Ascension

Ascension of the Lord, B

Happy feast day, brothers and sisters. Happy solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord. Pope St. Leo the Great describes our joy when he says that "we are commemorating that day on which our poor human nature was carried up, in Christ, above all the hosts of heaven, above all the ranks of angels, beyond the highest heavenly powers to the very throne of God the Father."

Yes, Jesus Christ has taken on our humanity, and, in his Ascension, has brought it into the presence of God the Father in heaven. This means that, in our communion with the Body of Christ here at the Eucharist, we are already seated in heaven and, in some sense, our ultimate destiny is already accomplished. We can now rejoice because our own bodily death, when it comes, will mean nothing more than a continuation of the communion with Christ that we celebrate here at Holy Mass.

Creation

(Pentecost Sunday)

Jesus breathed on his disciples and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

Brothers and sisters, this is an act of creation. The breath of the Spirit which Jesus breathes on his disciples is the same wind that swept over the waters at the very beginning of time. That wind is the breath that carried the creating Word of God: “God said…and it came to be.” This same Spirit breathed in Mary and brought forth Jesus, the Word made flesh, the first fruits of the final harvest of love which is the destiny of all created being.

Creation is not just something from the past, as if God made the world and then stepped back when it was all set. God is not “set it and forget it.” God—because He is love—is a Creator by nature, and he is always creating and offering us a renovation of ourselves and the world, drawing all to a perfect fulfillment of love and joy.

The Holy Spirit, just as He is the breath by which the creation came to be through God’s Word, just as He conceived Our Lord in the womb of Mary to make an indestructible marriage between humanity and divinity, now breathes himself on us so that we may become re-created, renovated citizens of the fulfilled creation.

We see examples of this renovation in the scriptures today. In the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles the Holy Spirit reverses the prideful and arrogant divisions we bring upon humanity, represented by the confusion of languages that began at the Tower of Babel. In the second reading, St. Paul teaches us about the particular manifestations of the Holy Spirit that each of us will have. ‘Grace builds on nature,’ after all, and because each of us has a nature that is a unique and unrepeatable creation, the Christian each of us becomes through the Holy Spirit will be a unique, unrepeatable, and precious manifestation of God’s grace. From the larger contours of our life’s vocation to the smallest ways in which our personalities become redeemed for the sake of goodness and gentleness toward each other, all of these are the ways that the creating, Holy Spirit of God works to renovate the creation through us.

Let us rejoice today in this beginning. “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth…a mighty wind swept over the waters.” That wind is here now, calling us into the fulfilled, new creation. Let us accept anew the gifts of grace and love that the Spirit brings to birth in each of us, and take up our new citizenship with joy.

The Spirit of Unity

(7th Sunday of Easter, C)

To celebrate this Seventh Sunday of Easter is a special privilege. In most of the world, the feast of the Ascension has been transferred to today, but not here in the stalwart ecclesiastical province of New York where we maintain the traditional celebration of Ascension on the biblical fortieth day of Easter. So it is our privilege to hear in the gospel today one of Jesus’ most beautiful and spiritually rich prayers. At the end of the Last Supper in St. John’s gospel, Jesus prays for unity. He prays for his disciples and for those who will come to believe through them—us—that we “may all be one.”

Now when we start to talk about the unity that Jesus desires for us, and the catholicity of the Church from which it is inseparable, sometimes the first thing we hear is how we have to be in unity with our pastors and obedient to our bishop in union with the Holy Father. That’s true, but if it’s all we talk about, we risk missing the original good news of the gospel from which it all derives. In fact, when we begin to speak of the unity and catholicity of who we are as the Church, we are talking about the Holy Spirit, Whose coming we celebrate in a special way in these days between the Ascension of the Lord last Thursday and Pentecost next Sunday.

After all—or better, before all—the Holy Spirit is the unity of the Father and the Son. In our collects or ‘opening prayers’ for Mass we typically pray in the classic manner of Christians: through the Son to the Father, who live and reign in the unity of the Holy Spirit. Hopefully this language will be clearer once again when we have the joy of the new and improved English translation of the prayers for Mass.

The Holy Spirit—Who is the unity of Father and Son in the Blessed Trinity—is also about the work of unity in creation. We see the dawn of this great work of unity in the mystery of the Incarnation, which we celebrate at Christmas. As we pray in the Creed, “by the power of the Holy Spirit he was born of the Virgin Mary.” By the consent of our Blessed Mother, the Holy Spirit conceives the Eternal Word of God in the human life of Jesus of Nazareth. By this conception the Holy Spirit accomplishes the work of unity that is our salvation: in Christ our human nature is united to the divine life of the Blessed Trinity. As the Spirit is the unity of Father and Son, so He also works to unite us to God.

During the Easter season, we celebrate the completion of this work of unity; the joining of humanity with God is fulfilled in Jesus’ death and resurrection, such that each of us who consent to be baptized into his death and resurrection becomes also a conceiver of the Holy Spirit within. We heard this in its simplest and most sublime form during the proclamation of St. John’s Passion on Good Friday. John describes Jesus’ death on the Cross: “And bowing his head, he handed over the Spirit.”

Jesus’ passing over—through the corruption of our human death into the new life of the Resurrection to a place at the right hand of the Father—makes the same Holy Spirit through which he was conceived available to us in our humanity.

This is the good news of the fulfillment of Jesus’ great prayer “that they may all be one.” The Holy Spirit, Who is the Loving Unity of Father and Son, stretches the divine unity into creation through the Incarnation of the Word of God, and makes that unity with God available to each of us. The Spirit then empowers each of us to take up our particularly Marian vocation: to conceive spiritually by the Holy Spirit and make a place within for the Word of God to grow, that we may bear the joy and new life and God’s own unity to the world.

God's Dwelling

(5th Sunday of Easter, C)

In a very real way, brothers and sisters, the scriptures we hear today describe the joyful fulfillment of everything we have been celebrating and meditating upon since Christmas. At Christmas we rejoiced in the Word made flesh, in Emmanuel, ‘God with us.’ In the gospel today Jesus brings out for us the full implication of ‘God with us,’ that we should be able to love one another with the very love with which God has loved us first. That’s the privilege and joy, the mission and the challenge, of being a Christian after all: to be a little home, a little dwelling for the love of God in the world.

