28th Sunday of Ordinary Time

On this mountain the Lord of hosts
will provide for all peoples
a feast of rich food and choice wines, 
juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines.  
On this mountain he will destroy 
the veil that veils all people, 
the web that is woven over all nations; 
he will destroy death forever. (Is 25:6-10)

The king said to him, 'My friend, how is it
that you came in here without a wedding garment?'
But he was reduced to silence. 
Then the king said to his attendants, 'Bind his hands and feet
and cast him into the darkness outside, 
where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.'
Many are invited, but few are chosen. (Mt 22:1-14)

Today Christ compares the kingdom of God to a wedding banquet. The image of the banquet is an important one to the New Testament, which is taken up, as we can see from the first reading, from the Old Testament.  Throughout the Gospels Christ refers to himself as the bridegroom and the Church as the bride.  This, in turn, is an echo of the prophet Hosea who describes Israel as the bride and the Lord God as the bridegroom. 

Marital imagery resonates with the whole of the faith.  The wedding rite describes the love of husband and wife as “an image of the love of Christ for his Church” and the love of married persons is the closest concrete image we have of the love of the Trinity: a love of persons that unites perfectly as one even as the persons joined retain their personal identities.  The Incarnation, God becoming man in Christ, is a kind of marriage of God and human nature, and through human nature, the entire natural order.  

And within the life of grace and conversion that is made possible by the Incarnation, Christ seeks to effect a marriage within each of us, to heal and restore the unity of body and soul within each of us, and by this healing and restoration to prepare us for communion with God and neighbor.  Thus the image of the wedding banquet has a personal significance as well.   And this healing prepares us for a participation in the larger banquet.  Once the integrity of our humanity has been restored by grace and the life of discipleship we are prepared for friendship.  Our personal restoration is a preparation for us to participate in the communal restoration of humanity. 

In our time and place humanity is more need of this than ever.  It seems to me, anyway, and I don’t claim to have any special expertise in recognizing cultural problems, nor do I claim to have any privileged experience that helps me reach this sort of conclusion better than others, but it seems to me that people today have a hard time arriving at the sort of personal integration and interpersonal fellowship that is signified by the wedding banquet.  

There are so many who have do not seem capable of being with others in friendship, and who yet are incapable of being alone.  I realize this is a sweeping generalization, and while I have no time to get into too many details of precisely what I mean, I will offer only that social media corresponds in a particularly close way to what I have in mind.  On social media one is not exactly alone, nor is one truly with other people.  And it is not coincidental, I submit, that we hear so much of the bullying that takes place there. 

While not itself evil – I confess to having a Facebook page! – the nature of social media provides a ideal home for the sort of malice that motivates bullying.  The vengeful are obsessed with the people they bully and malign, but are simultaneously incapable of living in peace with them.  Hostility isolates them from their victims, but in their isolation they are preoccupied with those they despise.  The feelings of superiority they enjoy as they attack their victims blind them to fact that they are exiling themselves to a kind of infernal middle ground where they have access to neither the peace of fellowship and nor of solitude.  For the proud, the envious, the wrathful, the lustful, the vain, every movement towards communion ends up frustrated and spoiled.  Every movement outward sends one back upon oneself.  Every movement inward is distracted by obsessions.  I think this is the significance of the man in today’s Gospel who before he is thrown from the wedding banquet is bound “hands and feet.”  

Most other forms of media follow this same pattern.  The sight of persons walking down the street wearing headphones is a familiar one to everyone.  And I don’t think anyone will deny that the seven deadly sins get a generous hearing in our popular culture.  When we break it all down into its component parts we end up with something pretty toxic: people isolating themselves under the cover of keeping company with their favorite artists, feeding eagerly on messages and sentiments that if internalized, make one even less fit for real human fellowship.  And when real human interaction becomes frustrating, where do people often turn for consolation and encouragement? – to the very entertainment that has hollowed their capacity for friendship in the first place. 

When we are baptized we are “clothed in Christ.”  This is the wedding garment that we are to keep clean.  This is the wedding garment that marks us as fit to participate in the wedding banquet.  By practicing the virtues of solitude – prayer, devotion, meditation – we are brought close to a Word that is very different from the one presented to us by the world around us.  It is a word that heals and restores us, that unbinds us, and renders us capable of communion and fellowship.  It prepares us to receive the Lord’s generosity and to share it with others, and seats us at his wedding banquet. 

25th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Mt 20:1-6

"'My friend, I am not cheating you. 

Did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? 

Take what is yours and go. 

What if I wish to give this last one the same as you? 

Or am I not free to do as I wish with my own money?

Are you envious because I am generous?'

Thus, the last will be first, and the first will be last."

I think everyone can relate to the frustration of the first group of men from today’s Gospel, who end up paid the same wage after having done more work.  It is a little more understandable when one keeps in mind the relation of Jews and Gentiles in the early.  Before Christianity, the Jews were the exclusive chosen people of God.  God had chosen them, established with them the covenants, sent to them the prophets, and they labored in the Lord’s vineyard as his chosen people for centuries, and this labor was often hard.  They knew the abuse and the disdain of the Gentiles as a result of their fidelity.  They bore, as the men in today’s parable complain, “the day’s burden and the heat.” 

