Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Isaiah 35:4-7a; James 2:1-5; Mark 7:31-37In today’s Gospel we hear of Jesus
engaging in what might seem to us unusual behavior.
Confronted with a man who cannot hear or speak,
he touches the body part to be healed,
sticking his fingers in the man’s ears.
He puts his spit on the man’s tongue,
as if it were possessed of magical properties.
He groans, perhaps in effort or for dramatic effect?
And he speaks a magical word — Ephphatha! —
which our Gospel writer Mark
is careful to keep in its original, Aramaic form.
In short, he acts very much like a typical magical healer
in the ancient Mediterranean world.

Such a depiction of Jesus as a “magician” makes Christians nervous.
Indeed, it made the Gospel writers Matthew and Luke nervous enough
that this is one of the few incidents recounted in Mark’s Gospel
that they do not include it in their own Gospels.
The idea that Jesus might have behaved in such a way
that people would have seen him as a magician
seems to trivialize what he was about;
it seems to reduce Christianity to a superstitious cult
that is about manipulation of occult forces
rather than the worship of God in spirit and in truth.
We Catholics might be particularly sensitive to this,
since the sacramental nature of our worship
sometimes strikes other Christians as indistinguishable
from various forms of religious magic
that can be found in many so-called “primitive” cultures.
We want to say that our sacraments are radically different
from the ritualistic magic of tribal peoples.

But perhaps we protest too much.
Maybe these so-called “primitive” cultures recognize something
that we modernized,
industrialized,
urbanized,
individualized,
rationalized people have forgotten.
We human beings are ritual animals;
we make meaning with bodily gestures.
Symbolic action is the DNA of human cultures,
the means by which tradition is transmitted and imbibed,
an effective means of communicating
that which is distinctively human.
Even more, our rituals are signs of a deep mystery
that lies at the heart of the world’s existence,
and they are the means by which that mystery gives itself to us.
So there is really no reason for us Catholics to apologize
for believing that our ritual actions actually make something happen,
that they are, for lack of a better word, magical.
After all, if Mark’s Gospel is to be trusted,
Jesus did not hesitate to engage in “magical” behavior.

But perhaps we do need to make some distinctions
between different sorts of “magic.”
The kind that is probably most familiar to us,
the sort traditionally performed by men on stages
wearing tuxedos and top hats and waving magic wands,
the kind you see at a “magic show,”
is really a matter of illusion, clever and entertaining,
but not really magic at all.
I think it is safe to say that this is not the sort of magic
that is going on
either in today’s Gospel or in the sacraments.

Then there is the “magic” that is associated with incantations and spells —
potions, crystals, amulets, curses, voodoo dolls, the evil eye, and so forth.
This crops up in a variety of places:
from ancient folk beliefs to new age religions to the Harry Potter books.
This magic seeks to control unseen forces in the universe
in order to attain a desired result --
asort of primitive technology
by which people have sought some measure of control
over cosmic forces.
At its best, it expresses our human desire to live in an enchanted world
with hidden possibilities.
But in any case, I think it is safe to say that this is not the sort of magic
that is going on
either in today’s Gospel or in the sacraments.
Jesus is not manipulating hidden forces in order to heal the man;
rather, the healing power of God is manifesting itself
through his symbolic actions.
Likewise, the sacraments are not about our power to control,
but about God’s power to act through our human rituals.

This is a third form of magic.
At least, I cannot think of a better word than “magic”
to convey the idea
of that which makes possible
what we normally consider impossible.
This is the real magic
that will satisfy the desire for an enchanted world.
In literary terms, the world of Christian faith
is a world of “magical realism” —
the magic of God’s hidden power manifesting itself in our reality,
transforming our symbols and rituals
so that they become effective signs of God’s grace.
Jesus’ actions —
involving touch and spit and groaning and ritual phrases —
show us that there is real magic in the world:
there is hope for the hopeless,
there is forgiveness for sinners,
there is release for captives,
there is a home for the outcast.
The world of dead ends and limited possibilities
is not the final truth about the world.
To believe in real magic, the magic of God,
is to believe that when you are in a situation
in which you can see no way forward —
whether depression or addiction
or a broken relationship or professional failure —
that is not the end of the story:
when you cannot hear, cannot speak, cannot see a future,
God can touch you,
God can release you,
God can show you a way forward.
And in the sacraments, the real magic of God touches us
just like Jesus touched the man in today’s Gospel.

So perhaps we shouldn’t be embarrassed by Jesus acting like a magician.
The world is hungry for magic, for real magic.
The world is hungry for the hope that what appears possible to us
is not in fact the limit of the possible.
Let us have confidence that in our sacramental celebration
Jesus will touch us and say to us ephphatha — be opened:
be opened to hear the silent music that sustains the world;
be opened to speak a word of hope to the hopeless,
be opened to embrace
the impossible possibility of the kingdom of God.

Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: 1 Kings 19:4-8; Ephesians 4:30—5:2; John 6:41-51
In today’s second reading, Paul gives the Ephesians
a command that, at first glance,
might strike us as rather strange: “be imitators of God.”

Imitators?
It sounds sort of. . . phony. . . and pathetic.
No one wants to be a copycat, a poseur, a clone, a wannabe.
We like to think of ourselves as those
who march to the beat of a different drummer,
who take the road less traveled,
who think outside the box. . .
or whatever other cliché you prefer to invoke.
We want to be trendsetters,
and not trendy.
We want to be the ones who are imitated,
and not the ones who imitate.