But before we get to all that, I think we as Christians always need to step back and remind ourselves what we really mean by ‘love.’ The world we live in is sometimes very confused about this. Greeting cards, sitcoms, those silly wedding shows, the increasing normalization of pornography; all of these things confuse our sense of love. To love someone is first of all not about our feelings, although it might include our passion. It does not necessarily depend on whether we like someone, or even appreciate them. To love someone in the spiritual sense simply means that we desire the best for that person, and organize our behavior toward them in light of that desire. It just means that I want the best happiness and flourishing for your soul, and I’m going to relate to you out of that desire.

This is exactly what the love of God is like. God is, after all, a dynamic, passionate Desire for the good, blessing, and flourishing of His creatures. The Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us so that we might not only know about this love, but that we might know it, as we say, in the ‘biblical sense,’ as something which has come to penetrate and dwell within us. After all, this is what we celebrate in Holy Communion; that the love of God in Jesus Christ should make a home in our bodies and our lives.

By our baptism into the death and resurrection of Christ, and our communion with his humanity here at Mass, the whole love of God comes to dwell in us and empowers us to love each other with God’s own love. Those who consent to this blessing and plan of God in Christ become that new heaven and new earth, the New Jerusalem that John the Seer sees coming out of heaven in the reading from Revelation today. We form that new city which is also, by the way, the Kingdom of God.

Now, perhaps it’s something we don’t always think about, that our Christian life consists in loving our neighbor with the love of God dwelling within us. But this too is important. God is a very humble character. God is happy to dwell within us as our love for each other, without having to make a big deal about his Presence. But He is there. He is the Spirit of desire for the good of one another that dwells in our hearts. “Behold, God’s dwelling is with the human race.” This is the joyful good news that comes from the throne of God as the New Jerusalem appears. This is the payoff and the fulfillment of everything in our faith. God, in his sublime humility, decides that his home will be our little hearts. It is there that his Love dwells, reaching out in divine passion for the salvation of the world.

The Lamb Who Is The Shepherd

(4th Sunday of Easter, C)

The fourth Sunday of Easter is traditionally called Good Shepherd Sunday. The readings speak to this image of Christ, and we are given a special opportunity to pray for our Holy Father, our bishops, and pastors who continue the ministry of Christ the Shepherd among us. In the same way today is also a special day of prayer for vocations. This emphasis on Christ the Good Shepherd fits into a larger movement in our meditation as we go through the Easter season. At the beginning of the Easter season we simply rejoice in the announcement, in the good news that Christ is risen. As we go through the fifty days of Easter, however, we begin to shift our reflection to how this risen Christ is present to us. This movement culminates on the last day of the Easter season when we celebrate Pentecost and the gift of the Holy Spirit, Who is the abiding Presence of Christ with His Church. Recall the words we heard on Good Friday when St. John’s passion was proclaimed: “bowing his head, he handed over the spirit.” (John 19:30) That’s the basic movement of Easter; the Lord’s Passion becomes the means by which His Spirit is handed over to us, and this is what we call the Resurrection.

Today, right in the middle of Easter, we are given the image of Christ the Good Shepherd; He is present among us as the shepherd of our lives. It’s a very beloved and sweet image; those of you on the left side of the church can look up and see him. But when we come to the readings today, we are given images that are much more challenging and stark than any nice picture of Jesus tending his little sheep. In fact, as we hear in the second reading from the book of Revelation, it is Christ who is the Lamb. The inhabitants of heaven stand before the throne of the Lamb who is also their Shepherd. Christ is both; He is Shepherd and Lamb. In this we see an illustration of the contrast or tension which is the spiritual heart of Christianity: A humble, young girl becomes the bearer of the Word of God to the world. A condemned criminal in the midst of brutal execution; this man is the King of the Universe. A little piece of bread becomes the food of eternal life, having all grace and sweetness within it. The slaughtered Lamb is the Shepherd.

This contrast has everything to do with the nature of our salvation in Christ. In heaven we will look upon and worship the Lamb whom we have followed in this life. It is precisely in his being led to the slaughter of his Passion that he becomes our Shepherd, the one whom we are called to follow. Brothers and sisters, it’s obvious to anyone that our faith in Christ does not shield us from the suffering, pain, and bodily breakdown and death we experience in this life. Our salvation does not consist in being magically relieved of these grieving and sufferings. God’s answer to the misery and death we have brought into this world with our sins is not to magically remove them from our lives, but to meet us in them. On the Cross the Lamb of God draws to himself all of who we are at our most miserable, so that we might, in our sufferings, find Christ crucified united to our pain and leading us through it to the new life of resurrection.

This is why he allows his Body to be broken on the Cross and his Blood poured out, so that we might find a way to step into the openings of his wounds with our own sufferings. On the Cross, Jesus makes our suffering his own, and in the Eucharist he gives his broken Body to us as our food. This is the work of the Good Shepherd, who shows us that the way through suffering to new life is by allowing our hearts to break at the sufferings of others, and pouring out our own lives in compassion. By giving his Life for us, the Lamb of God becomes the Good Shepherd, because he leads us into the way of compassion and offers us the salvation of giving ourselves for each other.

The Lord's Breakfast

(3rd Sunday of Easter, C)

You have to love someone to cook breakfast for him. Growing up, my Mom made my Dad’s breakfast every single day. When she got a hip fracture a few years ago, Mom was convalescing for a while, and Dad had to cook his breakfast himself. When Mom got better, she presumed that she would be back cooking, but Dad declined and said that he would keep on doing it for himself. Mom was perplexed; what did this mean? So she spied a little on Dad and realized that when he made his own breakfast, he got twice as much bacon! It can be a tough contest between bacon and love. My pastor when I was a deacon used to make me breakfast every Sunday. Fr. John Gallagher made me breakfast once, on Christmas. Fr. Moe has made me breakfast once so far. So he should know that he has a couple of months to do it again if he wants to get into second place as loving pastor.

