Ascension

Ascension of the Lord, B

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

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

Christian Freedom

(13th Sunday in Ordinary Time, C)

“For freedom Christ set us free; so stand firm and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery,” writes St. Paul in the second reading today. The spiritual freedom we have in Christ is worth our reflection from time to time. On the one hand, freedom is one of the great gifts that we have in Christ, and one of the most important ways we recover—in Christ—the image and likeness of God in which we were created, and thus find our happiness and fulfillment. God, after all, is infinitely free, and by being free ourselves we imitate Him and share in His freedom. That’s why human beings always strive for freedom and why it makes us happy, because our hearts and minds are always reaching out for the ultimate, divine Love and Freedom of God. On the other hand, we always have to be on guard against the shallow and erroneous understandings of freedom that come from the world and from that mystery of human selfishness and frustration that Paul calls “the flesh.”

Some people think freedom is just being able to do whatever we please. Thomas Merton has a great line on this: “The mere ability to choose between good and evil is the lowest limit of freedom, and the only thing that is free about it is the fact that we can still choose good.” (New Seeds of Contemplation, 27) Evil and sin make us unhappy by definition. So when I sin by deliberately choosing the bad, thereby making myself miserable—as well as all those who, by their immense charity, put up with me—I am exercising my unfreedom and my slavery to sin. The metaphor of exercise is pertinent, too, because our choices develop our habits and our habits determine what sort of person we become, whether better or worse each day. This is why it’s hard for the wisdom of this world to accept that real freedom is the ability to choose the good, not the false liberty of being able to do whatever we think we want.

This is also why, as St. Paul points out, spiritual freedom and love of neighbor go together. Forgetting about all of the nonsense fed to us by romantic comedies and the like, love is simply to desire the best for another, and to organize our behavior out of that desire. Love means making our life into a right effort for the good and flourishing of the people and earth around us. So, by loving our neighbor, we are seeking the good, and by learning to seek the good consistently we become free and happy. All of this we do in Christ; in fact, this is the very renovation of our humanity that we know as Christ’s Resurrection.

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.

The Body and Blood of Christ

(Corpus Christi, B)

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

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

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

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

The Good Shepherd

(4th Sunday of Easter, B)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Risen Into Our Midst

(3rd Sunday of Easter, B)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Believing Thomas

(2nd Sunday of Easter, B)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Taste of Easter

(Conversion of Paul, Apostle)

This feast of the Conversion of Paul is like a little bit of Easter that intrudes upon us in the middle of winter. It’s like a taste of Easter because today is about the Resurrection of the Lord, and the power of his Risen Presence to re-form and trans-form human lives, indeed to recreate the world anew. In this case we are talking about the transformation of one human life, that of the devout Jew Saul of Tarsus who becomes for us St. Paul the Apostle. His conversion is a big deal for us Christians; the writings of St. Paul make up almost a fifth of our specifically Christian Scriptures, commonly called the New Testament. In fact, if we add those books written by Paul’s co-workers and disciples, we’re up to about a quarter of the New Testament. Paul himself is the second most represented author in the New Testament, after St. Luke.

Because of all this, Paul’s influence upon us and our understanding of the faith is almost incalculable. As a preacher he is adamant that the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ have forever changed the situation of the human person in the world. As a founder of churches he has left us with a missionary model and legacy employed by Christians to this day. And all this because of one encounter with Jesus Christ risen from the dead, while on his way to Damascus.

Now here’s the kicker, brothers and sisters. The Resurrection is a matter of eternity; the Lord risen from the dead enters into his eternal existence at the right hand of the Father. Now notice what this means for us: the Resurrection is just as much a matter of right now as it was on that first Easter morning, and as it was for Paul when his journey was interrupted by grace. This means that the experience of the Resurrection is available to us. Indeed, that is the deepest meaning of our gathering here for the holy Eucharist. Drawn together by the Holy Spirit, we are lifted up and made into the Body of Christ risen from the dead. His risen Presence is here in the Word we hear and in the Holy Communion we share.

