Trusting Anew

Some places in life have a special importance. A young girl might recall with great fondness the sights and smells of her grandmother’s kitchen. A married couple might revisit on special occasions the restaurant where they had their first date. For each of us, there are some places that are just imbued with spiritual significance, where the power of memory and meaning forever stay with us.

Take this sanctuary, for example. This church was built in 1960 – in fact, it was dedicated this very day, fifty nine years ago. And from that day until today, thousands of people have experienced something special in this space: a homily preached that made an impact on the life of a young person; a insight in prayer that brought clarity and perspective; a moment of refuge from the turbulence of the world outside. Untold numbers have received the sacraments here – the healing waters of baptism, the joyful graces of confirmation and marriage, the Holy Eucharist. The spiritual legacy of our church extends far beyond the confines of these four walls.

In the Gospel today, we hear about the very first church sanctuary: the Upper Room. As a physical space, it was probably fairly unremarkable, a room in the southwest part of Jerusalem’s Old City that was probably a meeting space or guesthouse in the first century. But for the apostles and other disciples, and for Christians ever since, it is a place imbued with spiritual significance because of the events that happened there. It is where Jesus washed the feet of his disciples on Holy Thursday. It is where he ate the Last Supper with his friends, giving them the Eucharist as the way of remaining connected to what he would do on Calvary. It is the place where the disciples, gathered together after Jesus’s Ascension, received the power of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. But arguably the most poignant events that happened in the Upper Room are what we hear about in today’s reading: the encounters of the Risen Lord with the disciples.

Jesus Appears to the Disciples (2009) by Imre Morocz

It is hard to underestimate the tension at the start of this Gospel. The disciples are hiding out behind locked doors, afraid that they too will be found and put to death as their Master had been. They are likely on edge because they have heard from Mary Magdalene and others that Jesus has been raised, but they don’t know what to make of those reports. If he has been raised, is he coming for them, to condemn and punish? After all, the last time they saw him, he was being arrested and they had fled in fear. Into this locked room, the Risen Jesus enters, not with condemnation but with words of mercy and forgiveness: “Peace be with you,” he says. He shows them the wounds of his Passion, the marks of his very real, very painful death, healed now and surpassed by the loving power of God.

Today is the Second Sunday of Easter, Divine Mercy Sunday, and a recapitulation of all that we have been celebrating since Easter morning. Jesus’s Resurrection is God’s crowning achievement – it is the pinnacle of his work of reconciliation between us and him, the means by which he heals us of sin and offers us the opportunity to eternal life. God’s infinite mercy was made real and personal for those disciples gathered in the Upper Room. And they were changed by it; that experience affected them – it stayed with them. Not only were they forgiven but they in turn were made ministers of mercy, entrusted with this godly power to forgive sins themselves. Having received mercy, they were sent to offer it as well. It is through that apostolic ministry that you and I receive also the grace of the Risen Jesus: God’s mercy made present and personal for us in the sacrament of reconciliation, where he reminds us that there is no sin too great for him to forgive.

But not every kind of brokenness is so easily healed. Today’s Gospel also presents us with the figure of the apostle Thomas, a person for whom healing and forgiveness is not so easily accepted. There is much about Thomas that is easy perhaps for us to relate to. He is clearly hurt. The suffering and death of Jesus was shocking for him – a scandal. Thomas must have trusted in Jesus deeply, and we can see just how deeply from his unwillingness to believe the claim that Jesus been raised from the dead. Having trusted so deeply, and with that trust seemingly broken, Thomas resists trusting again. He demands assurance.

How easy it is to relate to this mentality, especially in these days! Our trust in the Lord and in his Church is tested in seemingly endless ways. It can be tested through painful personal situations, when God seems to be absent or not listening to us. Our trust might be tested when the pastor makes an unpopular decision or when the bishop does something we disagree with. Our trust might be tested when the church hierarchy or even the pope himself chooses priorities that are different than the ones we think are most important. Certainly, there is a great test for all of us in the current crisis of abuse and of the scandalous uses of power and authority in our Church, when trust has been not just lost but betrayed. In these situations, or others like them, aren’t we sometimes a bit like Thomas, unwilling to trust again without assurances?