Yet a certain impulse to imitate
seems to be built into our human nature.
Indeed, some have argued that imitation
is at the heart of human desire —
that a major factor in the desirability of something for us
is our perception of its desirability to others.
In other words, seeing someone desiring something
awakens in me a desire for that same thing,
precisely because I see another desiring it.
My desire has less to do with the intrinsic worth of the thing
and more to do with my imitation of the desire of another.

I do not know if all desire can be explained in this way,
but it would certainly seem to explain a lot:
from romantic triangles to professional rivalries
to inexplicable fads like Tickle-Me-Elmo.
I never noticed how attractive someone was
until she started dating my friend;
I didn’t particularly want the job,
until my colleague applied for it;
I hadn’t noticed how much I needed a particular product
until I heard about people standing in line for it.

This imitative element in desire
might to some degree also explain
the conflict that seems endemic in human relationships.
Because my desire is awakened by your desire,
you and I must become rivals in our desiring:
we both want the same object,
but we can’t both have it.
Whether it is a person or a position or a product,
the imitative character of desire
means that my gain is your loss, and vice versa.
And because of such rivalry,
we come to view life as a competition
and others as a threat.
So not only is imitation pathetically uncool,
but the imitative nature of our desire
leads to the very evils
that Paul speaks of in our second reading:
bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling.

So why, then, does Paul call on us to imitate God?
Because imitating God is not like imitating another person:
God’s gain is not my loss.
God is not a rival with whom we are in competition.
God needs nothing.
God lacks nothing.
God is rather the source of all things:
pure generosity without boundaries;
the inexhaustible source of the torrent of life
that pours constantly into our world.
God desires nothing but to share God’s goodness.

This is the God whom Paul calls us to imitate
by being “kind to one another, compassionate,
forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.”
Our imitation of God, our desiring what God desires,
is the medicine that can heal our rivalries.

But how is this possible?
How can a mere human being imitate God?
We should always remember
that we are created in God’s image and likeness,
so that if we can manage, through God’s grace,
to be the people God created us to be,
we are already imitating God, being God’s image.

And we see what this looks like
by looking at the life of Jesus.
Jesus is the Word of God made flesh
and the image of the invisible Father,
but he is also fully human,
like us in all things except sin.
In him we see what it means
for human beings to be the people God created them to be.
To desire what God desires
is to desire to live the kind of life Christ lived.
As Paul tells us: “live in love, as Christ loved us
and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God.”
Or, as Jesus says in our Gospel,
he gives his flesh “for the life of the world.”
To imitate God is to imitate Christ,
who holds nothing back,
who sees no one as his rival
and desires nothing but to share God’s goodness,
who goes to his death rather than live in any other way.

Some imitate Christ in a quite literal way,
by laying down their lives for the cause of God.
These we call martyrs and we rightly venerate them.
For most of us, however, this imitation
happens in small, undramatic ways.
It happens when we rejoice in the good fortune of others,
and manage not to see their gain as our loss.
It happens when we desire to live our lives
in service of those less fortunate
and to see in their flourishing our own flourishing.

So in the coming week, take some time to reflect on your desires
Do they foster in you a sense of rivalry with others?
Or are they the desires of God, the desire to be more like Christ,
the desire to live a life of joy and generosity?
And as we discern the source of our desires
let us pray that, through the grace of Christ,
we might become imitators of God.

17th Sunday in Ordinary Time

For most of this year,
our Gospel reading is taken from the Gospel of Mark,
but today we begin what we might call
the lectionary's “Johannine digression.”
For today and for the next four Sundays following,
our Gospel reading is taken from the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel,
the so-called “Bread of Life Discourse.”
It is in this section of his Gospel that John,
who does not recount Jesus’ words
over the bread and wine at the Last Supper,
shows us Jesus speaking of himself
as the true bread that has come down from heaven
and in whom we abide by eating his Eucharistic flesh.

John prefaces this “Bread of Life Discourse” with a miracle story
that is found in all four of the Gospels:
the familiar story of Jesus feeding the multitude
with five loaves and two fish.
John underscores the Eucharistic echoes of this miracle,
by telling us that it occurs at Passover time —
the same time when Jesus will eat
his final meal with his disciples one year later —
and he describes the actions of Jesus in the same terms
used by the other Gospel writers at the Last Supper:
Jesus takes the loaves, gives thanks, and distributes them.
In feeding the multitude,
Jesus foreshadows what he will do at the Last Supper,
and what he does for us every time we gather at his altar.

In preaching on this text, St. John Chrysostom,
who lived in the last half of the 4th century,
raised an interesting question:
why doesn’t Jesus simply create food out of thin air?
Why bother to multiply the food that was there,
rather than simply make new food from nothing?
After all, barley loaves and pickled fish
were pretty simple, lowbrow food —
a young boy's lunch;
maybe the first-century equivalent
of saltines and canned sardines —
and Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh,
through whom the universe was created from nothing,
could surely have conjured up something more exciting,
something more elegant,
something that would be a special treat
for the multitude that had followed him across the sea of Galilee.
So why does he choose not to throw out that simple peasant food
and create from nothing a great feast of the finest delicacies?

