My Lord and My God

(2nd Sunday of Easter, A)

Thomas wasn’t with the others when they first saw the Risen Lord. As John tells us, he didn’t believe it right away. He wanted to see for himself. Thomas wants to make sure that whatever experience the disciples were having, this was the same Jesus who they knew in his historical life. That’s why he wants to see and touch Jesus’ wounds, to make sure that this Risen Lord is the same guy. But even though—thanks to many artists—we often imagine Thomas touching the Lord’s wounds, the evangelist never says that he did. In fact, as soon as Thomas sees the Lord, right away he utters the greatest and most perfect of confessions, “My Lord and my God!” At that moment, all of his conditions and caveats evaporate in a moment of perfect vision and faith.

Nevertheless, Thomas’s concerns are matters for us too. For we too need to come to grips with the challenging and amazing truth that the Jesus whose teachings and miracles we proclaim in the Gospels each Sunday, this Jesus is the same Lord who is present to us now.

This is the good news of the Resurrection, that Jesus Christ, the Word of God made man, who walked the earth with his dusty feet, is just as present to us now as we was to his first disciples who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. Our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles gives us a picture of how the Risen Lord is present to us: “They devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and the communal life, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers.”

Prayer is the primary way the Resurrected Lord is present to us. When we pray it seems to us that it is something we are doing, and that it is we who are praying to God. But this is a kind of optical illusion of the spiritual eyes. Prayer happens not when we do something, but when we simply consent to the Holy Spirit praying within us. The Holy Spirit, who after all is the abiding presence of Jesus in the Church, prays within us, catching us up into the loving and dynamic inner life of the Trinity of God. Prayer is nothing more than that, but what more could we want?

The Breaking of Bread is also one of the preeminent ways that the Risen Jesus abides with us. Just as his human body was broken on the Cross and given for the life of the world, so the bread of this Eucharist is broken for our spiritual nourishment. St. Francis of Assisi marveled at the humility and gentleness of a God who was willed to be present to us “under the little form of bread.” He called it God’s “sublime humility” and “humble sublimity.”

These blessings are free to all. If only we are willing to see the Risen Lord among us in our prayer and in the Breaking of Bread, we will realize that we too have been raised up with Christ and have received a “new birth to a living hope” as St. Peter says in the second reading today. And just like it happened to St. Thomas, with this realization our heart will blurt out, “My Lord and my God!”

We too see the Risen Lord, and if we consent to it, this experience of faith will give us such strength that we will actually burn with the desire to transform our world into the life of perfect generosity and communal sharing we heard about in the Acts of the Apostles.

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.

The Light of the World

(4th Sunday of Lent, A)

At the climax of our gospel today the Lord proclaims, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see might see, and those who do see might become blind.” This judgment is not something off in an unknown future. It is the judgment that is present every time Jesus appears: when he appears in our hearts as an invitation to patience, service, or prayer, and especially when he comes among us as the bread and wine of this Eucharist. Wherever the Lord is, there is his judgment.

The word in the original Greek that we translate “judgment” is krima, meaning the delivery of a judgment, like a sentence imposed by a judge. It’s closely related to the word krisis, from which we derive the English word crisis. Whenever Jesus is present there is a crisis that is also a judgment. Like any crisis, the decisions we make in the midst of the crisis will determine that path we take for the future.

And that decision is to accept, to consent, to believe in Jesus Christ as the revelation of God, or not. That’s what we saw happening in Jesus’ final conversation with the man who had regained his sight. Jesus asked, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” And he worshiped him, and said, “I do believe Lord.”

This is what it really means to gain our sight, to learn to see clearly: to come to believe, to see that Jesus is Lord, that he is “the Light of the world.” To see Jesus as the Light, and to see and interpret things by this Light of the world is to have true vision.

This judgment, this crisis happens every time we gather here for the Eucharist. We take ordinary bread and wine and by the calling down of the Holy Spirit, the great Eucharistic Prayer of thanksgiving, and by the Lord’s own words at the Last Supper, this bread and wine becomes for us the Body and Blood of Christ. But do the bread and wine look or smell or taste any different after we have consecrated them? No, not to the bodily senses at least. And that’s just the moment of the crisis and judgment. We can accept from God the spiritual sight to see that this bread and wine is now the Body of Christ broken for us on the Cross and the Blood of Christ poured out in the ratification of the new and eternal covenant, or we can harden our hearts and remain blind to this new vision.

The Lord says he came into the world so that the blind might see, and those who see might become blind. That’s the great reversal of this judgment. If we admit that we need God’s help to really see Jesus as the Light of the Word, then he will help us to gain our spiritual sight. If we think we know it all, that we can see everything clearly, then God will leave us in our spiritual blindness. And that makes the spiritual division between the seeing and the blind, and that’s the judgment of God on the world.

So let us pray for our sight, for the vision to see and believe that Jesus Christ is the Light of the world. Then, as Paul tells us today, we will be able to live as children of the Light, as those who see and understand the world in the true light who is Jesus himself.

Our world doesn’t understand itself, and it is led into all kinds of violence and misery because it follows lesser lights: the intellectual lights of science and reason, the emotional lights of desiring riches and security. But when we accept from God the sight to see and believe that Jesus is the Light of the world, we will be able to understand ourselves and our world in the glorious Light of the Risen Lord.

Consumerism, Desire, and Freedom

(3rd Sunday of Lent, A)

Consumerism is one of the great spiritual dangers of our culture. We are surrounded night and day by advertising and salespeople trying to sell us something. Often their promises are empty. We are supposed to be tricked into thinking that the latest drug will make us feel better than we ever felt before, that buying some appliance will make our family happy, or that a new car will solve all our problems.

