Being Invited and Saving the Party

(2nd Sunday, C)

We arrive, brothers and sisters, at the start of another cycle of Sundays in Ordinary Time, and for this beginning we hear from St. John the beginning of Jesus’ “signs.” The account of the wedding at Cana is so full of spiritual truth and good news for us that a preacher might hardly know where to begin. The story speaks not only of the gospel of Jesus’ compassion and humility, but also of the exciting news of the possibility of transformation and new destiny that all creatures have in Christ. So for fear of preaching forever, I’ll limit myself to two points of good news for us today.

First, we shouldn’t miss the simple truth that Jesus accepts invitations. Jesus was invited to the wedding, and he showed up. That’s good news for all of us, because we can be confident that if we invite the presence of God in Christ into our lives, our prayer, and our troubles, we can be assured that Jesus will be there. Jesus accepts invitations. His disciples accept invitations too; they too were at the wedding. So if we wish to be disciples of the Lord we have to be ready to accept the invitations we receive to enter into the joys, griefs, and chaos of others. To be unmoved by the suffering of others or unable to rejoice in the joy of another is an almost certain sign of sin.

Second, Jesus saves the party. Why didn’t his hapless couple have enough wine? Poverty? Poor planning? Too many wedding crashers? We don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Jesus (at the invitation of his mother we might add) saves the party by providing new wine. Jesus saves the party so that the newlyweds and their guests may rejoice on this most special occasion. Jesus makes up for their lack, whatever it was, so that their joy could be full.

So it is with us, brothers and sisters. We must never fear our own lacking in what we need to be faithful to God or to flourish in the vocations God has given us. The sign Jesus works today shows us that if we seek the presence of Jesus Christ and the intercession of his mother, whatever way we lack can be an opportunity for the revelation of the glory of God through Christ. So if we ever feel that we don’t have what we need, let us turn to Jesus through Mary and we will soon find that our lack is changed into the glorious and superabundant grace of God. The water not only became wine, but the best wine. If we invite Jesus into our lives we can be assured that our souls too will blush into the new wine that gives joy to the heart. May the same transforming grace come upon every place in our hearts and lives where we feel dull, tired, and plain, so that the joy and delight of God himself might shine through us, making each of us into revealers of the Father’s glory.

Light to the Nations

(Epiphany of the Lord)

The Christmas season is a very dense set of celebrations. In less than three weeks, we observe five big days: The Nativity of the Lord, the feast of the Holy Family, The Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, the Epiphany of the Lord today, and the Baptism of the Lord next weekend. These days represent for us the Christmas mystery in increasing revelation. The Incarnation of the Word, the Son of God, the good news of “God with us” becomes more and more public over the course of the season. We are especially aware of this on this day of Epiphany, because in the magoi who visit the infant Jesus, the good news is revealed to us, the people of the nations. The word epiphany is derived from the Greek word that means, ‘coming to light,’ or ‘appearing.’

This step by step revelation of the appearance of the Son of God began at Midnight Mass, when angels announced the good news to the shepherds. These shepherds living in the fields were the first to know the joy of Christmas, because it’s always the poor who understand the mystery of God most freely and easily.

The next step came last Sunday when we celebrated the feast of the Holy Family. As Jesus’ parents went to present him in the Temple, he was recognized by Simeon and Anna. This elderly pair represents the faithfulness of the Israel of history and they rejoice to see the fulfillment of God’s promises in the newborn Lord. Anna becomes the first evangelist, as she goes off and speaks “about the child to all who were awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem.” Simeon takes the child Jesus in his arms and proclaims his great canticle, which the Church sings every single night in the Liturgy of the Hours. He sees in the child the “glory” of God’s people Israel, who will become “a light for revelation to the Gentiles.” This is the fulfillment of the promise made through the prophet Isaiah in the first reading today: the Light has come and will be the “shining radiance” by which the nations of the world will walk.

That’s us, brothers and sisters. I suspect that few of us are biological descendants of Abraham, but through the manifestation of Jesus Christ as the Light of the nations we have become heirs of the promise made to Abraham through adoption. As we pray in the Eucharistic Prayer, “Abraham, our father in faith.”