Guercino, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1621)

Thomas received a pretty awesome assurance: he encountered the Risen Christ. He got to see with his own eyes and touch with his own hands the Body of the Lord that had been crucified, had died, but is alive again. Believe it or not, though, that same assurance is offered to us, just in a different form. Thomas encountered the Risen Christ in his physical Body; we encounter him in his ecclesial Body, in the Church, which is no less of a real encounter with him. We do not behold Jesus physically before us, but we feel his presence in prayer and we see his love and his Spirit active in the midst of the believing community. We may not be reconciled to him face to face, but we are reconciled in no less real of way every time we confess our sins and receive his sacramental forgiveness. We may not put our hands in the side of the Risen Lord, but we do truly hold out our hands receive him in the Eucharist, where his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity is Really Present, saying with Thomas, “My Lord and My God!”. As Jesus himself says, those who see the Risen Christ with eyes of faith are even more blessed than those who saw him with physical sight!

When our trust is tested, we may be tempted to not trust anymore, to hide behind locked doors of fear and unbelief. But the Lord is always faithful and worthy of trust. He comes to meet us, especially here within these walls, unremarkable perhaps in themselves, but truly marvelous because of we encounter him here. Here we encounter the Lord’s healing presence; here we are made worthy to receive his grace. When we invest ourselves in the visible Church, when we are active and participating in the sacramental life of our parish – despite the challenges of doubt, despite the temptations to turn away – then we are like Thomas: touching the Risen Lord, tangibly in communion with his Body present on earth, the Church. That Body might bear at times the marks of wounds, inflicted by the sins and failings of her members, but it is always alive with the Lord’s Divine Presence. Let’s be frank – a given test may be very difficult. But every trial is also an opportunity to trust anew, to remember that faith is about believing even when we do not fully see.

Friends, when Bishop Fletcher and the community of St. Thomas Aquinas dedicated this building fifty nine years ago, they did so because they wanted to create a space where Christ can be encountered, an Upper Room right here on the campus of the University of Arkansas. And because they did, we are the beneficiaries of the spiritual legacy of this place; it is imbued with a spiritual significance that comes not from them, or us, but from the Risen Lord. He may not always appear in the way we desire, but that doesn’t mean that he isn’t Risen or that he isn’t present among us. If we are not locked in upon ourselves in the false securities of fear and unbelief, then we will meet him here, in his Church, despite its human flaws and failings. Like Thomas, let us see the reality of his presence here among us, not with physical sight but with eyes of faith. Like him, we can come to believe as firmly as he did – that the Risen Lord is worthy of our trust, that he really does know what he is doing, and that he can take even the most troubling situation – like the rift of broken friendships, like faith tested even by death – and transform it into an opportunity of grace, of blessing.

With continued Easter joy, may our celebration of this Eucharist give assurance to each of us of the Lord's personal love and presence.

Easter: Light for Our Darkness

Just about two years ago, a group of people from all around the world looked up into the heavens to try to do something thought to be impossible. Eight groups of scientists trained their telescopes on to a single spot in the night sky over the course of five days in order to see something they knew was there but which no one had ever seen: a black hole. Not only did they see it, they captured an image of it, the first ever picture of a black hole. As I’m sure you saw, that image was released to the public a few weeks back and it made headlines around the world.





That story got me thinking again about black holes. I have always been fascinated by them, and I know I’m not the only one. When I was in high school, I briefly considered the notion of becoming an astrophysicist just so I could learn more about them, but I quickly released I wasn’t nearly good enough in math. Black holes are captivating – to me and to many other people – because the idea of them is so alien to our experience: a cosmic space with such intense gravitational pull that nothing, not even light, can escape from inside it. They are inherently devastating – to experience it is to be overwhelmed by it. Black holes are unyielding, inexorable.

Perhaps one of the reasons people like me find black holes so mysterious is because they remind us of that other reality that can also be described as devastating, overwhelming, unyielding, inexorable – namely, the reality of Death. There is, I think, a deep and existential dread within each of us (sometimes more apparent to us, sometimes less) about the reality of our own mortality: that at the end of each of our lives – no matter how abundant and joyous, no matter how meaningful and well-lived – we will die. Death is like a spiritual and moral black hole, impossible to resist, drawing every one of our lives slowly and inevitably unto itself. No one can escape its grasp.

