Of Infinite Worth

This past Friday, I went to the store to pick up a few things. I remembered to use all the advice that my mom taught me about how to be a smart shopper. I bought the value pack of toothpaste. I made sure to pick up the off-brand trash bags. In the produce section, I selected the bag of salad greens with the latest sell-by date.

We are all used to making value judgments about things. We do it every day, choosing this and not that, preferring one thing over another. We even make the same kind of judgments about people. We make decisions about which friendships to invest in, which family members to consult for advice, which business relationships to cultivate. As limited people, we have limited time, which means we have to make choices about who is worthy of our time and attention, and who isn’t.

In today’s first reading, Peter addresses the Sanhedrin, the council of elders that was the highest authority in Jewish life. Peter had been arrested and brought before them because of someone who, along with Peter himself, would not have normally warranted their time and attention: a crippled man whom Peter had healed in the name of Jesus. This reading shows us the how the dynamic of religious authority was shifting after the Resurrection: the powerful Sanhedrin was losing its influence and being overshadowed by Peter, this poor fisherman from Galilee, by the crippled man who had been miraculously healed, and above all by Jesus, the itinerant preacher whom the Sanhedrin had condemned to death but who now had been raised.

In the Gospel today, Jesus declares himself to be the Good Shepherd, the true shepherd of the Lord’s flock, whose authority comes not from any human source but from God himself. He proves this authority by willingly laying down his life for his sheep; for that reason, Jesus has a special claim to our time and attention. As the Son of God, his self-sacrifice was of infinite worth in God’s eyes. Its value for us, therefore, is also infinite, the only way to be saved, as Peter tells the Sanhedrin. Amid all of the relationships we have in life, no one else has died for us, and even more importantly, no one else can ensure that we rise to eternal life. As limited people, who have limited time, we nonetheless must make sure we place the relationship with the Good Shepherd first in our lives – not just in theory or intention, but actually doing so. We are reminded again of the importance of the basic building blocks of a relationship with Christ: daily prayer, engagement with Scripture, Sunday Mass, frequent confession. These aren’t just dictates of the Church; they are the fundamental components of an authentic faith.

Jesus as the Good Shepherd also means that we are attentive to the ones whom he’s shepherding. This first starts with us. We can be our own worst critics, spiritually speaking. Because we know our own imperfections and sins, we can fall into the trap of thinking we are nobody special in God’s eyes. At times, his presence might feel distant. We might even feel unloved by him. But Jesus as the Good Shepherd reminds us that he laid down his life for us; how much we are worth to him! Whenever we feel tempted to put further distance between ourselves and him – to turn away from prayer, from Mass, from spiritual things, and seek solace or distraction somewhere else – the love of the Good Shepherd calls us back. Because he died and rose for us, he has time and attention for all of us. We must be careful not to minimize or discount the great value God has for each of us, the infinite worth he finds in each of our souls.

When we have understood better the value God finds in us – an awareness that we arrive at again and again, in ever deeper ways – then it will also affect how we look at others. Every person is either a member of the Lord’s flock, or a potential member, and so each person has a worth beyond what this world can give. We must be careful not to view other persons only in the ways that the world looks at them: according to earning capacity, social status, economic productivity, cultural background, skin color, immigration status, etc. etc. Even an individual’s personal history or moral choices don’t tell the whole story, because within everyone, there is an immortal soul, uniquely created by God and infinitely valued by him, and that means infinitely valued by us too. Peter healed the crippled man because he first did not overlook him; he saw him as someone worthy of his time and attention because he knew that, despite that man’s disability and low social status, he was loved and redeemed by Jesus Christ. In the same way, we can lead others to know the love of the Good Shepherd in the way that we first see them as persons and seek to love them in the way God loves them.

Friends, Jesus the Good Shepherd helps us to do this because he still cares for us, the sheep of his flock. He comes to us in this Eucharist, attending to us and reminding us of the infinite worth he finds in us. And then he sends us forth, so that having received him, we may use the limited time we have on this earth to bring others into his fold.