To experience the Resurrection is to avail ourselves of the opportunity for transformation, to have our lives reformed and renovated by the presence of Christ, who is God united to our humanity. Listen to how St. Mark describes the transformation of those who encounter and believe in Christ: They will drive out demons and they will speak new languages. And so it can be for us. With our hearts renovated and our thoughts transformed in Christ, we will be empowered to drive from ourselves the demons of selfishness, despair, anxiety, and depression. And then we will be free to drive from our society the demons of violence, poverty, and the ‘culture of death.’ We will speak new languages. Instead of the tired excuses for sin and the toleration of structures of injustice in our society, we will be empowered to speak the word of peace and of God’s desire for the flourishing and salvation of all people. The power flowing from Christ’s Resurrection can do this for us, as it does for Paul. Let us pray for our conversion, for our transformation in Christ, that we too might become the missionaries God desires to send for the renewal of the world.

Destination and Destiny

(Christ the King, A)

The cosmic kingship of Christ is the end of the world. ‘End’ not so much in terms of a terminal point—though it is that too—but ‘end’ in the sense of purpose. That the kingdom of God in which Christ reigns forever should become complete and extend to every human soul and every other part of creation is the point and purpose of everything God has ever done.

We start to get a sense of this in the second reading we hear today from St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. “…in Christ all shall be brought to life, but each in proper order.” This is the process of creation moving toward its final goal of all being brought to eternal life. Christ was first at his Resurrection; his rising to new life is like a kind of preview of the world to come. As Paul says, then those who belong to Christ will be raised as well. When this resurrection of the world reaches completion, then even the final enemy, death, will be destroyed and Christ will reign supreme, and, as Paul says, “God will be all in all.” That’s the reign of Christ the King.

This is about destiny! The full and final reign of Christ is the “life of the world to come” we proclaim in the creed, when the eternal life which we now enjoy obscurely comes to rule every heart and mind and all creation is rolled back into the Original Blessing we call God. This is the fulfillment for which all the prophets hoped, just as Ezekiel in the first reading today looks forward to that divine shepherd who would gather those who are scattered, injured, lost, or sick. This is what God is doing for us in Christ; by pouring his own infinite goodness into our humanity through the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, God offers us a path to safety and healing from all the injuries and misery we have brought upon ourselves with our sins.

In the meantime, brothers and sisters, God not only invites but commands us to become part of this movement towards the final fulfillment of creation. We are not in the situation of the nations who stand before God in St. Matthew’s vision of the Last Judgment—the nations who didn’t know that they were or were not serving Christ in the least of their brothers and sisters. We who are Christians know that on account of the Incarnation of the Eternal Word and the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, the presence of God is to be found in suffering and needy humanity. We are not ignorant like the nations who are judged in the Gospel we hear today. Instead, we are gifted with the eyes of faith that can see the broken body of Christ in the least of our brothers and sisters, and God calls us to serve him in them and so join in the real history of the world, which is the movement toward the fullness of the kingship of Christ.

This is where the world is going, to the fullness of love in which the Resurrection of Christ comes to encompass all the hurt, lost, and broken of our world. Let’s join in.

The Forgiving Body of Christ

(23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, A)

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

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

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

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

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

Stepping Into The Mystery

(4th Sunday of Easter, A)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On The Way

(3rd Sunday of Easter, A)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Untie Him, and Let Him Go

(5th Sunday of Lent, A)

On this last Sunday before we arrive at Holy Week, it makes sense that we should hear about this great sign that concludes Jesus’ public ministry in the gospel of John. The raising of Lazarus shows us Jesus’ victory over death, that he himself is the “resurrection and the life,” and that eternal life is ours in Christ.

Let’s do a little thought experiment. I’d like us to think back to, say, two weeks before we were born. I know, we can’t really remember, but just imagine it. There, at the very beginning of our life, our whole world is our mother’s little womb. It’s dark and it’s small, but it’s complete as far as we were concerned then, and has everything we need. Now let’s say, by some magical process, we were able to receive a letter while we were still in the womb. And let’s say we did receive a letter from our big brother or sister.

So we read the letter. Our older sibling writes: You are not going to believe what’s on the way for you. You’re going to go through some rough hours. This is what you call “being born.” But—and I know this is going to sound crazy—soon you will find yourself in a world infinitely bigger than the one you know now. You’re going to see things, and meet all kinds of people, you’re going to go places, see light and colors, and you’re going to stand up and walk and even run.

So we’re sitting there in the womb, reading this letter and saying to ourselves, “go places and see colorful things?” “Run and jump? I don’t even know what these things are.” Back before we born we couldn’t have known how grand and diverse and beautiful this world we now live in was going to be. So maybe we would have believed the letter or not, but it turned out to be true. We were born, and gradually found ourselves in an infinitely larger reality.

