Power and Splendor

Earlier this week, I was in Kansas City for a few days to see some friends. While there, I went to see a particular exhibit that one of my friends had recommended at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. The exhibit was called Napoleon: Power and Splendor. It was composed of a few hundred pieces of all different kinds that demonstrated how Napoleon Bonaparte used art to project an aura of opulence and authority during his ten-year reign as Emperor of France. From paintings, to sculpture and metalwork, to lavish furniture and furnishings of all kinds, Napoleon used his wealth and influence to portray himself as the semi-divine, all-powerful ruler he desired to be.

As I went through the exhibit, I couldn’t help but think about how the human spirit has always been inclined toward the trappings of power and splendor. Maybe Napoleon was more ostentatious than most, but history is full of examples of those who seek authority to rule over others, and to do it in style. Precisely for this reason, when true Divinity, true Omnipotence entered our world in the Person of Jesus Christ, he preached service and poverty as virtues to aspire to. Jesus gave his apostles real authority in leading his Church, but he sought to form them in a way different from worldly models.

The Gospels are full of examples of this. The brothers James and John want to sit at his right and left hands; Jesus tells them that he who serves is greatest of all (Mk 10:42-43). Peter believes he knows better than Jesus that he should not have to suffer; Jesus tells him to get behind him, for he is thinking in worldly not in godly ways (Mt 16:22-23). John is jealous when others are doing works in Jesus’s name; Jesus tells him to not be (Lk 9:49-50). Jesus himself gives a final testimony about his attitude toward worldly power when he tells Pontius Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world” (Jn 18:36). Jesus came to serve, not to be served, and he wants his Church to be the same way.

In the Gospel today, Jesus makes it clear that this standard is one to be embodied by every disciple, not just those at the Church’s highest levels. Today’s passage is a direct continuation of last week’s Gospel, when we heard Luke’s account of the Beatitudes. Jesus declared that “the blessed” – the word really just means those who are spiritually happy, joyful – are those who recognize that their deepest desires cannot be satisfied by the trappings of this world but only in the world to come, and so they embrace sorrow and suffering here now in order to live now for the heavenly kingdom. Jesus calls everyone who follows him to be among those who strive for this ideal, who seek to be among “the blessed.”

In today’s passage, Jesus describes how his disciples, “the blessed,” having oriented themselves interiorly to the world to come, should treat others. His standard is not that of the world – not the grasping, contentious, zero sum game that so often dominates the various dynamics we are familiar with: political, social, even interpersonal. Jesus’s standard is entirely new because it is modeled on himself. It is a standard that is more than an ideal – it’s a calling by grace to see by a new lens every interaction we have with others, to allow every relationship to be transformed just as our relationship with God has been transformed. 

Our first reading today provides a wonderful example of just this kind of thinking. David has been anointed king of Israel, but he’s being hunted by Saul, the previous king but the one who still has all the power. David and his cohort come upon Saul’s army in the night, and David’s general Abishai offers to kill Saul and put the conflict to an end. It must have surely been a tempting idea. David, after all, was the legitimate king, and Saul had been trying to murder him for some time. To be rid of Saul, David would no longer have to hide out and could take up his duty of actually ruling the people. In the logic of the world, killing Saul is not only the correct, efficient thing to do, but to not do so seems ludicrous. 

However, David is attentive to a higher wisdom. He recognizes that how he treats others is indicative of his attitude toward God – especially when it happens to be his own former king, who had been anointed by God. And so, he chooses mercy. Mercy means inconvenience for himself – in fact, it means the continuation of a threat to his own life. But by showing restraint, and by being attentive to a wisdom beyond that of the world, David exerts a power, an authority that speaks to his own moral excellence. 

Pietro Antonio Magatti, David Spares Saul's Life (c. 1760)

Our day to day lives normally do not feature the kind of life and death choices that David faced. But we do find ourselves in fraught relationships, struggles over authority and influence, tough decisions about whether to act in a way convenient for ourselves but harmful to others. David’s example reminds us that we must be attentive to a wisdom higher than the world’s way of thinking. This is all the more true, of course, in light of what Jesus Christ has done for us. Jesus doesn’t just command us to love our enemies and do good to those who hate us; he illustrates what this looks like by his own passion and death. In the words of St. Paul, he died for us while we were still sinners (Rom 5:8) and he forgave us despite the fact that he was condemned for our offenses (Rom 4:25). With such a Savior, with such a Model to keep always before our eyes, we as his disciples are to personify in our dealings with others the wisdom of mercy, the power and splendor of charity.

We are living at a very important time, not only in our world, but in our Church. We have seen all too clearly in recent months the shocking scandals of how those who claim to follow Christ have instead followed a wisdom of the world. The very disciples who have been entrusted with authority have too often abused that privilege – they have misused their power either for their own gain, or for some misunderstanding of what is best for the Body of Christ. Thank God that we are now grappling with what true authority demands, what it must be if it is to be faithful to the Lord’s commands. You may know that just in the last few days Pope Francis has been meeting with bishops from around the world to discern better ways to protect the young and the vulnerable and to hold those in authority to account.