No one, that is, save One, the Risen One. Today, we join our voices to the voices of more than two billion Christians on the face of the earth, and untold myriads more in heaven, to proclaim anew the Good News, the greatest of announcements there ever was: Χριστός ἀνέστη, “Christ is Risen!” Today, we exclaim with loud and full faith that Jesus Christ, he who lived once and died now has been raised, and he lives again forever and ever. In him, the hold of Death has been broken; the grip of our spiritual black hole has been undone. A Light has come forth from the darkness of the grave and his Light will shine forevermore.

This is the Easter message. This is the ever new, everlasting message of the Church – the only message that in the end ultimately matters. As we heard in the Gospel, the tomb of Jesus has been found empty! The One who had been there – the One who by all human reason and experience should be there still – is there no longer, for he is Risen. Χριστός ἀνέστη, Ἀληθῶς ἀνέστη! “Christ is Risen, He is truly Risen.”

James Tissot, Mary Magdalene and the Holy Women at the Tomb (1894)

But that is not all. Because, while it could be enough perhaps to know that Death’s grasp has been undone at least for some one, this Risen One is Jesus Christ, who is God and Man, and so his death and rising means something for all of us as well. As we heard Saint Paul explain to the Colossians [vigil: Romans], what is true now for Jesus can be true for us: by baptism, we share in his death, and if we live by that grace, conforming our lives to his, then we will truly rise with him. 

We need not have merely a hazy dream, some vague hope for an afterlife. In Jesus, we can see that God has definitively done something new. The God who created the heavens and the earth, who created us in his image and likeness, who formed a covenant with Abraham, who by Moses led Israel through the waters of the Red Sea out of the slavery of Egypt, who through Isaiah promised to slake the thirst of those in mourning and exile – that God, in Jesus, has joined himself to us, has shared the very depths of our existential experience, even to the point of death, and now through him has given us new life, a life beyond the power of the grave.

Friends, just because the Light has come does not mean that the darkness is gone entirely. You might have heard about a number of bombings that occurred this morning in Sri Lanka, especially it seems in churches. Christians just like us – our brothers and sisters, gathered in joy for Easter services – have now been violently reminded of the reality of death. But as Saint Paul tells us, not even such reminders can stamp out our Easter joy, for in Jesus death no longer has power over us. We are gathered here this morning to proclaim just that idea; we believe it and know it to be true. But there are many who do not. There are many who do not know the Light that has come, the Light that dispels the darkness. There are many who cannot find reason to believe or who cling to only hazy dreams and vague hopes of some life beyond the grave but who have not yet found by faith in Christ the assurance of what they hope for. We who are present here must go and tell them what we have found. It is our calling now to carry his Light into every darkness, to proclaim that there is no reality – not even the most devastating, overwhelming, unyielding, inexorable thing known to human experience – that is beyond the love of Christ and the Light that he brings. We must tell others – by our voices, by our acts, by our lives – that the impossible has been done: that we have come to know a Risen Life, a Life not just after death but beyond death’s power.

The Tomb has been found empty. Christ is Risen, He is truly Risen, and we along with him!

Holy Thursday: Love in the Extreme

Think, for a moment, about something daunting that you are facing. Maybe you are struggling right now in one of your courses. Maybe you have a tough decision to make about your major or about life after college. Maybe there is a relationship with a friend or a family member that is on the rocks. Maybe a loved one faces a serious illness. Whether it is one of these things or something else, life provides all of us with difficult situations, realities that occupy a lot of our mental and emotional energy. It can be very easy and very understandable to focus on those things rather than on the present moment and on the people that we encounter. We may become distracted, maybe even irritable to those around us. We understand that they don’t know or understand what we’re going through, but still we can’t help but have to become a bit self-focused, needing to conserve our emotional and spiritual energy for what we face. 

