Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

"Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me; and whoever receives me,

receives not me but the One who sent me."

The Spirituality of Imperfection

We continue this week with the second of three passages where Jesus describes his fate of persecution and suffering that awaits him.  Last week we took a look at the cross from a different angle, the "Tao" of the cross emphasizing sticking it out until the end with Jesus as being the cross of discipleship.  This week we look at the cross of servanthood and humility.

Mark's gospel resonates with the Suffering Servant of Second Isiah where biblical scholar Reginald Fuller notes that in verse 13 (not included in the reading), God's suffering servant is called pais, a term used to denote both servant and child; both were at the very bottom of power in society.  So then Jesus uses children as an example of the types of people whom the disciples must embrace (Jesus embraces the child).  For us, who exalt children, this may not seem unusual, but in Jesus' time such an act of concern for the least and last was profound. 

After being told to get in line last week, Jesus address the rest of the herd as they vie to be " the first disciple".  Jesus tells them to become servants (pais).  In a sense, they should compete to become last and least.

In Matthew, this discourse about humility and greatness occurs in chapter 18 and more fully develops the concept of "receiving these pais".  Jesus declares that beyond "receiving", the disciples, one must become as pais to enter the Kingdom.  Clearly Jesus' words speak as much against the triumphalism rampant in the church today as it did for Jesus' disciples in the First Century C.E.

Simon Tugwell writes eloquently about the need to not count the success of the church with the world's standards of power and domination.  In his book Ways of Imperfection, Tugwell writes 

"There is a kind of unsatisfactoriness written into her [the church’s] very constitution, because she is only a transitional organization, keeping people and preparing them for a new creation . . . .Christianity has to be disappointing, precisely because it is not a mechanism for accomplishing all our human ambitions and aspirations, it is a mechanism for subjecting all things to the will of God"(1)

 Inevitably, our human ambitions always creep into our communities, and into the church as a whole, but today's gospel reminds us how Jesus regarded such attitudes of a triumphalist church.  We need to become like pais, servant/children, who, as Tugwell has written, are not valued by Jesus for their innocence, but for their vulnerability.  They receive everything as gift.

Imagine the transformation from a church of control and power to church as vulnerable as the wounded Christ; the vulnerability that grows gratitude becomes the mechanism for being Good News.  When people turn away from the church because they can't abide such a powerless institution unable to be an extension of their need for power and control, we shouldn't change to accommodate that sinful need.  The church's real gift is its witness of the Suffering Servant of Christ---vulnerable and committed to distributing God's grace to the least and last, and inviting transformation into that life of vulnerability, compassion and gratitude.

Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

"Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself,
take up his cross, and follow me.
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake
and that of the gospel will save it."

The "Tao" of Christianity

A former Jesuit friend of mine recently drew my attention to the idea that when Jesus spoke about taking up one's cross, he probably wasn't referring to the cross of crucifixion, but about the more common cruciform image of the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, tao. He combined this with another observation: Jesus' reference to Peter being evil was better understood in the Hebrew understanding of "obstacle" rather than "source of malicious intent".  The result was a fascinating homily.

The significance of the the letter tao for the Jews of Jesus' time was its symbolic suggestion of the end, the completeness of something. Taking up one's cross, then, could broadly suggest following Jesus completely, from alef (the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet) to tao.

Jesus' rebuke of Peter as being an obstacle, rather than evil incarnate, gives us a clearer picture of what Jesus was trying to teach.  After Peter drew Jesus aside, Jesus looked back to see the disciples to notice Peter standing in front of him, an out of place position for a disciple, a "follower".  Jesus then rebukes Peter by saying, in essence, "Get out of my way and follow me.  To be a true disciple is the commitment to follow me completely and not presume to lead me."

Most Christians will not die for their faith, but in some parts of the world, such martyrdom is very real and not a remote possibility.  For us, blessed with the safety of our nation to worship God as we see fit, we "lose" our life in the daily sacrifices to love.  The journey to the cross is always love, sacrificial love.  The tao cross reminds us that the nature of our love is being a disciple completely, following where the Spirit takes us.  Ours, then, is a sacrifice of our time, our ego, our comfort, for another.  Shouldering the Cross, is taking our commitment to its logical extreme of offering ourselves for others.

Jesus begins the gospel with the question: "Who do people say that I am ?" and quickly asks "Who do you say that I am ?"  The second question is our question.  We answer, as James suggests today, more in what we do than what we say.  Our faith is not an intellectual proposition, but a living faith, a faith of sacrificial love. 

