Holy Thursday

Readings: Exodus 12:1-8, 11-15; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; John 13:1-15

“It is the Passover of the Lord.”

With these words, 

God institutes the sacred meal and celebration

in which the Israelites

would commemorate God’s salvation of them

when they were slaves in Egypt.

It is called in Hebrew pesach, 

which we translate as “Passover,”

in part because it celebrates God’s “passing over”

the homes of the Israelites,

which had been marked with the lamb’s blood,

sparing them from the final and most terrible plague:

the destruction of the first born.

But it is also a celebration of the Israelites “passing over”

from slavery into freedom,

from bondage in Egypt 

into the land of God’s promise,

from oppression and death 

into new life as God’s covenant people.

It was therefore appropriate that Jesus

would adapt the Passover tradition

in instituting his own sacred meal,

the meal in which his followers would commemorate

Jesus’ passing over from death to life,

and their own passing over 

from the captivity to sin and death

into the freedom of God’s grace 

and the life of eternal glory.

As St. Augustine said, 

“all the mysteries of the Old Testament

were fully consummated

when Christ handed over to his disciples

the bread that was his body

and the wine that was his blood” 

(Sermo Mai 143).

Over the course of the next three days,

we will be celebrating Jesus’ passing over

as well as our own passing over:

our passage from bondage into freedom,

from death into life.

But what does that mean concretely?

What does it look like to undertake this journey,

this passage, into freedom and into life?

Pope Benedict wrote, 

“Love is the very process of passing over,

of transformation, of stepping outside 

the limitations of fallen humanity –

in which we are all separated from one another

and ultimately impenetrable to one another –

into an infinite otherness” 

(Jesus of Nazareth, vol. 2, 54-55).

To pass over is to step out of ourselves

and into the infinite mystery of divine love,

the gift of love that makes possible 

true love for one another.

This passing over from self-centeredness

to God-centeredness and to neighbor-centeredness

was echoed by our new Pope, Francis,

just yesterday in his first Wednesday audience:

“to live Holy Week following Jesus

means learning to come out of ourselves. . .

to reach out to others, to go to the outskirts of existence,

ourselves taking the first step towards our brothers and sisters,

especially those farthest away,

those who are forgotten,

those most in need 

of understanding, 

consolation,

help.”

We live the mystery of the Passover of the Lord

by passing over from self-centeredness to find the other

at the outskirts of existence,

by coming out of ourselves into the mystery of love

in an exodus from bondage to our own needs and desires,

through the mystery of divine love,

and into the promised land of freedom.

The final end of our passing over will only arrive

when we live fully in God’s presence in eternal glory,

but we already begin to live it now

in the hearing of God’s word, in prayer, in the sacraments,

and in loving service to our neighbor.

In a few moments we will obey Jesus’ command

to wash one another’s feet,

as a sign of the passing over from self to other

that lies at the heart of our Holy Week celebration.

But we do not simply wash the feet of others;

we also let our own feet be washed,

because Jesus says that it is only if he washes our feet

that we can share in his inheritance.

The word pesach, which we translate “Passover,”

can also mean “to stumble” or “to trip.”

And we all know, if we are honest with ourselves,

that in our passing over from love of self 

to love of God and neighbor

we often stumble,

we almost always trip over ourselves 

in one way or another.

So tonight we let Jesus, 

in the person of our fellow Christian,

wash our feet with the pure water of his love.

Tonight we who have stumbled let Jesus pick us up

and join our passing over to his own,

so that through him and with him and in him

we can continue our exodus

into the mystery of divine love.

Lent 3

Readings: Exodus 3:1-8a, 13-15; 1 Corinthians 10: 1-6, 10-12; Luke 13:1-9

It has been an interesting week to be a Catholic.

Of course everybody who has access to any form of media

knows that Pope Benedict’s resignation from the papacy 

took effect on Thursday

and that the Church has entered a period of sedes vacans,

or the empty chair of Peter,

as we await the election of a new Pope by the college of Cardinals.

In my mind, this event is framed 

by two other events from this week:

on Monday the Scottish Cardinal Keith O’Brien resigned

amidst accusations of sexual misconduct with several priests,

and on Friday the Archdiocese of Baltimore issued a statement

that one of my brother deacons had been suspended from ministry

after his arrest for possession of child pornography.

Sad to say, for all too many people 

such news has ceased to be shocking,

because it has come to seem like business as usual 

from the Catholic Church.

And I find myself praying that God will seize this opportunity

to send us a leader who can make the Church into the kind of place

where at least such things regain their capacity to shock.

So what does the Word of God offer us today?

