Fifth Sunday of Easter

“Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit,”

Eight times in today’s Gospel Jesus admonishes his disciples to “remain” in him. The Greek verb suggests making a permanent home, not a camp. Ironic, if you consider Jesus is preparing for his Ascension, but perhaps not. Each of us “remains” with Christ through the presence of the Holy Spirit.

It is rather an unusual way to think about our relationship with God—Father, Son, Holy Spirit...that we are asked to say rather than asking God to remain; our perception is often that God might leave given enough cause, but this is not the case.

The dwelling of the Spirit is a permanent fixture from our baptism. We can thwart the influence of the Spirit through sin, but the Spirit never departs and is infinitely patient.

We are given the image of Jesus as the fine and ourselves as the Church, the branches that are prepared to bear fruit. But, like the fruit, it is only viable in its attachment to the branch, and the branch’s attachment to the vine. So too, we must remain attached to Christ through the Spirit and dwell with God in order for our lives to realize the potential with which we have been gifted at baptism. We are a people of varied fruits of the Spirit in service of Christ’s mission. As St. Paul reminds us in Ephesians Chapter 4,

 “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; ⁵ one Lord, one faith, one baptism; ⁶ one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.”

Paul uses the body and its parts to suggest the need for unity, Just as Jesus’ metaphor of the vine and branches suggest a crucial interdependence. And that is what the Church is—a community of faith animated collectively by its members remaining (and often struggling to remain) in Christ through the Holy Spirit.

In 1 John, we are reminded that our obedience to Christ comes in the form of following the two cardinal commandments of Jesus: that “we should believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another just as he commanded us.”  Believing “in” the name is Jesus is “remaining”, being sensitive to the workings of the Holy Spirit as our condition for bearing fruit. Being part of the Church as the body of Christ, we need to remember that our fruit is not the product of our own efforts but the will of God. Our “fruitiness” is the outgrowth of our relationship with Christ both in and through the community of the Church. There are no ears walking down the street or grapes growing apart from the branch.

Fourth Sunday of Easter

We are the Good Shepherds; We are the Sheep

In today’s gospel, Jesus famously proclaims “I am the Good Shepherd. A good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep”. We are, perhaps, so familiar with this image of Jesus that it doesn’t make much of an impact.  However, if we consider who Jesus is, and who we are, it provides a powerful image of God’s love for us.

Shepherds not only watch over the flock, they share the pasture and the danger of being attacked by predators; they live with the sheep. We “like sheep have gone astray”(Is.53:6), but our shepherd is the one who will “lay down his life”. God is chasing us all over this world in the person of Christ through the Holy Spirit. This may sound a bit ephemeral—being looked over by the Holy Spirit—-but the Spirit makes her dwelling where the name of Jesus is invoked, and we, the faithful, are each of us both shepherd and sheep.

The power of Jesus’ name lives in each of the faithful, and we share in the relationship of God’s divinity. Our salvation is, in the Greek word for salvation, “being made whole” is not being rescued from a fiery pit and enjoying a bacchanal in heaven, but sharing in the life of the Trinity, as members of His family.  As St. Peter affirms, “There is no salvation through anyone else….” In no other religious belief or philosophy does God seek out the “lost sheep” and invite the sheep to share the life of the shepherd.  Christian salvation is being invited to enter the life of the Triune God and share in the intimacy of this relationship. Each of us has been called by our true name (Is.43:1) uttered by Christ, God’s Word to humanity.

Following Christ, we find fellowship and communion with one another; we speak the language of God to one another. We seek out the lost sheep because we are all of us “found sheep”, and through Christ, have become shepherds living with the sheep for whom we will lay down our lives.

Good Friday of the Lord's Passion

We Call this Friday Good

Good Friday is when we recall that even Jesus' closest disciples fled into the night and sought refuge away from the Roman and Temple authorities for fear that they too would be arrested: faith: FAIL. 