Today in the gospel we see the risen Jesus in this tender, loving act of cooking breakfast for his disciples. As we hear this image of Jesus preparing the bread and fish on the beach, we are, of course, reminded me of how Jesus had fed the multitude with the miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes. This comparison brings out a larger and important teaching for us during this Easter season: The Risen Christ, from his place in God’s eternity, does the same things that the historical Jesus of Nazareth did in his earthly ministry. What’s more, the Resurrection reveals that these two categories are not entirely distinct, but are continuous with one another. This means, brothers and sisters, that when we hear about the preaching, reconciling, forgiving, and healing of Jesus in the gospels, we are not hearing about the past, but about the present. The gospels were, of course, written from the perspective of the fullness of the revelation of the meaning of Jesus that comes with his resurrection, and so illustrate for us what the Lord is up to in our lives right now. Jesus Christ, risen into the Presence living within each of us who are baptized into his death and resurrection, risen into our faith, and risen into the sacraments handed down to us by apostolic tradition, continues his work of healing, saving, and proclaiming the Kingdom of God among us.

But there is a slight difference between the ministry of the historical Jesus and that of the risen Lord. Jesus in his earthly ministry fed the multitude with the loaves and fishes. In the gospel today he only feeds those who recognize him standing on the beach. So it is with us who live in these last days inaugurated by Jesus’ resurrection. He offers his own Love as our nourishment here at the Sunday Eucharist, but only for those who accept the eyes to recognize him standing on the shore. That’s where our risen Lord Jesus is, brothers and sisters, standing on the shore of the eternity into which we shall all go one day, longing for us to look up from our busyness to recognize him, and preparing for us the meal that will nourish our spirits in this life, and carry us into the world to come. Here, at the Eucharist, the Holy Mass, Jesus is preparing for us the breakfast that is the first meal of our eternal life. That’s love.

The Resurrection, Continued

(2 Easter, C)

Brothers and sisters, we arrive at “octave” of Easter, the eighth day of the Easter season. Having first celebrated the good news of Jesus’ resurrection last Sunday, the readings and prayers today invite us to drill a little deeper into the mystery. Who is this risen Jesus? What does He do? Where can He be found?

The answer to that last question is simple to say, but not so simple to understand and accept. For the risen Lord is right here. He is the eternal life living in each of us who are baptized into his death and resurrection. When each of us descended into the water on the day of our baptism, we went down into his death. When we came up again, we rose in the resurrection of Christ. We became newborn parts of the risen, human body of Christ. When we receive Holy Communion here at Sunday Mass, we receive Him whom we are, and the eternal life within us in nourished and fortified. When the minister of Holy Communion says to us, “The Body of Christ,” he is addressing us by name, calling us by our deepest identity.

If the presence of Christ risen from the dead lives and breathes in our humanity through our baptism and Holy Communion, then our ordinary behavior will resemble the historical, human life of Jesus. Simply put, we will do what Jesus did. This is what we hear in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles today. Peter and the apostles were at the Temple curing a great number of people who were sick or afflicted with unclean spirits. The healing ministry of Jesus not only continues in them, but is multiplied in them. This is the mission for which we are sent by the risen Lord in the gospel today, when he breathes the Spirit on the disciples. In his resurrection, Jesus hands over his mission to us, that we, in our lives, might continue and multiply his work of healing, reconciliation, and proclamation of the Kingdom of God to the world. This is what it means for us to be the Body of Christ we become at each Sunday Eucharist; in the simplest terms, we are to be Jesus for one another and the world. The mission of Jesus is risen into our faith and action; this is the fruit of resurrection.

Now, this sounds great, but maybe it’s all a little abstract. How do we get started on our vocation as the risen Body of Christ, the healing presence of Jesus in the world? How do we come to experience it, to really believe it? For this we have our dear friend Thomas in the gospel today. He comes to that perfect confession of faith, “My Lord and my God!” after he puts he puts his fingers and hand into the wounds of Jesus Christ. If we want to truly know the risen Lord, brothers and sisters, we must do the same thing. First, we must put our hands into Christ’s wounds by bringing our own hurts and betreyals, griefs and injuries into our prayer. Jesus has united these personal sufferings of ours to his own suffering on the Cross, and by embracing them we find Him. He has made our wounds His own. By offering our own pain, and allowing Jesus to unite it to His Passion, we come to know ourselves as people whom God is dying to save.

Through this kind of prayer, we get to know ourselves as people saved by our incorporation into the Body of Christ. We are then empowered to go out and get our hands dirty and blessed by putting them into the suffering of others, into the lives of all of the poor, sick, and lonely of our neighborhoods and our world. When we encounter the suffering Christ in others, we too will know the great confession of faith welling up from within: “My Lord and my God!” We will become the Presence of the risen Lord for each other, members of the risen Body of Christ.

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.

The Outpouring

(Pentecost, Day, B)

Brothers and sisters, today is the big payoff. Today is the feast of God’s overwhelming generosity. By everything Jesus Christ has done for us in his Incarnation, his teaching, his Passion, his Resurrection from the dead and his Ascension into heaven, today we receive the definitive and surpassing gift of God, the Holy Spirit.

Back at Christmas we celebrated how the Holy Spirit conceived Jesus in the womb of the Virgin Mary. The Word of God was thus born as one of us. The Word became flesh as Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus took this divine humanity and accepted for himself the worst evil we inflict upon each other, even to disregard, torture, and death. But because death could not hold onto his divine nature, he emerged anew in the Resurrection, thus creating a path for our humanity from death to life. He took that same humanity and ascended to the Father, and so all of us who are in communion with him are already citizens of heaven.

Today we rejoice in what this means for us. We are Christians, those who are united to God through the humanity of Christ and each of us is called to be “another Christ,” an alter Christus, as the tradition says. Just as the Holy Spirit stretched the dynamic love of the Blessed Trinity into the world by conceiving the Word of God as man, so the Holy Spirit delights to conceive the Presence of God in each of us who is baptized into Christ.

This is the ongoing self-emptying of God. The Incarnation of God continues in us who are other Christs for the world. And the most sublime and beautiful good news is that God in his humility wants to live in each of us in a way that doesn’t displace our humanity. God wills to live in each of us as our love, as our care for the world, as our Christian service to our neighbor. That’s what St. Paul is getting at in the second reading, when he is talking about how the Spirit produces different gifts in different people. Each person is a unique creation of God, and so the Spirit of God made flesh within them will be a unique and unrepeatable grace for the world.