According to Chrysostom, it is because he wished to use
“the creation itself as a groundwork for his marvels”
(Homily 42 on the Gospel of John).
Rather than create something anew,
Jesus takes what is already at hand,
and transforms it by multiplying it,
so as to feed a multitude.

It seems to me that in wishing to use creation
as the groundwork for his miracle
Jesus is pointing out two things to us.

First, creation itself is already miraculous.
John Chrysostom’s contemporary, St. Augustine,
in preaching on this same passage,
noted how odd it is
that the multitude marvels
at the multiplication of the loaves and fishes,
but takes no notice of the miraculous fact
of God’s on-going and continuous activity in the world.
He says, “Governing the entire universe is a greater miracle
than feeding five thousand people with five loaves of bread,
yet no one marvels at it.
People marvel at the feeding of the five thousand
not because this miracle is greater,
but because it is out of the ordinary”
(Homilies on the Gospel of John 24, 1.6.7).
Jesus works miracles not to convince us
that God can, on occasion, do extraordinary things,
but to awaken us to the fact
that God does extraordinary things all the time.
This is why in John’s Gospel
the miracles are always referred to as “signs.”
Like a sign, they point away from themselves to something else:
the constant extraordinary action of God
in what we think of as the most ordinary events of life.

Second, the way God works in the world
is not by discarding the ordinary realities of creation
and substituting for them something new and different,
but by taking what is already at hand and transforming it.
If God’s creation and preservation of the world is itself a miracle,
as Augustine said,
then God does not need something “better” to work with
in order to save us.
Just as Christ uses the simple loaves of barley
to feed the multitude,
so too he can use the simple substance of our lives
to make his kingdom present.
We might look at our lives and ask, like Andrew in today’s Gospel,
“what good is this for so many?’
but it is good enough if Christ takes it and blesses it.
An adage of traditional Catholic theology
is that “grace perfects and does not destroy nature.”
This means that becoming a new creation in Christ
does not involve the destruction of who we are
but rather is our perfecting and transformation
into who we truly are in God’s eyes,
the miraculous beings whom God has loved into existence.

So as we continue to reflect on this story
of the miraculous feeding of the multitude,
let us pray that we grow ever more attentive
to the miraculous ways in which God feeds us everyday,
the way in which God feeds our bodies
with the food that comes from the earth,
and the way in which God feeds our souls with Christ,
the bread who has come down from heaven.
Let the miracle of the Eucharist awaken us to the ways in which
God uses the daily bread of our lives
and transforms and perfects it to become the bread of angels.

Don’t miss the miracle that you live everyday,
because it is this everyday life
that Christ will take into his hands,
and bless,
and multiply to feed a multitude.

12th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Three years ago this month I went with a group of people,
including some Corpus Christi parishioners,
down to New Orleans to participate in the efforts
to rebuild the city after hurricane Katrina,
which had hit the gulf coast some nine-months previously.
I say “rebuilding efforts” but in fact what we spent the week doing
was emptying and gutting a house in the lower Ninth Ward —
a low-income area of the city that was particularly hard-hit
in the flooding following Katrina —
as a prelude to its possible rebuilding.
Wearing protective masks and heavy clothing,
we spent our days hauling out furniture, appliances,
and personal belongings
that had been ruined by the rising waters,
and then tearing out the mold-covered walls and floors
so that the house would be ready if, one day,
the owner might find the money and emotional energy to rebuild.

Two things stand out in my mind from this experience.
One is the immense destructive power of water.
The interior of this house looked as if a giant
had picked the whole thing up
and shaken it vigorously.
Furniture had been moved from one room to another;
heavy appliances had been overturned;
every single item that was touched by the water
had been displaced.
And this was not simply one house;
when we stepped outside and looked up and down the street,
we saw an entire community that had been destroyed by water:
almost all of the houses were deserted
and the only people on the streets seemed to be National Guardsmen
and occasional drug dealers.
I have never in my life had a keener sense
of the deadly, destructive power of water.

This destructive power of water
is highlighted in our first reading and Gospel.
More precisely, we are assured in those readings
that God’s power is greater than water’s destructive power.
God can bar the doors of the sea
and say to the proud waves, “be stilled.”
And Christ, the power of God incarnate,
can “rebuked the wind” and say to the sea, “Quiet! Be still!”
It is the God who creates the sea who can command it,
and this is the God we encounter in Jesus Christ.

The other thing that stands out in my mind
from that week in New Orleans
was how the combination of our heavy protective clothing
and the climate of New Orleans in June,
with temperatures in the nineties,
gave me not just a sense of water’s destructive power,
but also a sense of the life-giving and life-sustaining power of water.
We were told that frequent water breaks
were not a luxury but a necessity
and we quickly learned that this was true.
We sometimes say that we are “dying of thirst,”
but during that week I began to have some sense
of what this might mean in a literal sense.
The same element that had destroyed the lives
of the residents of the lower Ninth Ward
was also life-sustaining.
Indeed, one of the factors preventing people from moving back
was the lack of fresh water.

The power of water to give death is matched by its power to give life
and it is for this reason, I believe,
that Christ chose water as the outward sign
of the sacrament by which we become members of his body,
the sacrament we celebrate today.

