10th Sunday in Ordinary Time (C)

A story is told among the Buddhists of Kisa Gotami, a woman who lost her only son. Deeply afflicted with grief, she approached the Buddha, begging him for a cure. He told the sorrowful mother that he could restore her son to life if she could bring him a handful of mustard seeds from a household that had never lost son or daughter, father or husband. Making her way about the village, although she found all willing to help her, she also found not a single household that was free from the death of a loved one, and indeed where the grief did not still afflict them. Seeing how universal grief was, how common the suffering coming from death is to all men, she returned to the Buddha to follow his teaching, finding in him alone a way to relieve her suffering.

The Gospel also presents us with a woman who lost her only son, a woman stricken with grief. Unlike the Indian sage, however, Jesus actually brought the dead son to life. While both sage and Savior responded to the woman's grief, in the former case, the woman was led to see the folly of sorrow, while in the latter case, the very cause of the woman's grief was taken away, death conquered by Life himself.

Yet, despite this clear and important difference, there is a remarkable similarity in these two stories. In both cases, it is not to the son that pity is shown, but to the woman who is suffering grief. Said differently, we are not told that Jesus, on seeing the dead youth, was moved with pity for him, but rather that, on seeing the widow, he had pity for her. Surely, there is something a bit odd about this. That is, we would surely regard death as a greater calamity than sorrow, however onerous the burden of grief may be. Sorrow may be lived through, may abate in time; death, considered in itself, is final. Yet, the Gospel is clear. Jesus' pity is directed toward the widow, not her son.

There is much wisdom to learn here, but surely one of the lessons is that we are not as good at measuring suffering as we might take ourselves to be. The problem, both for the Buddha and for the Lord Jesus Christ, is the woman's grief. The Buddha answers this with natural wisdom about the universality of human death. Jesus answers it as the Lord of life itself, but the lifegiving is at least as much directed to the woman as to her son. What this suggests is that our diagnosis of our own pains, our own confidence about what it is that most ails us and those we love, and thus what we imagine ought to be God's foremost concern, is less than reliable. We cannot, of course, simply set our reason aside, act as though we have no way to tell what kinds of ills are bad, and which kinds are worse. Even so, we should not be so quick to fall into despair when God seems to not want to take away from us the ills we believe most impede our joy.

Unlike the placid wisdom of the Buddha, the love of Jesus Christ is, we need have not doubt, directed to attend to the evils that assail us, and in his heart, Jesus can surely be moved with pity. Are we prepared to receive the mercy he chooses to give, rather than demand he respond on our terms? Are we willing to learn, from the mercy he does send us, what it was that truly had been oppressing us, and give thanks?

Pentecost

Acts 2:1-11 / 1 Corinthians 12:3b-7, 12-13 / John 14:15-16, 23b-26

When we speak of the coming of the Spirit, whether we refer to his historic coming on that first Pentecost of the Church after the Lord had ascended into heaven, or whether we mean the coming of the Spirit into the lives of the faithful, we are quite naturally inclined to speak of the effects of the Spirit on those upon whom he has descended. They, we imagine, are the ones transformed by his coming. To be sure, we are altogether justified in thinking this way. After all, at the first Pentecost, when the Spirit descended on the disciples and they began to speak in different tongues, we are assured that they did so as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim. When Jesus promised to send his Spirit, he likewise assured his disciples that the Spirit would teach them everything and remind them of all that he had told them. St Paul, similarly, assured the faithful of Corinth that life in the Spirit is characterized precisely by the presence of spiritual gifts, not the same to each, but that nonetheless to each individual the manifestation of the Spirit is given for some benefit.

Even so, we find one quite surprising feature of the story of the first Pentecost. When the disciples, now filled with the Holy Spirit, preach Jesus Christ to those devout Jews from every nation under heaven staying in Jerusalem, we are not told that the disciples were given the power to speak in several languages and so proclaimed one homily several times, each time in another language. That, of course, would be remarkable enough, and would remind all of the power of the Spirit to give gifts that transform those he has brought to life in Jesus Christ. Yet, the story tells us something quite different: At this sound, they gathered in a large crowd, but they were confused because each one heard them speaking in his own language. In other words, at Pentecost, it was not that the disciples were empowered such that each now had new abilities they did not have before and which simply empowered them alone, but rather that, enabled by the charisms of the Spirit, their gifts were transformative both of the disciples themselves and of those to whom they spoke.