And with these gifts raised up the Spirit within us, we are sent. In the gospel we hear today Jesus empowers us with divine forgiveness. This is the power of the Holy Spirit for the reconciliation—a reconciliation that our world, so plagued by selfishness and greed and violence, needs so desperately. Let us take the gifts that the Spirit has conceived within us, and be about our mission of forgiveness and reconciliation. Amen.

The Desire of our Hearts

(Pentecost, Vigil)

For me the spirituality of the Pentecost Vigil, which we celebrate tonight, connects all the way back to the other side of the liturgical year at Advent and Christmas. Just like the season of Advent, the Pentecost Vigil is about the desire of the human heart, our deepest longings, and what we really want and look forward to.

That’s basically what we are as human beings, a desire. We seek. We want. We do everything we do because of the belief, right or wrong, that it will make us happy. But what is it that we really want? At a basic level, the goods of security, comfort, and pleasure. Go a little deeper, become a little more mature, and we realize that we want beauty and goodness. In the end what we want is love, to delight in loving and being loved. Ultimately what we want Love Itself, and this Love is the goodness out of which all of the goodnesses of the creation overflow, the Mystery and Source of all that we call God.

It is God that the heart wants. St. Augustine calls the human being a capax Dei, a “capacity for God.” (De Trinitate, XIV:11) The human person is a desire, a home, and a capacity for God. St. Paul expressed this so viscerally in the second reading tonight: our longing for adoption into God, the redemption of our bodies for which we long and for which all creation is “groaning.”

The trouble is, we are often misguided in our effort to satisfy our desire for God. We reach out for the wrong thing, thinking it will make us happy, but it doesn’t. And this goes for all of our little, distracting personal sins all the way up the great tragedies of violence that scar families, communities and nations. The classic Biblical example of this problem comes to us in the first reading today. The prehistoric people tried to build a tower that would go up to heaven. They wanted to reach up and grab the heaven that they desired. And so it is with us whenever we try to get what our heart wants by grasping. And we see the result of it all: mass confusion. This confusion continues in our own society, when crimes and errors that are clearly against human dignity and goodness have become all but normal and acceptable.

All of our grasping and grabbing for happiness, pleasure, and security is ultimately doomed because we are looking the wrong way. The great gift of Pentecost, the good news of this beautiful celebration, is that the God that we desire is right here. Jesus says in the Gospel tonight, “"Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink. Rivers of living water will flow from within him who believes in me." By his Incarnation among us, Jesus has placed the divine life of God within our humanity, and we join our humanity to his by our faith and our Communion with him here at Mass. Thus the real desire of our hearts is right here, flowing from within. It is the living water of our baptism into Christ.

Therefore, let us turn our attention inwards in prayer, that we might notice this great gift of God. Prayer will teach us how to unseal the Spirit God has placed within us, that He might flow forth from us for the recreation and renewal of the world.

The Mission Handed Over

(7th Sunday of Easter, B)

In these days, brothers and sisters, we find ourselves in the midst of the Church’s first and original novena, the nine days of prayer that extend from the Ascension of the Lord to the arrival of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. (Our word novena is derived, of course, from the Latin numeral novem, nine.)

In this time of the great novena we look forward to the feast of Pentecost next week, which is one of the real crowns of the whole liturgical year we celebrate here at Sunday Mass. So as we approach the coming of the Holy Spirit and the fulfillment of all our hope, where are we left as another cycle of the Advent-Christmas and Lent-Easter seasons comes to a close?

Well, we are not left at all. We are not abandoned, but instead we are sent. In the Gospel we hear today, after praying for us, his disciples, and assuring us of his desire to have us share in his joy, Jesus sends us into the world. Jesus prays to the Father, “As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world.” As Jesus ascends to the Father, we inherit his mission. As Jesus was sent, so are we, and our mission is continuous with and identical to his.

But what exactly was the mission of Jesus? If we back up a little bit in St. John to the gospel we heard back on the fourth Sunday of Lent, it becomes very clear. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” The mission of Jesus is thus twofold: to be the expression of God’s love and to save the world. In our own lives—and in our deepest identity as the Body of Christ we become in the Eucharist—this mission is handed over to us. This is the first sense of what we Christians mean by tradition, from the Latin tradere, to hand on or hand over. As Jesus was handed over for our salvation, so his mission is now put into our hands that we might continue to make it real in the world.

This mission is our great joy, but it also our most intense challenge. It is our joy because, through our communion with God through the humanity of Christ, God delights to live in us and to express his own divine love and care as the love we offer to our brothers and sisters. The love of God takes shape in the world as our love. That’s the joyful payoff of the mystery of the Incarnation. This is what it means to say that we are sent into the world, just as Jesus was, to be the expression of God’s love. “God so loved the world,” that he sends you and me into it to be the bearers of divine love and delight.

But our mission is also a challenge that can be very difficult and very painful. The Body of Christ saves the world by offering itself to be broken on the Cross, that its life-giving blood might be poured out for the forgiveness of sins and the ratification of the new and everlasting covenant. When we say “Amen” to the minister of Holy Communion after being addressed with our real name, “the Body of Christ,” each of us affirms that we will have to embrace the Cross in the particular way it takes shape in our life. Each of us will have some way we need to break ourselves in order that God’s love and salvation might flourish more in our lives and be expressed more fully to the world around us. It might be pride, or selfishness, or spiritual listlessness, or any number of things that hold us back from being the fully loved and completely loving people God calls us to be for the world.

Let us accept our mission. Let us be sent anew into the world as the Body of Christ, expressing God’s love and offering itself for the world’s salvation. This is the new life of the Holy Spirit, Whose renewed Presence we seek and long for in these days.

The Love of God

(6th Sunday of Easter, B)

We arrive today, brothers and sisters, at the thirty-sixth day of the Easter season, so we know that we are close to that fortieth day after the Resurrection when Jesus will ascend to the Father. So as we prepare to mark the departure of the Risen Jesus from our midst, that we might welcome his abiding presence among us in the Holy Spirit, Jesus gives us his farewell commandment: “Love one another, as I love you.”

In order to know how it is we are to love one another, we must first understand how it is that God has loved us; only then can we love each other with that same love. In his first encyclical, Deus caritas est, our holy father Benedict wrote to us extensively on the love of God. Benedict reminds us that God loves us in a “completely gratuitous manner, without any previous merit” on our part. (10) This is why the love God has for us is a love that is always ready to forgive; because God—in the Love that he is—desires and delights only in the happiness and flourishing of his creatures. In the service of that desire and delight God wishes to remove from us all the guilt and selfishness that hold us back from loving with our entire being.

