Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

"Strive to enter through the narrow door."

            The image of the narrow way, or gate,  is treated in both Matthew and Luke; however, Luke’s account, the one we are reading today, provides a fuller context than Matthew’s gospel, but Matthew’s gospel is important to consider as well when trying to understand what Jesus is saying.

            Matthew’s gospel develops Jesus’ saying about the gate a bit more than Luke’s.  In Matthew, Jesus adds: “For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. ¹⁴ But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”  In this gospel, it seems the restriction isn’t so much the size of the opening, but its difficult to find.  They both have an image of struggle associated with salvation. The context in Luke is Jesus answering the question “Lord, are only a few people going to be saved?” Such a question was part of a current theological concern of Jesus’ time among the Jews as to who among the Jewish people were the “chosen ones”, the remnant to be saved.

            Typical of Jesus’ style of turning questions in an unexpected direction, he responds with an answer directed towards the questioner as a person rather than to the question with an abstract answer.  Jesus uses the image of one knocking on a door, and the master of the house not opening the door because he does not recognize the petitioner’s voice. What began with a question of abstraction has become personal.   Despite the protests of the petitioner who identifies himself as part of a crowd who “ate and drank” with Jesus, and who witnessed Jesus in the streets, this casual association was not enough.  It is rather difficult to make it through a narrow door when you are part of a crowd.  Again, Jesus reinforces the personal dimension of salvation; crowds aren’t saved, individuals are saved.

            The protection of membership in a particular group, the Essenes, the Pharisees or Sadducees or whatever isn’t enough.  Salvation is recognition, personal recognition by Christ. If the master of the house did not open the door because he didn’t recognize the voice of the petitioner, so too we keep our hearts closed to the voice of God who is trying to enter our hearts.  How many times has Christ stood patiently at the door of our hearts knocking and we have kept him out?  Is it any wonder then he cannot recognize our voice as part of a crowd? The narrow door isn’t narrow because God wants to keep people out; it is narrow because salvation is realized one person at a time; it is a relationship, not a theological abstraction that is the way to salvation.

            Finally, Jesus adds the paradox that many who consider themselves first will be last, and the ones who are least will be first.  The pride that results from considering one's salvation guaranteed through association seems to Christ, at best, suspect. All of us who enter the narrow door do it one at a time, clinging on the hem of Christ’s robe who recognizes us because we knew him when he knocked and we opened the door of our hearts.  Ultimately, though the door may be narrow, as the hymn reassures us, "There's a wideness in God's mercy." We approach the narrow door alone but walk through it with Christ.

Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

The Divine Arsonist

"I have come to set the world on fire"--Jesus

         Today’s readings strike us as particularly harsh, especially the passage from Luke’s gospel (paralleled in Matthew) of family division and strife as a consequence of following Christ; how can this be good news? The old phrase, “No cross, no crown” comes to mind.

        Paul’s famous teaching about the kerygma, or preaching, of the cross, proclaims “For the word of the cross is to those who are perishing foolishness, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. . . . For since in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not come to know God, God was well-pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. For indeed Jews ask for signs, and Greeks seek for wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block, and to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. . . . God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong . . .” (1 Corinthians 1:18, 21-25, 27).

      Paul’s observes that “those who are perishing” see the cross as foolishness.  What a powerful observation!  A sign of “perishing” is dismissing the cross of Christ as foolish.  This superficial understanding can only be penetrated by faith because “the foolishness of God is wiser than men.”  Men see the destructiveness of fire, God sees what survives the fire, and redeems the ashes.

      The “cloud of witness” of which Paul writes in Hebrews, includes the great Fathers of our church who witness to this “baptism of fire”.  St. Cyril of Alexandria refers to the “fire of baptism” as the Holy Spirit.  St. Ambrose relates the image of Pentecost, with the Holy Spirit appearing like flames above the apostles.  Fire and water, two of the most basic elements, combined in our baptism to signify both the physical purity and spiritual purity of our initiation. Fire is also the sacrifice of martyrdom which is the ultimate test of our love; are we willing to die for the gospel of Christ?  Are we willing to lay down our lives in our service to Christ?