At the dawn of Christianity, the Church’s proclamation was that Christ has established a new covenant to which all are called on the basis of faith and our shared humanity.  The Gentiles – the non-Jewish races and peoples who were now included among the people of God – who had worshipped false gods and undertaken all manner of impure practices, as far as the Jews were concerned, were now on an equal footing with the Jews, and, understandably, some Jews had questions about this.  What happened to their privilege?  What was their reward? 

           

St. Paul addresses this very same issue in his letter to the Romans, and we see how hard pressed he is to provide an account of how this elevation of the Gentiles and their inclusion in the elect of God occurs according to God’s plan, and that the Christian proclamation does not imply that God has suddenly changed his mind regarding his chosen people. 

St. Paul makes his case by pointing out that what God has called all of humanity to is an exalted state incomparably greater than anything enjoyed formerly by the Jews.  God in Christ has revealed himself and made possible a complete intimacy with all that is good, beautiful and true.  The Jews should regard this as more than compensating for whatever advantage they have lost relative to the Gentiles.  To resent the loss of their superiority with respect to the Gentiles can only be the result of failing to realize the full magnitude of the gift given to them by God that they did not deserve any more than the their Gentile brothers. 

To cling to their former advantage in this way is tantamount to resenting the gift God has given to humanity in Christ.  It is not hard to recognize the kinship of this resentful attitude with the bitter sentiment expressed by Satan in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, where he declares, “It is better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven.”  God’s act of generosity, because it took an unexpected form and involved the loss of something formerly enjoyed, went unrecognized and elicited its very opposite, an attitude of resentment and spite.  The words of the landowner are telling in this regard: “Are you envious because I am generous?”

Of course, this Gospel has more to do with the situation of the early church.  It has everything to do with us and our reaction to the Lord’s generosity, which all too often exhibits the same symptoms of spite and envy.  What I have in mind is summarized beautifully by a fellow named Michel de Montaigne, who was an important French writer from the Renaissance.  He said, “If we want to be happy, that is easy enough.  The problem is that we want to be happier than others.  And this is hard, because others always seem happier than they really are.” 

I suspect that Montaigne was right about most of us.  We tend to imagine others are happier than they really are.  When we meet people, and stop to say hello, and they generally don’t discuss their problems.  We ask how they are doing and the response is usually positive.  We are aware only of their happiness even as we are fully aware of our own anxieties and difficulties.  This by itself wouldn’t be such a problem if it didn’t disturb our peace and diminish our own happiness, but all too often it does, and betrays the fact that the happiness of others makes us fear that we are being left out.  Or to use the language of Jesus’ parable, it makes us fear that God is asking us to labor more for less reward.  The way we often console ourselves in these instances is telling as well.  “Everybody has problems” we say and remind ourselves that the sufferings of others are almost certainly as great as our own.  As long as others are not as happy as they seem we can be at peace.  We might simply be happy at the sight of others happiness, but this is often not our way.  We might take another attitude; we might rejoice that God was generous to another, but so often what seems, at least, to be God’s generosity to others elicits our envy. 

There is an episode in Dante’s Paradiso, his sojourn through heaven, where he encounters a woman who is near the bottom of heaven.  She was not among the most holy of persons, so there are many who are higher up and enjoy a greater closeness to God.  Dante asks her if she wishes she were closer.  She says no and says that if she did, she would be guilty of envy, which is, as she says, “contrary to the law of this place.”  She is referring to the fact that in heaven is ruled by charity, the contrary of envy.  The distance between our frustration at the happiness of others and the freedom expressed in this woman’s words is the measure of our conversion. 

A friend of mine is a big C.S. Lewis fan, and whenever we have conversations about faith he will almost always invoke something said by Lewis, and it usually hits the nail right on the head.  In one story called The Horse and His Boy, a lion (of course) tells a boy “I am telling you your story, no one is told any story but their own.”  This expresses a beautiful idea that is hard to keep in mind.  God gives to each of us a story.  We share the story of Christ; we all have the same vocation to his grace and life, but our individual paths to that life will features obstacles, burdens and blessings that are different from those of others.  As we look at the lives of others it is easy to imagine that others are spared the hardships that we are asked to endure.  God has provided for us a path that is all our own, and we must remain confident that God has provided it to us out of his generosity.  

The stories of others often seem easier than our own and so more attractive, but it goes the other way as well.  My friend referred to that quote from C.S. Lewis within the context of a discussion concerning homosexual marriage.  Our culture presents romantic and physical intimacy as the highest of all goods, and so the suggestion that there are certain persons for whom this is not a possibility seems like it is too much of a burden.  It seems unfair that there would be those who are excluded from what others enjoy.  But on the other hand, there are those who deal with material deprivation that others do not face.  There are those who deal with diseases from which others spared.  There are those who grow up in a stable home that life does not grant to others.  We each have burdens to bear that others do not.  These are as much a part of our own story as our personal identities.  And as such they ought to be understood as an essential aspect of God’s generosity, even if we experience them as difficult or even at times bitter.