In our second reading, Paul tells us
that “whoever is in Christ is a new creation.”
Paul sees salvation not in terms of what happens after we die,
but rather in terms becoming a “new creation,”
of taking on a new sort of existence
that he characterizes as being “in Christ.”
This is an existence in which we live no longer for ourselves,
but for the God who creates and redeems us.
And our Catholic faith is that this normally happens to us
through the sacrament of baptism.
In baptism, the life-giving power of water
is raised by God to a new level.
The water that sustains our mortal lives
is taken up by God in baptism
to become the instrument through which
God grants us immortal life,
through which we become a new creation.

But Paul also tells us that becoming this new creation
means leaving behind our old self:
“the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come.”
And here we return to the destructive power of water,
the power of water to sweep away all in its path.
The waters of baptism are the waters of life,
but they are also, in a certain sense, the waters of death —
the death of an old way of life:
a way of life that we are born into as members of the human race,
a way of life in which we live only for ourselves,
a way of life that Jesus died to free us from.
Old things must be swept away by the flood of baptism
so that new things might come.
In baptism, our old self is plunged into the waters of death
so that we might arise from the waters of life as a new creation.

Death and new life:
this is pretty serious business for a tiny baby.
Indeed, it sounds sort of risky.
But it is precisely because life itself
is a serious, risky business
that we bring our children to the waters of baptism.
We bring them because we believe
that they too have been born into that old way of life
from which all of us must be freed.
We bring them because we believe
that dying to the old ways of living for ourselves
and leading the life of the new creation in Christ
is the path of true life.
We bring them because we believe
that Christ is the one “whom even wind and sea obey”
and that those who have faith in him need not fear.
So let the waters of baptism
sweep away the old life,
and let the waters of baptism
give and sustain our new life in Christ.

Easter 6

St. Thomas Aquinas,
at the end of his lengthy commentary on John’s Gospel,
recounts the medieval legend that “as an old man
John was carried to the church by his followers
to teach the faithful.
He taught only one thing:
‘Little children, love one another.’”
Then Thomas adds,
“This is the perfection of the Christian life” (§2653).

This is a legend and not from scripture,
but it rings true with our second reading and Gospel for today,
both of which are traditionally ascribed to St. John
and both of which place love at the center of their message.
From the first letter of John:
“let us love one another, because love is of God.”
From our Gospel:
“This I command you: love one another.”
This is the perfection of the Christian life:
to know the one, true and living God.
And we come to know God by loving because God is love,
and when we love, we know God, as it were, from the inside.

This sounds like pretty good news.
Love: this is the commandment of Christ to his disciples.
Disciples who love will “bear fruit that will remain.”
What could be more simple than that?
As St. Augustine said,
“Love, and do what you will” (Homilies on 1 John 7.8).

But anyone who loves knows
that love is really not simple at all.
Our feelings about people and things
can be complex and conflicted.
Our love finds itself entangled
with a host of emotions and passions,
not excluding anger, jealousy, lust and pride,
which makes it difficult for us to separate what is love
from what might be something else, some darker impulse,
that has attached itself to our love, or masquerades as love.
People bind themselves to others in the name of love,
but they also break those bonds in the name of love.
People die in the name of love,
but they also kill in the name of love.
St. Augustine’s injunction, “love, and do what you will,”
can be twisted so that any action on our part can be justified
so long as we do it in the name of love.

This has been on my mind recently
particularly in light of the highly-publicized murder
of Stephanie Parente, a student at Loyola College, where I teach.
Stephanie, along with her mother and sister,
was killed by her father,
who then took his own life.
I did not know Stephanie personally,
but the impact of her murder on her friends,
many of whom are my students,
and the particular nature of this crime,
a father murdering his family,
has caused me to reflect on this event
more than I might on the typical human tragedy
that confronts me in my morning paper.

I don’t think anyone yet knows what role, if any,
mental illness might have played in this tragedy,
and how this might affect our understanding of this man’s actions.
But what has haunted me
is that this man who killed his wife and children
appears from all reports to have loved them.
What haunts me more is that he quite possibly thought
that he was taking their lives because he loved them —
that he was somehow protecting them,
or ensuring that he could have them with him even in death.
Could it be that he used love as the justification for his actions?

“Love, and do what you will?”
In this case, surely not.
This man may have loved his family;
that is not my place to judge.
But this was not an act that was born out of love
but out of some darker passion that hid behind the mask of love.
Surely there are actions that are simply incompatible with love,
and yet our human love can become so twisted by sin
that we attempt to justify these actions in the name of love.
This is an extreme example,
but the shadow of sin falls across us all
and if I am honest with myself I find that I my love too
is not immune from the darker impulses of the human species.

But thanks be to God that all this talk about love
that we hear in today’s readings
is not first and foremost about our human love at all.
Our second reading says: “this is love:
not that we have loved God, but that he loved us
and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.”
This phrase “expiation for our sins”
is perhaps somewhat ominous and technical sounding,
but what it means is that God has sent us Jesus
to redeem the failures of our love.
We are to love one another
not according to the pattern of our fallen human love —
a love that has become entwined with other, darker passions —
but with the pure love that Christ showed on the cross,
the love that lays down its life so as to give new life.
This is the pattern of true love in which we are to abide
and the good news of Jesus Christ
is that God gives it to us as a gift
because God is love.
It is not something that we achieve,
but something that God achieves in us.
Through the free gift of God’s love,
our human love can, over the course of a lifetime,
begin to be untwisted,
disentangled from those dark passions that hide within it;
it can be remade according to the pattern of Christ’s love.
In the waters of baptism, love can be purified,
because we are immersed in God’s own love.
At the table of the Eucharist, true love can be nourished in us,
because the love of God becomes our food and drink.
This is the gift of love in which we are to abide.
This is the love that Christ commands.
This is the perfection of the Christian life.