Today is a day we move deeply into meditating on our need to tell God, like Jesus, hanging on the cross to pull off another miracle, save yourself and save us! No? We’re out of here! I’m not going to end up like that!! 

     Peter’s famous denial three times echoing Jesus’ earlier query, also three times: “Do you love me, Peter?” Peter responded then: “You know that I love you!” Now, fearful of his life, he replies “I know nothing of this man you refer to!” This person is the disciple upon whom the Church is built: Peter, called “Rock” by Jesus, crumbles into the sand at the crucifixion. 

     The cross is a spectacle of human folly, failure, and faithlessness. "Yet, in spite of that", as T.S. Eliot wrote, “We call this Friday good.” Its goodness lies in God’s total submission to his love for humanity in the person of Jesus. It is the goodness inherent when we willingly suffer for another person, perhaps a stranger, or even an enemy. Today, we contemplate how we respond to being asked to suffer for another, or whether or not the possibility of suffering sends us scurrying into the night, renouncing God. 

     “How could God allow such suffering ?” many ask and imply this is the cardinal weakness of Christianity. Perhaps the better question is “Why would God be willing to enter into our world of suffering?” The mightiness of God isn’t a lifeboat dropping out of the sky for survivors floating in a tempest; it is God falling into the water next to us to show us the way to dry land. 

     God with us, “Emmanuel”, means God suffering for and with us. God does not want to “save” us as much as he intends to be with us. We want to be “saved”, just as Jesus wanted to escape suffering; it's only natural. No one suggests that to follow Jesus we should seek out pain, but rather following Jesus we will enter the suffering of a suffering world with a resounding affirmation: “Yes” to being with the poor and hopeless, the excluded, imprisoned, tortured, and sick. “Yes” to the suffering of the world, and all its messiness and dysfunction. The Cross’s affirmation is entering into the heart of the suffering world and walking with those who suffer to find God calling us into his embrace, arms stretched out on the cross, now embracing us in all of our horror and pain, failure, and humiliation. Today we come to the cross to be embraced by Jesus’ crucifixion and to be resurrected with Christ.

Palm Sunday

A Passion for Humanity

Today we begin Holy Week. We see the Passion from Jesus' entry into Jerusalem to rolling the stone to seal the tomb. On Monday we rewind to six days before Passover, followed Tuesday and Wednesday with the Passover meal and Jesus' subsequent betrayal by Judas. Holy Thursday is Jesus washing his disciple's feet and telling them "If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet." Good Friday, we, once again, meditate on The Cross. So today and Friday, we speak of the Lord's passion, of God's love of His creation.

Passion.  The word evokes reckless adventure, impulsive romance, gestures too big to fulfill, and the brief but intense relationship of Romeo and Juliet.  This word places Jesus in the tradition of the foolish Romantics—an itinerant preacher from the margins schooled by his radical cousin (John the Baptist) and led to make one final, dramatic gesture to get his message out: die as a martyr.  But Jesus’ death was unlike the death of many of the martyred faithful to come.  His death wasn't for a cause, but a relationship.  God fell hopelessly in love with humanity and inserted Himself to be with His own creation to deliver this message of healing, love, and forgiveness.  God’s power isn't the power of Zeus with lightening-bolts from the heavens, but God’s message is now simply “Return; I love you”.

Throughout Holy Scripture, God has struggled and seemingly failed many times, just as His people have.  It has been an on-and-off-again cosmic love story between the Creator and His creation since humanity was first created and was given a choice not to love God.  This dance between Creator and created culminated in His great and defining act of love: self-sacrifice on the cross.

Today’s gospel reading recounts this journey to the cross with Jesus as God leading the way, experiencing the pain and abandonment of His creation, the physical pain of a gruesome, ignominious death, giving into the abyss of his own un-created end-all for love.  But in this remarkable journey, he found a few responding with courage: Simon of Cyrene shared some in your suffering, the women who gathered at the foot of the cross and stayed there long after the men had scattered for fear of being arrested, the felon who believed because he, of all people, responded to the suffering of an innocent man, and finally the Roman centurion who saw in this suffering man God’s love.  This is pretty intense stuff

Rather than struggling to believe, many struggle to disbelieve because God’s affirmation of his creation, of saying “yes” to the cross, is the ultimate folly for a world seeking safety over communion.  God as Jesus, crucified, dead, and buried.  Stay tuned.