This is the good news of the visit of the Magi. Their knowledge and their worship of the Son of God, these wise men from far away reveal how, in Christ, the blessing and promises made to the little nation of Israel become available to the whole world.

Notice what a miracle this whole process is! The Son of God was born away from home in poverty and obscurity. His birth—and indeed his life—were important by no conventional human standard. And yet today we, along with our Christian brothers and sisters all over the world, know him as the perfect and complete revelation of God. The process of this public revelation of the Incarnate Word is what we celebrate today.

But let us not forget that the gift of this knowledge of God makes demands of us. That the wise men were able to discern the appearance of the eternal and universal King meant that they had to bring him gifts. And they brought the best things there were: riches, worship, and reverence for the death he would eventually suffer for our salvation. We too, to whom the knowledge of salvation has been given, are called to offer to Jesus the best of ourselves.

How To Read The Bible

(30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, A)

This Sunday we hear another Gospel in which Jesus is tested. You will recall how last week they tried to trap Jesus in what he would say about the Roman census tax. Today a scholar of the law tries to test Jesus with a specifically religious concern, and it has to do with the very old question of how to read the Sacred Scriptures. What’s the right way to read and interpret the Bible?

This problem was very much alive in Jesus’ time, as it is in ours. All you have to do is flip around on your television or radio to find a preacher delivering some homemade doctrine supposedly based in the Scriptures, or you can walk down the street until someone gives you a pamphlet. And when you hear some of these things you think to yourself how it doesn’t sound right. But then you ask yourself, how do I know? How do I know that one way of interpreting the divine revelation contained in the Bible is better than another? Whom should I believe?

I think that an awareness of this problem can help us to enter into the spirit of the Gospel we hear today. This question, “which commandment of the law is the greatest?” was very much alive at the time of Jesus. A little bit later on, the Jewish tradition will decide that there are, in fact, 613 precepts of the law: 248 in the form of “thou shall” do this, and 365 in the form of “thou shall not.”

In his response Jesus answers once and for all the question of how to read and interpret the Bible. He delivers the great double commandment: we are to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves. As Jesus says, the whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” That means that the whole of the Sacred Scriptures depend on the love of God and neighbor; it means that these loves are the point and purpose of all divine revelation.

To love God means to always seek to put God first in our lives, to seek and to consider the happiness that God wants to give us. To love our neighbor means to desire and act for what is best for those around us, to seek their joy and happiness. We are called to do this just as much for those we like as for those we don’t. In fact, often the great work of the Christian life is to make the effort to love those we don’t like. Some of this we hear in the first reading today from the book of Exodus, though it’s expressed negatively: we are to make sure that in our dealings with the vulnerable they are not cheated or oppressed.

So, anytime we want to ask ourselves what the Sacred Scriptures mean, or to judge what somebody else tries to tell us they mean, all we have to do is ask ourselves: would this interpretation lead us to a greater love of God and neighbor? If so, it’s probably a good way to understand the Bible passage in question. If the interpretation seems to point away from love of neighbor especially, then we already know that the interpretation is wrong.

Sometimes the point at question doesn’t seem to make a difference for love of God and neighbor. Take for example the burning question of creationism vs. evolution. Scientists tell us that the earth is something like four and half billion years old. In stark contrast, if you take the Biblical account on its face, the world seems to be just six thousand years old or so. Hence, in the Jewish calendar, we have just entered the year 5769. So which is right? Did God create the world in precisely six days about six thousand years ago, or have we and all the rest evolved over a much longer time? It’s a live and open question, even in our national discourse. But does it make a difference for how we love God or our neighbor? Not really, and so it’s not something we should really worry about. That’s why, in her wisdom, the Catholic Church has not found it necessary to declare anything on the question of so-called creationism against the theory of evolution. For what the Scriptures are actually about, the love of God and our neighbor, it doesn’t really matter.

Indeed, we who are Catholic Christians, who, along with our Orthodox brothers and sisters belong to the Churches founded on the apostles, are very fortunate. For we belong to the communities whose reflection on their faith produced the New Testament in the first place. We are the direct heirs of the tradition Jesus begins in the Gospel we hear today: it is the love of God and our neighbor that is at the heart of hearts of all divine revelation. What nurtures these loves is to be followed, and what injures them is to be discarded.