23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

For where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them.

            Three weeks ago we heard Jesus’ exchange with the disciples at Caesarea Philippi where Jesus gave to Simon the name “Peter”, which means “The Rock,” and then declare to him that, “upon this rock I will build my church.”  Jesus provides for the Church’s future by laying a foundation for its growth and expansion as it carries on Jesus’ message.  

            Of course, this passage plays an important role in the life of the Catholic Church.  It is closely associated with the office of the papacy and the Church’s insistence that in elevating Simon to the status of “the Rock,” Christ established an office that was given the divine guarantee of infallibility.  This doctrine of the Church is a stumbling block for many, of course, but perhaps it can be understood in light of the pressing need it addresses.  Christ is the Word made flesh, and over the course of his life, he makes himself known as “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”  After his earthly life comes to a close the possibility arises that this Word of Truth, having been spoken clearly and fully in one brief moment in one remote corner of the world, would fall away, be forgotten, or fall into hopeless confusion.  Christ, in laying a solid foundation for his Church, guarantees the purity and precision of its teaching.  He gives to the Church the means by which to carry out its vocation to ensure that his Word will be known and proclaimed to every generation, so that the passage of time will not see the diminishment of what Jesus’ first disciples saw and understood. 
            Christ himself constitutes his disciples in a hierarchical structure, a characteristic of all institutions.  In today’s Gospel he warns us that problems will arise, and he provides some advice regarding how to deal with it.  He equips the Church with more institutional features: procedures and protocols.  When someone causes a problem, that person should be approached in person and in charity.  Hopefully it is the result of a misunderstanding, and if no one overreacts and allows the process of dealing with it, the problem may be taken care of quickly.  If that does not work, bring a few others to settle the matter so the facts can be fully investigated.  If that doesn’t yield a result and the problem remains, a separation may be required. 

            At one point in his letters St. Paul addresses a difficult situation where someone must be excluded from the Church, what we would call today “excommunication.”  He makes it clear that the person is being excluded from the communion of the Church for the person’s good, so that he can be helped to acknowledge a rupture with Christ that the person is not able to see.  The hope is that sending the person away will alert the person to the fact that he has alienated himself from the source of authentic fellowship and will then seek to be reconciled.  It may seem ironic, but the Church’s recourse to exclusion is an essential tool by which it carries out its ministry of reconciliation.  At another point in his letters, St. Paul refers to the Church as “the household of God.”  Like any household, the Church must be managed and ordered, and as will happen in households closer to home, this sometimes requires “tough love.” 

            Christ addresses the need to manage and order the inner life of the Church, to develop protocols and procedures for dealing with problems.  In other words, he makes clear the need for the Church to function as an institution.  It is easy to be cynical about the Church’s institutional aspect.  I myself joke with the couples that I prepare for marriage that nothing combines God and paperwork quite like the Catholic Church.  The heretical French bishop Alfred Loisy once remarked, “Christ came proclaiming the kingdom, and what arrived was the Church.”  But the institutional aspect of the Church is fundamental to the accomplishment of its historical mission. 

            I have in mind an example first pointed out to me by a professor of theology from a university in Australia.  On one occasion he described to me a brief and bloody episode of history that occurred in his part of the world and which he researched extensively.  It had to do with a genocide that occurred in a place called East Timor, a tiny island in Indonesia that used to be a Portuguese colony and so has a sizable Catholic population that now constitutes most of the island’s population.  In the mid 1970s Indonesia invaded East Timor and began to wage a war of extermination that included vicious attacks on the Church.  A few days before Indonesia invaded East Timor, the American president, Gerald Ford, visited Indonesia on an official visit it is widely thought gave at least tacit approval to the invasion.  The American press had no interest in the matter, and the invasion and its atrocities went completely unreported.  The whole matter, including America’s involvement, is still largely unknown by Americans.

            During the course of the genocide, East Timorese Catholic bishops asked for the help of American bishops who lobbied their governmental authorities in the United States to intervene and to stop the genocide.  This occurred, and the genocide was stopped.  The Church could work effectively to provide a solution in this case precisely because it is what people so often complain about: precisely because the Catholic Church is a global institution it could promote global solidarity and bring the reconciling power of Christ to bear on an international crisis.  Because the Church is a global institution it can bring the Gospel to bear to every aspect of human culture at every level of human civilization, at the level of the individual and the family, and at the level of superpowers. 

            The Church can promote solidarity on an international level because individual Christians do it at the level of neighbor and community.  Each of us must take up this work of promoting fellowship by finding ways to reach out to one another.  We are to come together to worship as we do now, and to find other ways to seek out each other and to strengthen one another’s faith.  Christ encourages us with an emphatic promise: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”  We have to be present to one another.  We have to seek each other out in order to draw strength from the faith of each other, as well as from the presence of Christ who promises to be with us when we are with each other.  We are told that there is strength in numbers.  For Christians there is the strength of Christ in numbers.