      The wildfires that seem so destructive, and indeed destroy many homes, also have a natural function of renewal.  When fires clear the dead underbrush, they can cleanse a forest and actually help it to thrive.  When the fires are artificially delayed by well-intentioned firefighting, the undergrowth accumulates such that when there is a fire, say every fifty years, it burns so hotly that it has lost its benefit and destroys the forest rather than help it to thrive.  So it is in the spiritual life.  When one’s focus is to avoid suffering, to insulate one’s life from the “fire”,  when great suffering comes, we are ill-equipped to face it because we have not endured the suffering of lesser trials and temptations.  Our faith must be nurtured in our daily lives of more endurable sufferings and difficulties for the sake of our journey as ambassadors of God’s love to the world. We must learn early to find our refuge in God’s love among the community of the faithful so that we can grow to find our refuge in God alone. Among all of this suffering, we are being directed into the embrace of God’s love in the crucified Christ, which delivers us to the resurrected life, the life of a forest renewed after the fire, of hope rather than despair, of a fire-born faith that can sustain the heat of loving our enemies and keeping the flame of faith alive in our hearts.

Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

"Lord, on the day I called for help, you answered me." (Ps. 138)

     I recall one of the stories of the Desert Fathers in which a young monk asks his spiritual father, his abba, why his prayers are so ineffective; he prays, but rarely gets what he asks for. The monk asks his disciple to take an old, dusty basket and bring him some water.  The disciple obliges but gets no farther than a few steps before the basket leaks the entire contents of water out, and so he must return to refill it.  He does this several more times and soon realizes the futility of using the old basket to carry water.  He returns, sullen, unable to accomplish his abba's request.  He explains his great effort to try and keep the water secure, but that the basket will not hold the water.  His abba nods in agreement. He asks the disciple if he noticed anything different about the basket since he took it to the river.  The disciple says "Yes, it is now clean."  The abba says "Yes, it has been cleaned by the water passing through it while you were filling it. God answers our prayers by first purifying our hearts, not granting us our desires. Only a pure heart can say with faith, "Your will be done."
     What we usually mean by "God does not answer prayer" is "I didn't get what I asked for." For some Christians (and anyone in a fix), prayer can be little more than a spiritual ATM.  Not to discount the need to ask God for those things we need, and we desire, but all prayer should be with the proviso Jesus used in the Garden: "Not my will, but your will be done"(Luke 22).  If Jesus, who was in perfect communion with the Father, humbly submitted to his Father's will when scared, anticipating a gruesome death and feeling abandoned, how much more should we be willing to pray under the condition that it is God's will.
     In today's gospel reading from Luke, Jesus is asked how we are to pray, and Jesus follows up with the "Our Father"--a prayer not invented by Jesus but passed along from John the Baptist who taught his disciples a prayer from the wilderness. The Our Father can be used not simply as a text for our prayer, but is a small catechism on how to pray:

"Father hallowed be your name."
Prayer begins with acknowledging God as Father, or more accurately, Jesus uses the word abba---" daddy" to bring into sharp focus the intimacy with which we can approach God.  God is both supremely holy, but through Christ and the Holy Spirit, supremely accessible to us; we should begin every prayer not only with the awareness of God's holiness but with the great gratitude that we are, as St. Paul says,"heirs of God", God's children (God has no grandchildren).

"Your kingdom come."
Other gospels add "your will be done, etc..."  To first pray for God's kingdom is to honor Christ's central mission, to make the kingdom realized by his disciples, and to spread this grace to all. We must, as Thomas Merton wrote "will the will of God"; our prayer must first raise our consciousness to seek first the Kingdom before all else.  It is, as my spiritual father said many years ago to me, necessary "to pray for the Kingdom of God to come, not the Kingdom of Todd"!

"Give us each day our daily bread."
The "bread" is understood by biblical scholars to point to the Messianic banquet, the eschaton, the final culmination in history of the establishment of the Kingdom for all eternity.  The prayer asks for that realization to be daily; the eschaton isn't only historical, it is eternally present and accessible by grace. We should earnestly pray for this spiritually sustaining need as we realize the need for physical nourishment.