Jesus is for us the incarnation of this love. In the self-emptying of his humble birth we see the God who is ready to give up everything it ought to mean to be God. And especially in his self-sacrifice on the Cross and his giving of himself into our hands in this Eucharist, we see the incarnate love of God, passionately expressing God’s desire to share his love with us. (13)

To love God is to love the love that God is; to love God is to be in love with God’s goodness to his creation. And so when we love God, we begin to share God’s loving attitude toward his creatures. This is why the love of God and the love of neighbor always go together. In loving God we love him in his love for each one, and so we come also to share in God’s love for our neighbor.

Jesus commands us to do precisely this: to love each other with the same love with which God loves the world. Indeed, the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives is exactly this: that the love of God should live in us as our love for our brothers and sisters. By our communion with God through the humanity of Christ, the Holy Spirit of love comes to expression through our love of each other. This is what the first letter of John is talking about in the second reading, when John writes that everyone who loves is “begotten of God.” The love we express for each other is the renewing and re-creating force of God’s Spirit present in our lives. It has the power to bring us and the whole world to a new and spiritual rebirth.

This is certainly the most beautiful that there is, but it won’t be easy. All who resolve themselves to fulfilling Jesus’ commandment of love will also have their share of the Lord’s Cross. Supporting the Church’s institutional works of charity requires of many the sacrifice of time, talent, and treasure. On a more personal level, many of those we are called to love will be people we can’t stand on the emotional or natural level. Many times our attachments to our own feelings and prejudices will have to be mortified in order to see every person as the lovable creation they are in the loving gaze of God. But to see each brother or sister as God sees them is to love them with a perfect love. When we let ourselves fall in love with God, we will begin to love each other with the Love that is the Holy Spirit, and he will be poured out from our hearts to renew the face of the earth.

Vine Grower and Vine

(5th Sunday of Easter, B)

I spent one of my summers when I was in formation in the Order living with the friars in our novitiate in Nueva Ocotepeque, Honduras. The novice master was a very wise friar and he said to the novices, “I can’t see your soul, so I need to see how you take care of a living thing.” So he assigned each of the young novice friars a little patch of ground outside the friary, maybe two or three square feet. Each one was to grow something in his little garden, and care for it.

I bring this up because it will help us to explore the image of the Blessed Trinity that we have in the gospel today, and especially because it will help us to understand what the Trinity means for us.

Jesus says, “I am true vine, and my Father is the vine grower.” We have God the Father and God the Son, the vine grower and the vine. And where is the third person of the Blessed Trinity, the Holy Spirit? The Spirit is the love and care that the Father puts into and transmits to the vine in the course of his care for it as vine grower. So here’s our image of the Trinity: Gardener or Vine Grower, Vine, and the Love and Care the Grower transmits to the Vine and which is reflected in its growth.

Now we ourselves imitate the Blessed Trinity whenever we too are involved in the care of a living thing, whether as the caregiver or the one cared for. This should not be too surprising; as know from Scripture, we are created in the “image and likeness of God.” Now if God is a Trinity then we are created in the image and likeness of that Blessed Trinity, and our likeness to the Trinity should be revealed in our best selves. And so it is. Whenever we are involved in a relationship in which caring and creative love is transmitted between two living things, we become an image of the Blessed Trinity who is Vine Grower, Vine, and Loving Care.

This is why a mutual relationship of tender, caring, creative love is the thing that makes us most happy as human beings, because it is how we both image and imitate the perfect mystery of dynamic Love that we call Father, Son, and Spirit. Like my brothers the novices in Honduras, when we care lovingly for a living thing we are at our best and most happy as images and likenesses of God.

Now, as if this weren’t enough, here’s the real good news: Jesus makes us into part of the vine that he is. We are the branches of the vine. When he allows his body to be broken on the Cross, his wounds open a path for us into his divine humanity. And so, in Christ, we have the opportunity to not only imitate the Blessed Trinity but to become part of him. This is what we really celebrate when we gather here for Mass; that we become the Body of Christ, and that our loving care for each other and for the world might be empowered to do everything that the Body of Christ does: announce peace, heal, and ultimately break itself open for the salvation of others.

We who are Christians are the branches on the vine that is the Son, receiving the tender care of the Father. We are the limbs of the Body of Christ. This is our dignity and our joy: that we are drawn up into the perfect, infinite, and dynamic love that is the Blessed Trinity of God.

(Comments are especially invited on the question of whether or not I have violated the filioque with this homily. ;-))

The Good Shepherd

(4th Sunday of Easter, B)

Each year on this middle Sunday of the seven Sundays of the Easter season, the gospel we proclaim invites us to reflect on Jesus the Good Shepherd. It is one of the most beloved and traditional images of our Lord, is it not? But comforting images of Jesus with his sheep and shepherd’s crook aside, in what does Jesus’ good shepherding consist? As we heard the Good Shepherd himself say, it is because “he lays down his life for the sheep.” Unlike the “hired man” who takes care of himself when danger comes, Jesus sacrifices himself to the danger that threatens the sheep in order to save them.

So we see that Jesus as the Good Shepherd is really a way to understand his Passion. Danger threatens the sheep; we all, to one degree or another, live in a world threatened by suffering and misery. This is the plain old ‘problem of evil.’ And Jesus the Good Shepherd—who lays down his life for the sheep—is God’s answer to the misery and danger human sin and stupidity have brought into the world.

You know the standard question: if God is so good; indeed, if there is a God at all, why does he permit such suffering and evil to thrive in the world? Well, first of all, is the suffering in the world God’s fault? No; it’s the fault of individual human sin, much of which has metastasized into structures of injustice in society. And as any parent knows, if you always magically fix the consequences that a child brings upon himself with bad choices, he gets to be spoiled and irresponsible, right? So—on the one hand—this is part of how it is between God and us. On the other hand, though, God has made a definitive and saving response to evil in the world. The trouble for some people is that this isn’t the overt intervention they think God should make; God’s answer to evil and suffering is not a magical fix, but solidarity.