(With thanks to St. Augustine’s De doctrina christiana, chapter 36)

The Light of the World

(4th Sunday of Lent, A)

At the climax of our gospel today the Lord proclaims, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see might see, and those who do see might become blind.” This judgment is not something off in an unknown future. It is the judgment that is present every time Jesus appears: when he appears in our hearts as an invitation to patience, service, or prayer, and especially when he comes among us as the bread and wine of this Eucharist. Wherever the Lord is, there is his judgment.

The word in the original Greek that we translate “judgment” is krima, meaning the delivery of a judgment, like a sentence imposed by a judge. It’s closely related to the word krisis, from which we derive the English word crisis. Whenever Jesus is present there is a crisis that is also a judgment. Like any crisis, the decisions we make in the midst of the crisis will determine that path we take for the future.

And that decision is to accept, to consent, to believe in Jesus Christ as the revelation of God, or not. That’s what we saw happening in Jesus’ final conversation with the man who had regained his sight. Jesus asked, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” And he worshiped him, and said, “I do believe Lord.”

This is what it really means to gain our sight, to learn to see clearly: to come to believe, to see that Jesus is Lord, that he is “the Light of the world.” To see Jesus as the Light, and to see and interpret things by this Light of the world is to have true vision.

This judgment, this crisis happens every time we gather here for the Eucharist. We take ordinary bread and wine and by the calling down of the Holy Spirit, the great Eucharistic Prayer of thanksgiving, and by the Lord’s own words at the Last Supper, this bread and wine becomes for us the Body and Blood of Christ. But do the bread and wine look or smell or taste any different after we have consecrated them? No, not to the bodily senses at least. And that’s just the moment of the crisis and judgment. We can accept from God the spiritual sight to see that this bread and wine is now the Body of Christ broken for us on the Cross and the Blood of Christ poured out in the ratification of the new and eternal covenant, or we can harden our hearts and remain blind to this new vision.

The Lord says he came into the world so that the blind might see, and those who see might become blind. That’s the great reversal of this judgment. If we admit that we need God’s help to really see Jesus as the Light of the Word, then he will help us to gain our spiritual sight. If we think we know it all, that we can see everything clearly, then God will leave us in our spiritual blindness. And that makes the spiritual division between the seeing and the blind, and that’s the judgment of God on the world.

So let us pray for our sight, for the vision to see and believe that Jesus Christ is the Light of the world. Then, as Paul tells us today, we will be able to live as children of the Light, as those who see and understand the world in the true light who is Jesus himself.

Our world doesn’t understand itself, and it is led into all kinds of violence and misery because it follows lesser lights: the intellectual lights of science and reason, the emotional lights of desiring riches and security. But when we accept from God the sight to see and believe that Jesus is the Light of the world, we will be able to understand ourselves and our world in the glorious Light of the Risen Lord.

In Epiphania Domini

(Epiphany of the Lord)

A simple question: How do we know anything about God? How do we know to have the encouragement of faith amidst all of the evil and difficulty of this word, what the prophet Isaiah calls the “darkness” that covers the peoples like “thick clouds”?

It’s because God is a God whose goodness overflows onto the earth and into our lives. God’s glory “shines” on us, as Isaiah goes on to say. This is what is meant by divine revelation, that the Divine Mystery makes himself known to us in Jesus Christ.

This revelation of the living God is a process that has been snowballing throughout human history. It started when God called Abraham. At that time it was just Abraham and his family who knew about the true God. Then there were the covenants with Jacob, with Moses, and with the great king David. This is the whole history of the Old Testament, when the living God was known by just one nation on earth, God’s beloved Israel.

But it has always been God’s desire to be known by all the earth, that, as the prophet Isaiah says, all nations should walk by the light of the Lord. And that’s what the celebration of the Lord’s Epiphany is all about. It is one thing for the Lord to be born unknown, of young parents in an obscure place. But today, with the visit of the magi, this newborn king begins to be revealed to the entire world.

The magi are the beginning of universal religion. They are the first gentile believers, and in that sense, are our spiritual ancestors. They are the beginning of the great commission that the Risen Lord will give, to go and make disciples of all nations.

