Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

“Why are you terrified? Do you not yet have faith?”

How long does it take to have faith that God will spare you from the ravages of a storm? What reason did the disciples have to think they would be spared? Jesus had not saved them from such harm before.  What does it take to have faith that would face the wind, rain, and choppy seas with serenity?

I have always taken issue with Jesus’ rebuke and wish one of the disciples would have stood up and said, “Hey, we have left everything and followed you. You heal the lame, feed the thousands with only a few fish and loaves of bread; you are an amazing guy, but who wouldn’t be afraid of being swamped in a small boat in the middle of a storm?”

We have no such comment (at least not one recorded), and should perhaps look more deeply to find the truth the gospel writer was trying to reveal in this story of terror and faith.

Mark’s story is in a long tradition of Old Testament stories where prophets still storms. The focus of the story is to reveal Jesus’ identity as one “whom even the wind and sea obey”. The story is meant to establish Jesus’ association with God. The disciples’ faith is not yet fully developed and won’t be until Jesus’ crucifixion and subsequent resurrection, ascension, and sending of the Holy Spirit.

Yet, we who have the great advantage of hindsight, and the great gift of the Holy Spirit, often are stuck in the boat without the strength of faith. What excuse do we have?

From the Letter to the Hebrews: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, of things unseen”. Trust engenders hope, and hope, faith. Father Henry Nouwen wrote, “The real hope is not in something we think we can do, but in God, who is making something good…in some way, we cannot see”(Turn My Mourning into Dancing). Nouwen makes this crucial connection between trust and hope in writing that a “person in difficulty can trust because of a belief that something else is possible. To trust is to allow for hope.”

We don’t hope because of what God has done, but what God can do. We live within this relationship made real and present by the Spirit such that whatever happens to us, God is always present, not as a spectator, but as one who is with us, Emmanuel.  He is with us in and through the stormy weather. Our hope is not that every anxiety is assuaged, but that our connection with God is never broken. Our faith may not quell the storm, but it will allow us to see through it.

Third Sunday after Pentecost

Losing Control and Finding the Kingdom

We have a lot of baggage associated with the word "kingdom".  On the positive side, King Arthur comes to mind with all of the associated virtues of chivalry and knighthood; on the negative, we see feudal oppression, paranoid brutality, and hedonism.  For the Jews, kingdom meant one thing:  God's reign on earth in the line of David. The reading from Ezekiel is a prophetic utterance in exile.  As a priest in exile, Ezekiel cannot offer sacrifice at the Temple, which is over a thousand miles to the west, but Ezekiel does become God's voice to his people promising them a return and a vision of the future in which a messianic ruler will unite God's people again and usher in a new age of prosperity. The image of Israel's new life from a cedar branch becomes "a majestic cedar.  Birds of every kind shall dwell beneath it, every winged thing in the shade of its boughs."  In Mark's gospel, Jesus picks up on this imagery in describing the mustard "tree"(it is more of a bush) that "'becomes the largest of plants and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the sky can dwell in its shade'".  For Ezekiel, cedar grew from a single branch; for Jesus, a tiny seed. 

Jesus' kingdom, though, wasn't to be realized through the establishment of a theocracy (this was a constant source of tension among his disciples).  Jesus' kingdom is a people who are directly animated by God's Spirit and called to a high ethical standard (love your enemies, justice for the poor, etc..).  The branches in Jesus' kingdom go out rather than up, and it would be a mistake to associate (as many have and do) the Church with God's kingdom.  While the institutional Church is part of the kingdom, we still pray "Thy kingdom come".  In John's gospel (unlike Mark, Matthew, and Luke), Jesus announces "My kingdom is not of (from) this world" when questioned by an anxious Pilate about the nature of Jesus' "kingdom".  This is echoed in Luke's gospel when Jesus replies to the Pharisees "the kingdom of heaven is in the midst(among) of you".  Jesus' presence defines kingdom while he walked the earth, and we have inherited this presence at Pentecost with the sending of the Holy Spirit.  The "branches" that have sprung are not royal lineages, but the profound ethic of sacrificial love.  The sacrifice of Christ made real and present at each Mass, becomes the "mustard seed" of our faith that finds roots among ourselves initially, but then branches out to the world.  We also find seeds of faith in prayer and reading of sacred scripture, each seed sprouting and growing in many different and splendid ways.

This image of the sprawling tree/bush can be complemented with what we usually do in response to wild, vegetative growth; we want to manage it.  In a world that has fallen in love with control, this bush breaks out of its fences, defies pruning, knocks down walls and seeks to embrace the world.  I think of women religious who are struggling against Rome's heavy-handed treatment, and the response of a particular sister who was referred to in an essay quoting a lay worker: "The Eucharist will live only if we find a way for it to live outside the Mass."  Spot on. Jesus' parable is one of distributive, expansive justice, of inclusion set prophetically against the "kingdom" of royal lineage, palaces and "trickle-down" justice.  Ezekiel's prophetic vision of a greater, supreme kingdom arrived with the birth of Jesus and continues in its many "royal" lines at every baptism when the candidate is given the powers of priest, prophet, and king by the Holy Spirit.

Corpus Christi

"Behold what you are; become what you eat"--St. Augustine

Today's scriptures make an arc between the understanding of the Jewish people's use of blood in Moses' covenant with God on Mount Sinai and Jesus' using this imagery to position himself in a new covenant between God and his people. Of all that distinguishes Christianity from other religions, the body and blood of Christ is the greatest.

Blood sacrifices have a finality that no other kind of sacrifice can offer.  The sprinkling of blood over the people in Exodus united them with the finality of the sacrificed bull, and the use of blood on the altar gave back to God the life that animates us all.  In a sense, blood was the life-essence that was uniquely God's.  Jewish law prohibited the eating of animal flesh unless all of the blood was drained so as not to appropriate that essence.

In Hebrews, Jesus becomes the new lamb of sacrifice.  This isn't Jesus sacrificing himself to an angry God for appeasement, but rather God's complete and final offering of himself in an act of mind-boggling love for his creation.  As Jesus declares in today's gospel reading "This is my blood of the covenant".  This new covenant ushers in the new and eternal relationship between humanity and God.  It is an agreement that can never be topped or superseded by something more profound or lasting.  God opens the most sacred of places in the Temple at Christ's death on the cross by tearing the curtain that separated this holiest space from the rest of the Temple.  God's submission to Christ as the Lamb of God now embraces all of humanity in the story of Exodus.  We are all now inheritors of the liberation the Jewish people have made real in the celebration of Passover.  The New Passover is the passing over of our unworthiness and the invitation to the liberation Christ offers.

Eucharista is Greek for Thanksgiving and where we get the name of the part of Mass where we unite ourselves to Christ's one, perfect sacrifice.  Our "thanksgiving" is both a response to Christ's perfect offering and participation in the ratification of the covenant God made eternal at Calvary.  Saint Augustine declared "So you are beginning to receive what you have also begun to be."  The body and blood of Christ are transformative, not only in the once-and-for-all historical act two thousand years ago, but continue to transform the faithful at each Mass; the sacrament makes that single act real again every time you receive the body and blood of Christ.  It isn't a "spiritual" communion in which the elements are simply reminders of God's act, they are a participation in Christ's sacrifice the way the Jewish people at Sinai participated in the covenant of Moses and relive that experience at Passover each year. Christ's blood as the Lamb of the New Covenant does more than redefine our relationship with God, we become God's bloodline children (God has no grandchildren).  It is more than checking off the sins we've committed (and continue to commit). We might fail miserably as God's children, but as God's children, we are never outside the home looking in.  Our bloodline is divine, our redemption eternal.