Recognizing the Christ

(12th Sunday in Ordinary Time, C)

In the gospel today we have Luke’s account of St. Peter’s great confession. When asked who he says Jesus is, he responds, “the Christ of God.” This confession is the heart of our faith. For each of us, our Christianity begins when we admit, come to believe, and are willing to say publicly that Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew of the first century, is the anointed Christ, Savior, and Messiah of God. For most of us, this confession was made on our behalf when we were baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ as infants. Those of us who were baptized as adults made our own confession of faith.

Nevertheless, however we came to be baptized, our confession of faith in Jesus as the Christ is not a ‘one time’ thing. This realization, this spiritual knowledge which is at the heart of God’s purpose as Creator, lives in us each day and should animate every thought and action of the Christian soul.

So how do we obtain, or how do we receive this knowledge that Jesus is the Christ, and with such certainty that we become willing to proclaim our faith publicly and begin to base our whole lives upon it? For this we turn to today’s first reading from the prophet Zechariah.

The prophet writes that God will pour out on his people “a spirit of grace and petition, and they will look on him whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him as one mourns for an only son.” These two go together; in fact, it is through looking on him whom we have pierced—that is to say the contemplation of Christ crucified—that we come to notice, appreciate, and perceive the Spirit of God poured out upon us, his people. This is because it is precisely the Passion that accomplishes the handing over of the Holy Spirit to us, which is God’s way of making a home in our hearts and lives. Recall the moment of Jesus’ death in St. John’s Gospel: “And bowing his head, he handed over the Spirit.”

Here we have the dynamic process of faith and prayer which is the heart and the basis of Christianity. By our contemplation of Christ crucified, we become aware of the Holy Spirit we have received through the sacrifice of his Passion. In turn, the Spirit enables us to recognize Jesus as the Christ of God. As this confession of faith wells up in our hearts and minds, we are pushed further into the contemplation of Christ crucified. Prayer and faith live in a mutually growing process and the result is that we become better Christians each day.

This contemplation is what we are about here at Mass, for holy Mass is Jesus’ extension of the sacrifice of his Passion through time such that we can share and receive his broken Body into our lives. Our Holy Communion, then, is the perfect contemplation of Christ crucified because in it we receive his Body into our bodies. It is by our Communion, then, that we also receive the Spirit that recognizes Him Whom we have received.

We come here to Sunday Mass in order to become Christians, to make again the confession of faith that the Spirit prays within us. We become the Body of Christ we receive, and so inherit the saving mission of Jesus. In this we ourselves are called to be the fulfillment of the last part of Zechariah’s prophecy we hear today; to become, as Church, a “fountain to purify from sin and uncleanness.” The Church is called to be the sign for the world of God’s salvation, and the source of the baptism that can save the world from its selfishness and misery. Let us recognize Jesus as the Christ, accept the mission God wills to embed within us by Holy Communion, and become this baptism for the world.

Corpus (et Sanguis) Christi

(Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, C)

Today we celebrate the feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, a day set apart to reflect upon and celebrate in a special way the Most Blessed Sacrament we receive here at Mass, and which we adore here in this church, and in all the tabernacles throughout the world.

The Catechism reminds us that it is incomplete to say that the Church celebrates the Eucharist; it is the Eucharist that makes the Church. (§1396) Here, at this moment and in this place, by his own sacrifice extended into our lives, Christ makes us into his Body, the Church.

Our birth as the Church of Jesus Christ begins at the Last Supper. In First Corinthians, one of the earliest books of the New Testament, St. Paul reports on this tradition. At the Last Supper, on the night he was betrayed, Jesus blessed and broke bread, and gave it to his disciples, saying, “This is my body that is for you.” He then took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” By identifying that broken bread and that shared cup with his own body, soon to be broken on the Cross, and his own Blood, soon to be shed in his Passion, Jesus perpetuates through time the offering of his own one sacrifice. This is a tremendous gift for us; because Jesus has extended his one, perfect sacrifice to us in the Mass, we have an opportunity to share in it. We come here to offer our own sacrifice of praise, to offer our own joys and troubles on this altar, that we may be transformed into the Body of Christ in the world. This is what conscious and active participation in the Mass means: to come and offer ourselves as a spiritual sacrifice and consent to our own transformation in Christ.