The Best News

No one likes to receive bad news. But bad news is part of life: the ballgame is rained out, you didn’t get the job, the doctor calls with a scary diagnosis. But sometimes bad news is followed by good. The game is canceled, but tomorrow is a doubleheader. You didn’t get the job, but the boss is offering a better one. That scary disease? No worries – there’s a cure.

In today’s first reading, the apostle Peter addresses the people of Jerusalem. What he has to say must have been very difficult to hear: the man Jesus whom they had killed had been sent by God, was in fact God’s very Son. As he says, “The author of life you put to death.” Talk about the ultimate bad news! But quickly he follows it with good news – the best news, actually: God has raised this Jesus from the dead, and through him he has made it possible to receive the forgiveness of sins.

This is the basic message of our Christian faith, and one which we continue to proclaim today: that we human beings did the worst possible thing – we killed the Man who was God – but even then God did not stop loving us. Risen from the dead, Jesus continues to offer us the love of God – the love that heals, reconciles, and forgives. We need that healing, reconciling, and forgiving, of course, because of our sins. It can feel like receiving bad news to realize that sin is still a part of our lives even when we believe – that even after receiving the Good News of the Resurrection, we can struggle with sin. But as St. John tells us in the second reading today, fortunately we have an Advocate: Jesus who continues to intercede on our behalf with the Father, most especially in the area of mercy.

"Jesus Appears to the Disciples" (14th cent.), Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France
Photo by Ralph Hammann, Creative Common License CC BY-SA 4.0

Sometimes we hear the criticism, “Why does the Church focus so much on sin?” That’s sort of like asking why a doctor focuses so much on disease! The Church speaks about sin, because sin is what stands in the way between us and God. Because of the Resurrection, there is no sin more powerful than God’s love, but to receive that love we must let go of our sins. That’s why the apostle Peter ends his address to the people of Jerusalem by urging them to repent: to turn away from sin in order to turn toward the forgiving love of the Risen Jesus.

If we really have faith in the Lord’s Resurrection, then repentance must be a theme never too far from our minds and hearts. We focus on it especially in the penitential seasons of Lent and Advent, but in Easter, too, there is cause to look at the newness of the risen life of Christ and where it is that we might need and desire that newness in our own lives. What in our lives feels old and tired? What still stands in the way between us and God? The Resurrection allows us to bring those things to Christ and to invite him to transform them, so that we can be transformed. The Lord comes to us, as today’s Gospel tells us, always with the gift of peace – a peace beyond what the world knows because he is beyond the power of the world.

Friends, receiving bad news is a part of life. But there is no bad news that isn’t followed by good news, the best news, really – that the love of the Risen Jesus heals, reconciles, forgives, and ultimately saves us, if we receive it. That is *the* Good News, the Gospel, which we must come to believe again and again and to which we must bear witness to the world.

The Community of Believers

When I was a senior in high school, I had to write an essay on “Meditation XVII”, better known today by its first line, “No Man Is an Island.” It’s a poem by the English writer John Donne, written almost 400 years ago, about how human beings are interconnected. What happens to any one of us affects all of us at a fundamental level: “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

Several years later, when I was in the seminary, I came to understand that idea even more deeply when I read another work called “No Man Is an Island” by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. In one of the essays from that book, he says that the interrelatedness of human beings is rooted ultimately in our relation to God. We can really only learn to love each other when we come to understand the love that God has for the other, and he says that nowhere is this idea made more clear than in the Church, the body of believers. In the Church, we are united to each other in a communion, with each other and together with God.

The Fractio Panis ("Breaking of Bread") fresco, 2nd cent. Greek chapel, Catacombs of St. Priscilla, Rome

In today’s first reading, we hear about this unity was expressed in the earliest days of the Church: that “the community of believers was of one heart and mind.” Their connectedness was expressed by how they took care of the poor, holding in common what they possessed as the property of all, and also by together proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus. That degree of unity and interrelation might seem very far-fetched when thinking about the Church today, but this reading gives us an ideal to strive for. Each of us should consider: to what degree am I related to, connected to, the other members of my church community? Is it only that we show up in the same place on Sunday mornings, sitting in the same pews, listening to the same homily? Or is there something deeper too, a connection, a communion that I sense even with those whose name I may not know or who have a language or a culture or a history different than mine? Is this connection something about which I am passive or indifferent, or am I striving to deepen it in some way: to come to know and love more fully those I relate to in faith? In short, am I active in and united to the body of believers, or am I trying to live my faith individually?