Now the point of all this is that our situation here and now is much the same. At our own death, when we conclude this stage of our lives, we are born into eternity, into a world even larger and more beautiful than this one. And like my little experiment about getting a letter before we were born, we have received a message, a letter from the life that comes after this one. This message, this letter from beyond, is the Word of God himself, Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ is the revelation, in this world of time and space, of the eternal Source of all that is that we call “God.” Jesus Christ is the goodness, gentleness, eternity and beauty of the world to come made visible for us in this world. He is the message sent to us to encourage us to believe in the goodness of our destiny. But just like we couldn’t have imagined the extent of this world before we were born, we can’t now really understand what the new life of heaven and eternal life will be like. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t believe it.

Each of us will have to die. Even Lazarus who received this great work of God raising him from the dead, he’s not with us now. Presumably he died again, and for good. And so it is with each of us. Our time will come. Jesus Christ saves us from death, but not from dying. Recall what Jesus says about Lazarus’s sickness: “This illness is not to end in death.” And it is the same with us. Whatever hurts us in this life, from the natural decline of our bodies, to the misfortunes of life, to our depression and anxiety and all the misery we insist upon for ourselves with our sins, these illnesses will not end in death. We will die, yes, but death is not our end.

For Jesus boldly says, “I am the resurrection and the life.” And his resurrection becomes our own resurrection as soon as become members of his body—by our burial with him in our Baptism, and by our weekly initiation into the Body of Christ in Holy Communion. In fact, this Eucharist fulfills the promise God made through the prophet Ezekiel: “O my people, I will open your graves and have you rise from them.” Our Communion with Christ associates our humanity with his, and makes our own lives part of his rising from the dead.

And this is true freedom. The world we look forward to in the eternity of God himself will heal every hurt with its overwhelming and gentle kindness. And notice: this sets us free from ever fear. For nothing and nobody can really hurt us anymore when we are set free from death. And that’s how God sets us free in this life, free to be happy, healthy, and without worry. That’s God’s hope and desire, to give the command for each of us, as Jesus did for Lazarus, “untie him, and let him go.” Let’s let God untie us from whatever is binding us, and let’s be free.

This Preview Approved for All Audiences

(2nd Sunday of Lent, A)

Anybody here ever go to the movies? Good. Now when you go to the movies, first you have to watch the previews, right? And in a preview, they show you a couple of minutes of a film not yet released. What usually happens is that they show you pieces of different scenes, all mixed up and cut together in a way that makes the movie look better than it actually is. The purpose of this is to make you want to see the movie, and to say yourself, after seeing the preview, ‘wow, that looks good, I want to see that.’ The preview is there to try to make you commit to going to see the whole movie.

Now I suggest to you today that in this Gospel we just heard, Jesus is providing his disciples with a sort of preview of the Resurrection. He takes Peter, James, and John, the three of his apostles who will be most responsible for preaching the Gospel and leading the churches after his Ascension, and he shows them a preview of the glory of his Resurrection. His face “shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light,” Matthew tells us. Even more miraculously, for a moment Jesus enters into eternity itself, and is thus able to commune with Moses and Elijah.

This Transfiguration of the Lord is like a preview of the glory of the Resurrection. Just as a movie preview is designed to encourage to see the whole movie, the Lord gives his apostles the Transfiguration as a way to encourage them through all the terror and trouble that is on the way: Jesus’ arrest, his trial, and finally his execution on the Cross—the great events we will recall more fully in Holy Week.

Brothers and sisters, as the Lord’s Transfiguration provided encouragement to his first disciples, so this Eucharist is meant to do for us. We are pilgrims in this world, people who are journeying on their way to fullness of the Kingdom of God. Often it’s not an easy road. There are many obstacles and many opportunities for discouragement in this life. Life has its misfortunes. We make ourselves miserable with our own sins and suffer because of the sins of others. Many times in life things go wrong or just don’t work out. The final mysteries of sickness and death hang over us, taking those we love.

That’s why we gather here each week for this Eucharist, so we too can be encouraged on our pilgrim way through life. Everything about what we are doing here right now is meant to be a preview and a foretaste of our destination—our personal destination in the God we will all return to at our own death as well as the final destination of all creation in the fullness of the Kingdom of God.