At the Last Supper the apostles are given the gift and the command to continue to offer bread and wine—now identified with the Body and Blood of Christ. By the prayer and laying on of hands in ordination, the apostles handed over to their successors the office and power to offer this true memorial of Jesus’ sacrificial Passion. Thus, the Eucharist—the great ‘Thanksgiving’—has come down to us in the priesthood of our bishops, which they have also shared with their helper priests in the Order of Presbyter.

We see a picture of this process of Sacred Tradition in the gospel today: faced with the apostles’ anxiety for the hungry crowd, Jesus instructs the Twelve to “give them some food yourselves.” Jesus blesses and breaks the loaves, gives them to the Twelve, who in turn feed five thousand people. This is an image of Sacred Tradition; Jesus offers himself as the broken bread entrusted to the Twelve, the bread of life which multiplies in the hands of bishops and priests down through the ages until this very morning, when the holy Eucharist is celebrated all over the world.

Today, as every Sunday, we celebrate all these great mysteries. We give thanks to Jesus for giving us this memorial of his suffering and death. By his institution of the Eucharist, Jesus provides us with a way to join our own sacrifice to his here at Mass. By receiving his Body and Blood into our bodies and our lives, we become what we receive, and are built into the Church. In turn we are called to imitate the sacrifice we receive, to let our hearts be broken at the suffering of others, and to pour ourselves out for their salvation.

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.

Renovated and Missioned

(3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, C)

In the first reading today we hear from the book of Nehemiah, in which we meet Ezra the priest. Ezra and Nehemiah were two important figures in the return of the people of God from the Babylonian Exile. Towards the end of the sixth century BC, after two generations in exile, King Cyrus the Persian ended their Captivity and allowed the people to return to Jerusalem. The city, of course, had to be rebuilt, and Nehemiah is famous for some of this work. The faith had to be reestablished as well, and this is what is going on in the reading. Ezra is reading out the Law to the people and restoring familiarity with God’s word and commandments. Though the people are weeping—perhaps from having to stand there all morning or because the newly rediscovered demands of the Law seemed overwhelming—Ezra invites them to celebrate. Jerusalem is being rebuilt, the covenants are being renewed, and it’s time, as Ezra says, for “rich foods and sweet drinks.”

The good news for us today is that Jesus, in the announcement and inauguration of his mission which we hear in the gospel, is about the same work for us. Nehemiah rebuilding the walls and gates of Jerusalem can be an image for us of what we are about here at the Sunday Eucharist. As the Catechism teaches, “The Eucharist makes the Church.” (§1396) In Holy Communion we are addressed by the minister with our deepest name, our enduring and eternal identity—the Body of Christ. We gather here to be made together into the New Jerusalem, which, as we hear in the book of Revelation, is the new City which comes out of heaven and joins herself to earth as the ultimate destiny of creation. We, in our human lives united to the humanity of Christ in our baptism, are the living stones that provide for that joining of heaven and earth. Here at Mass we are built into that New Jerusalem. “The Eucharist makes the Church.”

As the Church we are the heirs and custodians of the mission of Jesus Christ. His mission is put into our hands and entrusted to us. This is part of what it means when Jesus says that the prophecy of Isaiah is “fulfilled in your hearing.” When we gather each Sunday to hear God’s Word, the mission of Jesus is handed over anew and fulfilled in our acceptance.

What is the mission of Jesus Christ? It is to be anointed to “bring glad tidings to the poor,” “liberty to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.” To offer our time, praise, personal sacrifices and indeed our whole selves on this altar each Sunday is to be willing to be transformed into the Body of Christ and become the bearers of this mission. As the Catechism also teaches, the “Eucharist commits us to the poor.” “To receive in truth the Body and Blood of Christ given up for us, we must recognize Christ in the poorest, his brethren.” (§1397)

In our Holy Communion today, may we know that we are fulfilling the command of Ezra to make our rejoicing in the Lord our strength as we eat the rich food of the Body of Christ and share in the sweet drink of his Precious Blood. Let us rejoice to be built into the New Jerusalem, and let us accept anew the mission of Jesus to bring good news to the poor.