But while we all face daunting things, few if any of us have had to face our own imminent death. None of us have had to face death in a violent way at the hands of another. Imagine for a moment if you did face such a prospect. How terrible it would be! How helpless you would feel! How very understandable it would be if you were to just shut down, tune out, focus entirely on this horrific thing that awaited you.

Jesus, amazingly, did not do that. The mental and emotional anguish that he must have been going through in the days and hours leading up to his Passion must have been excruciating. We catch glimpses of it in the Gospel stories, when they tell us that his heart was troubled, or when we hear that he sweat blood in the garden of Gethsemane. Jesus was not only aware of his coming physical suffering. Perhaps even more painful to him was the knowledge of the treachery of his friends, the betrayal of Judas and the abandonment of the other disciples.

Bearing the Cross (2015) by Anatoly Shumkin

Faced with all of this, we might expect Jesus to be agitated, distracted, beginning to pull away from his disciples, conserving his emotional and spiritual energy for what he is about to do. And yet, the exact opposite is true. In his last days, as he draws close to the Cross, Jesus’s compassion for those who surround him and those whom he encounters is all the more evident. For example: mere hours before his arrest, Jesus shares an intimate meal with his disciples, sharing with them his knowledge of the Father and calling them “friends” for the first time; he shares with them the Bread that is his Body and the Cup that holds his Blood, and makes it clear that they are connected to him as branches are to a Vine; when Jesus’s arrest occurs, he speaks to Judas as a friend, even as he is betrayed; he heals the wound inflicted by Peter on the servant of Caiaphas the high priest; he consoles the women of Jerusalem who mourn for him; he literally asks his Father to forgive those who crucify him; he has mercy on the penitent thief and assures him he will be with him in Paradise; he ensures those whom he loves the most will be cared for, entrusting his Mother to his best friend John and John to his Mother.

These are just a few examples. No doubt there are more. But it is clear that in his Passion – despite his own intense suffering, physical, mental, spiritual – Jesus was still focused entirely not upon himself but upon others. Jesus was not just gritting his teeth and gutting it out, begrudgingly facing what had to be done. No, he went to the Cross as he did everything else, caring for those whom he encountered, sharing with them to the last his love and his mercy. The Passion of Jesus is his public ministry par excellence.

In today’s Gospel, we hear the explanation for all of these actions and more. Washing another person can be viewed as something servile, as Simon Peter clearly sees it. But it can also be something profoundly compassionate: think of a mother gently washing her child, or a person carefully washing an elderly adult. Jesus’s act is an act of compassion and it is an act of explanation: it is a symbolic sign of the love and service for others with which he went to the Cross. Jesus’s act is a kind of manifestation of his interior being at that moment. It shows what is on his mind and heart in the mere hours before he would be arrested, tortured, and executed. It shows his love in the extreme.

As always, though, Jesus is also teaching. He washes the disciples’ feet not merely to elucidate to them his compassion but also to encourage and inspire them to the same. As we heard, “I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.” What they should also do is not literally to wash others’ feet but to love to the extreme – to adopt the whole mindset and attitude of Christ that regards others always with care and compassion, no matter what difficulties we may be facing, no matter what we ourselves may be suffering, even if necessary to the point of death. That is the invitation Jesus shares with us, the model of love and service to which he calls all disciples, those at the Last Supper and us here present.

To love like Christ, though, we need the grace of Christ, and it is through the sacraments par excellence that we receive that grace. St. Thomas Aquinas taught that the sacraments draw their power from Jesus’s Passion: through them we share in the love of his suffering and dying. By receiving the sacraments, we “put on Christ” in the words of St. Paul (Gal 3:27). The Church’s sacraments are always Jesus’s sacraments and so they communicate to us the state of his mind and heart, the actual love and compassion with which he went to the Cross. Through them, not only are we sanctified by his grace, but we receive his power and strength to love others in a radical way, despite distractions, despite inconveniences, despite the tragedies and sufferings that may tempt us to turn inward and shut others out.

