The Divine Gardener

 III Lent, C

One of the key words of Pope Francis’s pontificate, of which we just celebrated the twelfth anniversary, is accompaniment. In his vision, this is the work of the Church and her sacred ministers, to accompany the People of the God and the grace at work in them.

As a priest, this makes sense to me. Jesus is the Shepherd, not me. The Holy Spirit is the Teacher, not me. My job is to help people recognize, discern, and embrace what the Blessed Trinity is up to in their lives. That’s pastoral accompaniment.

However, though it is the duty of the Church and her sacred ministers to accompany the People of God, all this in service to how God himself accompanies us. We see this divine accompaniment in our readings today.

Making An Easy Thing Hard

(18th Sunday in Ordinary Time, B)

The crowd asks Jesus, “What can we do to accomplish the works of God?” Anyone who believes in God asks this question at some level. If there is a God, what does it mean for me? What does God ask of me? What is God’s will? It’s a really big question, so it’s very good news to hear in the gospel today that the answer is so simple! What does God want from us? “To believe in the one he sent,” Jesus says. That’s it! It’s like that advertising slogan, ‘that was easy.’ “This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent.” When we do that with all our heart and mind, everything else will fall into place.

But notice how the people in the gospel respond. Rather than accept the good news of this easy answer, they make it hard. They ask, “What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you?” What sign? Are they kidding? This gospel passage follows upon the one we heard last Sunday, when Jesus fed five thousand people with five loaves of bread. What sign can you do? Are these folks that forgetful?

But aren’t we like that all the time? Take this very morning for example. We wake up, open our eyes and begin to see this miraculous and beautiful creation. The sun rises on both the bad and the good, a symbol of God’s generous blessing to each of his creatures. If we have a family, perhaps we are greeted by people we love in the morning, revealing the grace of God as it has come to dwell in our lives through the love that is God’s Spirit among us. If we are aware of all this, we arrive at Mass filled with gratitude and bursting with the desire to thank God for his goodness to us. But if you’re anything like me, this isn’t what usually happens. Perhaps I’m preoccupied with some difficult relationship, or missing the miracle of the present moment by worrying about something I have to deal with later.

We do this kind of thing a lot. We miss the miracles and beauties of the moment because we are worrying about the future or living in the past. We miss a lot of the gentle acts of God when we live not in the reality of the now, but in futures that don’t yet exist. Or maybe we miss the presence of God in the present because we are living in the past. Look at the people in the first reading. They complained to Moses about being led into the desert, and want the ‘good old days’ in Egypt when they had better food and bread to eat. They were conveniently forgetting that in Egypt they were slaves and victims of hard, forced labor! People always do this. When thinking back to the past, we imagine that things were better because we’re only remembering the things that were in fact better, while sometimes ignoring that the ‘good old days’ weren’t always so good.

God is eternal, so there is no before or after with God. God lives in the eternal Now, what the medievals called the nunc stans. So if we want to notice, appreciate, and live in the wonders and blessings God gives us, we have to notice the now. We have to work against the twofold distraction illustrated by the two readings today: not forgetting the miraculous signs God does at each moment, like the crowd in the gospel, and not selectively remembering the past like the Israelites in the first reading. Let us make it our spiritual practice to pay attention to the goodness of God that comes to us at each moment of the day, for it is the pouring out of the divine life on the world in the Son. When we see it we will believe in the One God sends, and this is the work 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.

On Our Behalf

(3rd Sunday of Lent, B)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How To Read The Bible

(30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, A)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Nation of Priests

(11th Sunday, A)

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

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

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

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

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

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

What God is Like

(24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, C)

We have in the first reading today the consequences of what, in my interpretation, is the worst sin in all the Sacred Scriptures. Yes, I know, there’s our first parents who ate from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, but they were tricked, after all! But when the children of Israel got Aaron—who should have known better—to make the golden calf for them to worship, that was all on them.

God was very angry, and God resolved to destroy the people and to make a fresh start with just Moses. But Moses convinces God to change his mind. How? What strategy does Moses take in getting God to repent from his decision to destroy the people?

Does Moses say, “God, the people are really sorry, and it won’t happen again.” No. Does he say, “They’re going to put their mind to it, and really try to do better.” No. In fact, the tack that Moses takes in convincing God to spare the people has nothing to do with the people at all! It has everything to do with what God is like.

Moses says, “Remember you servants Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and how you promised to make of them a great nation, powerful, and more numerous than the stars in the sky or the sand on the shore of the sea.” Moses reminds God that he is a God whose good purpose in human history is not to be stopped by human sin or by our consistent failure to respond well. And God spares the people.

Moses’ intercession works because he knows what God is like. He knows that God is faithful in his covenant, and refuses to be foiled by human sin.

In the same way, if we desire to have a healthy spirituality, we need some idea of what God is like. It seems obvious, but there are a lot of unhealthy images of God out there—and in here. This is critical, because, as the letter of John tells us, no one has even seen God. In fact, if we have the courage to bring our ideas out into the sober light of day, it’s pretty hard to even know what we even mean by an utterance like “God.” What—or better, Who—are we talking about when we say, “God”?

This is why it is important for us to take our ideas of what God is like from divine revelation—from the Scriptures. And in this, a Gospel like we have today is very beautiful and useful.