            And the world resists this.  One of my favorite spiritual writers is a man named Josef Pieper, who lived and wrote in Germany during the Nazi period.  He commented that it is the characteristic of totalitarian regimes to keep persons apart in order to preserve the power and prestige of the regime and its leadership.  In the totalitarian regimes of the 20^th century, the force of the all-powerful state was used to accomplish this: free speech was stifled by law and dissent meant imprisonment.  We do not face this sort of oppression, but our culture has its own ways of stifling the faithful from coming together and supporting one another.  Public expressions of faith are met with condescending looks, and Christians are made to feel out fashion and behind the times for their fidelity to the Gospel.  Many choose to remain hidden for the sake of avoiding scorn.  Christ’s words today tell us that we must not let ourselves be discouraged.  I recall one occasion when I was at Whole Foods eating lunch and saw a mother and her daughter make the sign of the cross and say grace before eating their food.  They made their gesture and prayed their prayer as if it was entirely natural for them to do so, and as though no one were watching.  But I was watching, and it was kind of thrilling to see it.  They never knew the encouragement they gave to me, and who knows who else saw it and drew strength from their expression of faith.  In that moment two or three were gathered, and Christ was there. 

            I recall also a story told to me by an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh who was in a class where the teacher spontaneously launched into a diatribe directed against the Church.  Priests came in for particular scorn.  Finally, this student I describe raised his hand and asked the simple question, “Do you know any priests?”  The answer, of course, was “no.”  The student proceeded to insist that he knew many priests, and that none of them are as she describes.  The teacher changed the subject and got on with her lecture.  After the class, several of his classmates approached him and thanked him for speaking up.  If he hadn’t said something – and what he said was actually quite simple – those people might have imagined themselves to be alone, to be the only one among the 200 persons in the class to think differently.  Because someone took a risk and spoke up, even if just to register a modest bit of dissent, those believers could find each other and encourage one another.  A small risk yielded a great result.  Those who would have remained in isolation could gather strength from each other and share with one another the presence of Christ. 

            We are not all called to witness in the same way.  But we are called to the virtue of courage, and we must, even if only in small ways, find ways to witness our faith to our generation.  Not in order to provoke confrontations with those who disagree, but to reach out to those who share the faith so that Christ may be present among us. 

            

22nd Sunday of Ordinary Time

He turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!  You are an obstacle to me.” 

            Today’s gospel is a continuation of last week’s gospel, which recounted for us the discussion between Jesus and his disciples at Caesarea Philippi.  There we heard Jesus ask his disciples, “Who do the people say that the Son of Man is?”  All the disciples respond by saying, “Some say John the Baptist” (who had already been executed at that point in the life of Christ), “others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”  So the leading popular opinions concerning Jesus’ identity involved regarding him as some kind of reincarnation of John the Baptist or one of the long dead Old Testament figures.  Finally Jesus addresses the disciples more personally: “Who do you say that I am?”  Only St. Peter responds: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

            For this response Jesus praises Peter in the highest possible terms: “Blessed are you Simon, son of Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you but my heavenly Father.”  Peter is praised as one inspired directly by God.  And Jesus bestows on him a new name: “So I say to you, ‘You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.”  Jesus’ admiration seems absolute. 

            But in today’s gospel we hear of the sharp turn taken in this encounter between Jesus and his disciples.  Jesus predicts his own suffering and death.  After Peter’s confession he describes the events of Holy Week: his arrest, condemnation, and his physical anguish and death.  He adds, too, an indication of his resurrection, but this passes his disciples by unnoticed.  Peter notices only Jesus’ predictions of his suffering and death and clearly cannot stand the thought: “God forbid, Lord, No such thing shall happen to you.”  For this objection, Jesus condemns Peter in terms no less absolute than his former praise: “Get behind me, Satan.  You are an obstacle to me, because you are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”

            Having been condemned as “Satan” must have been pretty shocking after having been extolled moments before as “The Rock.”  Perhaps the most basic lesson we can glean from this 180 degree turn is that it is one thing to know the truth of an abstract principle, and quite another to understand the practical implications of that principle.  Peter understands very well that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the living God,” but he cannot yet see how this is not only consistent with, but even demands all that Jesus indicates regarding his suffering and death. 

            I once heard a comedian describe what a poor basketball player he was when he was in high school.  He said that in his own mind he was very good at basketball.  In his mind he knew exactly how to dribble the ball down the court, shoot, score, and everything else that requires.  The problem he had was that his mind had to “outsource” the job of actually playing basketball to his awkward body that was incapable to doing all that his mind was telling it.  He was describing something we all experience, the gap between what we understand and what we are able to do.

            Perhaps we should understand this in terms of the word “obstacle” that Jesus uses to describe Peter.  Peter is an obstacle to Jesus because he has within himself an obstacle that prevents him from recognizing, let along enacting, the practical consequences of his faith.  His confession of Jesus as the Christ encounters an obstacle as it tries to move to an understanding of what Jesus’ status as Christ will mean in terms of the living out of that vocation. 