God’s infinite love is moved by human suffering and the cry of the poor, and Jesus in his self-sacrifice becomes God’s response. In his Passion, Jesus unites God himself with the worst we bring upon ourselves and each other with our sins—even to the point of how we disregard, torture, and kill one another.

But here’s the thing: this also unites the infinitely creative power of the divinity of the Son of God—through whom all things were made—into the experience of human suffering. And that means that each of us, in our own pain, alienation, and suffering have access to the power of God. And this power can free us from the effects of sin that hold us down: as individuals, our selfishness, depression, and anxiety, and as a society, poverty and our addiction to violence. This is the mystery we call the Resurrection.

This is how Jesus is for us the Good Shepherd: by laying down his life and suffering with us so that we might find, with him, the path out of sin to new life. The effects of Jesus having shepherded us through the misery of sin to new life are revealed in the first two readings we hear today. The first letter of John proclaims that we are no “children of God.” This is to say that as Christians, we enjoy the same relationship to God the Father as Jesus does. We are caught up into that mystical dynamic of Father and Son, Source and Word—the one unified relationship from which all creation spills forth in superabundance. We become daughters and sons in the Son; our lives and souls gathered into the intimacy of the Blessed Trinity.

And just as Peter proclaims, this new life will give us the power to uncripple ourselves and the world around us, that all creation might be renewed and renovated by the power of the Good Shepherd revealed in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ.

Risen Into Our Midst

(3rd Sunday of Easter, B)

Brothers and sisters, if the resurrected Jesus seems a little hard to understand, you’re not alone. The Lord, upon encountering his disciples in the gospel we hear today, sees immediately that they are troubled and have questions in their hearts. It’s easy to understand why, really. Who is this Jesus who died and rose? On the one hand, the evangelist goes to great lengths to make sure we know that the risen Jesus is not a ghost or a simply spiritual presence. We also saw this last week when Jesus challenged Thomas to touch him. Today Jesus again invites the disciples to touch him, to see that he has flesh and bones. Jesus even eats! No ghost or spirit can do that.

So when we are talking about the risen Lord Jesus—at least in the time in between the Resurrection and Ascension—we affirm that he has a physical presence which is at least something like the physical body we have, and is continuous with the physical body he was for us in his earthly life.

But it’s not as easy as all that, brothers and sisters. Though the Lord Jesus rose from the dead in the flesh—as we affirm in the Roman Canon during the Easter Octave—his physical presence and his resurrected body are not exactly like the physical bodies that we are during our earthly pilgrimage. The Presence of the risen Jesus comes and goes instantaneously. He arrives in the midst of his disciples when they are hiding behind locked doors. Unlike us, he is not bounded by space and time.

So it seems like the risen Lord is a curious reality. Like a purely spiritual being, his presence and movement are not hampered by space, time, or physical barriers. But on the other hand, like a physical being, he can be touched, has real flesh, and even eats with his disciples. Sound far out? Well, it shouldn’t. This shouldn’t sound too strange for us Catholic Christians, because we see precisely the same thing in the first and foremost way the risen Lord is present with us now: the Real Presence in the Eucharist.

At the Last Supper, Jesus broke the bread and identified it with his own body, soon to be broken on the Cross. He offered the cup of wine, identifying it with his own blood, soon to be poured out in his sorrowful Passion. As we carry out his command to keep the commemoration of his own self-offering, we believe that the bread and wine of the Eucharist become the Real Presence of the risen Jesus among us. At Mass we find ourselves in the same joyful situation as the disciples in the gospel today: Jesus comes into our midst, blesses us with his peace, and is present in such a real way that we can really touch him and even eat with him in our Holy Communion. But though we touch and taste the real Presence of Christ’s Body and Blood, we know that this Presence that is still mysterious. Like the risen Lord with the disciples, it is a Presence not bound by time or place. That’s why we adore the one and undivided Body of Christ present here and in all the tabernacles through the world.

So as we gather here to know the Real Presence of the risen Jesus among us, and we receive his greeting and blessing of peace, let us be “amazed” like the disciples in the gospel today. Even if we still don’t know quite how to believe in something so sublime and wonderful as the real Body of Christ risen into the bread and wine of the Eucharist, let us not be doubtful in a sad way, but joyful before the mystery of Jesus risen into our midst.

P.s. This is the 100th post to Praise and Bless. Thanks to all who have prayed for me and encouraged me in this ministry. May the Lord reward your devotion to the Word of God.

Believing Thomas

(2nd Sunday of Easter, B)

Every year, on the second Sunday of Easter, we hear this Gospel because it relates a scene of the disciples gathered on the Sunday after the Sunday of the Resurrection. So this is one of those special moments when the situation of the people in the Scriptures matches our own pretty closely. The disciples were gathered on the Sunday following the Sunday when Jesus rose from the dead, just as we as disciples of the Lord gather together on this second Sunday of Easter.

In this scene we meet the famous Thomas. He gets a kind of bad rap in the tradition, and on a certain reading of this gospel he earned the awful nickname of ‘doubting Thomas.’ But is that fair? All he wanted was to see what the others had seen the Sunday before when he was absent. And he wanted to know that this person that they had seen was really and truly the Jesus that he had known in his earthly life; that’s why Thomas demands to touch Jesus in the wounds of his Passion.

So, as the Gospel relates, when the disciples are gathered on that second Sunday, Thomas is now with them. And just as on the first Sunday, “Jesus came” and “stood in their midst,” greeting the disciples again with peace. Now the history of art has left us with the image of Thomas putting his hands and fingers into the Lord’s wounds, but the gospel doesn’t indicate that this ever happened. Instead, as soon as Thomas sees Jesus he bursts out with the most perfect Christian confession of faith and exclaims, “My Lord and my God.”

After Thomas’s confession, and this is the climactic conclusion of St. John’s gospel, Jesus gives Thomas a challenge right back. Jesus asks him if he believes because he has seen, and then Jesus pronounces a blessing on those who believe without having seen. That’s us, brothers and sisters. We are the ones upon whom the Risen Jesus gives his special blessing: those who have not seen, but have believed.

Now here we are at a subtle point. Obviously we have not seen the Lord in the same way that the first disciples did. But the life to which Jesus was raised is eternal life, and as we say in the Creed, he is “seated at the right hand of the Father.” This means, because the Resurrection is a matter of eternity, it is a mystery that is, in a very real sense, just as present to us as it was to the disciples in the gospel we hear today.