The Pharisees from the Gospel had a certain idea of God as pure, holy, and righteous. And this is quite true. But their problem was in their next logical step: since God is pure, holy, and righteous, then he is the God of the pure, holy, and righteous. And this isn’t exactly the case.

But this is why they complain when Jesus receives sinners and welcomes them to table. In response Jesus offers two beautiful images of God: the diligent shepherd and the woman caring for her house.

God is like the shepherd who seeks after the sheep that has wandered off. God is like the woman sweeping her house, looking for the lost coin—and the valuable coin is our soul.

It changes our idea of what repentance means, no? Sometimes we have the idea that if we have sinned or drifted away from God or from prayer or from our faith entirely, well, then we need to somehow claw our way back. We need to return to prayer, return to the diligent practice of our religion, and once we have done this, we will be acceptable to God again. The images of God in the Gospel today turn all of that on its head. When we drift away it is God who is looking for us! Repentance is not our turning back to God but our allowing ourselves to be found.

Let’s imagine ourselves as the lost coin. We’re under the couch or something, in the dark because of our distractions from God. We’re a bit dusty and tarnished because of our sins. But here comes God the little old lady sweeping the house. And she finds the coin, smiles, picks it up, dusts it off, and holds it to her heart. This is the same way God will behave with us if we only pray for the willingness to be found.

And what will be the response when the coin—our souls—are found? The woman calls her friends and neighbors and has a party. So let’s give heaven a chance to rejoice, and allow ourselves to be found by the God who seeks us, especially when we are lost.

Burning Bush and Fruitful Tree

(3rd Sunday of Lent, C) These days we can’t help but be aware of all of the severe weather in the world, of all the earthquakes and natural disasters, of El Niño and global warming. And once in a while you hear someone saying that all of the suffering of these misfortunes is God’s punishment on the world. There are folks here in the United States who want us to believe that recent hurricanes and tornadoes are a punishment from God for our sins, for things like abortion and so-called gay marriage. But do you really think that a loving God would punish schoolchildren in Georgia or the poor folks in New Orleans for these sins?

In our Gospel today Jesus comes right out against this kind of thinking, and turns it around on the hearer. As we heard, “those eighteen people who were killed when the tower at Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than everyone else who lived in Jerusalem? By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did!”

Do you think the parents who lost their children in the tornado in Georgia were greater sinners than we are? How about the folks who lost their homes and their lives in hurricane Katrina? Were they greater sinners than you and me? Certainly not. Jesus teaches us today that these misfortunes should not lead us to reflect on other people’s sins, but on the state of our own souls, and on our own need for repentance.

This is what Lent is about, is it not? It’s a time to get back to basics, to turn ourselves back to God and to let go of what gets in the way between us and God. The Scriptures offer us so many models of how we can do this, but we have one of the greatest in our first reading today: Moses approaching God in the burning bush.

And what does God say when Moses begins to come near? “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground.” What’s that all about? Sandals are great, but they are made of leather, and leather is dead skin. And nothing having anything to do with death can come near to the living God. And it’s the same with us: in order to approach God, or, better, to allow God to approach us, we have to take off everything that has do with death—that is, the sins by which we bring suffering and difficulty into the world.

This is our choice in life: to approach the Lord or to remain in the selfishness of sin. Moses was amazed at the bush that was on fire, but was not consumed. The fire of God, the Holy Spirit, does not consume, does not destroy. But when we burn with the grumpiness and anxiety of sin—that’s the fire that consumes us. The burning of sin hurts and consumes us, leaving us burnt and dulled in our feeling and perception. But the fire of God does not consume, but rather affirms us, makes us more into the people we are meant to be. And when we see someone truly on fire with the love of God, their true humanity shining through so brilliantly, we are like Moses who was amazed to see the bush burning without being consumed.

So that’s our choice: to burn and be consumed in sin, or to glow safely in the fire of the love of God.

And this choice has some urgency to it, as Jesus teaches us today in the parable of the fig tree. The owner of the vineyard, who is God, of course, comes to look for his figs. Finding none, he tells the gardener to cut down the tree. The gardener promises that, although the tree has been fruitless up to now, he will take better care of it, and it will bear fruit in the following year.

When I was staying at our novitiate in Honduras, the novice master gave each of the novice friars a little patch of ground to cultivate. He said to them, “I need to see that you can care for a living thing. And I can’t see your soul, but I can see this little garden.” How beautiful, right?

This is one way we can hear Jesus in his parable today. We are the gardeners, each of us taking care of the fig tree of our own soul. God is owner of the vineyard and comes to see if our hearts have borne any good fruit, if they have blossomed with love and gentleness and faith.

But God is no absentee landlord! God is right there working in the garden with us. God provides everything we need to grow and flourish. The warmth of God’s love is like the sun that strengthens. Like the Israelites in the desert we receive the life-giving water that flows from the rock—and as Paul says, the rock was Christ!

In this Eucharist, blood and water flow over us from the side of Christ to nourish and fertilize the little garden of our souls. The bread of life gives us the strength to continue to prune and cultivate ourselves, so that, when we finally come face to face with God, we may be found flourishing with all the fruits of love and faith.

Each week we come closer to the great feast of the Resurrection of the Lord. Let us receive today the bread of life and the life-giving water from the Rock, and allow God to cultivate our hearts, so that, when we come to renewal of our baptism this Easter, we are found with loving and peaceful hearts, blossoming out with joy.