            We, of course, deal with something similar.  We make brilliant confessions of faith.  We recite the Creed precisely every Sunday.  We address Jesus as Lord and Savior, we kneel before him in the Eucharist.  All of us, though, are forced to admit that our lives are not fully intelligible in terms of the faith we profess.  There is something inside us that prevents the faith we have in our minds from translating itself into the concrete fabric of a life lived.  We cling to attitudes contrary to the gospel; we harbor and feed resentments and prideful sentiments.  In ways we cannot fully perceive, we maintain within ourselves obstacles to a full expression of our Christian faith, and so, to varying degrees, we must all admit to being an obstacle to Christ.  We can tell people about the faith we profess, but the lives we live in our bodies are less than transparent to that faith. 

            In his letter to the Romans St. Paul us “to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.”  This he says will be our spiritual worship.  The offering of our bodies, bringing our bodily actions – the things we do and say – into line with the faith we profess is the progress of our sanctification.  This is the offering we struggle to complete every day as disciples of Jesus.  This offering requires that we clear away the obstacles that exist within us, and Jesus today refers to the means by which we are to do that.  He tells us to take up our crosses every day.  By disciplining the body in order to conform it to the example we have in Christ we will bring our outward behavior into conformity with the faith we profess.  By receiving generously the example given to us by Christ in his sacred humanity we will bring the flesh and blood of our lives into conformity we the faith we have received from his Spirit.

            Daily prayer, examinations of conscience, the practice of sound disciplines: these help us accomplish the far greater task of what St. Paul describes as “taking every thought captive for Christ”: of biting our tongues when harsh criticism leaps to mind, of reining in lustful thoughts, of working to see the best in others.  The substance of our spiritual offering is what has been called “spiritual combat,” the daily struggle to bring our passionate responses into line with the faith we profess with our lips.  The daily commitment to this undertake this combat is our contribution to the work of removing from within ourselves the obstacles that stand between our faith and the holy life we are called to live. 

            We are not left to our own devices in this work.  God makes his contribution as well.  God works within us to remove obstacles, so long as we are open to this work, which can be painful.  One of my favorite passages from St. Paul is from his letter to the Philippians where he writes that he does not regard himself as having attained the goal of a perfect likeness to Christ.  Even so, he says he “presses on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”  In the next line Paul exhorts all to think this way, and notes that “if on some point you think differently, that too God will make clear to you.”  I take this to mean that if we remain faithful to our striving after Christ, if we remain faithful to the work of discipleship, God will, in time, bring to light the obstacles that exist within us.  Perhaps by growth in wisdom and purified vision, perhaps by being subjected to painful trials, he will help us recognize what we have placed between ourselves and him, and we will be able to confront formerly hidden obstacles head on.  And as this process moves forward over time, we will arrive at a more perfect integrity as disciples of Christ. 

            We see exactly this occurring in the life of St. Peter.  In the course of the wild swing between praise and humiliation that Peter experiences at Caesarea Philippi, Peter becomes aware of an obstacle that exists within him.  Something similar happens in the far more painful experiences of Holy Week.  On Holy Thursday we hear his protests before the Lord that “Even if all fall away, I will not.”  We can hear in these words, I think, a subtle indication of what may be the worst sort of abuse among those in authority, to lord it over subordinates.  Peter says, in effect, “All others may be liable to betrayal and treachery, but I am not.  They may very well be inadequate, but not me.”  Instead of insisting vainly upon his superiority to the others, he might have looked for ways to shore up his brothers’ weakness.  

            The events of Holy Thursday are, of course, a prelude to Peter’s betrayal of Christ, and this prelude provides a glimpse of the obstacle on which he will stumble just a few moments later when he denies Jesus.  On Easter Sunday, when Jesus forgives and restores Peter, he asks Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?”  Jesus’ question recalls Peter’s boastful claim from Holy Thursday.  Does he still regard himself as superior to the others?  Peter shows a small but significant increase in maturity.  “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.”  He declares his love, but not at the expense of the others.  Peter’s stumble at Caesarea Philippi and his stumbles during Holy Week are not without progress.  We see that with the Lord’s help, Peter is recognizing and overcoming the obstacles within him.  The Lord is making known to Peter the obstacles within him, and so long as Peter remains eager to work to over come them, the Lord grants him progress. 

            This continues throughout the whole of Peter’s life.  There is a well known story concerning St. Peter that people are sometimes surprised to learn does not come from the Gospels.  The story occurs during the time of Emperor Nero’s persecution of the Christian church at Rome.  Peter himself is fleeing along the Appian way when suddenly he sees the risen Lord walking the other way, back towards Rome.  Peter asks him, “Where are you going?” (Quo vadis?, in Latin).  Jesus replies by saying, “I am going to Rome, to be crucified again.”  Peter receives this as the Lord’s indication of what he should do, and so Peter turns around and walks back to Rome where eventually he is crucified.  In the end, therefore, after many mistakes and failures, after many efforts at beginning again, Peter is finally is conformed perfectly to the example of Christ.  There, his body, like that of Jesus, is offered upon a cross.  Finally, at the end, after many stumbles, Peter is able to offer himself fully - body and spirit - as a sacrifice to the Lord.