At our confirmation, we publicly proclaimed our  faith.  Today, Jesus calls us to see this through to its completion in our answer to his question by living the answer to his question: "Who do you say to the world that I am ?"

Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time

"Ephphatha!"-- "Be Opened"

In today's gospel, Jesus opens the ears and restores the speech of one who is deaf. It is common for those who are not able to hear to also have a speech impediment. This relationship between speaking and hearing is no coincidence; speech is perfected not through the tongue, but through the ear.  Speaking is all about self-expression.  We use it both for healing and wounding,   praising and condemning.  It is a powerful tool in the hands of one who is adept in the art of speaking. Listening is associated with receptivity,  vulnerability, and openness.  It can manifest as profound hospitality and docility to a teacher, but it can also be a profound failure to act in the face of injustice.  In the right combination of motive and skill, it is God's gift of deep abiding wisdom and healing.  Speaking and listening is our agent of true communion.

We shouldn't confuse listening with hearing, though.  Hearing is simply the physical act of perception, but not of response; listening is much deeper.  Listening presupposes attention.  When we listen, we are in communion with the speaker, opening ourselves to her or his word, allowing ourselves to have our consciousness shaped by the word spoken.  When we attend to the proclamation of Scripture, we are open both to the word (text) and Word (God's voice heard in Jesus and the Spirit).  It isn't the book that saves; it’s the words and Word attended to that becomes healing and life.

Today, the Letter of James tells us to listen to this:

"Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters.
Did not God choose those who are poor in the world
to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom
that he promised to those who love him?"

We hear the poor, but do we really listen?  What would it mean to “be opened” to poverty?  Does it mean we must become poor ourselves? (That's the scary part!).  What if we did become poor?  We could then not help the poor because we would be poor, as the reasoning goes.  But what constitutes "helping the poor"?  The poverty of the poor is much more than the absence of financial means; it is a loss of participation in making choices.  To hear the poor is to participate in their poverty at this level.  To give the poor hearing and a voice, one must first enter into communion and listen.  Too often those who seek to "help" begin by imposing a solution rather than by entering into communion through listening.  The "poor" is not a single entity, but something in us all.  Can we hear our poverty?  Can we experience the beggar in ourselves, and are we ready to enter into communion with the literal beggar and listen before we speak?

Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

"Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person;
but the things that come out from within are what defile."

Purity is a word that few would consider pejorative; it sits alongside other words we associate with virtue such as honesty, courage, etc.  It is even more effective as a marketing tool to entice the consumer that you are getting 100% of what you are expecting.  The other word associated with this one is perfection. In a sense, purity is a type of perfection, and when you begin an endeavor, it common to hope for perfection.

It is this struggle to be perfect before God that the Jews turned to Torah (the first five books of the Bible).  These books contain a little over six-hundred laws that were composed between 600 and 400 BCE.  These laws were extended to interpretive texts that were designed to help people apply these laws to everyday life to keep better the original six-hundred or so laws in Torah.  By Jesus' time, some of these laws became impediments to the spirit that informed them.  Like so many good ideas, when people who have lost sight of why the law exists simply follow the law "because it is the law", the spirit suffers the ignorance of the law-abiding.

In today's gospel, those whose job it was to interpret and admonish adherence to the Law (Pharisees and scribes) were incensed that Jesus seemed oblivious to the demands of the Law.  He did not seem to chastise those among his disciples that did not wash before meals in violation, not of the law, per se (Leviticus 15:11), but explicitly from the Talmud, a group of interpretive statements to apply the Law.  When questioned as to why Jesus seemed such a scoff-law we get a two part answer:  You are like the hypocrites of whom Isaiah speaks "They honor me with their lips; but their hearts are far from me", and the spiritual insight that "Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile."

Jesus' statement in the fifth chapter of Matthew intends not to abolish the law but to fulfill it, and now he seems clear as to how the Law is fulfilled: intention.

The other day, I had a rather distressing conversation with a man who insisted that undocumented immigrants should not be allowed to receive any public services such as education and a driver's license. He said this about the poor entering our southern border.  He felt quite confident that his view wasn't obstructed by racism, but that "it was the law".  He insisted that being acting unlawfully was the fundamental transgression that could only be remedied by these people returning to their native country, and following the procedure for properly entering the United States. He was so focused on the violation of the law that the broader question of justice seemed to him as a distraction from the core issue of these folks breaking the law.