Easter 4

Every year, on the fourth Sunday of Easter,
our Gospel reading is one of the passages from the tenth chapter of John
in which Jesus speaks of himself as a shepherd.
Thus, in the tradition of the Church,
this has come to be called “Good Shepherd Sunday.”
The image of Jesus as a shepherd is one that is familiar to us all —
indeed, some of the earliest artistic representations of Jesus that we have
are not the familiar robed and bearded figure
but the image of a young, beardless shepherd boy.
The image of a shepherd was a resonant one for early Christians,
and not simply because shepherds
were relatively more common two thousand years ago
than they are now.
It was an image rooted in the Old Testament’s understanding
of what sort of king God desired for the people of Israel.
The king was not to be
one who used and exploited the people for his own gain,
but was to care for them and guide them and protect them.
And as the Jewish people hope for a messiah —
a savior who would restore the fortunes of their nation
and lead them in the ways of God —
this image of the shepherd king
became a way of expressing that hope.

In speaking of himself as a shepherd,
Jesus is claiming to be the fulfillment of that hope:
the king who will care for and guide
and protect the flock of God’s people.
But more than that:
in calling himself the good shepherd,
the shepherd who not only cares for
and guides and protects the sheep,
but even lays down his life for them,
Jesus presents himself as the one who surpasses Israel’s hopes —
a radically new kind of shepherd, a new sort of leader.
The kind of rule that Jesus exercises
involves nothing less than giving his life for his people:
the stone rejected by the builders
who has become the cornerstone of God’s new temple.
In Jesus’ laying down of his life, God’s love is bestowed on us,
so that we may be called children of God.

But this is not simply the kind of leadership,
the kind of shepherding,
that Jesus himself exercises.
He calls us, too, to be shepherds.
At our baptisms we were anointed with the oil of Chrism
to share in Christ’s ministry of priest, prophet and king.
We share in his priestly ministry
by worshiping God as part of Christ’s body, the Church.
We share his prophetic ministry
by bearing witness to his Gospel in the world.
And we share in his kingly ministry, his royal ministry of shepherd,
by exercising the kind of care and guidance of others that he exercised:
the kind of care and guidance that calls us to lay down our lives.
As the first letter of John puts it:
“We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us —
and we ought to lay down our lives for one another” (1 Jn 3:16).

So part of our being sent as Jesus’ disciples
is our being sent to be good shepherds
who will lay down our lives
for those whom God has put into our care.
Not the kind of care and guidance
that dominates or smothers,
but the kind that empowers and gives life,
even if this requires us to sacrifice ourselves.

Of course, the language of laying down one’s life
conjures images of dramatic acts of sacrifice,
in which one dies in the act of defending
those whom one has been charged to protect.
It conjures such images
not least because this is precisely what Jesus does:
he is the good shepherd who gives his life
to keep the wolf from catching and scattering his sheep.
And perhaps it is the case that some of us
will lay down our lives in this dramatic way.
But we ought not let these dramatic images lead us to overlook
the more mundane, every-day ways in which we lay down our lives
for those who have been put into our care.

Any parent who has walked the floor in the middle of the night
with a sick or fussy baby
or who manages to let go of the parental grasp
and send their child out into the adult world
knows what it means to lay down one’s life.
So too, any child who cares for an aging parent
with patience and forbearance
knows what it means to lay down one’s life.
Any employer or supervisor who stays late at the office
figuring out how to tweak the budget,
or who forgoes a bonus,
in order not to have to lay anyone off
knows what it means to lay down one’s life.
Any minister, ordained or lay,
who spends hours listening to his or her people,
sharing their struggles and joys,
while still laughing at jokes
about only having to work one day a week
knows what it means to lay down one’s life.
All of these involve a kind of dying to oneself
so that others might have life in its fullness.
All of these can be ways that we as disciples
answer Christ’s call to lay down our lives.

But Christ does not simply say that he is the good shepherd
who lays down his life for his sheep;
he says that he has “power to lay it down,
and power to take it up again.”
And it is part of our Easter faith as Christians
that he has power to take up our lives as well,
if we lay them down for the sake of his flock.
The kind of dying to self that is involved in being a good shepherd —
a good parent or child or manager or minister —
might at times seem beyond our capacity.
But the call to lay down our lives is in the end
not simply a call to self-sacrifice,
but rather is a call to entrust ourselves
to the one who is our good shepherd,
the who has laid down his life for us
and who will take up our lives with his into eternal life.
For the Lord is our shepherd, and there is nothing we shall want.

Easter 2

“As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
During Lent we have been reflecting on our call as disciples —
our call to sit at the feet of Jesus
and learn from him the path that leads to true life.
We have gathered on Sundays and Wednesdays to pray and reflect
and to deepen our relationship with Christ
and the relationships we have with each other in Christ.
But today, as we move further into the Easter season,
we hear something different.
We hear not so much “come, you are called” as “go, you are sent.”
Jesus is still calling us as disciples, of course,
but having been called to be formed in our identity as disciples,
now we are called to live out our identity as disciples in the world.
Having been called, now we are sent.