            During the Gospels and beyond, throughout the whole of Peter’s life, he struggled with the obstacles that stood in the way of expressing his faith fully in the manner of his life.  He never gave up, and we too must never give up.  We too must always be ready to start and start again in our lives as disciples, always confident that the work begun in us by the Lord will come to completion.

30th Sunday of the Year, 2012

And they came to Jericho; and as he was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a great multitude, Bartimaeus, a blind beggar, the son of Timaeus, was sitting by the roadside.  And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out and say, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!"  And many rebuked him, telling him to be silent; but he cried out all the more, "Son of David, have mercy on me!"  And Jesus stopped and said, "Call him."  And they called the blind man, saying to him, "Take heart; rise, he is calling you."  And throwing off his cloak he sprang up and came to Jesus.  And Jesus said to him, "What do you want me to do for you?"  And the blind man said to him, "Master, let me receive my sight."  And Jesus said to him, "Go on your way; your faith has made you well."  And immediately he received his sight and followed him on the way.  Mark 10: 46-52

Today we hear about Jesus healing blind Bartimaeus   Bartimaeus calls out, “Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me,” receives the healing of Jesus, and then rises to follow Jesus “on the way.”

We find Jesus healing diseases throughout the Gospels.  The performance of miraculous cures goes a long way to explaining the large crowds that followed him throughout his ministry, and for that reason I have no doubt these are real cures.  But what also interests me is the symbolic value of the diseases he cures, in this case blindness.  This is one of a few instances recorded in the Gospels where Jesus cures a blind man.  Another is found elsewhere in Mark’s Gospel where Jesus takes the blind man out of the village where he find him, out to the “wilderness” where he heals him in, but in stages.  The first healing is incomplete.  After this healing the blind man says that he sees people, but says they look like trees walking.  He sees them poorly, as objects, one might say. 

I have encountered cable TV documentaries where a Bible “expert” explains this as showing a weak Jesus, one who needs two attempts to pull off the miracle.  This misses the point entirely.  This healing shows a kind of progress, first from blindness to seeing poorly, then from seeing poorly to seeing fully.  This is clearly a symbolic representation of moral progress of spiritual conversion.  All too often our behavior betrays the fact that we see other persons as objects.  I recall one cultural critic lamenting the fact that civilizations tend to set up divisions between those persons who have rights, those who are treated with dignity and respect, and others who are treated as “two legged beasts” for the benefit of the privileged.  I think this image of a human reduced to the status of a two legged beast is has a strong kinship with the image of the “walking trees” from Mark’s Gospel.  To progress in conversion is to see and treat persons fully as persons, as ends in themselves, worthy of the same treatment we would have for ourselves, and to acknowledge this not just abstractly in thought, but in our behavior, in fact, in the words we say to others and in the way we treat them. 

So this physical blindness is a figure for spiritual blindness.  But there is an important difference between physical blindness and spiritual blindness.  The physically blind can see, as it were, their blindness.  And seeing their lack of sight they take precautions against their own blindness; they use canes and seeing-eye dogs.  The man healed in stages is also able to see his own blindness.  He knows that trees do not walk so he is able to realize that they are actually people.  His understanding compensates for his faulty senses.  

The spiritually blind all too often are only dimly aware or not aware at all of their blindness.  We are blind to our blindness.  We think we see fine, until something shameful happens that forces us to acknowledge our blindness and then in hindsight we recognize our myopia.  We see that we have trampled on others’ feelings, excusing our own abuse of others by imagining ourselves to be acting for the sake of pure and lofty motives.

In one of his poems T.S. Eliot refers to “the rending reenactment of all you have done and been, the shame of motives late revealed, the awareness of things ill done and done to others’ harm, which once you took for exercise of virtue.”  We have all experienced this.  To be driven by selfishness and is to live in the delusion of an ego that bends and distorts the truth to selfish aims.  A satisfying image of our selves is preserved by excusing our own faults while holding other fully accountable. 

There was a philosopher from the 20^th century named Max Scheler who described what he called “the organic falsehood.”  It is a selfish principle, some self-concern or some notion of what is true that is clung to in such a way that it distorts the ability to see anything else clearly.  Scheler says that this delusion can become so strong that the affected person affected no longer needs to lie.  Reality is twisted right at the level of perception such that one see what one wants to see and hears what one wants to hear. 

Whether Scheler realized it or not he was describing what Christianity describes as effect of Original Sin.  We are all affected by our selfishness, and it acts in exactly the way Scheler describes, distorting our vision, falsifying our perceptions of other persons and what we owe to them.  Unless we have the humility and the courage to stand up against this twisted and twisting part of ourselves it will have a corrosive effect on all we say and do, every relationship we try to enter into.  Living sinfully is like going through life with dirty hands, where everything we touch becomes soiled and sullied. 

The way out of the distortions associated with sinfulness is pointed to in our Gospel by the indication of Bartimaeus’ reaction to his healing.  St. Mark tells us that he rose and followed Jesus “on the way.”  The “way” that Bartimaeus is called to is the way of the Cross of Christ.  Jesus encounters Bartimaeus just as he is about to enter Jerusalem, just as he is about to suffer and die.  There Jesus shows the way to be fidelity to his Father’s will against every inclination to abandon it.  In his betrayal by his disciples, in his unjust arrest, in his suffering and death he receives invitations to resentment and hate, and responds instead with forgiveness and love.   There he returns curses with blessings. 