>But there is a something good we can learn from the consumerism of our culture. It shows us that we, in fact, desire something. There is something we all want. If there weren’t, there wouldn’t be any way for advertisements to play on our desires. So what do we really want? What is it that our hearts are always reaching for? Well, first of all we want a happy and peaceful life—that’s why people in commercials are always having a good time. We want a meaningful connection with another person—intimacy—and that’s why commercials always sell sex or at least employ physically attractive people, because our sexuality is the simplest way to get at our desire to connect with others.

It comes down to life. That’s what we want: to be alive, fully—happy, peaceful, and with life-giving connections to others. And this core of our human desire is what Jesus is talking about when he promises eternal life­—not eternal life in the sense of some future we don’t even know about, but eternal life now, filling our hearts with the love and peace that we really want.

Our basic problem is that we try to reach out and grab the eternal life, love, and satisfaction in all the wrong places. We get fooled into thinking that money or stuff or security can satisfy our hearts, but at the end of day we realize in our depression that they can’t. The way our culture is plagued by sexual exploitation and pornography just shows how desperate people are to reach out and connect with another human being—and how many of us have no idea how to do that in a fulfilling and healthy way.

The Samaritan woman in the Gospel today was looking for the desire of her heart just like we are. Her history of failed relationships and her eagerness for the living water Jesus’ promised—even though she interpreted his words in a physical way—show that she had spent her life looking for love and was at least a little bit weary of daily life.

Jesus’ promises her what she really wants and what we really want, eternal life. And it’s not something you have to go buy, or something you have to reach out and grab, because it’s something that comes from within. As Jesus says, the water that he will give becomes in us “a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” It’s the great tragedy of our lives that we are always trying to buy or to reach out and grasp happiness and fulfillment, when our God has promised that everything our heart desires he himself will make to well up from within.

Once we realize that God has already put within us everything we truly desire, and that all we have to do is consent to his presence in our hearts and minds in order to be happy, then we will be free, because we will no longer be susceptible to being fooled by our culture of advertisements, false promises, and empty prejudices.

When we surrender to the presence of God within us—and what else does it mean to approach and receive Holy Communion—then we will be able to imitate the Lord in his behavior in today’s Gospel. As we heard, Judeans weren’t supposed to have anything to do with Samaritans. Much less was the great teacher supposed to talk casually with a woman. But none of that matters to Jesus. He breaks through all of that man-made boundary and prejudice without bother or even making a big deal about it. And once we accept the living water that wells up in us to eternal life, we will be free from prejudice and fear, and we too will be able to walk effortlessly through all the walls that are set up only by human fear and prejudice.

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.

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.

Citizens of the Kingdom

(4th Sunday in Ordinary Time, A)

Last week we heard the beginning and central message of Jesus’ preaching: Jesus appears with the message, “The Kingdom of God is at hand.” The Kingdom of God, which is the destiny of all creation, us included, and is mysteriously present among us now, is the heart of the Gospel.

Today, in Matthew’s Beatitudes, we hear a description of the citizens of this Kingdom. In these proclamations of who is blessed, we hear about what someone who lives in the Kingdom of God looks and acts like, and thus we hear about the attitudes to which all of us Christians must aspire.

First of all, the citizens of the Kingdom of God are “blessed.” The word in the original Greek is makarios, and it’s just as easily translated as “happy.” My dictionary defined makarios as “blessed, happy, or fortunate.” That’s the first thing to know about being a Christian, a citizen of the kingdom of God: we are blessed, happy, and fortunate for the call we have received to Holy Communion with God in Christ. And that’s why the primary attitude of the Christian is always gratitude.

The Christian is “poor in spirit.” That is, before God we have the stance and attitude of poor people, who do not have what they need and who have to beg necessities from others. We know that only the grace of God saves us, and it is only his Sacred Heart that offers the rest that our hearts desire. We do not worship the false God of security, whether it be financial security, personal security, or national security, this false God that tells us we can make ourselves safe and fortunate in this world.

No, only God. Only God has what we truly desire, and we are all poor before God. So instead of the arrogance, the self-righteousness, and the insanity of peace through war that the children of the kingdom of this world offer us, we Christians are poor in spirit. We strive for this attitude through prayer, begging the grace from God to be “clean of heart,” so that we may be those who are blessed by our “hunger and thirst for righteousness,” rather than the hunger and thirst to protect and please ourselves that the world recommends.

The citizens of the Kingdom of God mourn and are merciful. They are those who allow their hearts to break when they see and hear of the suffering of others. If we are to be true Christians we need to let the suffering and misery of others affect us. We need to let ourselves be hurt by all of the poverty and suffering and misery present in our world, because this is the first step to compassion, to praying for the suffering, and to seeking ways to give them the peace and salvation God desires for them.

Finally, the citizens of the Kingdom of God are meek, and are peacemakers. They are those who look for opportunities to not return evil for evil, hurt for hurt. Christians seek to break cycles of violence and hurt in their families, their communities, and among nations. If we are to call ourselves Christians we must recognize that the peace the world talks about isn’t real peace, but just the absence of conflict. The peace that God gives is so much more; it is a positive force for ending violence and producing gentleness and kindness.

These Beatitudes are a tall order. They challenge us to change our minds about how we look at ourselves and at the world. And if we follow them, we can be sure that we will share in some of the misunderstanding and persecution that the Lord himself experienced among us. Maybe we won’t be martyrs for the faith, but if we take being disciples of the Lord seriously, we can be sure that some people will mock us, some will insult us, and many, many just won’t get it. And when this happens, we know we are especially fortunate, most happy, and blessed by the Lord more than ever.