But today’s Gospel calls us to notice not simply that we are sent,
but that we are sent in a specific way, after a particular pattern:
“As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
In other words, we are sent by Jesus
in the same way that Jesus has been sent by his Father
into the world of human history.
But what is it about the way that Jesus has been sent by his Father,
that is reproduced in our own being sent by Jesus?

Referring to this verse, St. Gregory the Great wrote:
“The Lord is sending his chosen apostles into the world,
not to the world’s joys,
but to suffer as he himself was sent.
Therefore as the Son is loved by the Father
and yet is sent to suffer,
so also the disciples are loved by the Lord [Jesus],
who nevertheless sends them into the world to suffer” (Homily 26).

Well, how is that for raining on your Easter parade?
Here we are, still basking in our Easter joy,
and Gregory comes along to tell us
that being sent by Jesus as he has been sent by the Father
means being sent to the cross.

I remember a few years ago when Clarence Hicks was in RCIA,
he used to ask, “Did Jesus have to suffer and die on the Cross?
Was it God’s will that Jesus die?”
This is a profound question.
It pushes us to ask how it is possible that the Father who loved Jesus
could have sent him to a world in which he would have to suffer and die.
Was that the point of the whole thing?
And this is inseparable from the question of how Jesus,
who loved his disciples,
could send them out into a world
in which they would have to suffer and die.
How can one who loves us
call us to a life of discipleship that will lead to suffering?
Is suffering the whole point of discipleship?

Here we are dealing with the deep mysteries
of how the divine will plays itself out in history,
something that surpasses our comprehension,
and perhaps the best we can do
is try to come up with analogies from our own experience.
So when I ask myself,
why is it that God the Father would send Jesus into the world
knowing that he would suffer,
and why would Jesus send his disciples into the world,
knowing that they would suffer,
I think about my own children and what I hope for them.
When I ask myself, “who do I want my children to be?” I think:
I want them to be honest,
I want them to be generous,
I want them to be loving,
I want them to be people who have faith in God.
And I want them to be all of these things because I love them
and because I believe that all of these qualities
are what makes a human being truly happy.
But at the same time I know that if they are honest,
they will meet opposition;
I know that if they are generous,
people will try to take advantage of them;
I know that if they are loving,
they may well have their hearts broken;
and I know that if they are faithful to God,
they will not turn back, even in the face of suffering.
So, do I desire the suffering of my children?
I don’t think so.
What I want is for them to live truly human lives,
even though I know that in a world marked by evil
such a life will inevitably bring with it a measure of suffering.
And so my children are loved by their father,
who nevertheless sends them into the world to suffer,
yet it is not the suffering I desire,
rather I desire for them the kind of life that leads to true happiness.

I think it is something like this that is going on
with the suffering that must be endured by Jesus
and those who would be his disciples.
God does not desire that Jesus suffer,
but rather that Jesus live the sort of human life —
a life of love and faithfulness —
that is the path to true happiness.
It is the life lived, not the suffering endured, that is the point.
But in a world marked by sin, a life of love and faithfulness
will bring with it a measure of suffering,
and in the case a Jesus a suffering beyond all measure.
And so too Jesus does not desire that his disciples suffer,
but rather that their lives, like his,
would be lives of love and faithfulness.
And such a life — the life of a true disciple —
is the pearl of great price;
it is a way of life of such value
that it is worth the suffering that it might entail.

“As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
We as disciples have been sent by Christ
on the path that he himself trod,
the path that led him to the Cross,
but not a path that ended there.
And because it did not end there,
we are sent as those who through our faith
are already victors in the struggle of life with death.
And if we believe this, if we really believe this,
then we will know that the path of Christ
that we as disciples walk
is not simply the path of suffering
but is in fact the path that leads through the empty tomb
into the very life of God.

Holy Thursday

I recall a particular Holy Thursday, over 20 years ago,
listening to the first reading, the story of the Passover.
It suddenly struck me that this story
was not about something that happened years ago
to an obscure group of slaves in bronze-age Egypt,
but, in some mysterious way,
was about something that had happened to me.
I had been marked with the blood of the lamb who was slain,
and the angel of death had passed over me,
and I was the one who was to remember and give thanks.
Though I could not explain it in any way
that would fully satisfy the demands of reason,
I knew that this story was also my story,
the story of all of us who have been baptized into Christ
and marked with the sign of his cross.
In the years since then,
I have struggled to understand this mystery.
Isn't this, after all, what theologians are supposed to do?
Isn't this, after all, what all of us as disciples are supposed to do:
to sit at the feet of our master and learn and understand?
But before some mysteries understanding must, in the end,
give way to silent, ecstatic adoration.
This too is part of what it means to be a disciple:
to learn how to live in the mystery that we cannot master.

This night is filled with such mysteries.
Or, rather, this night is filled
with the one mystery that is the story of Christ:
the one mystery that is refracted
through a multitude of particular mysteries:
a people saved from slavery and death by the blood of a lamb,
a meal in which the flesh of God becomes our food,
the creator of the universe stooping to wash our feet.
These things are mysteries
not because they leave something hidden from us,
but because they show us everything,
and our finite human minds cannot take it in.
In the second century Melito of Sardis spoke of Christ,
the Alpha and the Omega,
as “the beginning which cannot be explained
and the end which cannot be grasped.”
In Christ, nothing is hidden; everything is revealed.
But just as we can be blinded by light that is too bright for our eyes,
the light shed by Christ dazzles our reason
and disorients our desire to grasp and control the mystery that is God.