The law serves justice, but so many today have it reversed thinking that if it is law it presupposes being just.  Needless to say, in recent memory laws that kept blacks segregated from society, women from voting, and prohibiting consenting adults who are gay from marrying are examples of laws most would find difficult to reconcile with concepts of justice.

Jesus understood this insidious tendency to focus on law rather than justice.This focus provides a false sense of comfort to those who don't want to deal with the messiness of justice and opt for the simplistic purity of law. For many Christians, the Bible has become the modern equivalent to the religious law--studied to discover transgression rather than compassion in the false promise that by doing so one may become perfect.  But perfection does not lie in the observance of the law, but in its fulfillment as Christ fulfilled it: love of God and love of neighbor--the two most important commandments according to Jesus. 

The standard of civil justice for us as Americans is the Constitution, and the standard for Christian justice is love.  The Good News must be received and dispensed from the heart.  Reading the scripture to discover "what to do" is ignorant. We read scripture to become more like Christ.  It isn't so much searching the Scriptures to see "what would Jesus do" as much as it is searching scripture to see "what Jesus did".  Holy scripture doesn't interpret itself, but only comes to life in the circumcised heart of someone who loves aided by the Spirit.

Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

The words I have spoken to you are Spirit and life

The last two weeks, John's gospel has begun with "murmuring" in response to Jesus' claim to be the Bread of Life.  Today, it isn't "the Jews" who are murmuring, but Jesus' disciples.  After the discourse on eating Jesus' body and blood, that it is real food and real drink, he has forced the hands of those who purport to follow him; it is time to separate those who can commit to this truth from those who cannot.  For those who would like to believe in a Jesus who demands that we only "follow", but not believe what he says, this is a very problematic set of verses.  Jesus now reveals why this truth is not self-evident, despite "following" him in his ministry:

"For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by my Father." 

In John's gospel, because of Jesus' claim to be God's bread sent down from heaven, "many of his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him."  

The gospel does not indicate how many left, but turning to the disciple who would later deny him three times, and the one to whom Jesus would call the cornerstone of his church, asks Simon Peter "Do you also want to leave me?"  The reply is remarkable: "To whom shall we go?  You have the words of eternal life?"  

Peter and those who continue with Jesus don't see their discipleship as an option; they can't imagine life without Christ.   Peter didn't say "I'd really like to stay, but..."  For Peter, following was not an option, not because it was easy, but because he could not see any other possibility.

In considering what gathers us together weekly to celebrate in communion with one another and the real presence of Christ, could we confess, as did Peter, that we have no other place to go, because for us our encounter with Christ together is "spirit and life"?  

Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Hoc est Corpus Meum

If you noticed a similarity between the graphic for today's blog and the Latin title ("This is my body"), it will come a no surprise that hocus pocus is derived from the Latin mass' words that the priest uses in the consecration of the bread into the body of Christ.  Sacrament is often mistaken for magic.

Mistaking the rituals of Christian worship for magic goes back well over a thousand years to the Romans' misunderstanding as to the nature of the Eucharist, and how we can "eat" the body of Christ; Christians were, among other false charges, regarded by many as cannibals. Recently, I had a young man at my parish explain to me why he has a reluctance to attend Mass: "Its too magical; I can't relate to a magic Jesus".  And herein lies the difficulty many have of understanding the nature of sacrament as distinct from magic.

When the Temple authorities argued about Jesus' proclamation that "I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world", they encountered the seemingly impossible.   Then it gets even stranger when Jesus says "...unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you . . . . Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him." No wonder the many of those outside of Christianity regarded Christians with suspicion.  What a doctrine!

But Jesus is calling us to be more than an agape-meal fellowship, more than simply a gathering of like-minded do-gooders who sit down and enjoy a common meal.  While the sacrifice of the Mass is indeed symbolic, it is the symbol that brings the reality of what it symbolizes to life.  Put another way, the bread and wine of the Mass are symbols that bring the reality they symbolize (body and blood of Christ) when taken in faith.  Jesus is asking us, as a matter of faith, to enter into a new reality---a reality that makes communion with his sacrifice a present-day reality through this sacrament.

The "common meal" aspect of the Mass has enjoyed the emphasis for the past 40 years or so, but John's gospel reminds us that our Eucharistic sacrifice joins us, physically, with the reality of Christ's sacrifice.  Christ's calls us to more than an important memory-meal by declaring "For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink"; he is calling us to a physical reality, not through a magical act, but an act grounded in faith.  Magic needs no faith, but sacraments require it. As Catholics, any one of us may come to the Eucharist with insufficient faith, but it is the faith of the gathered assembly, indeed, the faith of the entire Church, which allows us to participate in this reality.  The symbol becomes what it symbolizes even if we individually lack sufficient faith.  Clearly this is not hocus pocus.