It is helpful to remember that, unlike the age of Moses or of the prophets of old, when the Spirit came upon this or that person to effect mighty works and glorify the name of God in Israel and among the nations, the coming of the Spirit in the age of grace is altogether different. It is prodigal and universal, sweeping the world with his Lordly and Life-giving grace. The Spirit, not as sent to one individual but poured out in his fulness on all peoples in a definitive way, comes to draw all people into the life of Christ, both those who possess a special charism and those to whom that charism is applied. Just as his descent on the disciples enabled their power of speech, so also, by that transformed speech, opened the power of the listeners to hear, and in hearing, opened for them the way to life eternal, to a sharing in the eternal life of the blessed Trinity.

This is why we, the many parts of the one body of Christ, are called to be open both to one another in that body and to present ourselves with frank and open witness to those not yet drawn into the Church. While the Spirit could have given each of us a gift for his own good, and his own good alone, in the unimaginable depth of his love has distributed gifts such that each of our gifts finds its perfection not in ourselves alone, but in us only to the extent that through it the Spirit draws others into new life. Likewise, it is only when we patiently, lovingly receive the Spirit's gifts from others' charisms that we will come to know the glorious wonders that the Spirit has in store for us.

Seventh Sunday of Easter (C)

Acts 7:55-60 / Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20 / John 17:20-26

How is the Ascension of Jesus Christ into heaven not, at least in some respect, a disaster for the Church, rather than a glorious mystery? We hear today of the witness to the faith given by St Stephen, a witness filled with the Holy Spirit. Yet, at least by any normal metric, we would conclude that the outcome was not so glorious: But they cried out with a loud voice, covered their ears, and rushed upon him together. They threw him out of the city, and began to stone him. Now, in his earthly ministry, Jesus Christ was certainly no stranger to opposition of this sort, of those hearing his message and seeking to kill him, even then and there to throw him off a cliff. Jesus, however, always passed through the midst of them unharmed. Even when the time for his Passion arrived, and Jesus humbly submitted to his own betrayal, false judgment, torture, and death, he made sure that not one of his disciples, save the son of perdition, would be lost. For all the pains that he endured, his disciples were spared.

So, we might be forgiven in thinking that something has gone wrong here, that the providential care which had watched over Jesus and his disciples while he was on the earth has been withdrawn to heaven, where Jesus is, seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty. However, this would be a mistake, a failure to see what the martyrdom of Stephen is supposed to remind us of the saving mystery of the Lord's Ascension into heaven.

As we are reminded, what both motivated and empowered Stephen to be such a bold witness was not simply being filled with the Holy Spirit, although that would surely have been enough, as it had been for the prophets of old. Rather, we are told that Stephen, thus Spirit-filled, looked up intently to heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. That is, Stephen's fearless witness is not merely a result of having met and learned from Jesus in his earthly ministry, nor even from having encountered the risen Lord. As would be the case for St Paul after Stephen's death, the protomartyr Stephen was able to witness to the truth, and be so conformed to his Lord that he could not only forgive his murderers but also had so overcome death that he is more properly said to have fallen asleep, not in spite of the absence of Christ's earthly presence, but, paradoxically, because of it.

Said differently, Jesus Christ is not less, but radically more present to us in his ascended glory than he ever was in his earthly ministry. It is not by the Incarnation alone, nor by the Passion, nor even by that victory over sin, death, and Hell we recall in the Resurrections that Jesus brings us to the Father. It is through drawing up whole and entire everything he has assumed from us, his whole, complete, victorious human nature into the presence of the Father, and receiving in that nature from the Father the name above every other name, the name reserved to divinity alone — Lord, I AM — that we, in him, are brought to that completion of life with God that is the purpose of the whole Christian mystery. While on earth, the divine humanity of Jesus Christ was, in his self-emptying, only available to those who came to see him those who touched him or even the hem of his garment, those who in his presence confessed their faith and found not only their own needs, but those of the ones they loved, responded to and fulfilled. Now, in the presence of the Father, that same divine humanity is, through the power of the Spirit and by means of the mysteries of the Christian faith, directly available to each and every person. It is in and by the power not only of the Risen Lord, but the Ascended Lord, that we can, here and now, be so fully conformed to his death that we can share, as Stephen did, even now in his victory over death and sin, and know not death, but sleep and life eternal.