And as our spiritual ancestors, the magi are models for us of how to live our religion. First of all, they are models for us in seeking the Lord. Their journey from the East is analogous to our journey of faith. They kept their attention fixed on the star and so found the newborn Lord. In the same way, we must keep our attention fixed on Jesus Christ. His light can lead through all the darknesses of our own hearts and of the world.

The gifts of the magi are models for us too. They bring him gold to show that they believe he is royalty, that he is the king of the Jews. In the same way we are called to offer our best to God, and to recognize Jesus Christ and his grace as the true riches we are to seek in this world.

The magi bring him frankincense, recognizing that this baby is the Incarnate God. Incense, after all, is for divine worship. We too are called to bring him the incense of our prayers, to worship God alone, and to reject all of the idols and false Gods this world offers us: money, power, security, convenience, nationalism…not to speak of vulgar celebrities and the various other inanities of our culture.

And finally, the magi bring the Lord the embalming ointment myrrh. In this they recognize the self-sacrificing God. They embrace the hard truth that the newborn king of the Jews is also the man who will suffer and die on the Cross with that same charge hanging above him, “The King of the Jews.” We too must approach the Lord, fully accepting that his is the way of the Cross and we as the Body of Christ are a crucified body. We are called, like the Lord, to give up the best of ourselves for each other.

A Matter of Life and Death

Well, friends, we are hardly a third of the way into our joyful celebration of this Easter season, and a tragedy has struck this week, reminding us that, despite the Resurrection of the Lord, we still live in a violent world. We still live in what John Paul II called the “culture of death.”

So we pray especially in these days for eternal rest for the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre and for the consolation of their families and friends in their overwhelming loss. And we pray too for the perpetrator, that somehow, in the eternity of God’s irresistible gentleness, he might be freed from the horrible inner torment that drove him to these crimes.

And thus we are reminded in our Easter joy that the Resurrection does not magically remove suffering and violence from our lives. We are reminded that in Jesus Christ we are freed from death, but not from dying.

In fact, the kind of violence and brutality we witnessed this past week are part of the very mystery we worship! As the book of Revelation says today, “Worthy is the Lamb…worthy is the lamb who was slain, to receive power and riches, wisdom and strength, honor and glory and blessing.” And as the apostle Peter proclaims in the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, “the God of our ancestors raised Jesus,” the very Jesus we killed by “hanging him on a tree.”

Jesus Christ enters into all of the violence and isolation and brutality that we have brought upon the world with our sins, not to take violence away, but to open for us a path for its transformation.

And so, as Peter says later on, the Holy Spirit is given to us who obey God. This is the same Holy Spirit which conceived Jesus in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary and which raised Jesus Christ from the dead. And it is by this Holy Spirit present in our hearts and minds, that we will be able to see the Risen Lord. The Spirit will help us to notice ways that we can begin to transform the meaninglessness of suffering and death into the joy and peace of gentleness and new life.

This movement and possibility are clear from our gospel today. The disciples had been fishing all night and had caught nothing. But once they are able to perceive Jesus Christ risen from the dead and present with them, eating with them, fishing with them, their efforts are transformed and they catch an overwhelming number of fish.

And the same thing is possible for us. As the disciples found courage in the Lord to keep fishing after a discouraging night, we must not let something like the Virginia Tech massacre or the horrifying situation in Iraq make us discouraged in our faith. We must ask for the Holy Spirit, who will give us the eyes to see through the culture of death to the possibility of proclaiming a culture of life.

God is always inviting, always calling us back to the path to new life he has established for us in the Passion and Resurrection of his Son. Today at the end of our gospel we have the beautiful story of the rehabilitation of St. Peter. Having denied Jesus three times on Good Friday, today the Lord asks him three times, “do you love me?” And each time Peter responds that he does, the same imperative comes from the Lord: “feed my sheep.”

Let us pray for the Holy Spirit, the Spirit who will teach us the path to the transformation of our violent culture of death into a gentle culture of life. The strength of the anger and bitterness that breaks out into wars and school shootings can be transformed and re-directed to gentleness and the conviction of faith in goodness. We call this transformation the Resurrection.

Feed my sheep, don’t shoot them, says the Lord. And the pattern and path to do this have been provided for us by Jesus, the first-born of the dead and the beginning of the new creation. Let us believe in him, and in whatever small way we can, begin to gather up the whole world into the new life of his Resurrection. The world is desperate for it, though they don’t know it. Let’s make the new life available to us in Jesus Christ risen from the dead the worst kept secret in the world. They need to hear it.