While this is certainly good news, we can’t forget that the renewal of the Church – the reinvigoration of the witness of Christ to the world – also includes us. We should call for justice for victims and accountability for those who have abuse or misused their authority – no doubt. But we also must be aware of the ways we too can become enamored with power and privilege. In our lives, we can become enraptured with material things, or consumed with the desire to gain more and more, or fixated on the wants of Number One rather than those in need. In our relationships, we misuse our own power when we become petty, or hold grudges, or judge the value of another person, or refuse to forgive out of spite or even legitimate grievance. Don’t get me wrong – these sins and offenses are not on the scale of the sins, and in many cases the crimes, of the worst of the offenders we have heard and read about. At the same time, we each have room to grow in following Christ more closely. What a wonderful witness we can give to the world and to our fellow Christians when we are willing to not only call for renewal but to work for it within ourselves! We may not be responsible for the crisis we are now in, but we can be a part of its solution – we can give testimony to a wisdom higher than that of this world, to Jesus Christ, “the Power of God and the Wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:24).

Friends, we are about ten days out from the season of Lent. We need not wait until then to begin, with the Lord’s help, a work of renewal within our hearts – to see where it is that we, as the Lord’s “blessed,” can be transformed in our relationships with others. We can strive for justice, and demand what is right, while also being examples – as David was – of listening to a wisdom higher than what the world practices. Every interaction, every relationship, every encounter is an opportunity to exhibit the world’s values or the Lord’s. May we seek the power and splendor that comes from knowing Christ and becoming like him in all that we do and to every person whom we meet.

Into Deep Water

Every relationship has its own story. For any person that we are close to, we can give – if asked – an explanation for how we have come to know that person. This is especially true of friends. Some friendships are rooted in the distant past, in childhood or adolescence, while others are much more recent. For example, Fr. Jason and I got to know each other as adults, but we have been friends now for nearly fifteen years. I still remember the dinner for prospective seminarians at Bishop Sartain’s house when we first met. I remember thinking, “This guy is interesting, but he sure does talk a lot.”

The friendship of Jesus and Peter is one of the most important relationships in history, especially for us Christians. In the Gospel today, we hear St. Luke’s rather interesting account of how that friendship began. Jesus and St. Peter were not childhood acquaintances. They meet as grown men, and as we heard, they are very different in many ways. Jesus is a traveling preacher and healer; Peter – or Simon, as he’s still called here – is a professional fisherman. Jesus’s message is one of repentance, and Simon is very much aware of his own sinfulness. Their friendship begins not because of similar personalities or shared interests but because Jesus gets into Simon’s boat and begins ordering him around.

Peter Paul Rubens, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes (1619)

If this is a startling way to describe it, imagine how Simon must have felt. This famous prophet invites himself into Simon’s boat, and tells him to put out into deep water. And somewhat amazingly, Simon does what Jesus says. He is open to the direct action of Jesus, and thus a relationship begins, a friendship that will shape Simon’s life – indeed, that will remake his life, that will give him a new name, “Peter,” and that will be the foundation for every friendship with Christ that will follow.

Why does Jesus choose Simon’s boat? Because he knows what he will become. Jesus sees Simon as not just a fisherman, but, as he says, as a “Fisher of Men”, as one of his chosen apostles, indeed as the “Rock” (in Greek, “Petros”) upon whom he will build his Church. All of that though is in the future – it’s easy to skip ahead in the story and think of it as a done deal, but the reality is that it’s not. Jesus has initiated an invitation to Simon to a friendship, but Simon must respond to that invitation, cooperating with the grace of relationship that Jesus offers to him.

This is the fundamental dynamic of every disciple. By virtue of our humanity, each of us has a relationship with God; by baptism, that relationship has become a friendship in Christ. God is the one who makes the overture – it’s his direct action, not ours, that initiates the grace of knowing him and relating to him. And yet in Jesus, God also wants to elicit from us a response, an act of faith that allows the Lord to climb into our boat and orient our lives in the direction he has in mind. This is the grace of friendship – this is the grace of vocation – by which we grow into becoming that which the Lord has foreseen all along.

Of course, the flipside to all of this is our freedom to say, “No.” Simon could have said something like “Sir, with all due respect, could you find someone else’s boat?” When the Lord invites us to the grace of friendship, we are free to resist it, either because we are afraid of where it may lead us, or because we’re unwilling to do what it will require of us. How relatively easy it is to decline that offer of friendship – to say something like, “I would prefer not to” – because of false humility or a sense of unworthiness. Note that in the Gospel Simon is ready to that very thing – he confesses to Jesus he is a sinful man and even says, “Depart from me.”

Jesus’s response is very interesting, and very important for us. “Do not be afraid,” he says. God doesn’t want us to grow fearful because of our own unworthiness. We are unworthy, we are sinful, and at times, we experience a renewed awareness of this. When that happens we should be contrite – we should seek forgiveness – we should never grow dejected or afraid. Why? Because God knows what we can become. He knows much better than us what the grace of friendship can do for us, how it can purify us if only we are willing to let the Lord into our boat. All we need to do is extend that trust to him – to respond to his invitation as Simon did, and put out into the deep. As with Simon, Jesus sees in us not just lowly sinners, but saints who can bring others into relationship with the Lord by the way we live. Jesus knew Simon could become Peter – what might he see in us if we are willing to respond openly to his call?

Friends, the reality is that each of us has a story of friendship to tell, a story of our own about our relationship with Jesus. True – its details may not involve fishing, or a literal boat. But it is a story of the presence of Jesus coming into our lives in a radical way, probably in a disruptive way, but in a way that leads to true life. What is the Lord’s invitation to you? Where is he offering you the grace of renewed relationship? Let the Lord’s friendship take root in you, despite your fears, despite your unworthiness. It’s easy to say, “I would prefer not to,” but to do so may mean to miss out on the very destiny for which God has created us. Instead, when the Lord calls, put your trust in him and set out into deep water. Let him set the course and lead you to full and abundant life.