Of course, we have our techniques.
We have our ways of trying to tame this mystery,
to make it something that we can handle,
something we can use,
something we can master.
We can turn the story of the first Passover
into a simple historical event, locked in the past.
We can turn the mystery of Eucharist
into a human meal of fellowship and remembrance.
We can turn Jesus’ washing of the disciples’ feet
into a simple moral lesson about service.

Such things can be easily grasped, easily mastered,
if we reduce them to our level of understanding
and hold them at a safe distance.
Or so we think.
But on this night we do not observe these things from afar;
rather, through our liturgical celebration we dwell in these events
and let them dwell in us.
We become disciples of the mystery
and let it pervade our consciousness.
We unclench the grasp of merely human reason
so that our hearts and souls and minds
can be carried beyond themselves
into the very life of God.

In a few moments, in the ceremony of the washing of feet,
we shall obey the command of Christ:
“as I have done for you, you should also do.”
We shall follow his example of humble service
in a ritual that speaks to us of our call as disciples
to serve those who are in need.
For we wash feet in myriad ways:
giving food to the hungry,
seeking justice for the oppressed,
offering friendship to the lonely.
In all of these actions we follow Jesus’ example
and fulfill his command:
“as I have done for you, you should also do.”

But there is more going on in Jesus’ washing of his disciples' feet
than a simple example for emulation.
Rather, it is an enacted parable of the mystery of our salvation.
When Jesus removes his outer cloak
and ties the servant’s towel around his waist
this is not simply part of the practical business of footwashing.
It is an action that brings before our eyes
the mystery of the eternal Son of God
stripping himself of his divine glory and taking the form of a servant,
so that he might stoop at the feet of his own creation
and pour out his life for the world,
a cleansing flood that can wash away the stain of sin
and give us new life.
For the water that flows over the feet of the disciples
is in fact the blood of Christ:
the blood of the sacrificed lamb
that marks and protects the dwelling of God’s people,
the blood that is in the cup of eternal salvation
from which we are invited to drink.
It is this mystery that enfolds and sustains
our giving of food,
our seeking of justice,
our offering of friendship.

We try to understand this, and it is right that we do so,
for Christ speaks to us the same words he spoke to Peter:
“What I am doing, you do not understand now,
but you will understand later.”
And we will understand, in the end, when we see God face to face
and know as we are known.
But what we will understand, in the end, is that we stand before a mystery:
it is not something that we master,
but something that masters us.
We will understand that we live within the mystery of God,
and that this is what it means truly to live.
And so, tonight, let our minds bow before
the mystery that has stooped to wash our feet,
the mystery that has given its life to guard us from death,
the mystery that has become our food and drink.

Lent 3

During this Lenten season
we have been focusing on our call as disciples of Jesus —
our call to sit at his feet and learn from him,
our call to follow him where he would lead us.
Of course part of the difficulty in reflecting on our call as disciples
is the difficulty we have in thinking of ourselves as disciples at all.
“Disciples?” we ask.
“Weren’t those the people who followed Jesus around
2000 years ago in Palestine?”
We tend to this of the disciples as Jesus’ contemporaries,
and we presume that the time of discipleship is past.

But even once we grasp the idea
that “disciple” is a more general term
that can include us today as we seek to be followers of Jesus,
I suspect that we continue to feel that we are at some disadvantage
by comparison with those
who could actually see Jesus with their own eyes
and hear Jesus with their own ears.
I don't mean to make excuses,
but I sometimes find myself thinking that
if I could have heard Jesus' preaching with my own ears,
if I could have seen Jesus’ miracles with my own eyes,
then I would have the same kind of faith,
the same kind of hope,
and the same kind of love
as disciples like Peter or James or John or Mary Magdalene.
If I could have been Jesus’ contemporary during his earthly ministry
then I could have heard first hand
his call to sit at his feet and learn from him,
his call to follow him where he would lead me.
If I could have been his contemporary,
then I could have been a real disciple.
As it is, I feel as if the best I can do
is be what the philosopher Kierkegaard called
“a disciple at second hand.”

But our Gospel today indicates that being Jesus’ contemporary
did not necessarily confer any advantage
with regard to being his disciple.
In today’s reading from John’s Gospel,
Jesus performs a rather strange, disruptive act
in the temple in Jerusalem,
utters some cryptic words about his Father’s house,
and speaks mysteriously
about a temple being torn down and rebuilt in three days —
and his disciples are left, frankly, baffled.
They have no idea what he is talking about.
They see his actions with their own eyes
and hear his words with their own ears
and they are at least as puzzled as we are.
John tells us that it was only several years later,
after Jesus had been raised from the dead,
that they begin to understand
that it is his body that was the temple
torn down and rebuilt in three days.
John tells us that it is only after,
when Jesus’ mortal voice had faded from their hearing,
that, “his disciples remembered that he had said this,
and they came to believe the Scripture
and the word Jesus had spoken.”
Though they were his contemporaries,
they found it no easier than we do to believe his words
and to answer his call to come and be his disciple.
As Paul indicates in our second reading,
the words and actions of Jesus
seemed foolish and weak when viewed from the perspective
of human wisdom and human strength.