This is why the Lord's Ascension is not for us a disaster, nor the inauguration of a suspended time between the joy of his earthly presence and the joy of his return. Instead, now is the time of glorious joy, knowing that Jesus Christ our Savior, in the fulness of this glorified humanity and his divinity, is present to us in such fulness as only to be surpassed at the end of days, when all things are brought to completion, and the elect will delight in a new heaven and a new earth. Until that day, however, we need not wait to know Jesus, not in a remote way, but directly, for there is nothing closer to us, not ever our own selves, than God, and whoever is in God's presence. Jesus Christ is not gone from us, but with us, and in that hope, we can wait with confidence when the bright morning star which has dawned in our hearts, dawns at last for the whole world to see.

Sixth Sunday of Easter (C)

Acts 15:1-2, 22-29 / Revelation 21:10-14, 22-23 / John 14:23-29

I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb. The city had no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gave it light, and its lamp was the Lamb.

A modern reader might not find anything remarkable about the claim that the new Jerusalem which John saw in a vision coming down out of heaven from God should not have a temple in it. After all, the Jerusalem that we know, and indeed for nearly two thousand years, has not had a temple. More than that, we might be inclined to think that what this means, that is, for the new Jerusalem not to have a temple, is reducible to the end for formal cult in the world renewed by God. That is, we might think that what this vision serves to show is that worship as we now know it is a passing thing, the cult of sacrifices and oblations established of old is not a permanent feature of God's plan for us.

However, the absence of the temple must mean more than this. Minimally, it must mean more because the sacrifices and observances connects to the temple have already passed away, even here and now. There would be no need for a new Jerusalem to descend from the clouds for us to see that to be so. Rather, we ought to recall that the temple was the very sign and locus of God's presence with his people. To have Jerusalem without a temple is, on the face of it, to have worship without God, which is to say to have neither worship nor God. In other words, we are meant to be struck by what must either be an irreparable tragedy or an impossible paradox to hear of the holy city without the dwelling place of God.

This is when we can once again hear the promise of hope offered in John's vision. God is not promising to do something merely negative. He is not taking away something good in removing the temple any more than he is in rendering useless the sun and the moon. It is not as though men and women in the new Jerusalem will no longer worship God and delight in his manifest presence any more than they will see without light. Instead, what God promises is that he will be more, not less present, in the new Jerusalem, even as the light of his glory and the glory of the Lamb will not merely replace that of the sun and moon, but will, if such could be imagined, eclipse it, that might see with even more clarity than on a cloudless day by the noonday sun.

What God has in store for us, already promised in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, is not a world with less or mere replacements of what we have now. What God holds out to us, what sustains us in times of trial and difficulty, what we taste in partial ways in the joys we know here and now, is a world so fully open and available to himself that everywhere is the temple, everywhere is made a fit dwelling place, everywhere is drenched in the glorious radiance and clarity that is the very being of God himself.

Fifth Sunday of Easter (C)

Acts 14:21b-27 / Revelation 21:1-5a / John 13:31-33a, 34-35

This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

On the face of it, there is something odd about this otherwise innocuous, even inspiring saying of Jesus. It is odd because we might quite reasonably presume that what marks Christians off especially, how others will know that we are Christ's disciples, is not from the love we have for one another, but rather the love we have for others. Indeed, one would surely be excused for thinking that it is not love for anyone else in particular, but precisely love for one's enemies that marks off the followers of Jesus Christ in a distinctive way. Often enough it is the failure of Christians to love their enemies that is held as the surest critique of the possibility of following Christ, or at least of the sincerity of those who claim to do so.

We plausibly think this way, of course, because it echoes what Christ himself taught: You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy." But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same?