We hear in the Gospel the parable of the fig tree,

which for three years produces no fruit,

after which the owner of the orchard, 

justly and understandably frustrated,

tells the gardener to cut it down 

so that it will no longer deplete the soil.

But the gardener pleads with the owner 

to give the tree one more year,

during which he will tend it and fertilize it.

Early Christian interpreters such as St. Augustine

saw the parable as a warning to Christians that,

while we have been granted another season of grace

in which to bear the fruit of good works,

a day of judgment and reckoning is coming

for those whose lives remain barren.

But perhaps this parable 

is not just about us as individuals,

but also about us as a Church.

Events not just this week but over the past ten years

have led me often to wonder whether our Church

has become like the fig tree,

exhausting the soil around it

while producing no fruit but scandal upon scandal,

sucking life from the world

and offering nothing in return but one more excuse

for the cynicism that so pervades modern life.

Is time running out for our Church to bear good fruit?

Could the day arrive when God decides 

that the time has come to cut it down?

Christ said that the gates of hell 

would not prevail against his Church,

but we must also remember the words of St. Paul:

“whoever thinks he is standing secure 

should take care not to fall.”

These are dark thoughts to have on the eve of a papal election.

And they bring with them the temptation to think

that what is needed to fix the Church

is a Pope who fits with my particular agenda:

whether that is a Pope who will ordain women to the priesthood

or impose the Latin Mass on all parishes,

or change the Church’s teaching on contraception

or excommunicate all the bad Catholics.

These might be good ideas or bad ideas,

but a solution more radical than any of these is called for,
a solution that fits neither a “conservative” agenda nor a “liberal” one, 

a solution that is hinted at in the parable of the fig tree.

The gardener in the parable says

that he will cultivate the ground around the tree and fertilize it.

What our translation rather primly translates as “fertilizer”

is the Greek word kopria, which really means “excrement.”

A Pope from many centuries ago, Gregory the Great,

said, in reference to this parable, that the fertilizer that can make

the unfruitful tree of our souls fruitful once again

is the remembrance of the dung of our past sins;

the frank acknowledgement of the stench of our own misdeeds 

can pierce our hearts

and move us to begin bearing 

the fruit of good and godly deeds (Homily 31).

And what is true of us as individuals 

is just as true of us as a Church.

The Church must clear away all of the weeds that are choking it:

the desire to protect careers and images at all costs,

the denial that the world’s evils are found in the Church as well,

the denigration of any who would dare to call us to account.

The Church must be fertilized by facing up to the foulness of her failings,

and let her heart be pierced by the stench of her own sins,

so that we can in due season bear fruit

that will feed a world that is spiritually starving.

Perhaps our next Pope can help us to do this.

But the Church stands 

on the promise of Christ to remain with us,

not on the dream of a Pope 

who will fix everything that is wrong with us.

Still, we should pray in this time of sede vacans 

for God to send us a leader

who, like the gardener in the parable,

will cultivate and fertilize the Church with honest repentance.

And we should not only pray, but pray with confidence,

because we know that while our past is ours, and we must own it,

our future belongs to the God 

whose grace can make a barren fig tree fruitful

and make a desert bush burn with the fire of God’s presence,

the God whose Spirit, 

despite our best efforts to quench it,

still burns as a refiner’s fire within the Church, 

the living body of Christ. 

4th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Jeremiah 1:4-5, 17-19; 1 Corinthians 12:31-13:13; Luke 4:21-30

In today’s Gospel, the people who,

at the beginning of the story, “all spoke highly” of Jesus

and “were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth,”

have become by the end of the passage a mob “filled with fury,”

who try to throw Jesus over a cliff.

This change in attitude seems to occur

when Jesus recalls for them two stories in which

the prophets Elijah and Elisha came to the aid of Gentiles –

the starving widow of Zarephath and the leper Naaman the Syrian –

rather than helping their fellow Israelites.

Presumably what fills them with fury is the implication

that Jesus has come not only for them,

to fulfill God’s promises to Israel,

but also for others,

to extend God’s saving covenant to the Gentiles.

Their fury is, I think, rooted in fear:

the fear that God’s favor

is a limited commodity,

so that the more God loves others

the less he loves them;

the fear that there is only so much room

within God’s covenantal love,

so that the inclusion of others in that love

might mean their exclusion.

As is so often the case with the Gospels,

the figures we read about invite us to reflect on our own lives.

Do we treat God’s love as if it were a limited commodity?

Do we react with envy when others benefit?

Do we find ourselves filled with fury

because we fear that another’s gain is our loss?

And if we find such fear and fury in ourselves,

do we ask ourselves, is this who I really want to be?