Baptized or Burned

(3 Advent, C)

Brothers and sisters, we have a choice to make. To those who came to him in heartfelt expectation and received the baptism of repentance, John the Baptist announces that a fire is coming upon the earth. What will this fire will be for us? Will it be the fiery baptism with the Holy Spirit or the unquenchable fire that burns the chaff? John promises that both are coming. Indeed, they are the same thing.

For those who have looked forward to the arrival of the Savior and are ready to receive Him, this is a moment of rejoicing. “Fear not, O Zion, be not discouraged! The LORD, your God, is in your midst” proclaims the prophet Zephaniah. The love and salvation of God is arriving in our world and in our lives, and there is no greater cause for rejoicing. The classic name for this third Sunday of Advent is Gaudete Sunday, from the Entrance Antiphon for today’s Mass, which is taken from the second reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians: Gaudéte in Dómino simper: íterum dico, gaudéte. Dóminus enim prope est. “Rejoice in the Lord always: again I say, rejoice! The Lord is near.”

This nearness of the Lord is the coming fire of which John the Baptist speaks. The fire is the passionate love of God, God’s burning desire for our salvation. In his infinite compassion, God saves the world by uniting his own divine life to our humanity in Christ, so that our human nature—yours and mine—can be reformed and re-created from the inside out. Jesus Christ continues this divine mission each day for us who are baptized into his death and receive his Risen Life into our very bodies in Holy Communion. The Body and Blood of Christ is the medicine of the divine physician, meant to cleanse and re-create our lives from within.

The Incarnation of the Word, which we prepare to celebrate at Christmas, is the dawn of this divine plan of salvation, the arrival of the fire of God’s burning love in our humanity.

As God’s burning love descends to make a home within us, it is up to us to decide what this divine fire will be for us. It is too intense to ignore, and if we try it will burn us away like chaff in the wind, lost to eternity. Instead, may we rejoice to consent to God’s love as a cleansing, spiritual, fiery baptism for each of our hearts and lives. Let us make ourselves homes for the fire of God’s love, that God’s delight may be our joy as we become those called to radiate divine love to the world.

Can You Drink The Cup That I Drink?

(29th Sunday in Ordinary Time, B)

As soon as we begin to hear the gospel today, we know that something is very wrong. James and John approach the Lord and say, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” What? The disciples don’t get to boss around the master, or the learners the teacher! That’s backwards! We’ve all been in those homes where it is the children who are running the family, or God forbid, the cat. The rotten fruits of such disorder are many, and such confusion is the problem of James and John as they try to tell the Lord what to do.

James and John want to sit on Jesus’ right and left when he comes into his glory. Fine; Jesus knows that they will, but he also knows that they do not understand that his glory will be his exaltation on the throne of the Cross. They do not understand what they have surely heard in the Scriptures: Isaiah’s prophecy that the one who accomplishes the will of the LORD will be God’s “suffering servant.”

Jesus asks, “Can you drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?” St. John Chrysostom teaches that this cup is Jesus’ destiny as the Suffering Servant, and the baptism is his Passion. The Passion of Christ is a baptism because it accomplishes the purification and renewal of the world. Are James and John ready for the same destiny? Or perhaps closer to home, are we?

Here at Mass we ought to keep Jesus’ challenge in mind—“Can you drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?”—when we approach the Lord’s suffering in Holy Communion. We who are devout Catholics have received Holy Communion many more times than we can remember, and so one danger for us is that we might begin to receive casually. It’s a serious thing to dare to receive Our Lord in Holy Communion. Here at Mass we receive his broken Body and his Blood poured out on the Cross. We consent to receive the suffering and sacrifice of Jesus Christ into our bodies. It ought to fill us with a little bit of healthy fear and trembling, because to receive the sacrifice of Christ into our lives and our bodies is to allow God to configure our souls to Christ the Suffering Servant. In our Holy Communion we are asking to drink Jesus’ own cup of suffering, and to be baptized into his Passion and death. Now this is the Passion and death that is the purifying baptism for the world, but that doesn’t make it easy. It is a joyful thing to receive our Lord in Holy Communion, but it is also a grave challenge.