Now, we might think to save Jesus' words above by thinking that the "one another" to which he referred was simply "everybody," so that "if you have love one another" would be meant to include precisely not merely love for those who already love you, but love for enemies as well. That is, we might be tempted to make these words of Jesus say simply what he said already in the Sermon on the Mount. However, we cannot do so if we remain faithful to the Scriptures. Why? Because the words above are part of Jesus' Farewell Discourse, his last time to pass on his teaching to his disciples before his Passion and Death. Throughout this long sermon and prayer, Jesus is quite clear that the "you" to whom he refers is not a generic "you". He does not intend to speak a general word to men and women of good will, as such. Rather, he distinguishes between "you", that is, the disciples, and through them all those who will come to believe, and the "world" that will reject both him and them. So, when Jesus says that we will be known as his disciples when we love one another, he means quite clearly when we love our fellow disciples of Christ.

How, then, do we make sense of this? Has Jesus changed his mind from the Mount to the Upper Room?

I think the more helpful way to hear these words is to reconsider what Jesus intends to do through his earthly ministry, through his Incarnation, his teaching, his Passion, Death, and Resurrection. What we recall first is that the purpose of Jesus' coming is not to outline a program of moral improvement or a plan of action. Admittedly, moral transformation should and must follow upon becoming a true disciples of Christ, and this discipleship does indeed call us to new and generous acts in light of what God has done for us. Even so, the Gospel is not fundamentally a moral program. Instead, what God seeks to do in the whole mystery of the Incarnation and all that follows is to manifest his glory by gathering a people together, a people peculiarly his own, drawn not only from the chosen people of Israel, but of every race, from every people. He means for this people to be united, not merely morally, but in the deepest sense, to become the very Body of the Son, and so to be utterly transformed, to be one with him and with one another as the Father and the Son are one.

This is why Christian unity is the very sign of the Gospel. Absent that unity, the very goal of God's work in Christ is put into doubt, and the world will wonder what all the fuss has been about. We are of course to love our enemies, and such love must flow from being made one in Christ. Even so, to do good for the other and to be alienated or in conflict with the Church, with not only one's like-minded Christians, but with those persons entrusted to govern and teach, to minister and to serve, is to fail at the very work that Jesus intends to accomplish in us.

Ours is not to propose to the world a new morality, but to manifest, as much as can be in the world, the unity which is the very being of the Triune God.

The Entry of the Lord into Jerusalem: Flowery Sunday

Philippians 4:4-9 / John 12:1-18

In place of palm or olive branches, the faithful of the Slavic world bear in their hands branches of the pussy willow to recall the triumphal entry of Jesus Christ into Jerusalem. Of course, we might easily expect that climate had a great deal to do with the development of this custom. Palms and olive trees are harder to come by in Kiev than they are in Rome or Constantinople. However, it seems that the pussy willow among the pre-Christian Slavs was a sign of life and energy, a ward against the evils of disease and storms, the promoter of health and well-being, and herald of the coming of spring against the long, hard difficulties of winter.

To signal the pussy willow, then, for this day that recalls not only Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem, but in doing so anticipates his painful and terrible death upon the Cross, reveals a deeper understanding of the meaning of the Lord's entry. We might be tempted to see this Sunday only in terms of the next. That is, while we ordinarily recall on Sunday Christ's resurrection from the dead and his ushering into the world of the new and eternal life of God himself, we might see this Sunday as just a way to get the story started. Today, we may think, we recall his entry, Thursday the Last Supper, Friday the Crucifixion, Saturday the quiet of the Tomb and the Harrowing of Hell, and Sunday his glorious Rising to eternal life. While joyous in its own right, Flowery Sunday seems to be the odd man out.

Yet, in the flowering branch of the pussy willow, we are reminded that Christ's power to bring to life, while definitively and in a radically new way made manifest on Easter, was nonetheless already present in his Incarnation. This is why our Gospel today recalls repeatedly the presence of Lazarus with Jesus in his final days. Then Jesus six days before the passover came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, which had been dead, whom he raised from the dead, we are reminded, and again, Lazarus was one of them that sat at the table with him. In fact, the evangelist tells us that Lazarus, who had been dead but was called to life from the tomb by the Lord Jesus, was as much of a draw to the light of faith as Christ himself: and they came not for Jesus' sake only, but that they might see Lazarus also, whom he had raised from the dead. So powerful was the witness of Lazarus that he, too, became to object of the murderous designs of the same people who meant to see Jesus put to death — But the chief priests consulted that they might put Lazarus also to death — and yet, in spite of this, or indeed perhaps because of it, Lazarus and his new life brought people to new life in Christ: Because that by reason of him many of the Jews went away, and believed on Jesus. Indeed, after the Resurrection, it would be the witnesses of Lazarus' rising to new life that would constitute some of the first to bear witness to the Lord Jesus: The people therefore that was with him when he called Lazarus out of his grave, and raised him from the dead, bare record.

