The Scandal of the Cross

(24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, B)

Today we arrive at Mark the Evangelist’s account of St. Peter’s great confession: “You are the Christ,” the basic and fundamental confession of faith of Christianity. Peter’s confession, which is recorded by the gospels of Matthew and Luke as well, is important for us on many levels. First of all, as we know from St. Matthew’s version, Peter’s faith is the Rock on which Jesus builds his Church, and this faith is kept for us in an unbroken handing-on, a “tradition” down to St. Peter’s successor in our own day, our Holy Father Benedict XVI.

Along with that, Peter’s confession, “You are the Christ,” is important for us on a personal level. We’ve all had that moment or moments of the interior realization of faith, of confession that Jesus is the Christ, or else we wouldn’t be here at Sunday Mass. And our confession of faith has consequences that are not easy, as Peter learns the hard way.

As soon as Peter expresses his faith that Jesus is the Christ, Jesus goes on to tell him what this means: that the Christ will be rejected and killed, but will rise on the third day. Peter is scandalized; he is offended. To be the Christ is to be a great person, indeed the greatest of people; he should be like the powerful of this world who sit and dispense benefits on their friends and trouble on their enemies. That’s what the Christ should be like, Peter thinks, perhaps. Jesus regards this as a temptation, and rebukes Peter in turn, identifying him with the tempter himself, Satan. “Get behind me…you are thinking not as God does, but as humans do.”

This is the scandal of the Cross, and it is the heart of Christianity. In Jesus the almightiness and the power of God are revealed not in a lording over the world or a need to control, but in a perfect self-sacrifice. Our God is not a god who sits above us like a worldly ruler, doing good for his friends and condemning his enemies. No, our God is a god who places himself below us as a “suffering servant,” offering salvation and grace to all, deserving or not, grateful or not, good and bad.

As if this isn’t hard enough to swallow, Jesus goes on to say that if we wish to follow him, the Cross is our destiny as well. So when we have the realization, the grace of making the confession of faith in Jesus Christ as Lord, we know that the Cross awaits us. “Whoever wishes to come after me, must deny himself.” That goes against everything the world teaches. For the world teaches us to take care of ourselves, to get for ourselves what we need and want, and to protect our security once we have it.

Where has the worldly doctrine of self-service gotten us? What has it done to the world? Well, the evidence is all around us. The world teaches us to seek comfort, pleasure, convenience, wealth, and security, but it is a cult of values that do not exist, and it has left us with a world plagued by divisions and injustice. It is has left the conscience of the public so seared and confused that we can even entertain the question of killing our unborn children or of destroying God’s earth in the name of our extravagant and indulgent lifestyles, for example.

But we must not be discouraged, for Jesus has demonstrated for us the way that this world can leave this selfish self-destruction behind and find salvation instead. We are to follow him by taking up the Cross, by imitating him as suffering servant, as the self-emptying and self-sacrificing savior. If we care about the world and its well-being—as God does so passionately as to turn over his own Son into our violent hands—may we let go of our cult of comfort, convenience, and security, forget about ourselves and offer ourselves in sacrifice for each other. Anybody who has ever done direct service to the poor, cared for their own or someone else’s child, or even prayed for a friend knows that self-sacrifice in imitation of Christ is the path to true freedom and happiness. Let us follow that joy, for it is the taste of the Passion and passionate Love with which God longs to save the world through the Christ.

Cyrus and Jesus

(4th Sunday of Lent, B)

We arrive today, brothers and sisters, at the logical mid-point of our journey through Lent. As we begin, then, our ‘final ascent’ to the great mysteries of the Paschal Triduum, our proximity to those solemn days makes us rejoice. That’s the traditional name for this fourth Sunday of Lent, “Laetare Sunday.” It comes from the Entrance Antiphon for today’s Mass, Laetáre Ierúsalem, et convéntum fácite, omnes qui dilígitis eam…, “Rejoice, Jerusalem, and come together, all you who love her…” We rejoice today because we are drawing ever nearer to the New Jerusalem and to the saving works of the Anointed of God, Jesus Christ the Messiah.

But what does it mean that we call Jesus the Messiah or ‘Christ,’ as the term translates through the Greek of our New Testament? To help us understand what we mean by our confession of Jesus as the Christ, our first reading today goes a long way. Jesus of Nazareth was not first person in the history of the people of God to be called messiah. Indeed the second book of Chronicles relates to us the story of the messiah-ship of King Cyrus the Persian. So, understanding how Cyrus was a messiah can help us to understand how Jesus is the Messiah.

In the earlier part of the sixth century BC, Jerusalem was under siege by the Babylonians. The city and its Temple were eventually destroyed, and, according to their method of conquering other peoples, the Babylonians deported the leading classes back to Babylon. Thus the people of God were ejected from the land that God himself had given to them, and the reading tells us that this destruction and calamity came upon them because of their unfaithfulness. Thus began what is called the Babylonian Exile or Captivity. Now, as often happens in the history of this world, one superpower comes to replace another, and two generations after the deportation, the Persians replaced the Babylonians. Cyrus, the king of the Persians, was more tolerant toward other cultures and religions, and for reasons that are a little mysterious, decided to allow the Jews to return to Jerusalem and even to help them rebuild the Temple. This Temple, though it was almost completely renovated by Herod the Great shortly before the birth of our Lord, was the one that Jesus would have known.