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov

a character recounts a Russian folktale that paints for us

a picture of such fury and fear:

Once upon a time there was a peasant woman
and a very wicked woman she was.
And she died and did not leave a single good deed behind.
The devils caught her and plunged her into the lake of fire.
So her guardian angel stood and wondered what good deed of hers
he could remember to tell to God;
‘She once pulled up an onion in her garden,’ said he,
‘and gave it to a beggar woman.’
And God answered: ‘You take that onion then,
hold it out to her in the lake, and let her take hold and be pulled out.
And if you can pull her out of the lake, let her come to Paradise,
but if the onion breaks, then the woman must stay where she is.’
The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her.
‘Come,’ said he, ‘catch hold and I’ll pull you out.’
He began cautiously pulling her out.
He had just pulled her right out, when the other sinners in the lake,
seeing how she was being drawn out,
began catching hold of her so as to be pulled out with her.
But she was a very wicked woman and she began kicking them.
‘I’m to be pulled out, not you. It’s my onion, not yours.’
As soon as she said that, the onion broke.
And the woman fell into the lake and she is burning there to this day.
So the angel wept and went away.

Because she was convinced

that her single good deed belonged to her alone,

that God’s salvation was a limited commodity

that she had to grab for herself,

that those with her in the lake of fire were her rivals

rather than her fellow sufferers,

she found herself left in that lake for eternity

drowned in the fire of her own fear and fury.

But this is not who we are condemned to be.

In our second reading,

Paul speaks of a different kind of living,

what he calls “a still more excellent way,”

the way that prizes love above all else.

This love, Paul says, is not jealous, not pompous, not puffed-up, not rude,

“it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered,

it does not brood over injury.”

It is not filled with fear of being deprived of a blessing,

or fury at the good fortune of others,

but “bears all things, believes all things,

hopes all things, endures all things.”

If we want to be Christians,

if we want to live this still more excellent way,

we should pray that God fill us with this greatest of gifts,

the love that seeks not its own good

but rejoices in the good of others,

the love that led Jesus to endure the cross for all,

the love that conquers fear and fury.

The Baptism of the Lord

Readings: Isaiah 40:1-5, 9-11; Titus 2:11-14; 3:4-7; Luke 3:15-16, 21-22

What did Jesus find when he went down

into the waters of the Jordan river,

to baptized at the hands of John?

What awaited him as he plunged into the bath of repentance

to which John had called his fellow Israelites

in preparation for the coming day of judgment?

Certainly not the washing away of his own sins;

Luke has already informed us in the beginning of his Gospel

that the child born of Mary is holy, the Son of God.

There was no need for Jesus to repent,

to turn his life around.

What, then, took place that day in the river Jordan?

What happened to him in those waters?

Today’s celebration of the Baptism of the Lord

concludes the Christmas season,

and reminds us that for the past few weeks

we have been doing something more

than simply celebrating Jesus’ birthday.

The Baptism of Jesus continues

the “epiphany” or “manifestation” of Jesus to the world

that we celebrated last Sunday:

the Father’s voice from heaven

and the descent of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove

show to those present that Jesus is God’s beloved Son –

he truly is “Emmanuel,” God-with-us.

But there is an even deeper connection

between the Baptism of Jesus and the mystery of Christmas.

For the incarnation is not simply about God the eternal Son

taking on a human nature –

as stupendous as that event is –

but it is also about we humans

becoming, through Christ, partakers in God’s own nature.

The early Christian theologian Athanasius of Alexandria

wrote that Christ “was made human

that we might be made God" (De incarnatione no. 54).

This theme has echoed throughout the Christian tradition.

When the priest or deacon mixes water into the wine

at the preparation of the gifts at Mass

he prays, “may we come to share in the divinity of Christ

who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”

The poet Gerard Manly Hopkins put it this way:

      In a flash, at a trumpet crash, 

      I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am.

This theme is sometimes called

the admirabile commercium or “wondrous exchange”:

God takes on human nature in all its frailty

so that we may take on the immortality of God’s own nature.

This is the event of our salvation that we celebrate at Christmas,

and it is also what we celebrate in the Baptism of Christ.

What did Jesus find when he went down into the water?

He found the waters of death that we had created.

And in those waters he found us:

drowned in the waters of chaos,

submerged in our alienation from God,

suffocated by our own unlovely sinful acts,

the dead bloated with the corpsegas
of pride and greed and envy.

And stripping himself of his immortality,

Jesus transformed those waters of death into waters of life,

exchanging his divine immortality for our human death,

so that we who were drowned in sin

might be raised with him to immortal life.