At the center of this is the humility of God, the cure for all self-deception and self-delusion. To be humble is to live in the truth.  Bartimaeus embraces the call of Christ to renounce oneself, to take up the cross, and to follow the Lord.  This is the way of seeing. 

This is the way that Bartimaeus embarks upon in order receive the full healing Christ wishes to impart, and still imparts through the agency of the Church.  In its first days, “the Way” was the name given to Christianity.  St. Luke notes the first time the follower of Christ came to be known as Christians.  Prior to this Christianity was simply known as “the Way.”  For us, embracing the cross and following after the Lord means to go the way of prayer, the sacraments, examinations of conscience, of conversion whereby we learn more and more to put away our egos, our narcissism, our self seeking, in order that we may see. 

Oakland Catholic High School, Baccalaureate Homily,

May 21, 2012

Echoing Angelina’s generous welcome I too, on behalf of St. Paul Cathedral and my brother priests would like to welcome all of you to this great celebration.  I am even more eager to extend my heartfelt congratulations to the class of 2012!  You are not quite finished, but you are almost there! Just a little while longer and you will be high school graduates and off to bigger and better things. 

The first thing you have to look forward to is a great, long summer.  In fact, as I think about my own graduation, it is the summer that followed it that stands out most in my mind: it was one of the most fun, even blissful, times of my life. 

Graduation means looking back on a great accomplishment that is truly finished, and ahead to something truly new.  And for the next few months you get to contemplate that and celebrate it with friends and family. 

As you look forward you can contemplate the promise of greater independence and responsibility.   For many of you this means looking ahead to being away from home for the first time, new friends, the exploration of new fields of learning.  I think also that this is a joyful time too because it is easy to imagine that you are leaving behind all that is familiar and tiresome and beginning something new and exciting.  I suspect that fuels at least a little of the ecstatic feeling that goes with graduating from high school.  I know it did in my case.  I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that it is not altogether true, but I suppose your hard work at Oakland Catholic entitles you to enjoy that thought at least a little bit.  

It is entirely appropriate that we are celebrating your great accomplishment in the context of the Easter season, the time in which we behold the new life given to us by the Risen Lord.  Easter is for Jesus’ disciples first and foremost a time of joy and peace, enjoying the victory of Jesus.  But it also a time in which they prepare for their own mission.  Jesus appears to his disciples, forgives them, assures them of his peace, and prepares them for their mission in the world.  In that time following the original Easter, the disciples, like all of you, stood at a threshold.  Behind them was a time of being with Jesus, receiving his instruction.  Ahead of them the mission given to them by the Lord to put what they had received from him into action. 

The mission that Jesus gives to his disciples is neatly summarized in his own words spoken on Easter Sunday: “As the Father sent me, so I send you.”  And we see exactly how Jesus is sent.  He is sent into a world that is good, that is blessed by God, but which is broken and hurting.  The brokenness of the world is seen most graphically and tragically in its final response to Christ.  He comes proclaiming peace and reconciliation, and in return he is rejected and abandoned, even by his closest disciples.  And yet he clings faithfully to his mission to love and heal.  When he is rejected, he forgives; in the face of curses, he bestows blessings.  He persists unrelentingly in his offer of love and peace to an angry and hostile world.  This is his mission and he accepts the sacrifice it demands. 

This is how he is sent.  And so when he says, “As the Father sent me, so I send you,” we can know just what he means.  We are sent to bring to the world the healing that comes from Christ.  This is the mission of the Church; this is the mission of all Christ’s faithful.  To be risen with the Lord is to embrace the new life that comes from him, it is to be converted to the newness of life of which the prayers of Easter so often speak.  The converted person goes out into the world with the same healing purpose of Christ, determined to embrace the world’s goodness by answering its brokenness and confusion with love and patience, to respond to malice with mercy, to return curses with blessings.  This is what we behold in Christ; this is what we behold in his first disciples on the day of Pentecost and in their ministry that follows. 

We see further that this ministry is centered on what the Acts of the Apostle calls, “the breaking of the bread”: the celebration of the Eucharist, to which we in our worship are about to turn.  The Eucharist fuels their mission and impels them to embrace the mission on which they are sent by Christ.  The work of discipleship always draws its strength from Christ.  Christ is with his disciples as he prepares them for their mission, and remains with them as they carry it out.  St. Luke points out that in the midst of the Last Supper Jesus announces to his disciples as they argue about which of them is the best, that he “stands in their midst one who serves” (Lk 22:27).  In our celebration of the Eucharist we see that Christ still stands in our midst as one who serves.  Even now, risen in glory, exists not for himself but for us: to nourish us, to strengthen us, in order that we might conduct ourselves similarly, for others, for their benefit.  Even after sending them as he is sent, he remains with them to inspire them.