Today’s Gospel tells us of the dangers of trying to live out our faith on our own. The apostle Thomas is not present when the Jesus first appeared to the disciples after his resurrection. We are not told why he was absent, and in a certain sense it’s not important; what matters is that he misses out on encountering the Risen Christ along with the others, and because he was not with them, he does not experience what they experienced. His doubt is borne of the fact that he had been separated from the community in which Jesus became present. It is only when he is present again with the community, in the midst of the body of believers, that he encounters the Risen Christ as they had and overcomes his doubt with an act of great faith.

I think the same dynamic often plays out today. The degree to which we are able to have an encounter with the Risen Christ is very closely related to how united we are to the body of believers. If we want an experience of faith to shape who we are and to inform how we live, then we must be present in and united to the community of faith. The fundamental starting point for this is attendance at the Sunday Mass – not just when we can make time for it, or when it’s convenient, but every week, no matter what else is going on. Aside from illness or some other grave situation, we have the duty to worship God every Sunday in the midst of the body of believers; to not to do so is to fall short of the most fundamental part of our faith, and thus we believe it is a mortal sin. While it’s most important to attend Mass wherever we happen to be (even, if we are traveling, for example), we should typically try to worship in our own church and with the same community, because we become more closely united with each other the more often we are gathered together in the presence of God.

Fridolin Assists at Holy Mass (1833) by Peter Fendi

Once we understand the link between faith and presence, unity and communion, we can then begin to understand how we are called – as a community and as individuals – to evangelize to others. As I mentioned, the reading from the Acts of the Apostles tells us that the Christian community was “of one heart and mind” not only in how they were united to each other but also in how they proclaimed the Gospel. This is still our obligation, too – part of our baptismal call to live out holiness is to invite others to do so as well. The Easter season invites us to consider: with whom can I share the Good News that Jesus is risen? Who is God calling me to invite to come and share in the Lord’s presence in this community of faith? Maybe it is a friend whom I know is struggling with faith, or a coworker who has shown some interest in the Catholic Church; we can be bold in encouraging them to come and find a place in the community of faith that we have found. Perhaps the ones we are most ardently called to invite anew are those that were once part of our community, but who have drifted away, have stopped coming to Mass, have left the practice of the faith for one reason or another, sometimes not even intentionally, but just over time. As the Church, we miss their presence; we can feel the absence of those who are not with us, like the disciples did with Thomas. Maybe all it would take is a kind word from us to welcome them back, to invite them to come home, to take their place with us again in the community of faith. Who knows? Perhaps that is just the way that Thomas himself returned to encounter the Risen Christ.

Friends, as that poem says, no man is an island; we are all connected to each other, and that is true above all in our faith, as the community of believers. This Easter season is a new springtime of rediscovering the communion we have with each other: to get to know each other better as brothers and sisters, to live out that unity every Sunday in worship together, and to invite our brothers and sisters who are not with us to come and join us again. Then, the more deeply we realize our unity with each other, and the more fully we live out that unity intentionally, the more effectively we can give witness to the world that Christ has indeed risen.

As his Body and Blood are given to us in this Eucharist, may the Lord Jesus inspire us to always believe, and to share with others our belief that his true and living Presence is here among us, in this community of believers: “Blessed are those who have not seen me, but still believe!”

Our Easter

One of my earliest memories is of my parents piling us kids in the car on a Sunday afternoon to take a drive. We headed downtown, far from the familiar environs of our neighborhood or any one that we knew. Past houses and shops that had seen better days, we finally arrived at our destination: a broad open space with giant oak trees and green sloping lawns. It was a cemetery. We had come to pray at a particular grave: the grave of my uncle, my father’s brother Paul, who died at only 25 years old several years before I was born.

This memory – which has deepened through the years, as our family repeated that visit frequently, even to this day – has stayed with me perhaps because I’ve always felt a connection to that uncle that I never met. I was named after him; when I was born, his name became my middle name, Paul. Even as a child, it struck me that here was someone with whom I was linked in the deepest way but who was no longer part of this world, who has literally passed away from this reality. Even from a young age, I became aware of the thought: what happened to him will happen to me, and where he has gone I will some day be.