This is how the reversal Jesus teaches at the end of the gospel today makes sense. When we consent to be configured to the sacrifice of Christ, when we become willing to share in the saving work of the Suffering Servant, we effect in our own selves a reversal of the abusive power structures of the world. The rulers of this world like to lord it over those subject to them, but Jesus says it shall not be so among us who are his disciples. “Whoever wishes to be great among you will be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you will be the slave of all.” To be great in Christ is to be servant; this is the salvation from abuse of power and oppression that God offers to the world in his Son. Let us reverently approach the Lord in Holy Communion today, and allow ourselves to be shaped into the pattern of God the Servant revealed to us in Jesus Christ, that God may accomplish in us the salvation He gives to the world in his Son.

The Hard Saying

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

Lady Wisdom

(20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, B)

In the first reading today from the book of Proverbs, we encounter one of the great feminine images of God in the Sacred Scriptures, Wisdom, is preparing her table for her dinner guests. This passage we heart today is part of a larger section in which two banquets are being prepared, one by Wisdom and the other by Folly. Whose invitation will we accept? Who will be our hostess in this life, Wisdom or Folly?

We who are Christians know this personification of divine Wisdom, the Lady setting her table, as one image of the second person of the Blessed Trinity. Let’s just review our theology of the Trinity: God is so good, such an overwhelming Love, that from all eternity God overflows into a perfect self-expression. We usually call this first procession of the Blessed Trinity the Word or the Son. It is through this Word that God makes the universe; i.e., ‘God said…and so it happened.’ This is the Word that becomes flesh for us in the humanity of Jesus Christ.

So we are talking about the self-expression of God. Word, Son, Wisdom, there are all ways of talking about the self-communication of God, revealing to us what God is like, what is God’s personality, if you will; God’s style, desire, and will. This is what the written Word of God is for us in the Sacred Scriptures, just as is the birth, teaching, passion and death of the Word made flesh in Jesus Christ; it is all the loving God speaking to us of his desire and will for the good of every creature.

And so it also with minor images from the Sacred Scripture of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, like the woman Wisdom we encounter in Proverbs today. She reveals for us something of what God is like. God is like a woman carefully setting a table and preparing a meal. She calls to her potential guests, inviting them to “forsake foolishness” and come into her wise Presence.

Jesus proclaims that the one who feeds on him will have life, just as he has life from the Father. “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.” This is the same invitation: to come to the table of Wisdom and receive the food of eternal life. Jesus says that the one who eats his body and drinks his blood has eternal life. Not, will have eternal life, but has eternal life. Now. So in our communion with the humanity of Christ in this Eucharist, the overflowing Love—which is God—comes to live in us in all its eternity.

In one of the quiet prayers of the priest during the Mass, our Holy Communion is called the remedium sempiternum, or as our new Mass translation will call it, a “healing for eternity.” Coming here to this altar, to the table that Wisdom has prepared, we receive our divine medicine, the antidote to the wisdom of this world.

For the wisdom of this world is just cleverness at it best or pride at its worst. The wisdom of this world is about getting for ourselves something that somebody else lacks. But the Wisdom of God is instead about letting go of ourselves that others might live and flourish. This is nothing more than to imitate the self-emptying Incarnation and sorrowful Passion of Jesus Christ, and to imitate and become like Christ is the work of us who are Christ-ians.

Get Up and Eat

(19th Sunday in Ordinary Time, B)

Elijah, in the course of fleeing for his life from Ahab and Jezebel, gets tired. He gives up. He prays for death, and goes to sleep under a tree. The angel comes to him, not with an invitation, but a command: “Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you.” The food the angel provides strengthens Elijah to walk forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God.

Now when we hear this account of the man of God Elijah, right away we see ourselves in the story. We are in the same position. Our lives, like Elijah’s flight, can seem like a tiring journey. We are constantly threatened by sickness, insecurity, relationships that don’t work, and so many other hard things. The world around us isn’t very encouraging either; increasingly violent and aimless, a world without God or even respect for life or nature leaves us all a little more empty of motivation.

Now probably not a lot of us, faced with the terrors and troubles of this life, are going to totally give up and lie down and pray for death like Elijah did. Nevertheless, there are lots of subtle ways in which we can tempted to give up. Perhaps we see the social problems of our neighborhoods or our nation and they seem overwhelming, so we withdraw from our privilege of being active citizens locally and nationally. Maybe we notice here at Mass that there are a lot Catholics missing from the Lord’s assembly, but we don’t ask the Holy Spirit to show us opportunities to challenge the lapsed Catholics we know to be faithful to the promises of their baptism. In religious life or the priesthood we can tempted to just live our own journey as best we can, while ignoring the malaise and the decadence around us, and thinking that the scandal some religious and priests give to the world is somebody else’s business.