That is why we gather, and together participate in this sacrifice. The priest's sacrifice is the gathered sacrifice of the faithful.  What is done at the altar does not begin and end with the priest, but begins with the faithful and ends with the faithful; the priest is called to mediate this reality sacramentally.  The Eucharist celebration is presided over, and the elements consecrated by a priest, but he does so first and foremost as a member of the faithful gathered.  The power to consecrate the elements is not his power, but the extension of the work of the Holy Spirit from the community of the faithful. As our Orthodox brothers and sisters experience in the words of the priest before receiving communion: " Holy Things for Holy People."  Christ's body and blood belong to us, because we belong to Christ.  Christ's one, physically real sacrifice becomes physically real in us when we receive as a member of the Church his "true flesh" and his "true blood".

Ninteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

"Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him"

This line taken from John's gospel is the core of what Catholics believe about unity.  However, this unity of which John speaks is sometimes confused with uniformity by the institutional Church..  Case in point: the recent doctrinal investigation by Rome of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious assessing how well the organization is aligned with Church teaching on matters of "feminist issues"(op. cit. NCR).  Specifically, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is concerned that the LCWR is silent in matters of birth control/abortion and marriage norms set by the institutional Church, and that it gives dissenting voices from Church teaching, some of them quite radical (i.e. espousing a post-Church spirituality, post-Jesus, spirituality [op. cit. Bishop Leonard P. Blair]). The name of this investigation is formally called a "doctrinal assessment".  The goal is to have the LCWR align what they say (or what they allow their members to say publicly)  with official Church teaching; for Rome, having holy people saying different things about what it means to be an ecclesiastical community undermines the Faith for all believers.  However, it is this mistaken notion of uniformity for unity that I believe is a threat to the Faith.  Pope Benedict wrote

"We cannot keep to ourselves the words of eternal life given to us in our encounter with Jesus Christ: they are meant for everyone, for every man and woman. ... It is our responsibility to pass on what, by God's grace, we ourselves have received."
- Pope Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini, 2010

This is precisely what the sisters of the LCWR are attempting.  In their mission statement, they declare that bringing the Good News, "to further the mission of the Gospel" to the "world today"is the animating nexus of their community.  The Good News is often messy, because everyone who has been transformed by this "encounter" with Christ has, as part of her or his story, the uniqueness of the encounter.  Different that these encounters may be, we seek community to share our stories, and listen to the stories of others from the founding of the Church in the first century down to the present.  It should not be surprising, then, that the meanings attached to these personal experiences diverge in many places--good for spiritual health, bad for institutional uniformity.

Jesus said I am the "living bread" because he established a relationship with his disciples that continues as "living bread", a nourishing relationship through the Holy Spirit.  The unity, of which the Church speaks so much about, is borne from this living and dynamic relationship, and yields poorly to the box-building structures of institutional rule-making; unity is full of dissent, divergent understandings and practices, and embraces everyone who claims a relationship with Christ within and without the institutional Church. The keeper of uniformity is doctrine; the keeper of unity is dialogue.  It takes greater faith to live working with unity than simply abandoning the responsibility of communion by blind obedience to institutional decrees; one's conscience must be given the ability to speak truth to authority.

Dialogue is communion, because it presupposes sharing rather than declaring.  That isn't to say that there can be no doctrine or statements of definition, provided they are a product of this dialogue, something the Church increasingly is seeing as a threat to its centralized authority.  To be a living church, is to allow the messiness of relationship and espouse the humility to seek a new direction when the old one no longer speaks Good News to the world.  If we seek the eternal in human institutions, we worship a false God.

Jesus' admonition in today's gospel to "stop murmuring among yourselves" because "no one can come to me unless the Father, who sent me-draw[sic] him."  He then goes on to cite Isaiah 54 "They shall all be taught by God."  Our first and primary teacher in our spiritual journey is not the decrees of church, per se, but God, or more specifically, our living and dynamic relationship with God through Christ and the Holy Spirit that is tested not against a rigid authority, but against a sensus fidelium--honoring the experiences of the faith-filled as a foundation of expressing what we believe and understand to be true. When Church doctrine no longer speaks to the faithful, it becomes bread with bleached flour, void of sustaining nutrition, not the Bread of Life from which one may eat and never go hungry.