Fourth Sunday of Lent

Seeing is Believing: Living a Transparent Life

                 In today’s gospel reading from John, we have the rather remarkable statement comparing from Jesus “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life” suggesting that like Moses’ raised staff, simply by looking at the crucified Jesus, we will be saved; a very compelling theory of atonement that is often overlooked. It reminds me of the devotional response to the elevation of the host after consecration taken from the Apostle Thomas at realizing the body before him was Christ: “My Lord and my God”. 

              Sometimes witnessing a great act of faith can lead us to faith itself; that is why reading Scripture and biographies of holy men and women are equally powerful to strengthen faith, and for some, lead them to the Faith for the first time. Great works like Augustine’s Confessions, Thomas Merton’s The Seven Story Mountain, and other stories of faith are a rich source of illumination and sustenance. Devotions such as Adoration, prayer before icons, or simply being fully present in a beautifully designed sacred space can lead one to a deeper communion with God.

               However, not only the works of others can shine the light of faith into the world, but we ourselves can live in the light of faith when we allow others to witness our failures and also the faith that sustains us in the hope of living in a perfect relationship with God while we are yet sinners; living transparently before God and the world allows the world to witness our humanity in our failings and our relationship with the Divine in the grace we have received. We can live in God’s presence as sinners because through Christ we have been redeemed.

               Perhaps this week we can more fully appreciate our gift of sight as a great source of faith, not only in what we see but live fully in the light so that others may witness not only our crucifixions but also our resurrections. As John says in today’s gospel, “But whoever lives the truth comes to the light,  so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.”

Second Sunday of Lent

"No Cross, No Crown"

We Catholics seem to love suffering, or so my Protestant friend is fond of saying.  I very often retort "No cross, no crown", which brings a raised eyebrow and suggestion to change the topic.  But, I must admit that it as easy for Catholics to mistakenly evolve a spirituality of suffering for suffering's sake as it is for Protestants to evolve a "gospel of prosperity" where financial gain and material wealth are the goals of being a Christian.  Both views are distortions of Jesus' mission.
     In the first reading is Abraham's almost-sacrifice of Isaac.  Of this parable, early Judaism focused on the element of God testing Abraham, but with time, shifted focus to see the sacrifice in light of Isaac's willingness to submit to the will of his father and offer himself as a type of sacrificial lamb, a theme later picked up by the early Church's understanding of Jesus' Christhood.  The Pascal Lamb, as you recall, was the sacrifice for the deliverance of the Jews in captivity from  Egyptian oppression where the blood of the lamb was sprinkled across the lintel of the door as a sign for the Angel of Death to pass over and spare the household.  What began as an understanding of Isaac's sacrifice simply as an act of blind compliance evolved into a deeper, more mature meaning of giving of oneself for the sake of others.
     This notion was picked up in Isaiah's Suffering Servant and is the character Jesus most closely aligned himself and his ministry around.  This understanding of Christ's mission as a servant who suffers for humanity is the foundation of Mark's gospel, which sought to counter the tendency of the early Gnostic-Christian communities' focus on Jesus' divinity revealed in the Transfiguration as the pinnacle revelation of God to humanity, not the suffering on the cross and resurrection; for the Gnostics, Jesus' divinity eclipsed his humanity and made the cross a distraction on the way to the crown.  That is why in Mark's gospel, Jesus continually cautions his believers not to reveal his Christhood, because it is only in light of his suffering and resurrection that his mission has significance; he is the Suffering Servant Messiah, not the Warrior King messiah also portrayed in Isaiah.

"But he was wounded for our transgressions, 
he was bruised for our iniquities; 
upon him was the chastisement that made us whole,
and with his stripes, we are healed."