"Forgive us our sins for we forgive everyone in debt to us."
This part of the prayer isn't so much a quid pro quo as it is an admonition to be mindful of the need to avail ourselves of God's mercy so we can extend it as part of building up of the Kingdom.  We need to continue to seek God's merciful grace, not as a reward for forgiving others, but we need to seek God's grace so that we can forgive others. If we live in the gratitude of God's mercy to us, forgiveness can be genuine because it is an extension of the divine forgiveness of God. If this dynamic was working perfectly, I doubt we'd need to include it in our prayer, but it isn't, and we continue to find forgiveness tough at times; so, our focus ought to be seeking God's mercy for our lack of mercy towards others.  The "Jesus Prayer" is a great help: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner".  This ancient prayer, far from being self-abasing, abounds in the awareness of God's great mercy and our constant need of it.


"Do not subject us to the final test."
The Greek word used for "test" is peirasmos, which suggests the trials of the Messiah; the afflictions of the mission of Christ; it isn't suggesting that God is the source of our temptations (God never is the source of temptation--James 1:13).  We pray to be fortified in the life of trials for the sake of the Kingdom and that we might not "be subject"...or perhaps a better word would be "subjugated" to the final test---be overcome by our struggles.  Make no mistake, anyone seriously considering confronting the evil of the world would do well, to begin with, the evil in one's heart.  Satan rejoices in the self-righteous protester who can use an agenda of "social justice" to embitter the heart, and render it lifeless in the pursuit effectively hating one's enemies, but for a "good cause".  Real spiritual combat takes place in the recesses of one's heart, not on the street facing one's enemies.  Do you want to destroy your enemies?  Love them! Where is the enemy now?

The second part of the gospel sets up the short narrative of one who, because he was persistent in appealing to his friend got what he needed.  So "For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened". We need the persistence in prayer to cleanse our hearts like the water sifting through the dirty basket; it takes a lifetime of seeking and knocking to realize whom we sought was always with us, and the door has always been open.

Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

"Mary has chosen the good part."

     Both the parable of the Good Samaritan and today's story of Martha and Mary are unique to the Gospel of Luke. Preceding both these sections is Jesus' encounter with the scholar of the Law. In this encounter, Jesus' response connects us immediately to the scholar's question, "Who is my neighbor?", and provides the foundation for further meditation on the nature of Christian service in today's gospel account of Mary and Martha.  

     Luke's gospel uniquely combines "Love the Lord your God..." with "Love your neighbor" to be a single expression of what is the greatest commandment; it is the great Commandment of Love.  In the other two gospels, "Love your neighbor" is appended to the first admonition, "Love the Lord your God...", as being similar to the first; Luke makes them identical, which is characteristic of Luke's gospel ethic of loving the least and the last as a manifestation of the Kingdom.  The parable of the Good Samaritan clearly develops this theme, but on its heels comes the story of Mary and Martha, which attenuates the missionary zeal of "good works" with the realization that the Kingdom made manifest develops from the Kingdom within.  In short, true hospitality begins at the feet of the guest rather than in the kitchen.

     What does hospitality have to do with justice? Too often, those dedicated to pursuing justice for the poor proceed with hatred rather than love, and seek to define the needs of the poor rather than first listening to and understanding them. It is easier to organize a march for the poor than to listen to the poor; experiencing the poverty of my neighbor does not lead me to hate the rich, but should lead me to understand the one I am seeking to serve.

    Jesus doesn’t admonish Martha to stop what she is doing, but to avoid being contemptuous of Mary, who has “made the right choice”*: first, listen to the one who is being welcomed.  Genuine hospitality is connected to justice because before "restoring" what has been lost, the true servant endeavors to discover what the guest needs.  William Sloan-Coffin, a great Christian and proponent of social justice, remarked that "The Bible is less concerned with alleviating the effects of injustice than in eliminating the causes of it."

   Christian action must, necessarily, spring from a profound connection to a sense of personal grace experienced as an encounter with the Word, Jesus Christ. Our non-profits, acts of charity and political action committees must spring from this core reality of orienting ourselves as servants towards those we serve first, or we risk becoming jaded do-gooders whose mission to accomplish something worthwhile is done on the backs of those we deem impediments to our mission statements.

     If we truly desire to serve the poor and seek justice for the oppressed, it cannot begin on the streets with signs, but it should start at the foot of the Christ, in the heart of Mary, the listening servant.

*Luke Timothy Johnson Sacra Pagina suggests this is a better translation than the traditional “Mary has chosen the better part” because it is couched in the rhetoric of a moral choice.