(3rd Sunday of Easter, C)

It's So Good to See You

Today, friends, we have begun our reading of the Gospel of Luke, which will accompany us through this year’s Sundays of Ordinary Time.

Luke addresses his gospel to his patron, a certain “most excellent Theophilus.” The name “Theophilus” simply means ‘he who loves God’ or something like that. Therefore, friends, as far as we are people who love God, Luke’s gospel is addressed and dedicated to us personally.

And over the course of this year Luke will proclaim to us why it is God is lovable in the first place, why, as we pray in the Act of Contrition, God is “all good and deserving of all [our] love.” As Luke says, he will tell us of the “events that have been fulfilled among us,” the salvation and re-creation of the world that has been accomplished in the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

In Luke’s account Jesus begins his ministry in the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth. He opens the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and proclaims the “recovery of sight to the blind.”

Now if you will indulge me for a moment, every time I hear about blindness in the Scriptures, I think of my work before I entered the Order. Before I joined the friars I worked in a group home with several folks with fairly intense mental and physical disabilities. One of the men assigned to me had been blind and deaf since birth, and, by then in middle age, he had a suffered much in various institutions.

But he was a very bright guy! If everything was where he expected it to be, he had learned to use the microwave to heat up his own snacks. He could retrieve his own basket of toiletries and start his bath all by himself. One time when I was showing how he did these things to a new staff member, she said with surprise and admiration, “Wow, he sees just what he’s supposed to do.”

And I thought: what an interesting thing to say, to say that “he sees what he’s supposed to do,” because, of course, he couldn’t see anything!

But it’s true—we use the idea of seeing and sight for all kinds of things. To see is to understand, like when we say “I see what you mean.” Or seeing means appreciation and gratefulness and love, like when we say, “It’s so good to see you.”

And friends, call to mind that feeling, when someone is before you, and you say “It’s so good to see you.” Think on that feeling, because, let me tell you, that’s how God looks at us all the time. God looks upon us and says, I love you, and it’s so good to see you.

And when we’re able to notice and appreciate this love of God, when we’re able to say to God, “I see what you mean,” well, there’s a name for that event in religion: we call it divine revelation.

Revelation is when God looks at us with love and we notice it.

Now the Scriptures often talk about this interaction of love, this divine revelation, with the language of opening a scroll. We hear two great examples of this in the Scriptures today:

In the 6^th century before Christ, when the people of God had just returned from their captivity in Babylon, the scribe Ezra opens the scroll and reads the Law of Moses to the people, rededicating them as God’s special nation. Ezra then commands the people to rejoice; he knows that the revelation of God’s love ought to produce rejoicing on earth. In the Law the people of God found God himself looking upon them love and making them his own.

In the beginning of the public ministry, Jesus too opens a scroll—this time of the prophet Isaiah—and proclaims recovery of sight to the blind. He proclaims that through himself, this tired world which is so ignorant of God will come to notice and appreciate the love of God poured out on the earth. For Jesus Christ our Savior is God’s Word made a human being. And God’s eternal word is nothing more than the word “I love you,” and the word “It’s so good to see you.” And this is the Word made flesh in Jesus Christ.

Finally, at the end of the Scriptures, in the book of Revelation, the Lamb of God, the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world, will open the scroll of the seven seals and bring all of creation to its final fulfillment in the perfect love and victory of God.

And so let us take the advice of Ezra the scribe, and rejoice in the Lord today. For Jesus the Lord takes the scroll and opens it for us. And the scroll he opens is God’s own inner life. The man Jesus Christ is the perfect expression of the secret, inner life of Almighty God. And the inner life of God is nothing but love. In the Word made flesh this perfect love becomes the loving gaze of God upon his creation, the perfect sight of God that knows and sees us and says to our hearts, “It’s so good to see you.”

God is perfect love, God is perfect joy. Where the presence of God is, where the Spirit of God rests in our lives, there we find this love and joy. Let’s accept this joy today, and rejoice in it. For, as Ezra says, “rejoicing is the Lord must be your strength.”

(3rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, C)