Leonid Grigorashenko, Jesus Washing the Feet of Simon Peter (c. 1990)

Friends, in the next three days, we enter into the celebration of Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection. In a profound way, we have the opportunity to receive anew the compassion that Christ showed for us then, that he continues to show for us now each time we receive his sacramental grace. Life provides us with difficult situations: momentous decisions, personal tragedies, crises of faith or of trust in the Church, and more. How desperately we need the grace of Jesus! We need it not just for ourselves, but to share with others, through acts of love and service. The grace of Jesus helps us resist the temptation to turn inwards and focus just on ourselves, and instead allows us to love those present to us right now, to love in and through the suffering perhaps known only to us. By drawing strength from the sacraments, we ourselves become a model of our Master: to love as he loved, to offer ourselves as he offered himself, to redeem our corner of the world as he has redeemed all of it.

May the Eucharistic Christ whom we will receive in a few moments impart to us his very love and compassion, that as we now share in his sufferings, we may one day share in his glory!

Palm Sunday: Help for the Helpless

When something terrible happens, it is natural to think: “Is there something I could have done?” In a natural disaster, the first responders wonder how they could have saved more lives, and the government officials question whether they could have done more in prevention. In our family lives, when we are undergoing a great trial, we wonder sometimes what to do and whether we can do more. So often, we want to help but we are not sure exactly how.

The Master of the Aachen Altarpiece, Crucfixion (central panel, Aachen Altar Triptych, c. 1490)

We have just read an account of the Passion and Death of Jesus. If this account makes us solemn and sad to hear it, imagine the feelings of those who were present when it happened. Surely, there were many who were present during our Lord’s suffering who looked upon him and thought “What can I do?” They desperately wanted to help him in his hour of need, but his fate was beyond their control. All they could do was accompany him, walk with him as he went to his terrible death.

While Jesus’s suffering was terrible, it was not the most desperate situation present at that moment. Believe it or not, there was a situation even more dire, even more deserving of intervention. That situation was the reality of our human sinfulness. Jesus’s suffering shows us all of the nastiness of the human condition – the pain and sorrow, the brutality and injustice – all of our moral and spiritual dysfunction. God looked upon us in our brokenness and desired to intervene. While we may be limited to help those who are in need, God has no limits, especially none on his love and mercy, and so he desired to act. And he did act: through the Passion of Christ.

That Jesus suffered and died in the way he did is a dreadful thing. But it was not a senseless thing; it had a great purpose. The Lord’s Passion is God’s answer to our sinful dysfunction. It is the remedy by which he restored us to himself. In our second reading, Saint Paul tells us that Jesus is the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, who humbled himself to take upon our human form and even went to his death like a slave, all to save us from sin. When we were helpless in our sinfulness, God himself became our help. When our fate seemed sealed, God himself rescued us from eternal death. That is what we see with the eyes of faith when we look upon the suffering of Christ.

Friends, with our celebration today of Palm Sunday, we enter into Holy Week. This is indeed the holiest week of our year as Christians; a chance to remember all that the Lord has done for us, especially in his greatest act, the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus. We are invited to accompany Jesus through this week and allow him to accompany us. The greatest act our King has accomplished for us is to lay down his life for us. His Passion is the remedy for our sin, and so he is help for the helpless, the one to whom we turn when we do not know to whom to turn. In Jesus, we are never beyond God's power to save. This week, let us honor his loving sacrifice, by recalling his presence in our lives, and by modeling our own lives upon his. Remembering what he has given to us, we can give something to him: our faith, our hope, and our love. Let us praise Christ our King!

Something New

Most of us think of our lives in terms of big events: birthdays, graduations, weddings, anniversaries – the kind of events that greeting card companies survive on. As a priest, it is a privilege to share a lot of those moments in life with people. Just this week, I saw on Facebook that a baby girl was born to a couple whose wedding I officiated at last summer. They met and fell in love at the university and through our campus ministry, and now, from their love, a new life has been brought into this world.

But while life is certainly marked by such momentous, joyous occasions, it’s also true that it’s just as much defined by things we don’t celebrate at all. Illness, unemployment, divorce, and the like are just as real, just as significant for our lives as the happier moments. This is true also of sin. Our spiritual lives are certainly not reducible to our sins, but they do have a significant impact upon our relationship with God: whether we have sinned, whether we have repented of our sin, how we can keep from falling into sin again. We certainly don’t believe that God stops loving us when we sin; we know from the story of the Prodigal Son last week that the Lord’s love always draws us unto forgiveness. God does love us and yet our sins cannot be dismissed lightly. How do we balance these two things? How do we take sin seriously, while also not letting it define us?