This is why we who are the most recently converted disciples of the Lord continue the apostolic tradition of gathering on the first day of the week to commemorate the Resurrection and wait for the Risen Lord to appear and give us his peace. In fact, everything we do here at Sunday Mass is meant to make us attentive to the presence of the Risen Jesus. We proclaim the Sacred Scriptures, the Word of God. Since we believe that Jesus is the Word, the Speech of God made incarnate, then we know that everything we hear in Scripture refers to the mystery of Christ. Then we offer the commemoration of his own self-sacrifice which Jesus commanded us to make. We allow his Presence to be risen into the bread and wine of this Eucharist, which communicates, by our Communion, the presence of his Risen Life to us. And so by our Holy Communion, we allow the gift of the Resurrection to rise into our lives and our bodies, so that we might be the presence of Jesus for each other and for the world. This is what it means, in the words of the first letter of John in the second reading, to be “begotten of God,” to be born again into the life of grace and Resurrection.

So as we stand in awe before these sacred mysteries, let us exclaim with our brother, believing Thomas, “My Lord, and my God.”

Pentecost

(Pentecost Sunday)

(N.B. There are alternate endings for the vigil Mass and the Mass during the day)

Today is the fulfillment of all the mysteries of the Lord we have been celebrating all year, from his Nativity and his ministry to his Passion, death, and Resurrection. They all lead to that most wonderful of gifts to us, the Presence of the Holy Spirit in our hearts, our minds, our families, and in us assembled as church.

God is not someone who just sits there. It’s not like God just holds court in heaven enjoying his own perfection and the company of his angels and his saints. No! God is a dynamic movement, a perfect process of Love. This is part of what we mean when we say that God is a Trinity, trying to describe this God who is a dynamic movement of Love.

Anyone of us who has been in love knows that love wants more than anything to share itself with the other. And so it is with the perfect Love that we call God. From the most perfect charity which desires nothing more than the pure benefit and good of another all the way down to the most basic sexual desire in which our very bodies seem to reach out and long for the other, in all of these experiences of love we come to know a hint or a shadow of the tremendous passion of God to share his very self with the world.

The overflowing of the love of God, this stretching forth as it were, of God’s love for his creation, we call the Holy Spirit. This Spirit was present in the very beginning: as we read in Genesis, before God even began to create the heavens and the earth, the breath or spirit of God hovered over the waters. From the very beginning it wasn’t as if God sat aloof from his creation. Instead, God was intimately present, loving the creation into being.

This is also what it means when the gospels say that Jesus “was conceived by the Holy Spirit.” The same Spirit, the same divine Love which embraced creation from the very beginning, now accomplishes the perfect unification between God and our humanity in Jesus Christ. God desires so much to be present to us, to love us as we are, that he gives up all the power and prerogative that goes with being God and becomes one of us, vulnerable for sure, but able to relate to us perfectly as our brother.

And now this same Spirit which hovered over the waters in the beginning, which conceived Jesus Christ in the womb of Mary, and which most perfectly of all, raised Jesus from the dead, is given to us. The Spirit is given to us so that we too might be lifted up with Jesus. The Spirit both bids us and helps us rise from all of the violence , depression, anxiety—from all of this approximation of death that we have brought upon ourselves with our sins. The Spirit gives us true freedom. The presence of the Spirit which we have by uniting ourselves to the humanity of Christ in prayer, faith, and sacrament, rolls us up into the dynamic movement of love which is the Trinity of God. In this great Gift we become—obscurely, mysteriously, sacramentally—part of the very inner life of God.

This great gift leaves us with a mission, a mission with which we are sent forth at the end of this Easter season. And this mission is nothing less than the healing of all of human civilization.

Vigil

In the first reading from the book of Genesis we heard the story of the tower of Babel, and how the language of the people working there became so confused that they could no longer work together and were “scattered all over the earth.” So what went wrong with their project? Think back to the beginning of the reading. They said to themselves, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky, and so make a name for ourselves.”

This is the original sin of every politics and human effort at leadership that leaves God out of the picture. For when we try to build a family, a community, or a civilization for our own glory, it only ends in confusion and alienation. We must learn to run our communities, our society, and our countries for the glory of God rather than ourselves, and according to the Spirit of God rather than the wisdom of this world. That is why the very last scene in the whole of the Bible is the New Jerusalem coming out of heaven and joining itself to the earth.

God entrusts us with the mission of building up this civilization of the Spirit. And when we begin we will find that our differences are no longer confusing and scattering. We will find a new unity for humanity in the love and the Spirit of God, and we will let the Holy Spirit create the world anew.

Day

Jesus gives to his disciples this power to heal the world in the Gospel we hear today. He breathes on them and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” This is the same Holy Spirit which hovered over the waters at the beginning of creation. It is the same Holy Spirit which overshadowed Mary and conceived Jesus in her womb. And now this Holy Spirit is on us. It is an empowering Spirit, and Jesus describes the power that it gives: “Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain and retained.”

Today the power of divine forgiveness is put into our hands, yours and mine. And this is power to stop all of the cycles of violence which hinder and injure our personal relationships and break out into the wars which scar all of human history.

After all, the real power of violence lies not in its ability to hurt, but in its ability to reproduce and to grow. You hit me, I hit you harder. Nations retaliate against each other and wars escalate. Those who suffer abuse as children often grow up to be abusers. And murderers are executed to make the point that killing people is unacceptable.

The Holy Spirit empowers us to stop these cycles of violence in their tracks by forgiveness. And this is nothing less than an imitation of Christ’s own Passion, in which he takes to himself on the Cross all the violence and hate that we can dish out, and gives nothing back but the blessing and kindness of the Resurrection.

Let us gladly accept the power to forgive with the very forgiveness and compassion of God. By forgiving let us let go of every bitterness of heart that injures our personal relationships with gossip, detraction, and betrayal. And if we start there, let us have confidence that we are allowing the Holy Spirit to heal the world with the soothing forgiveness that will end all violence and war, and will create the world anew in the love that is the Spirit of 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.