That we gather here in this beautiful church is not just so we can enjoy something beautiful—it’s meant to encourage us in the knowledge that we are on the way to a beautiful destiny in God. The Wisdom of the Word of God we hear at Mass is meant to encourage us to believe in the peaceful Kingdom to which we are traveling. That we sing together in harmony reminds us of the peace and harmony and unity God so desires to give to the world. Most of all, the Body and Blood of the Lord that we receive as our spiritual food helps us to know and believe that God will fulfill every desire and hope, every longing of our hearts. Everything we do here at Mass is meant to be a weekly encouragement and preview of “the life of the world to come” we proclaim at the end of the Creed. And we always need encouragement when we are on a long and sometimes difficult journey.

Our God is an inviting God. Just as God invited Abraham to leave home and journey to a land that God would show him, God invites us to commit ourselves to the journey of faith that has its destination in God himself, in his Kingdom. Abraham didn’t know exactly where he was going, but he went because he trusted God. So it has to be with us and the invitation we receive to the journey of faith. And just as Jesus invited Peter, James, and John up the mountain to be transfigured before them and give them the encouragement of a preview of the Resurrection, so the Risen Lord invites all of us to climb the mountain of faith each week to be fed and encouraged by this Eucharist.

The Resurrection (and Jaws)

(32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, C)

The year of grace 2007 is beginning to come to a close, and we find ourselves once again at the end of the liturgical year. And at the end of the church year, the liturgy and the readings from Sacred Scripture always invite us to reflect on what will come at the end, the Last Things. Today the readings invite us into the primary mystery of our final destiny, the Resurrection. Though we aren’t sure about what it will be like—and this is clear from the Gospel we just heard—our Resurrected destiny ought to give us faith and courage, as it did for the seven brothers we heard about in the reading from 2 Maccabees.

Since the Resurrection is where we are going, since it is the new life to which we are looking forward, it is good for us to have a strong and intelligent idea of what we mean by the Resurrection.

Whenever we say anything about Resurrection, we are first of all talking about the Lord’s own Resurrection, his rising to new life that we celebrate every Easter and on each Sunday. But what do we mean by our Easter proclamation, “Christ is Risen”? Well, here’s one way to think about it—just go with me on this for a moment.

Do you remember the movie Jaws? Do you remember how Jaws is finally killed? Roy Scheider throws a tank of compressed air into the shark’s throat, and then shoots it with his gun. The tank of air explodes, blowing Jaws up. This is a little bit like what we mean by the Lord’s Resurrection. Jaws is like death, and the tank of pure air is like Jesus Christ.

Just as Jaws was able to partially swallow the tank of air, so in the human nature he borrowed from us, Jesus was able to be die, to be swallowed by death. But because Jesus Christ is also God, death can’t hold on to him. The power and love of God explode death from the inside; though he could be swallowed by death in his humanity, death could not hold on to Jesus Christ in his divinity. As the tank of compressed air blew up Jaws from the inside, so the divinity of Christ destroys death from the inside.

This is the Resurrection, and the good news for us is that there is now a path through death to new life, a path established by Jesus Christ in his humanity and divinity. And we are on this path to the Resurrection because of our baptism and because of the Holy Communion we celebrate in this Eucharist. This communion is the joining of Christ’s humanity to ours; the Mass is a celebration and ratification of the unity of our humanity—indeed our very bodies—with the humanity of Christ. And thus as the body of Christ was raised from the dead, so we too as the body of Christ which is the Church are on our way to Resurrection.

Now it’s true, we don’t know what our resurrected life will be like. That much is clear from the Gospel today, in which the Sadducees make all kinds of trouble because they are imagining our final, resurrected destiny in terms of the human society we have now. And Jesus gently reminds them, no, this is a whole new reality, and you can’t think of it in terms of the life and commitments we have in this life.

But even though we don’t really know what this “life of the world to come” we will be like, it can give us a lot of courage. Think of the seven brothers in the first reading today. They had no fear of death because they knew that God would provide new life for them on the other side of death. Thus, there was no suffering that could make them turn from God. Nothing could scare them. They were perfectly free.

Let us enjoy our freedom from the fear of death. It sets us free to live! Yes, every one of us will die. But we have no need to fear our death, because we know that Jesus Christ has passed through our human death ahead of us, taken away its power, and provided for us a safe path through our dying to the new life of the Resurrection.