So Jesus’ contemporaries were as bad off as we are
with regard to discipleship.
They had as much difficulty as we do grasping the truth
of “the foolishness of God,”
of feeling the power of “the weakness of God.”
Indeed, they were in some sense worse off than we are,
because they only learned later
what we have proclaimed to us now:
that “the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom,
and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.”
They had to await Christ’s resurrection before they could
“believe the Scripture and the word Jesus had spoken.”
The faith, hope and love of the disciples
was born from the empty tomb
and Jesus' risen presence among them.

But for us, Jesus Christ crucified and risen
stands in our midst right now,
if we can but see with the eyes of faith
and listen with ears of hope.
Indeed, if Jesus is not present to us here and now
as much as he was present in Jerusalem two-thousand years ago —
indeed, if he is not in a sense more present to us
because he has been raised to new life in the Spirit —
then we might as well stop now and all go home.

So for Lent, I’ve decided to give something up:
I am going to give up making excuses.
I’ve decided to stop telling myself
that if only I could have been there
to see and hear Jesus with my own eyes and ears,
if I could only have heard his own voice calling me,
then I would be a real disciple,
then I would sit at his feet and learn from him,
then I would heed his call to follow him where he would lead me.
Because the fact is, the risen Jesus is here now,
calling me and calling you;
his own voice is calling us, no less than it called his first disciples.
If we believe that Christ is risen and active in our midst
then the time for excuses is over
and the time of discipleship has begun.

5th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Job, who is perhaps history’s most famously unhappy person,
says in our first reading,
"the night drags on;
I am filled with restlessness until the dawn."
The image conjures for us those nights
in which we toss and turn
and wonder if the dawn will ever arrive.

Restlessness.
Not just the restlessness of sleepless nights,
though Job undoubtedly had many of those,
but a restlessness that is at the very core of our being.
The restlessness of creatures whose "life is like the wind,"
who long for union with their creator,
who long to see clearly that which they now perceive only dimly,
who long to find a love that will never disappoint,
a cause that will not fail.
This is the restlessness
of which St. Augustine wrote in his Confessions:
"O God, you have made us for yourself,
and our hearts are restless until they rest in you."

For the first thirty years of his life,
Augustine knew this restlessness
in the young person’s desire to have life mean something,
the desire not to settle from just some job
or just some relationship
or just some life,
the desire to live intensely
and to find that thing into which you can pour your love,
invest your life, and which will not fail you
by becoming boring or routine or trite.
This restlessness yearning for meaning led Augustine
through a succession of religions and philosophies,
friendships, jobs, and lovers.
If I may be permitted to associate him with another author
with whom he is not usually associated,
the young Augustine reminds me of Jack Kerouac,
who wrote in his book On the Road:
"the only people for me are the mad ones,
the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved,
desirous of everything at the same time,
the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing,
but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles
exploding like spiders across the stars
and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop
and everybody goes ‘Awww!’"

Restlessness.
Even those of us who are no longer young
can perhaps recall that feeling,
that thirst to have life mean something more,
that burning to be something more.
Maybe, beneath the rhythm of life’s routine,
we feel it still,
a kind of syncopation that calls to us:
"your life can mean more;
your life can be more."

Augustine eventually found
that his infinite thirst for life could only be quenched
by the God who is the infinite source of life.
And yet, even in finding God,
in falling deeply in love
with the one who had loved him into existence,
Augustine did not lose his restlessness;
his life as a Christian remained a life of always seeking more,
always seeking to know God better
and to love God more deeply,
to know as we are known
and to love as we are loved.
Our life on earth, he came to realize,
remains, even for the Christian,
a restless pilgrimage though time,
and it is only at the end of this pilgrimage
that our restless hearts will find their rest in God.

Restlessness.
It does not end when we realize
that we will only find our rest in God.
But it does change;
it does take on a new direction and purpose,
and in finding its direction it becomes somehow different.
The restlessness of aimless wandering,
the vague feeling that there is. . .
that there must be. . .
something more,
gives way to the restlessness of the pilgrim
who knows that he or she has a destination,
even if it lies unseen over the horizon,
and who hastens toward it.
We have a goal, we have a purpose,
and we are restless until we reach it.

Like Jesus in today’s Gospel, we cannot rest where we are,
whatever successes we might have had in that place,
but are called always onward into new labors in new places.
When asked by his disciples to return to Capernaum
and continue his successful ministry there
Jesus instead tells them that he must go
and preach in new towns and new villages.
It is for this purpose that Christ has come
and it is for this same purpose that God
has called us to be his disciples.
Because God’s love for the world infinitely surpasses
what we can even begin to imagine,
the task of bringing that love to the world
is always a task of restlessly hastening onward,
a restless task of becoming all things to all,
so that all might be won for Christ.

Restlessness.
But not the restlessness of those who lie restless on their beds,
hoping against hope for a dawn that will show them
that their lives can mean more, can be more.
Rather, the restlessness of pilgrims
who long to always be moving forward
into the mystery of God’s love
because their lives
have already begun to mean more, to be more.
And within that restless pilgrimage there is a peace
that allows us to journey without fear
because the goal of our journeying
does not lie hidden and unknown
but has come to meet us in Jesus Christ.
Indeed, the one who is our destination
has come to join us as a fellow pilgrim
and our restless hearts
are already enfolded within the heart of Christ.