Childe Hassam, Colonial Graveyard at Lexington (c. 1891)

The Greek writer Thucydides once said that every story in some way or another is about the human struggle against mortality. Within each of us there is an innate, unrelenting desire to live forever, and to believe that such is possible, and yet standing against that is the certitude and finality of the grave. Our readings this evening [at the Vigil] told us of how God is intimately bound up in this story, this great struggle within the human heart against the fortune of death. Abraham trusted in God’s promise to make him the father of many nations; but then as a test, God asked him to offer up the very one by whom that would happen, his only son Isaac, and Abraham remained faithful to the one who would be faithful to him. Moses and the Israelites had been brought out of slavery in Egypt, only to face impending death from Pharaoh’s armies; but God saved his people and destroyed their adversaries by the parting of the Red Sea. Through the words of the prophet Isaiah, God remembered that his people have been unfaithful; but he pledged he will wipe away their sins and restore them to the glory he had promised. In these readings and throughout the Old Testament, God promises that death will not triumph over life, that sin will be conquered by redemption, that by his loving mercy he will achieve a victory to overcome even the grave.

But how could he show this to us? With all apparent evidence to the contrary – wars and famines and pandemics, the deaths of our friends and families, our own physical frailties and aging bodies – how, with all of that, could he show us, convince us, inspire us to believe that death, in fact, does not have the last word?

The only way, perhaps, is by means of what St. Mark tells us in the Gospel: that early in the morning, women came to a tomb and found that the stone had been rolled back. This grave *was* empty; the One whom they had come to visit, gone. “He has been raised; he is not here.” Here, at last, is reason to doubt the total dominion of death, to truly believe in the possibility of eternal life – proof not by presence but by absence, by faith: death robbed of its power, and the One who had died raised up from its grasp.

As the Church sings in the Exsulstet, the great Easter Proclamation, it is this belief by which Christians are distinguished from the world: set apart from worldly vices, set free from earthly concerns, raised to a new and eternal possibility – that death has been defeated for all who believe in Jesus Christ. Our sorrows, our griefs, our fears of death – all are overcome for those who are connected to the Risen One. “Death is swallowed up in victory” (1 Cor 15:54). Even if for a while we might have to suffer, to wait patiently in sleep, we can say: what happened to him will happen to me, and where he has gone I will some day be.

The Holy Women at Christ's Tomb by Francesco Albani (c. 1645)

Having professed this belief, we must also live it out in actions. In acts of charity and attention to the poor, in seeking always to forgive and work toward reconciliation, in striving for sanctity each day, in a spirit always attentive to the other and willing to endure trials for the good of the other – by these works, we demonstrate that our faith is not hollow words. Every year, this great feast is made new for us so that by it we can be made new, enlivened once again to live for the God of Life.

My friends, Easter is not just about Jesus's Resurrection; it is about ours, as well. He has overcome the grave, and we await with joy and hope the final day when that reality will be unveiled for us too. I still pray for my uncle Paul, and visit his grave, and look forward to the day I will finally be able to meet him. I recognize now that besides our common name, he and I share a connection far more profound: we share a Savior, Jesus Christ, and it is His name that we call upon together, from either side of the grave, until His Easter joy has become ours too.

In Our Father's Hands

Since the early Church, the words of Jesus – his various teachings and sayings – have always been remembered and cherished by Christians. This is perhaps especially true about the words he spoke from the Cross. In the four Gospels, there is a total of seven things the Lord said after being crucified; they are sometimes called the Seven Last Words from the Cross. Five of these sayings are Jesus’s own words; for example, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” or “Today, you will be with me in paradise.” However, in two of the seven, Jesus quotes the psalms. We heard the first of these in our Responsorial Psalm on Palm Sunday, psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have You abandoned me?” And in today’s liturgy, we hear the other one, the very last of the Seven Words of Jesus, quoting Psalm 31: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