As graduates of Oakland Catholic you have been given great tools with which to bring Christ’s healing to the world.  These are gifts given to you for service.  The continuation of your development will lead you to fields of employment, to vocations within the Church or to family life.  Within these endlessly varied contexts you will encounter joys and hardships, successes and setbacks, opportunities and obstacles.  You will experience in all times and places the world’s goodness and its brokenness.   Your education has prepared you to engage these circumstances with a healing purpose, to make better what is good. 

This doesn’t mean that your education or any other aspect of your life is not given to you for your own happiness.  As Jesus prepares his disciples for their mission he promises them a share in his joy, and in fact we hear him telling his disciples, “to be of good cheer,” be happy!

They key to joy and happiness is taking up the mission that Jesus gives to us.  In one of Jesus’ most famous parables, the parable of the talents, the master in the parable congratulates his hard working disciples who have worked to increase what was given to them.  He says to them, “Well done, good and faithful servant.  You have been faithful over little; I will set you over much.  Enter into the joy of your master…”  These words indicate that to enter the joy of the master is to take up his work, to take up his mission.  And this is exactly what we see in Jesus’ disciples.  The men and women who fled in terror on the day of Jesus’ crucifixion now display not only a supernatural courage in going out into the whole world, but even joy as they face the opposition of the world to their Christian mission. 

As Jesus prepares his disciples for their mission he prays that the joy shared between him and his Father be in his disciples, and that “their joy be complete.”  The joy of your graduation is great, but for all its greatness it is still incomplete.  There is more to come.  Your joy will be made complete as you devote what has been given to you at Oakland Catholic to the living out of a good, holy life; a life that embraces the goodness of the world; a life of loving service to God and to neighbor. 

14th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light (Mt 11:28-29).

Jesus today encourages us to take up the yoke and burden of discipleship, telling us that this yoke is easy and the burden light. Not all will agree. The yoke and burden of Christianity seems hard to many, and to others it seems pointless. How can it be called easy in the face of the difficulties? And what is the value of it? Jesus talks about discipleship here as though it were a liberation. From what?

So many people have a hard time with following Christ. Old habits die hard; vices aren’t easily overcome. Discipleship isn’t easy all at once. One has to work at it and be patient. Conversion shows itself to be a process of coming to be. St. Paul tells us to “walk in newness of life.” That means we are to conduct ourselves, seek to become new persons by fighting against our bad habits in order to build new ones, and thereby become new, better persons.

Shakespeare’s character Hamlet describes the process well. In his conversation with Gertrude, Hamlet tells her to do the right thing just once, and then the second time will be easier. The more she does the right thing, he insists, the easier it will become. He tells his mother, “For use almost can change the stamp of nature.” “Practice makes perfect,” the saying goes, and so it is with virtue. I’m told that within Alcoholics Anonymous they employ the saying, “Fake it till you make it.” All these sayings express the same idea: virtue begins with difficulty, but once the habit begins to take shape, one comes to experience first hand the newness of life described by Saint Paul.

Much the same is true for prayer. Building a habit of prayer is difficult. At first it seems forced, as though praying to the air’ one feels like one is going through the motions. The silence is oppressive, distractions seem relentless. But as one perseveres the perspective changes. We begin to perceive how noisy daily life is, how incessantly the meaningless images of advertising come to us; against the background of the quiet attention of prayer we can better perceive the mindlessness of the chitchat of random encounters, the repetition of daily life. We can see the world and its cycles of work and reward for what they are: important, perhaps, but not all important. And suddenly the silence and peace of prayer can be appreciated. Suddenly the silence and attention of prayer comes to be seen as a refuge. The time one can really be oneself, rather than a cog in the machine of daily life. But one will only experience it this way if he really tries and perseveres.

There’s another important dimension to the lightness of the burden, specifically, the lightness of resentment and the frustration that goes with that. I remember that when Pope Benedict was elected pope one of the first things he mentioned was that Christians were to be characterized by a spirit of forgiveness and a freedom from resentment. In my time as a priest I have seen how weighed down persons are under the burden of resentment and anger, angers pertaining to bad family experiences, bad work circumstances, anger even at God for illness and tragedy. All these are weigh terribly on the soul, and very often make of life a terribly heavy burden. Resentment arises when we see ourselves as victims of the persons who have done us wrong or even God who fails to eliminate hardship and misery.

An essential step in progress towards what St. Paul called “perfect manhood, that maturity which is proportioned to the completed growth of Christ” (Eph 4:13) is our recognition of Christ as the Victim of humanity. This is true of his death on the cross, of course, but it is not restricted to this. Christ is still the victim. In the Eucharistic prayers, for example, Christ is addressed as the victim as he is offered in sacrifice to God the Father. He is not simply one victim among many, but the Victim, i.e., the Victim par excellence, the only one who has a claim to the status of “victim.” When Jesus says that no one knows the Son except those to whom the Father has revealed him, he means, at least in part, that those who know him truly, as he is, know him to be the Victim of humanity. To recognize him as such can only result in our insisting less fervently on our own claims to victim-hood and the indignation that goes with that.

To know Christ in this way is to be released from the hard yoke and heavy burden of resentment and frustration and to take up the light yoke of Christ.