We, too, might find our life something of a Flowery Sunday. We might be inclined to see both moments of rejoicing and moments of darkness, but nonetheless eclipsed by the glories of time past and the hope of the glories to come. We might, that is, see is as a mere preparation, an important time to be sure, but not the day we have been longing for.

This, however, would be a mistake. Looking to the flowering of the pussy willow, and to the witness of Lazarus, we are reminded that the life-giving power of the Good News of Jesus Christ is active here and now. Here and now, right in our own time, the world is being transformed, indeed conformed, in the life of every Christian called to new life in the Lord, to the glory that will one day be revealed in full. Yet, even if not now revealed, it is no less here, even as Lazarus was no less brought to new life in Christ, and others through him to the new life of faith, even though Christ had not yet ascended his Cross, descended into Hell, or risen from the Tomb. Today is a day of rejoicing, a day of the flowering of joy, on which we can look to those signs, already present among us, indeed already present in our own lives, that Jesus Christ is with us, that he has chosen to dine with us as he did long ago in Bethany, and that in his presence, and by the witness of those brought to life in him, we may truly rejoice in the Lord always.

Fifth Sunday of Great Lent: St Mary of Egypt

Hebrews 9:11-14 / Mark 10:32-45

Mary of Egypt, it is said, ran away from home at the age of twelve to live a dissolute life in the city of Alexandria.  Although she is said to have prostituted herself to earn a living, as often as not she would engage in sexual activity freely, earning her keep through begging and spinning flax. So committed was she to sexual pleasure that, after years of living this way, she went to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage, not in fact to venerate the Cross as the other pilgrims, but out of a perverse desire to draw the pilgrims into her own lust, luring them away from their holy desire to have union not with God, but with her. It is only when a divine force prevented her from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that Mary, filled with remorse, repented, and came to commit herself to a life of severe asceticism.

Many of us, even if we do not live at the extremes of Mary either in lust or in asceticism, nonetheless follow her earlier, wicked example. If we do not abandon ourselves to sin materially as she did, like her we imagine that we have the resources to make a life entirely of and by ourselves. We survive by our own meager efforts, and in the remaining time we have during the day, we indulge whatever pleasures strike our fancy. In the face of the preaching of the Gospel, especially when it challenges how we have chosen to live, we would prefer to draw our fellow Christians into complicity with our wickedness, or at least seek out the hidden faults of our clergy, and so hope in this hypocritical way to blunt and dull any critique they might launch against our sins.

In contrast to the self-sufficiency so craved by Mary and by ourselves, we are confronted with Jesus Christ: But Christ being come an high priest of good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this building; neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us. In the face of our insistence that we live or die by our own work, or that we contribute something so that we can claim to have be the principal authors of our life, the saving work of Jesus reminds us that the whole of our redemption is not our work, not our project, but rather his. It is not our hands that made the tabernacle, but his, not the blood of anything or anyone else which was shed, but his own.

Yet, rather than belittle us, this work of Christ's, while it undoes our delusions of self-sufficiency, also serves to liberates us. It liberates us from the fear that our resources are not enough. It liberates us from the worry that what have have contributed is so crooked, so contrary to love, that whatever God might do for us, we must always, even in eternity, live a diminished life. Rather, the Good News of Jesus Christ is that the redemption was worked by God Incarnate, and by him alone, and therefore its worth, its glory, is undiminished by our sins and waywardness. We can, we must receive it from him, but in receiving it, it comes to us already glorious, already splendid, already heart-breakingly beautiful.

This beauty, this splendor, this glory is who we have become in the work of Jesus Christ. With Mary of Egypt, can we not bend the knee in penitence, and so enter into the wonders of the kingdom prepared for us by the Father?