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

Faith is being grasped by the power of love"--William Sloane Coffin

The parable of the Good Samaritan is one of the Bible’s most popular stories. The phrase to describe a person willing to help the stranger, a “Good Samaritan”, is widely recognized. Given its popularity, it is easy to miss the power of choosing a Samaritan as the protagonist in Jesus’ parable.

The parable is situated as the development of the question posed to Jesus by a “lawyer” about what was necessary to obtain eternal life. Jesus responded with the traditional joining of passages about the love of God (Deuteronomy 6:5) and love of neighbor (Leviticus 19:18). Jesus then poses the question as to “Who is my neighbor?”; in essence: Whom should I love? Jesus then relates the story of The Good Samaritan.

For Jews of Jesus’ time, the Samaritans were despised. The Samaritans descended from the tribe of Joseph (one of the 12 tribes corresponding to Jacob’s(Israel’s) 12 children) and lived to the north of Judah, which worshiped at the Temple in Jerusalem. The Samaritans had their temple on Mount Gerizim too; however, they did not worship on Gerizim as in Jerusalem. Also, they were despised by the Jews because they came to accept intermarriage, only believed the Books of Moses (Torah) to be authentic holy scripture, mixed pagan, and Jewish practices, and opposed the rebuilding of the wall of Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile. There are other reasons as well. For us, this is all very academic, but for the Jews of Jesus’ time, it was visceral.

For us, the parable comes down to Jesus asking us to decide whom we despise on a visceral level, and to love them as our neighbor. Let’s give it a try by renaming the parable:

The Good Isis Terrorist

The Good Mass Shooter

You get the idea. Jesus isn’t suggesting that the Samaritan is good because he is a Samaritan, any more than anyone would accept that someone is good because they are a mass shooter. Rather, we are being asked to consider the possibility that someone so despised could also be good. Can we envision our enemies doing good? Can we envision ourselves doing evil?

The first step towards our ability to harm our enemies is to objectify them; in other words, make them less human than ourselves. It is quite easy to see a suicide bomber as the incarnation of evil, and by doing so deny them their humanity. One could easily reply that such behavior is outside the definition of human. I would suggest that humanity is capable of great evil and that we, given the right circumstances, could perpetrate evil deeds as well. What makes us human is our great capacity for love, as well as our great capacity for evil. Jesus is asking us to love the person capable of both.

Jesus asks us not to call our enemy simply our neighbor, but to love our enemies as we love those we regard as close to us, our “neighbors.” Jesus poses the challenge: If you want to inherit eternal life, love those you despise in how you act towards them. Love is not a noun, as the saying goes, it is a verb; it is a commitment to act in a loving way towards our enemies. Anything less is less than Christian.

  

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

Is Your Faith a Wall or a Door?

"The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love"(Gal.5:6).

