounce and drive out the demons of our culture, to sanctify ourselves and the world around us, and make of all creation a pleasing offering to God.

Living Stones

(5th Sunday of Easter, A)

As we come to these later days of the Easter season we are always aware of a shift in our reflection. At the beginning of Easter we are overwhelmed with wonder at the re-creation of the world and the renovation of our humanity in Jesus Christ risen from the dead. But as the Easter season moves on, we are invited more and more to reflect on how it is that the Risen Lord continues to be present to us.

This is, after all, the core of our faith: to confess that the blessing of God abides with us, his people, in the mysterious presence of Jesus as Risen Lord and in his gift of the Holy Spirit. We Christians are always using language that affirms this truth. We begin and end our prayer together with a confession of Jesus’ presence among us: “The Lord be with you…and also with you.” In the deepest way we affirm the presence of Christ among us when we receive Holy Communion, and someone looks at us and addresses us with our truest name and identity, “The Body of Christ.”

We who are Christians—the people who are “of Christ”—are meant to live in this world as the presence of Jesus Christ risen from the dead. We are to be witnesses of the possibility of living a risen life, freed from sin, freed from anxiety, freed form depression and from anything that holds us down to earth. And we live this risen life by the power of Christ and his Spirit living within us.

This is what St. Peter is getting at in the second reading when he urges us to allow ourselves, “like living stones,” be built by the Holy Spirit “into a spiritual house.” That’s what the Church is, not a place we go or a building—no matter how beautiful—but a people. Each of us is a stone made living in Christ and together we are built into a spiritual building by the Holy Spirit present in the world. And this spiritual building that we form is meant to be a place of safety and refreshment for the world around us that has made itself tired by violence and sin and despair.

This is what it means to be “in Christ.” That’s why this assembly, the church, is called the “body of Christ”. And this is exactly what we confess in Holy Communion—the Communion we receive, the body and blood of Christ, is who we really are who we are to become.

It is us who are meant to be the presence in the world of Jesus Christ risen from the dead. We who are buried with him in our baptism and made into this body in this Eucharist are empowered by the Holy Spirit to be the risen Body of Christ in the world. And thus our mission as individuals and as a Church is to continue Christ’s work of teaching, of healing, of reconciling, and of making peace. These missions are to be our work in our most personal relationships and activities all the way up to our intersection with public debate, politics, and issues affecting our whole society and world.

In short, that’s who we are, a people who form the Church which continues the presence and mission of Christ through history. And let’s not forget the Gospel we hear today, which assures us that if we do this, if we live in Christ in this life, we can trust that Jesus in his Resurrection has prepared an eternal dwelling for us in the Father.

Sin and Salvation

(1st Sunday of Lent, A)

On this first Sunday of our journey of Lent, the sacred Scriptures focus on temptation and sin. In a lot of ways this is an easy topic to reflect on and preach about, because we’ve all sinned and we all know what it’s like to feel like sinners or to suffer on account of the sins of others.

In the first reading from the book of Genesis we heard the archetypal story about sin, of the “original sin” of our first parents. And what was their sin? God had given them the infinite dignity of being created in God’s own image and likeness, but it wasn’t good enough. They believed the serpent who told them that they should want more, that they could “be like gods” if they ate from the Tree in the middle of the garden. They were already like God! That’s how we were created. But their greed for more made them disobedient.

That’s the anatomy of all sin. We try to set ourselves up as gods instead of recognizing that only God is God. We reach out for what is forbidden—and even things we know will make us unhappy and miserable—because we decide in our hearts that we know better what we need than God does. We hurt each other because we take the judgment that belongs to God to ourselves, setting ourselves up as those who know best. And in all these sins, we only reap the same thing our first parents did: shame, misery, anxiety, and depression.

Driving a car provides a simple example of this pattern of our tendency to sin. When someone is ahead of us going slower than we are, we call him a pain—or worse. And if someone passes us going faster than we are, well, he’s a maniac. So the only correct way to drive, the only correct speed is exactly what we ourselves are doing. We are the measure of all things. We ourselves are the standard by which everything else is measured. That’s taking the role of God and appropriating it to ourselves, and that’s the root of sin.

Sin has coursed through human history from our first parents down to us here today. From the little ways we hurt and betray each other with gossip and lies all the way up to the cycles of violence and hate that break out in wars and poverty and scar the whole history of the world, we are all plagued by sin. Because we do not trust and we try over and over to set ourselves up as little gods, we keep hurting ourselves, each other, and the world.

How can we be saved from this vicious cycle of sin? The good news is that God has applied, and is applying, the remedy. To us who are stuck in this sinful pattern of making little gods out of ourselves, God does the opposite—God makes himself one of us. In Jesus Christ the Almighty God becomes one with us and fights our tendency to sin on our behalf, from within our humanity, and thus creates a path out of the cycles of sin.

This is what’s going in the Lord’s temptations in the desert! Remember the Israelites in the desert on their journey after they were freed from Egypt? Remember how they complained to God and to Moses, continually demanding things and putting God to the test? Jesus, in these forty days he spends being tempted in the desert, is re-living the forty years the Israelites spent in the desert on their way to the Promised Land. But instead of failing the way the Israelites did and the way we too continue to fail, Jesus succeeds on our behalf. He defeats the temptations and remains faithful to God.

And Jesus’ faithfulness, his righteousness, and his victory over temptation and sin is freely available to all of us, as soon as we get sick and tired of being sick and tired with our sins. All we have is let his divine humanity enter into our humanity. And this is the meaning of our baptism into Christ, and our Holy Communion with his Body and Precious Blood.

This is the greatest of gifts. Jesus defeats sin on our behalf and heals the injury that our first parents brought into creation through their disobedience. But Jesus does more than just fix the situation. As Paul says, the “gift is not like the transgression.” The gift of salvation and freedom from sin in Jesus Christ goes far beyond just putting creation back together. It lifts all of creation into the divine life of God. And so, because of the work of God in Jesus Christ on our behalf, we are even more blessed than our first parents were before they sinned. We are not only created in the image and likeness of God as they were, but we are re-created according to the image of God’s only begotten Son.

The gift, this salvation, comes to us in our Baptism into Christ. At Easter we will renew the vows of our Baptism as new Christians are themselves baptized. And this is a gift so great that we spend these forty days of Lent preparing ourselves to receive it anew.