Stepping Into The Mystery

(4th Sunday of Easter, A)

One of my favorite writings of St. Francis of Assisi is the letter he wrote to Brother Leo. Leo wanted advice from Francis about following the Lord. Francis wrote to him simply, “In whatever way it seems best to you to please the Lord God and follow his footprint and his poverty, do this with the blessing of the Lord God and my obedience.”

This is a sense of God with which we are familiar: the God who calls us that we might follow him into the new and risen life he offers. This is Jesus the Good Shepherd. This fourth Sunday of Easter we call “Good Shepherd Sunday.” The Good Shepherd is, after all, one of the most beautiful and beloved titles and images of the Risen Lord. Jesus is the shepherd of his people, gently calling us, leading us, and bringing us to a place of spiritual safety and refreshment. Good Shepherd Sunday has also become a privileged time to pray for vocations to consecrated life and the sacred ministry, that God would raise up from among us shepherds to care for us and lead us in his ways.

But if we pay attention to what we hear in John’s gospel today, we notice right away that Jesus goes beyond simply calling himself the Good Shepherd. He not only refers to himself as the shepherd, but as the Gate for the sheep! What can this mean, to say that Jesus is a gate?

In some way we are meant to step through Jesus Christ. As he says, “I am the Way.” Our Risen Lord Jesus Christ is a Presence among us that we are meant to step into and through. St. Peter says as much in a different way in the second reading today: “Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in his footsteps.”

Far, far too often we treat our faith like a “spectator sport.” We think of the mysteries of our Lord’s birth, death, and Resurrection as something we observe. Perhaps we observe with deep contemplation or great gratitude, but to observe is only the very beginning of worship. Gathering for the Eucharist is not like going to the movies! Jesus Christ is not just someone we admire for the great things he did for us. We are to go further and step into these mysteries ourselves.

That’s the beauty of our sharing in Holy Communion. Our flesh and blood, our very lives and humanity become one with the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. In this way, if we only consent to it, all of our sufferings and struggles and doubts are taken up into the Lord’s own Passion. Best of all, the dying that we will all have to pass through at the end of our time in this world is taken up into the Lord’s own death on the Cross. That’s our hope. That’s why our Communion in this Eucharist is God’s pledge of our Resurrection. By uniting ourselves to the Body of Christ that suffered and died for us, our humanity is also taken up into his Resurrection, into Jesus’ victory over the finality of death.

Again, as Peter says, Jesus leaves us an “example,” that we might “follow in his footsteps.” We are to follow the example of Jesus’ own life, and place our feet on the path of the pattern he left for us. This will be different for each of us, as different members of the Body of Christ. For some it will be the “leap to faith” in prayer and contemplation. For others it will be the work of continuing Jesus’ ministry of teaching or leadership. For others it will be the imitation of God in providing quiet and gentle care to people in need. But whatever we are called to be, each of us has to seek how we are to follow in the Lord’s footsteps. Like Brother Leo, each of us has to seek each day how to put our feet into the Lord’s footprint, to step into the new Reality that is the risen humanity of Christ.

On The Way

(3rd Sunday of Easter, A)

The Resurrection is a matter of eternity. Like all the mysteries of our Lord’s Incarnation, from his Nativity, through his teaching and healing to his Passion and death, the Resurrection is the eternity of God breaking into our world and personal history by means of the humanity of Christ. And because the Resurrection is a matter of eternity, it is just as present and fresh to us as it was to the first disciples. The Resurrection is just as real right now, in this place, as it was on that first Easter evening we heard about in the Gospel, or at Pentecost when Peter made the great speech we heard in the first reading. Therefore we can read the accounts of the experience of the Risen Lord that come to us in the Scriptures as about us too. Since the Risen Lord is just as present now as he was to the first disciples, we can read ourselves into the Scriptures. And the Gospel of the two disciples on the way to Emmaus, which we hear today, provides a beautiful example of how the Risen Lord is present to us on the way.

For we all are on the way, we are all on the journey of our personal history, of the histories of our families and communities, and of the secret, inner journey of our path with God in prayer. And just like he does for the disciples on the way in the Gospel, the Risen Jesus comes and walks with us. Though we seldom recognize this Presence with us, he is faithfully there. And what does he do? He encourages us to recount and reflect on our journey: “What are you discussing as you walk along?” The Presence with us that calls us to reflect on our life with God and to call us to prayer, this is the Presence of the Risen Lord walking with us on the way.

And though perhaps we still don’t always recognize him, if we are faithful to this journey of prayer and reflection, we find that our understanding grows. We start to see glimpses of the great mystery of God. As the Gospel puts it today, “he opened the Scriptures” for the two disciples. And this will happen for us too, if we allow ourselves the dialogue with God which is the prayer of people on the way.

As our minds and hearts are opened to the Presence of the Risen Lord, as we “taste and see the goodness of the Lord,” we will want him to stay with us, and like the disciples in the Gospel we will want to sit at table with the Lord and have him break bread for us. And that is what we do in this Eucharist!

Here, in this assembly, just as Jesus took, blessed, and broke bread for those two disciples on the first Easter evening, he does so with us. And it is in this “breaking of the bread” that we see most clearly the abiding presence of Jesus with us. For in the Eucharist, the same Body which was broken for our salvation on the cross is broken for our nourishment, and the same Blood which was poured out for the forgiveness of sins on the Cross is poured out for the ratification of the new and eternal covenant. The humanity of Christ, which death could not hold on to, is risen into this assembly, into the bread and wine of this Eucharist. Before this mystery we stand in awe at the “sublime humility” of the God who, as St. Francis said, “hides himself under the little form of bread.”

But let’s not forget what happened to those two disciples in the Gospel when they recognized Jesus in the breaking of the bread—he “vanished from their sight.” This is one of the great challenges of the spiritual life, that as soon as we feel like we’ve come to an experience or an understanding God, God seems to retreat from us. As soon as we are able to say, “Wow, I get it, or I’ve had an experience of God,” it’s gone, and we feel like we don’t get it, like we’re not sure what we mean by “God.” But this is not an abandonment, but an invitation. For this is the way that God invites us to go deeper into ourselves, into who we really are, and to hear him calling us at a new level closer to our true identity.

If we are faithful to this journey, faithful to the walking on the way with God, even when it seems like we are being led into incomprehensible darkness, this is where we find pure faith. And we will begin to hear God calling us at our deepest and truest identity, which is, after all, the humanity of the Christ.