In the Lord’s own words, we Christians, no matter what our state in life, are meant to be light, salt, and leaven for the world. We are called by our baptism into Christ to be a force for the enlightenment and transformation of the world as it makes its way into the Kingdom of God.

This is a very tall order. It will not be easy, and left to ourselves and our own lights and strengths, of course we would give up. So God says to us, as the angel said to Elijah, “Get up and eat” and be fortified for your journey. This is God’s response to the mess we have made of our lives and this world: not a magical fix, but a desire to share with us his own divine life and power, so that we might take responsibility for ourselves. This is the word that comes to us here at Mass, “Get up and eat.” Here we receive the strengthening nourishment we need to fulfill our vocation of holiness and Christian leadership during our earthly journey.

In the Eucharist we receive the divine nourishment we need to let go of fear and walk boldly through troubled lives and a lost and violent world. As Jesus says, “the one who believes has eternal life.” Not, ‘will have eternal life,’ but has eternal life. Now. In our Holy Communion the eternal and indestructible Life and Creativity that is God himself comes to live in our hands, in our bodies, and in our lives. The fruit of this for us is twofold. First, our communion with Christ unites us to his dying and rising, and gives us the confidence that we will share in his Resurrection. “Whoever eats this bread will live forever.” Second, by receiving the Bread of Life we make a home for divine power and creativity in ourselves, and so far from giving up, we are empowered to become the light and leaven for this world, challenged to lead ourselves and all our suffering brothers and sisters out of darkness and gloom into the blessed light and peace of the Kingdom of God.

So if we are ever tempted to give up, let us listen to the words of the angel as we prepare to make our Holy Communion, “Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you.”

The Example of the Shepherd

(16th Sunday, B)

When Jesus “saw the vast crowd, his heart was moved with pity for them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd.” And isn’t it still true? Our troubled world rolls along day after day, year after year, confused and suffering, and not quite knowing how to really move forward. Turn on one of the TV news channels. Politicians and ‘experts’ argue all day about the fine plans that will get us out of war, protect us from terrorism, fix the economy, and put and end to poverty, racism, hopelessness, and every other social evil. But it doesn’t seem to happen. What’s wrong with us? Why do we have so much trouble trying to make a better world?

The world has not yet succeeded in hearing the voice of the true Shepherd. So often the shepherds of this world fail us. The constant news of political scandals—and Church scandals too!—makes the lament of the prophet Jeremiah just as current for us: “Woe to the shepherds, who mislead and scatter the flock of my pasture, says the LORD.”

Yes, both in the Church and in the political world, we can understand Jeremiah’s harsh words against those who were supposed to be good shepherds of the people. But we are also heirs to Jeremiah’s promise: the true King and Son of David, the “LORD our Justice” has indeed appeared, and he is the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the Good Shepherd who shows us the true and successful way to be human beings.

This is part of God’s purpose in the Incarnation of the Son; God gives us our Lord and our Lady to show us how to be human beings. Jesus and Mary reveal humanity as God sees it and was God would have it. The divine humanity of Jesus Christ is for our imitation, as is the perfect discipleship of Christ we see in his Blessed Mother.

Jesus is the Good Shepherd not just in what he teaches, but also by example. Again, in Jesus we see God’s idea of what a human being is—someone who announces the Kingdom of God, meets others with gentleness and peace, heals the sick and suffering, and ultimately offers his life for others. That’s the Jesus we meet here at Sunday Mass.

It’s no accident that the very next passage in St. Mark’s gospel after the one we hear today is the feeding of the five thousand. In this great prefiguring of the holy Eucharist, Jesus acts out his concern for the vast crowd by nourishing them with the bread that only he can give. And so it is with us here at holy Mass. Jesus offers his own divine humanity as our nourishment, so that God’s own idea of perfect and flourishing humanity might find a home in our lives through our Holy Communion.

