The Woman At The Well

 III Lent, A

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

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

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

The Most Holy Trinity

(Trinity Sunday, C)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creation

(Pentecost Sunday)

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Spirit of Unity

(7th Sunday of Easter, C)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God's Dwelling

(5th Sunday of Easter, C)

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

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

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

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

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

The Lamb Who Is The Shepherd

(4th Sunday of Easter, C)

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

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

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

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

The Lord's Breakfast

(3rd Sunday of Easter, C)

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

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

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

The Resurrection, Continued

(2 Easter, C)

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

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

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

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

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

Set Free

(5th Sunday of Lent, C)

Brothers and sisters, on this last Sunday before Holy Week we hear on the most beloved of Jesus’ acts of forgiveness and salvation, the story of the woman caught in adultery. This passage is full of beautiful and challenging spiritual teaching, and I thought that one way we could approach it is through the various characters.

The scribes and Pharisees. These are the bad guys in the passage, but we shouldn’t let their dastardliness distract us from the ordinariness of their spiritual error. It’s one that people commit all the time. They are so into the woman’s sin that they forget to notice their own sins. We do the same thing whenever we engage in gossip and detraction, pointing out to each other all of the bad things other people do. If we do this habitually we can learn to absolve ourselves and blame everyone else for whatever is wrong in our lives and the world. The sorry state of my religious community, my friendship, my workplace or my marriage is everyone else’s fault and I don’t notice the contribution of my own sin and selfishness. I once saw a “motivational” poster I liked very much. It had a picture of chain breaking at the weakest link. The message said, “The only consistent feature in all of your dissatisfying relationships is you.” The devil is perfectly happy to have us as zealous as could be in our condemnation of sin, just as long as it’s somebody else’s sin and not our own.

The missing man. Personally, I don’t know much about adultery, but I know this: you can’t commit it by yourself. ‘It takes two to Tango,’ as is said. So where’s the adulterous man? He’s missing from the scene. This reminds us that we always have to be careful in handing out blame. Rarely is someone individually responsible for evil. In fact, when we ask the question of what’s wrong with the world there is only one rational answer me: “Me.” To take responsibility for our own sins rather than blaming each other is the beginning of conforming our lives to the Cross of Christ. One of my favorite of the Desert Fathers, Abba John the Dwarf, put it this way: “We have cast off the light burden, that is to say self-accusation, and taken up a heavy burden, that is to say self-justification.” Let’s throw off the heavy burden of blame and take up the light burden of humility.

The woman. We should notice how she teaches us that it doesn’t matter how we get to the presence of Jesus. It wasn’t her idea to end up at his feet! But once there, she recognizes him for Who He is. She calls him “sir,” but the word is kyrie, there being no distinction between ‘sir’ and ‘Lord’ in the Greek of the New Testament. This poor woman is dragged before Jesus, presumably against her will, but once there she receives his kindness and salvation. Therefore, if our own contrition for our sins is weak or imperfect, we shouldn’t worry. All that matters is that we get to the presence of Jesus and recognize him when we get there.

Jesus. What is Jesus’ concern as he receives the adulterous woman? He does not deny that she has sinned, but he is not interested in condemning her for what has happened in the past. Jesus only concern is to protect her from danger, condemnation, guilt, and shame and to set her free to fulfill his command, “do not sin anymore.” That’s the gift we each have in Christ, to let go of whatever has gone before, and be set free for a future of holiness. I once told a priest in confession that I really just needed a fresh start. He said, “Fresh starts are the Lord’s specialty.” As Oscar Wilde put it, “The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.”

Brothers and sisters, let us let go of blame, notice or own sins, and become that sinner with a future. It is Jesus who sets us free for a future of freedom and holiness.

Being Invited and Saving the Party

(2nd Sunday, C)

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

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

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

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

Christ the King

(Christ the King, B)

Back in studies I once took a political science course, and in the class I met a guy from the island of Tonga. Now maybe you’ve never heard of Tonga – I know I hadn’t. Tonga is a little island in the south Pacific, and our political science teacher, interested as he was in different systems of government, was very interested in meeting someone from Tonga. You see, Tonga is one of the last places in the world with a real monarchy. They have a real king who actually rules the country.

Now this is pretty foreign to our experience. We’re not used to being ruled by royalty. For us, we are familiar with more modern forms of earthly government: presidents and prime ministers, parliaments and congresses. For us, kings are a thing of the past.

Does this make it hard for us to get into this feast of Christ the King? I don’t think so. Fact is, the kingship of Jesus Christ and the nature of his kingdom are so different from any earthly idea of power and government that perhaps we who don’t have any experience of earthly kings will understand today’s feast more easily.

Think about it. Take a look at Christ the King. What kind of power is this? Instead of earthly power he is nailed to the Cross and can’t even move his hands and feet. Instead of royal robes he is naked and shamed. For a crown he has only the crown of thorns made by his torturers.

What kind of king is this? Pontius Pilate was pretty curious about it. Seeing the beaten and bound Jesus before him, he wondered what kind of king he could possibly be dealing with. And so Jesus described his kingship to Pilate: For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth hears my voice.

The kingdom of Christ is about truth, not earthly power. Reigning from the throne of his Cross, Jesus Christ reveals the truth. And the truth is that real power in this world is humility and the giving of oneself for others. It’s not about having it your way, and not the power to influence and control anybody. Real power is humility and the willingness to give of oneself for others. And this is the kind of king we are dealing with in Jesus Christ.

Reigning from the throne of the Cross, Christ the King reveals to us the truth about our world. The true story of the world is not in the halls of power or in the overwhelming suffering of war. It’s not even in the world’s false hope for an earthly peace which is only about everyone being able to pursue their own desires without interference. The real history of the world is not found in the careers of presidents and prime ministers.

Christ the King reveals to us from the Cross that the true royalty of this world are those who quietly struggle to love each other, to bear with each other’s burdens, to give of themselves without counting the cost or expecting anything in return. The true story of this world is the story of those who in so many small and forgotten ways, give of themselves for each other, give of themselves for the life of another. And this is the Kingdom of God. It’s the real history of the world, and you won’t see it on CNN.

Jesus explains to Pontius Pilate that his kingdom “does not belong to this world.” The kingdom of Jesus Christ is not of this world, but it is in this world. And the kingdom of Christ is in the world because of you and me. In the book of Revelation we hear today how Jesus Christ has made us into a kingdom, priests for his God and Father. It is us who are made into the kingdom of God in this world.

In the sacrament of baptism we witness the royal anointing with oil we have all received. Just as David was anointed by the prophet Samuel to be the greatest of the kings of Israel, and just as Jesus was anointed on his feet by Mary in preparation for his enthronement and glorification on the Cross, we too are anointed in our baptism to share in the kingship of Christ.

You and me, we are the anointed royalty of the kingdom of God. As baptized Christians we are the kings of the world. But our royalty doesn’t get us anything as this world counts power and value. Our royalty is the kingship of Christ the King who rules from the Cross, naked, unable to move, and crowned with thorns.

Our kingdom is the kingdom of God, the kingdom of those who try to follow and imitate Christ by giving of themselves for each other, who offer their efforts and love and lives for the life of the other, indeed for the very life of the world.

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.

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.”

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.

The Outpouring

(Pentecost, Day, B)

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

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

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

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

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

The Desire of our Hearts

(Pentecost, Vigil)

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mission Handed Over

(7th Sunday of Easter, B)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Love of God

(6th Sunday of Easter, B)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vine Grower and Vine

(5th Sunday of Easter, B)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Good Shepherd

(4th Sunday of Easter, B)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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