Christ on the Cross (1881) by Jules-Élie Delaunay

We should take a moment to briefly consider why Jesus quoted these psalms, and how they help us to better understand his Passion and Death. The first one – “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” – is the opening line of Psalm 22, and it is clearly a cry of anguish. The whole psalm is the plaint of someone in very dire straits, someone who has fallen into the hands of persecutors and evildoers, and who begs God for help. It’s not hard to understand why Jesus would be quoting from psalm, as he’s being put to death. However, traditionally the Church has understood this cry not as a sign that the Father truly abandoned the Son; we believe that the Father always loves the Son and that Jesus, even crucified on the Cross, never lost the blessed vision of the Father and his love. Rather, the cry is a sign of that the Son has voluntarily united himself to sinful humanity. His cry of abandonment is made on our behalf, we who have been estranged by God because of our sinfulness. That Jesus suffered terribly for our sake is undeniable, but he did not do so in despair. Jesus probably would have recited the entirety of psalm 22, and in the last nine verses, the psalmist expresses trust that God will be faithful, and will make known to future generations his salvation: “My posterity shall serve the Lord, and tell of him to future generations” (Ps 22:31).

This hope for and anticipation of God’s saving power is echoed in Jesus’s second quotation from Scripture, psalm 31. Once again, the speaker of this psalm is beset by evils; he looks to God as a refuge and asks for his justice to redeem him. At this point, Jesus is on the verge of death; he has been completely faithful to his mission from the Father, and now will await the vindication of the Resurrection. And so, addressing his Father directly, he quotes with his very last words the first part of verse 6 of the psalm, “Into your hands I commend my spirit;” the second part of the verse, which goes unsaid, is this: “It is you who will redeem me, Lord.” It is clear that Jesus, even as the very life breath is going out of him, has full confidence in God, the Father who has sent him, the Father to whom he now entrusts himself in the moment of death. In his final suffering, he does not despair but reaffirms his complete trust in his Father’s love.

Friends, what a powerful yet humble lesson our Lord teaches us with these, his final words. As we meditate today upon his suffering and death for our sake, we could hardly blame him if his reliance upon God had wavered in his final moments; but it did not. Even in the throes of death, Jesus is teaching us by example. In him, we see that the fire of God’s love cannot be quenched by any suffering, not even that of death. If we remain steadfast in prayerful trust in our Father’s love, then we remain in his very grasp; even if our bodies cry out in agony, we are in his loving embrace, safely in the care of his hands. The Son proves this for us, by his example, and by the Resurrection which followed. May we follow after.

Our Family Meal

In every culture on earth, communal meals are an important part of family life. Whether it’s a Sunday dinner, a family reunion, or holiday gathering, sharing time with loved ones over food gives us life: life to our bodies and to our souls.

It is for good reason therefore that, since its earliest days, the Church has recognized every Eucharistic celebration to be a spiritual meal for the community. The Mass is a true gathering of and nourishing of the family of the Church, the Body of Christ. Of course, unlike merely human meals, we aren’t doing this by ourselves; the Lord Jesus gathers us together and feeds us himself. We heard in the second reading that what we do at Mass is a remembrance of and a participation in what Jesus did for his disciples in the context of a meal. By sharing with them his Body and Blood, in the appearance of bread and wine, he nourished not only their bodies but their souls; he gave them a share in the Sacrifice that he was going to offer the next day on Calvary.

Giovanni Lanfranco, The Last Supper (c. 1625)

In the Mass, that spiritual nourishment happens for us as well. As St. Paul says, “as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes.” In the Mass, our bodies and, even more, our souls are nourished by participating in and proclaiming anew Jesus’s Sacrifice for our sake. In and through our communion with the Lord, we are united more closely to each other as spiritual brothers and sisters, and we are made ready to show to others the same love, the same charity by which he laid down his life.

Friends, over the last year, the global pandemic has changed a lot about how we have been able to gather together for events as a family, community, and even as a Church. As we begin to return to something approaching normal life, let’s be most grateful that we still have this most sacred family meal, to which we are called every Sunday. Despite the differences that exist among us, in language, culture, and viewpoint, we are even more closely united by the Lord in whom we believe, and by the Sacrifice and Sacrament by which he sustains us.