It is in this sense that as Catholic Christians, we can say that the Eucharist is our social and political agenda. It is the Mass that the divine humanity of the Good Shepherd, the one who can lead us to a safer world of justice and peace, becomes present for us. Let us listen to his voice, rejoice in his Presence come to live within us through Holy Communion, and may we help the world to follow the true Shepherd, the only one who can lead us out of all the self-inflicted misery of this world.

The Body and Blood of Christ

(Corpus Christi, B)

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

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

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

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

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.

I Have Given You a Model to Follow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Optimistic Investor

(33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, A)

The parable we hear today from St. Matthew is one of those parables in which we usually jump too quickly to an examination of ourselves. As soon as we hear it we begin to judge ourselves morally to see how well we are doing with the resources that God has entrusted to us. But when we begin our self-examination right away, we miss a lot. We’ll get to all that, but first let’s bracket ourselves off and take the time to notice the image of God presented by the man in the parable, and the attitudes of God that are imagined through his relationships with his servants.

I don’t prefer the traditional title for this passage, the “parable of the talents,” but instead I like to call it the parable of the optimistic investor. The man entrusts his servants in the parable with a huge amount of money; the talent was a unit of both weight and currency in the ancient world. Now nobody is exactly sure how much it was. One commentator I read said that it might be about fifteen years’ worth of wages for an ordinary worker. Another said that a talent would be about a cubic foot of gold or silver. So in any case we’re talking about a lot of money. And this is the first part of the image of God we should notice; God has entrusted to each of us resources of tremendous value. Indeed, God has invested in us, in our humanity, the divine life of his only Son. Through our baptism into Christ’s death and Resurrection and through our Holy Communion with his humanity in this Eucharist, God has invested each of us with his own divine Presence. In fact, God has poured out his own infinitely loving and refreshing Self into our humanity. That’s the good news of the Incarnation, and the ultimate blessing each of us has received as members of Christ’s body.

Just like the man in the parable, God looks forward to a return on his investment. It is God’s delight to see us taking the gift of God within and making it flourish in the particular circumstances of our relationships and our lives. This is what we do as Christians; we strive to become vehicles for the grace of God, bringing the caring, gentle, reconciling love of God to all that we do and giving it a chance to grow and increase in the world around us. Notice what the man in the parable says when he settles accounts with the first servant, the one who had doubled his money: “Come, share your master’s joy.” This is the God who is delighted when we take the presence of Christ within us and allow it to flourish in our families, our jobs, and our communities.

But we also have to keep in mind that though heaven rejoices when we make God’s investment in us grow, this is not just an invitation. God does not invite us to make his goodness and holiness multiply in the world; he commands us to do so. God is demanding! See how the man treated the servant who buried his talent in fear. That servant was condemned pretty harshly. Is this unfair? Well, no, because as we were told in the beginning of the parable, each servant was given a sum to work with “according to his ability.” From this we know that the servant who was given the one talent could have done something with it, but he didn’t.

So it is with God. God invests his own divine life within us according to each one’s ability. The presence and blessing of God that each of us has is tailored and meant for the particular creation that each of us is. It is up to us to take the saving, reconciling, and renewing presence of God that he has placed within us and use it to build up the people and the world around us in love. This is what it means to be the body of Christ we become in this Eucharist, and to participate in God’s great work of lifting up all creation in the Resurrection of Christ.

Repaying To God What Belongs To God

(29th Sunday in Ordinary Time, A)

(Mass of Thanksgiving at parish of Baptism, First Communion, and Confirmation)

In today’s gospel we see the Jesus of the clever comeback. We shouldn’t miss this simple point; we are meant to cheer for our hero who eludes both the trap and turns the challenge back on his enemies.

They try to trap Jesus, because in the question of paying the tax to Rome he can’t win. Let’s notice who is sent to give the challenge: the disciples of the Pharisees, who, as devout Jews would have been set against the Romans who were occupying their country, and the Herodians who were the ruling class. Now as we all know, the ruling classes are always interested in having people pay their taxes. So Jesus can’t win. If he recommends paying the census tax, he’ll be in trouble with the Pharisees. If he says that the tax shouldn’t be paid, he’ll be in trouble with the local authorities.