The suffering of Christ was suffering in the service of reconciling us to God, of bringing everyone into communion.  Jesus didn't seek this suffering out though; he prayed "Let this cup pass from me" while his disciples slept in the Garden of Gethsemane.  But Jesus also added to his prayer "nevertheless, not my will but yours be done."  Suffering, to some extent, is always a mystery; however, some suffering is completely beyond our comprehension.  If we suffer and cannot discern its origin, or it is out of our hands, we should pray for the trial to pass and include our willingness to submit to God's will.  We must, however, also not shy away from suffering in the pursuit of justice and love.  In the face of injustice, ours is not a retreat into Quietism, into a passive acceptance of the suffering of ourselves and our neighbor, but to face the suffering that will come when we face the oppressor and the rejection that will come when we give our hearts away to the love of our enemies.  The Crown only has ultimate significance in light of the love from the Cross

—Fr. Todd

First Sunday of Lent

Follow Me.  I Know the Way Out.

Hunger, Powerlessness, and Inadequacy:  These are the weak spots Jesus struggled with.  Very often, we consider the battle and Jesus’ victory and overlook how the desert affected Jesus.  For us, going into the desert for forty days would involve a backpack full of food; it would be suicide to make such a journey without sufficient food and water; however, we can survive without food for forty days if we are in good health and have adequate water.  Jesus was hungry.  Fasting allowed Jesus to experience the temptation to be independent of needing others to bake his bread, as well as the understanding that life is more than the sum total of our physical desires and needs.  On a deeper level, Jesus experiences the profound understanding that, though the Son of God, he needs other people and that centering one’s life around physical desires is an error (Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God). Ultimately, we cannot even rely completely on human communion but upon God, our creator.

            Jesus’ next vulnerability was his feeling of powerlessness.  Exploiting this, Satan offers Jesus complete domination over the world’s countries if he would worship Satan.  Look at what being submissive to God the Father had gotten him: hunger pangs and feelings of worthlessness.  There is that famous line from Paradise Lost where Satan says, “Better to rule in hell than serve in Heaven.”  This was a test of Jesus’ resolve for the mission; success wasn't on Jesus’ terms; they were on God the Father’s.  He replies to Satan by quoting again from Deuteronomy, “You shall worship the Lord, your God, and him alone shall you serve.”   How often our fear of being powerless leads us to believe getting power is the answer, that realigning our priorities to become powerful is our ultimate goal rather than seeking the Kingdom and serving God.

            The final temptation came in a form quite unlike all the others.  It was the ultimate showdown.  In the desert of despair, with no visible sign of God’s presence and Satan close at hand, the desire to experience God’s care and concern in some manifestation becomes Jesus’ greatest vulnerability.  Just give me a sign of your love!  Everyone feels this, especially when things are not going well.  Satan’s answer was to call God’s hand and turn Jesus’ test into God’s test.  Now it is Satan who is quoting Scripture:

“He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you,”
and:
“With their hands, they will support you,
lest you dash your foot against a stone.”

Satan quotes Psalm 91, and Jesus responds with a third passage from Deuteronomy  “You shall not put your Lord God to the test”.  The very source of his reasoning---Holy Scripture—was turned against him.  How often do foes of God’s love and unconditional grace bend scripture to turn it from a source of healing love to a weapon?  This round of Bible Darts over, Satan departs “for a time,” suggesting that the tenacity of Satan grows, not diminishes, with defeat.  Being holy and being hounded has a long tradition of being paired, but like Jesus, we may be in for a time in the desert; but simply because the journey gets tough doesn't mean we walk it alone.  At every turn, the community, animated by the Spirit, joins us and reminds us that we follow Christ into the desert.  As the man standing at the bottom of a deep pit asks the other man who came to help him why he jumped in to be with him, that now they both were stuck.  The man who jumped in to rescue him said, “Don’t worry.  I've been here before, and I know the way out”.