     Every Christian will likely recount when he or she the made the conscious decision to follow Christ.  Some of the stories are quite dramatic, the classic sinner to saint repentance; these are narratives of great clarity and inspiration.  However, not many of us have had such conversions.  Most conversions can be likened to an extended dating between couples when at some point total commitment becomes imperative.  For us Catholics, that is usually Confirmation.
     The calling of Elisha in 1Kings and Jesus' call in Luke provide a couple of notable differences as outlined by theologian Reginald Fuller. Elisha's call was not the complete abandonment of his life, but rather an added responsibility to serve God as a prophet.  Jesus' call was absolute and urgent.  One had to respond immediately to the desire to follow Christ and completely ("No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God"-Lk.9:62).  Another significant difference noted by Fuller was that Elisha was not called to follow Elijah, but to succeed him as a prophet.  Jesus' disciples were not called to replace him, or even to succeed him, as much as continue to be led by him through the presence of the Spirit. Despite the tendency to set up structures of hierarchy and obedience in the institutional Church, every Christian from Pope to the most despised criminal who hears God's voice is accountable to Christ. We all minister as servants, but possess the baptized nature of priest, prophet and king for the mission.
     As we continue in our reading of St.Paul's letter to the Galatians, he negotiates the concept of the nature of our freedom in Christ in responding to our call.  Paul uses the highly-charged terms flesh and spirit.  In this context, Paul uses the word flesh to mean our human natures---instinctual and rational (lower and higher, respectively), not the carnal appetite alone as so many misreads. Spirit is capitalized and refers to the Holy Spirit.  Paul associates this "flesh nature" as that which seeks to justify oneself before God in following rules and thus meriting justification; rather, Paul speaks of being led by the Spirit.  The Spirit is liberation from law, from the futility of realizing righteousness through observance of rules of spiritual discipline (Law) alone.  As Christ came "not to abolish the Law but to fulfill it, so Paul preaches freedom from finding righteousness in the Law in declaring that "The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love." The Spirit releases us not from practicing the Law, but from the necessity of finding salvation through observance of the Law. 
     Our calling is to a relationship with a living God through Christ.  We don't have to abandon the Law, but it must serve, first and foremost, the chief commandment: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.  Jesus adds the ethical necessity of expressing this love "and your neighbor as yourself."  Paul's "only thing that counts" is our inherent freedom from placing observance before relationship; relationship always comes first, and that is why faith and discernment and connection to a community of professed believers is essential.  In seeking God, we're looking for Him as a community of believers.
     Faith, misunderstood as short-sighted obedience to rules rather than relationship, is a wall to our spiritual life and prevents us from accessing God's love and grace.  As Paul writes in Romans about the futility of this struggle: "For what I want to do I do not, but what I hate I do."  He is speaking of the futility of overcoming our "flesh" without the Spirit---reaching God by rules rather than by responding to a direct overture of God through Christ.  For it is in this relationship in the Spirit that Paul proclaims "...if you are led by the Spirit you are no longer under the Law".  To be "under" the Law means that to be "walled in" by the Law, prevented by the Law--The Wall.  The Spirit is the door Christ opened in his sacrifice, and we are asked to step through it.  Liberation can be a scary thing, though, because it is not possible to always know the nature of this transformation, where it will lead once we are committed. But that is the nature of faith. Consider the words of St. Paul: All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything (1Cor. 13:17).

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

The Heart of Grace: Love

Christian grace is the undeserved favor of God towards us; we don’t deserve God’s love because of what we have achieved, the good we have done.  God loves us because he desires communion with us.  In other words, God’s love exists independent of our actions, or even of our awareness of Him.  As we respond to this love over time, this becomes our story of salvation.  Christ’s death and resurrection was God’s greatest act of love, “for no one has greater love than this: to lay down his life for a friend”(John 15:13).  We are the friends of God when we show our love for one another; this is God’s “command” expressed in Jesus’ great command, but more importantly, revealed in his actions. It's not so much "What would Jesus do", but rather "What did Jesus do?"

In today’s reading from 1 Samuel, Nathan, the prophet who succeeded Samuel, helped David face his great sin of abusing his power by taking his loyal friend’s wife as his secret lover while his friend was away at war fighting for Israel.  How does one tell a king he is a great sinner effectively?  He does it with a story.  Likewise, Jesus in today’s gospel tells a story of the Pharisee, Simon.  In both instances, a painful truth had to be communicated, and because both King David and Simon had a sense of God’s love, Nathan and Jesus used parable rather than condemnation to reveal the need for repentance.

Jack Kavanaugh, a Jesuit scholar aptly observes that “Our resistance to repentance parallels our resistance to love. If we experience ourselves unable to trust fully that God could love us unconditionally, the indirect method of parables sometimes is the most efficient strategy to help us accept the mystery of our redemption.”

Paul, likewise, recounted his salvation in sharing a story, not providing a scholarly treatise on grace. He recounts God’s love revealed to him while he was persecuting the Church,  

"how I persecuted the church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it, and progressed in Judaism beyond many of my contemporaries among my race, since I was, even more, a zealot for my ancestral traditions. But when God, who from my mother’s womb had set me apart and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me,  so that I might proclaim him to the Gentiles…."

We witness to the truth of God’s love by striving to love one another as God loves us.  This is our liberation from the Law.  It isn’t that we can just disregard the commandments of God as revealed in earlier times (we can’t simply commit adultery by claiming not to be bound by the Law), but rather we fulfill the Law in loving one another as we have been loved by God.

Our confronting the sinners in this world begins not with condemnation, but with the story of our graced lives.  We share our table with sinners because we all have sinned and fallen short of meriting God’s favor. We gather to worship not because we are saints, but because we are sinners striving for sainthood.