But Jesus eludes this rhetorical trap by elevating the whole conversation. He offers a comeback that says: Would that we were so concerned with how we pay our debts to God! And this is a fine reflection us who find ourselves in a pretty intense election season in this country, when there is endless talk about taxes, who should pay them, and how much. (As my father used to say, the trouble is that the United States was founded on the principle that you shouldn’t have pay taxes.) But imagine what the world would be like if we were so concerned as all this for how to pay our debts to God.

To get this point across, Jesus uses a very clever analogy. He asks to see the coin used to pay the tax, and when he sees Caesar’s image on it, he recommends returning to Caesar what seems to belong to him. But then Jesus gives invites his adversaries to repay to God what belongs to God. And so we are invited to reflect on the question, what bears the image and inscription of God in the same way that the coin bears the image and inscription of Caesar? The answer is clear: it is us ourselves, created in the “image of likeness of God.”

This thing with the Roman money is a powerful analogy, and it’s worth some sustained reflection. Let’s bring it into our time though, and replace the Roman coin with one of our standard forms of money, say the $20 dollar bill. Here it is, with the image of Andrew Jackson on the front, and the image of the White House on the back. So if we are paying attention, and even if we’re not, each time we use one of these bills we are reminded of who we are as Americans. The history and the ideals of our country pass through our hands whenever we use this money, and by using it, we remember who we are as a country and what we stand for.

Now, our soul is the same way. It bears the image and imprint of the God who created it. So each time in the course of a day when we use our soul by loving, learning, praying, or just by trying to be fully present to another human being, we can be reminded, we can notice the imprint of God on ourselves. Just by paying attention to ourselves as we relate, work, and pray with each other, we can remember God. In the same way that the images of our secular history pass through our hands whenever we use our money, so the image and likeness of God in which each of us is created, passes into our relationships and becomes a holy communion between persons.

Once we have noticed the image and likeness of God in the loving actions of our own soul, we are ready to fulfill Jesus’ invitation to return to God what belongs to him. But what does it mean to return to God the soul that belongs to him? How do we do that? Well, here’s the really good news: it’s already been done for us.

This is the saving meaning of the Lord’s Resurrection. In his Passion and death Jesus takes our humanity, having borrowed it from us through our Blessed Mother, brings it through the suffering and alienation from God we have brought upon ourselves with our sins, and returns it to God in his Resurrection. So if we want to fulfill Jesus’ command to offer our souls back to God who made them in his own image and likeness, all we have to do is allow our humanity, our hearts and lives, to be caught up into the humanity of Jesus Christ. We do this by faith, by prayer, and especially through the Holy Communion we receive here at Mass. It’s here in the Eucharist that we become what we receive, become who we most truly are. It is here that we become the Body of Christ risen from the dead, offering our humanity back to the God who created us.

Invited

(28th Sunday in Ordinary Time, A)

Well here we are in church on Sunday. We should take a moment to notice that our presence here together is a remarkable thing. Even among us Catholic Christians who are fully initiated into our faith through Baptism, Confirmation, and the Eucharist, we who actually practice our religion and make an effort to remain faithful to God are a minority. In our culture, at this point in history, most of our sisters and brothers in Christ who once professed—or had professed on their behalf—the catholic and apostolic faith are no longer with us here at the Sunday Eucharist.

I think at one time or another, each of us who are religiously observant people have asked the question: Why me? How is that other people, even members of our families and those are otherwise dear to us, can be indifferent or even hostile to the presence of God which, though always obscure, is nonetheless somewhat obvious to us? Why do I have the faith which someone else seems to lack?

Is it because God is kinder to us than he is to the others? Certainly not. As the prophet Isaiah proclaims in the first reading we hear today, the salvation God prepares—which the prophet imagines through the wonderful image of the messianic banquet—is a salvation for “all peoples” and “all nations.” God wills and desires the salvation of everyone, and is inviting every heart and soul to his banquet at every moment. But as Jesus says at the end of the Gospel we hear today, though “many are invited, few are chosen.”

Now the parable of the banquet, much like the parable of the tenants in the vineyard we heard from Matthew last week, is meant by the evangelist to be an allegory for the mixed reception Jesus received among his own people. Just like the tenants of the vineyard mistreated or killed those who were sent to them, so in today’s Gospel those invited to the banquet mistreat and kill the representatives of the king. In this we are meant by Matthew to understand the rejection of Jesus by the chief priests and rulers of Jerusalem. Nevertheless, this applies to us as well in our situation in which some accept the invitation to the wedding feast and others do not.