The story of today’s Gospel is helpful in this regard. The scribes and Pharisees have brought to Jesus not just a hypothetical situation of sin, but an actual sinner, a woman apparently caught in adultery. The religious law of the Jews prescribed that those guilty of adultery had violated God’s law so severely that they deserved death. However, the Roman occupiers did not permit any group to put another to death; capital punishment was something reserved to them alone. Jesus, therefore, is caught in a trap. If he says the religious law should be followed, and the woman put to death, he will run afoul of the Romans and may be arrested for sedition; if he says the woman should not be put to death, then he’ll be guilty of clearly contravening the law of Moses and his prophetic authority before the people will be diminished.

Jesus doesn’t play their game. He refuses to answer their question directly and so avoids either of the political pitfalls that the Pharisees and scribes have laid out for him. But by answering in the way that he does, Jesus also shows that the Pharisees and scribes have subscribed to a false dichotomy between mercy and judgment. They think that the answer to sin is either to deny it or let it go unpunished, or punish it so severely that you end up hurting the person as well. This kind of dualistic approach to sin is too often our approach as well: either we deny the power of sin, and thus say there’s nothing that needs to be forgiven, or we make sin’s power so strong that we can’t think of the person (whether ourselves or someone else) separately from the sin.

Jesus shows us a third option: to acknowledge sin while also allowing God’s power to remove its hold over us. Notice that Jesus never dismisses or makes light of the woman’s sin. He doesn’t say anything to suggest that she does not deserve punishment, perhaps even capital punishment. The violation of God’s laws must always be answered with justice. But Jesus reveals that mercy is an aspect of justice: it’s the way that God’s justice is rendered to those who wish to be made right, who wish to be whole. Jesus doesn’t deny that the woman deserves punishment, but he shows that God’s mercy is powerful enough to withhold that punishment, to not allow the woman to be condemned along with her sin.

Christ and the Adulterous Woman (1869) by Domenico Morelli

The late archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Francis George, once remarked that the culture we live in tends to permit everything but forgive nothing. The culture around us doesn’t believe in “sin,” so-called; but, if one does make a mistake, that person becomes branded for life, with the culture unable or unwilling to forgive. As Christians, we are called to take precisely the opposite approach – we are called to be different because our God is different. God does not permit everything; he very clearly tells us that certain things are sinful – they are harmful for us and harmful for our relationship with him. But if we do sin, he can forgive – he can forgive anything, everything – since he does not see us as defined by our sin.

Today’s Gospel should prompt within us a remembrance of our own individual experiences of forgiveness. If life is about joyous and sorrowful moments, when and where have you felt the sorrow of sin and then the joy of forgiveness following it? In what concrete instances and experiences of your life have you received the mercy of God? Those experiences of reconciliation should stay with us, as reminders in times of struggle and difficulty. They should continue to resonate within us, just as they must have for the woman in today’s Gospel. God’s power knows no limits except the limits we place upon it.

Just as importantly, the Gospel story today invites us to consider how we respond to the sin of others. Are we like the scribes and Pharisees, accusing and condemning others when they fall? Or do we take an approach like Jesus, not excusing the sin, but also not letting it define the person who stands before us? If we feel a demand for justice at the violation of God’s law, how can we fail to also feel the responsibility of forgiveness when he himself shares it so freely? Mercy is not just something offered to us; it’s something asked of us as well.

Friends, God says to us through the prophet Isaiah today, “See, I am doing something new!” Indeed, the best parts of life are when we experience that newness that only he can give. Sometimes it is the newness that comes with the birth of a baby girl, as my friends experienced this week; sometimes it is the newness that comes from mercy and reconciliation, receiving it and extending it to others, recognizing that just as we have been forgiven, so too we are called to forgive. God’s power knows no limits except the limits we place upon it.