Through our baptism,

which St. Paul calls “the bath of rebirth,”

we become partners in that wondrous exchange.

In baptism the Holy Spirit poured out on Christ

is “richly poured out on us”;

in baptism God declares that we, like Christ,

are God’s beloved, on whom God’s favor rest;

in baptism, like Christ, heaven opened to us.

What did we find when we went down 

into the waters of baptism?

What awaited us in the bath of repentance?

We did not find death

but the robe of immortality

that Christ left for us there,

the glorious garment of which he stripped himself

so that we might be clothed in everlasting life.

Wrapped by Christ in that robe of light

we pray that we may be worthy of such a garment,

that we might live lives that reflect

the divine glory that has been given to us.

It was for this that God became a human being:

that God’s life and light might be reflected in us

who have become through grace 

what Christ is by nature:

beloved sons and daughters of God.

Epiphany

Readings: Isaiah 60:1-6; Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6; Matthew 2:1-12

We call this feast,

on which we recall the visit of the Magi to the Christ child,

“Epiphany,” from the Greek word epipháneia,

which means an appearance or manifestation.

We also use the word “epiphany” 

in a more secular sense,

one popularized by the novelist James Joyce,

to refer to flashes of profound realization

that seem to strike us from out of the blue.

Today it seems to be used for any insight,

some of them less-than-profound:

in a recent news story from Los Angeles,

a teacher at an elementary school

that had provided iPads for all its students

described the effect on learning as “an ephiphany.”

“Epiphany” is even the name for an integrated suite

of Customer Relations Management software.

Presumably using this software 

will give one striking new insights

into how to manage one’s customer relations.

But the epiphany that we celebrate today

is something more than an idea 

that suddenly occurs to the Wise Men.

What the Magi find in Bethlehem is not an idea, 

but a person: Jesus Christ.

Pope Benedict has written: “Being a Christian

is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea,

but the encounter with an event, a person,

which gives life a new horizon

and a decisive direction” (Deus Caritas Est no. 1).

What the Pope is warning against here

is the temptation, on the one hand, 

to reduce being a Christian

to a set of ideas that we hold 

about God and the world –

making it something like 

a philosophical system –

or, on the other hand,

to transform it 

into a set of ethical positions –

whether this be a commitment to peace and justice

or to so-called “traditional values.”

Pope Benedict does not deny 

that Christianity commits us

both to certain truth claims 

about God and the world

and to certain ethical positions,

but the heart of Christianity is found 

neither in our ideas nor our ethics

but in our encounter with the person of Jesus Christ.

The Epiphany of the Wise Men

was not their being struck by a startling new notion,

nor their adoption of a new set of moral values,

but the transforming experience 

of meeting God in Jesus Christ.

Their epiphany is their encounter

with the God who has entered our world 

as a human child,

as love that makes itself weak and vulnerable

so as to become one with us in all things but sin.

As a result of this encounter 

they no doubt found themselves

thinking about God and the world in new ways.

After all, if you go searching for a king

and find yourself kneeling before a baby

in a humble dwelling in a small town,

it is bound to overturn 

much of what you thought you knew

about God and the world.

And based on this new understanding 

you very well might find yourself 

with a very different set of values

and a very different approach to living them out.

As Pope Benedict says, this encounter

“gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”

In the wake of this encounter,

Jesus Christ becomes for the Magi 

the new star whom they will follow

on their journey of return 

to their true homeland in God’s kingdom.

And this is true for us too.

Our protestant brothers and sisters often speak

of having “a personal relationship with Christ.”

I used to react negatively to this phrase

because I thought it referred to having

a private relationship with God 

that took no account of other people.

This would run completely counter 

to our Catholic tradition

of the importance of the Church community 

in our life as Christians.

But now I see that 

speaking of a “personal relationship” with Jesus

is less about having your own personal Jesus

and more about having a relationship with Jesus

as a person who is even now living and active.

Perhaps this is something we Catholics need to learn

from our protestant brothers and sisters.

Pope Benedict himself reminds us

that Jesus is not someone 

who lived an long, long time ago

and left behind some interesting ideas 

and ethical injunctions.

Jesus is the risen Lord whom we can encounter

in a way that is just as direct and just as personal

as the encounter of the Magi with the Christ child.

We encounter him in the words of Scripture,

in prayer, 

in the sacraments,

in the poor and the suffering, 

and in each other.

The epiphany of God as love 

is not something that happened long ago;

it is something that is happening here and now.

Just as with the Magi, 

Jesus shows himself to us

so that he might become 

both the star that we follow

and the companion who walks beside us,

on our journey to God’s kingdom.