For the wedding feast is here and now. This Eucharist that we celebrate is the wedding banquet for the marriage of heaven and earth. As we hear each year in the proclamation at the great Vigil of Easter, “this is the night, when heaven is wedded to earth, and man is reconciled with God.” Why is that we have accepted the invitation to be here and so many of our brother and sister Catholics seem to have rejected it, like those in the Gospel who go off to their own business rather than attending the wedding feast? It’s not because God likes us better. It’s not because we are less sinners than they are. It’s only our good fortune. The particulars of our own personal histories and many other variables made it so that we were able to consent to the grace of God with less distraction than the others.

And for this we must be eternally grateful, literally. Though we haven’t done anything to deserve it, it is our privilege to be the ones who are faithful to God. We ought to rejoice in our presence here at the Sunday Eucharist, grateful that faithfulness to God and the virtue of religion have taken root in our lives and hearts. But this isn’t the end. It is our privilege to be here, but it is also our task to become more and more the Body of Christ we receive here.

In the Gospel the guest who was found without a wedding garment was thrown out of the party. We need not fear this happening to us, because we have received the wedding garment; it was symbolized by the white robe which we wore at our baptism. This baptismal garment will cover us again when we arrive at the door of the church for our funeral and the white pall is placed upon our coffin. But in between the beginning and end of our life of faith on this earth, it is up to us to keep that baptismal garment shining. We must consent to the grace of God working in us so that our baptism bears fruit and the garment of our baptism shines more and more brilliantly, reflecting the goodness and mercy of God to those around us.

The Imitation of Christ

(26th Sunday in Ordinary Time, A)

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Forgiving Body of Christ

(23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, A)

At first glance the gospel passage we hear today might seem like a simple procedure for dealing with trouble in the Christian community. Jesus advises us to take a step-by-step approach in dealing with someone who is trapped in a sin that is hurting the unity or the holiness of the Body of Christ.

Let’s notice, though, Jesus’ astonishing statement at the end of gospel. Do you remember a couple of weeks ago when we heard St. Peter’s great confession of faith, and how Jesus gave him the “keys to the kingdom of heaven,” so that whatever he bound on earth would be bound on earth and whatever he loosed on earth would be loosed in heaven? Well in today’s gospel we hear Jesus giving that same authority to all of his disciples. Consider what this means: the forgiveness of God is in our hands! When we forgive someone, we forgive them not just with our forgiveness but with the forgiveness of God himself. “Whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

Why should this be, that God has handed over to us the power to dispense his own forgiveness to each other? It is because we are the Body of Christ. As St. Paul writes in the letter to the Philippians, God “emptied himself” into the human life of Jesus Christ, so that in Christ we see the full revelation of God on our human terms. And where is this revelation of God now, for us? It is right here. Jesus Christ, who died on the Cross for us, is risen into the new life of the Living Bread and Precious Blood of the Eucharist we celebrate each Sunday. We who receive this Holy Communion with the humanity of Christ, become what we receive. We become the Body of Christ, risen from the dead.

So if we are the Body of Christ, what does the Body of Christ do? First of all it preaches the Kingdom of God, and so this is our primary vocation as Christians. Second, the Body of Christ allows itself to be broken for the salvation of the world. And so we who are Christians allow the suffering of the world around us to break our hearts, that we might learn compassion for all. Finally, as we hear in the gospel today, as the Body of Christ, the forgiveness of God is on our hands. “Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

We are all well acquainted with our sins. As the old saying goes, a clean conscience is a sign of a bad memory. We all know what it’s like to long for the healing forgiveness of God. Indeed the whole world longs for this forgiveness, for the forgiving of one another from the heart is the only thing that will stop this world’s endless cycles of violence. So if we have ever longed for God’s forgiveness, let us fulfill the injunction to love our neighbor as ourselves, and give God’s forgiveness to each other. It is ours to give, as the living Body of Christ, the revelation of God in the world. To forgive is to heal, to stop the cycles of violence and sin that hurt everyone. To forgive is to love perfectly. To stop the reproduction of violence and sin is to take up the Cross and fulfill our vocation as Christ’s risen Body. It is the love that is the fullest expression of the Mystery we call “God.”