So, let’s notice that pattern of what it means to be a messiah revealed in King Cyrus. He reverses the just punishment and deportation that the people of God had received for their unfaithfulness, returns them to the Promised Land, and even helps them to begin to restore their religious life centered, as it was, on the Jerusalem Temple.

In a wider and much more universal way, this is the same work accomplished by Jesus the Messiah. The Israelites suffered exile from the Promised Land because of their unfaithfulness to the covenants. In the same way, we, because of our sins, suffer from alienation from God and from the joyful and perfected humanity that God wants to give us. In his saving Passion and death, and in the Eucharist he gives us to stretch and commemorate this one sacrifice through history, Jesus restores us to our true and best humanity and reverses the alienation from God we have earned with our sins.

This is why we rejoice today, because even in the midst of all the misery and injustice and depression we have brought upon ourselves and the world with our sins, God in his mercy sends us the Christ, that we might look upon him and allow ourselves to be restored to the joy and justice God delights to give to the world.

Sin and Salvation

(1st Sunday of Lent, A)

On this first Sunday of our journey of Lent, the sacred Scriptures focus on temptation and sin. In a lot of ways this is an easy topic to reflect on and preach about, because we’ve all sinned and we all know what it’s like to feel like sinners or to suffer on account of the sins of others.

In the first reading from the book of Genesis we heard the archetypal story about sin, of the “original sin” of our first parents. And what was their sin? God had given them the infinite dignity of being created in God’s own image and likeness, but it wasn’t good enough. They believed the serpent who told them that they should want more, that they could “be like gods” if they ate from the Tree in the middle of the garden. They were already like God! That’s how we were created. But their greed for more made them disobedient.

That’s the anatomy of all sin. We try to set ourselves up as gods instead of recognizing that only God is God. We reach out for what is forbidden—and even things we know will make us unhappy and miserable—because we decide in our hearts that we know better what we need than God does. We hurt each other because we take the judgment that belongs to God to ourselves, setting ourselves up as those who know best. And in all these sins, we only reap the same thing our first parents did: shame, misery, anxiety, and depression.

Driving a car provides a simple example of this pattern of our tendency to sin. When someone is ahead of us going slower than we are, we call him a pain—or worse. And if someone passes us going faster than we are, well, he’s a maniac. So the only correct way to drive, the only correct speed is exactly what we ourselves are doing. We are the measure of all things. We ourselves are the standard by which everything else is measured. That’s taking the role of God and appropriating it to ourselves, and that’s the root of sin.

Sin has coursed through human history from our first parents down to us here today. From the little ways we hurt and betray each other with gossip and lies all the way up to the cycles of violence and hate that break out in wars and poverty and scar the whole history of the world, we are all plagued by sin. Because we do not trust and we try over and over to set ourselves up as little gods, we keep hurting ourselves, each other, and the world.

How can we be saved from this vicious cycle of sin? The good news is that God has applied, and is applying, the remedy. To us who are stuck in this sinful pattern of making little gods out of ourselves, God does the opposite—God makes himself one of us. In Jesus Christ the Almighty God becomes one with us and fights our tendency to sin on our behalf, from within our humanity, and thus creates a path out of the cycles of sin.

This is what’s going in the Lord’s temptations in the desert! Remember the Israelites in the desert on their journey after they were freed from Egypt? Remember how they complained to God and to Moses, continually demanding things and putting God to the test? Jesus, in these forty days he spends being tempted in the desert, is re-living the forty years the Israelites spent in the desert on their way to the Promised Land. But instead of failing the way the Israelites did and the way we too continue to fail, Jesus succeeds on our behalf. He defeats the temptations and remains faithful to God.

And Jesus’ faithfulness, his righteousness, and his victory over temptation and sin is freely available to all of us, as soon as we get sick and tired of being sick and tired with our sins. All we have is let his divine humanity enter into our humanity. And this is the meaning of our baptism into Christ, and our Holy Communion with his Body and Precious Blood.

This is the greatest of gifts. Jesus defeats sin on our behalf and heals the injury that our first parents brought into creation through their disobedience. But Jesus does more than just fix the situation. As Paul says, the “gift is not like the transgression.” The gift of salvation and freedom from sin in Jesus Christ goes far beyond just putting creation back together. It lifts all of creation into the divine life of God. And so, because of the work of God in Jesus Christ on our behalf, we are even more blessed than our first parents were before they sinned. We are not only created in the image and likeness of God as they were, but we are re-created according to the image of God’s only begotten Son.

The gift, this salvation, comes to us in our Baptism into Christ. At Easter we will renew the vows of our Baptism as new Christians are themselves baptized. And this is a gift so great that we spend these forty days of Lent preparing ourselves to receive it anew.