Suffering Rejection with Love

In any sphere of human life, rejection is painful. Whether it’s being betrayed by a friend, or turned down for a job interview, or having a potential romantic partner not reciprocate interest, no one likes that feeling of being rebuffed for who we are or what we are about.

Despite being God’s Son, Jesus wasn’t spared this human reality of rejection, as we hear in today’s Gospel. This episode continues the story of last week’s Gospel, when Jesus was celebrated by the people of his hometown of Nazareth, who listened with rapt attention to what he had to say. Even in this story, we are told they were amazed by him and spoke highly of him. But by the end, when at last they find out that he’s not going to do what they want, and that his mission doesn’t conform with their expectations, their rejection of him is so great they literally throw him out of town.

This turn of events perhaps feels surprising, but upon reflection, it probably shouldn’t be. Jesus encountered rejection throughout his life, from his birth in Bethlehem, when King Herod seeks to kill him, to the final rejection of the crowds that cry “Crucify him!” I mentioned last week that Jesus has come to fulfill God’s promise of helping those in need, of bringing his joy, healing, and peace to those who were lowly. The reality though is that we human beings often reject those gifts; there is something deep within us that often recoils at what is good for us and rejects what we most need. We call that reality sin, when we choose other things and follow other desires instead of choosing God as our greatest good. God knew that, and sent his Son also for that reason – to confront our sinfulness, to lay it bare, and finally uproot and defeat it by his Cross, Death, and Resurrection. Even now, the reality of sin is present among us, even in us; though it’s been conquered, it continues to wage little skirmishes in our wills and egos.

The Brow of the Hill Near Nazareth (c. 1890) by James Tissot

Jesus was rejected because of sin in the human heart, and it’s for that reason that we wrestle with rejection, too. I mentioned last week that we share in the mission of Jesus; because we have been baptized in him, and are members of his One Body, we are also sent to those in need. But as we do that, we should recognize that at times, we will be rejected for our faith, and for our identity in Christ. It’s not a possibility; it’s a certainty – it happened to the Lord, and it will happen to us as well. Maybe it will be the scorn of those who mock our belief and our prayers; maybe it will be the rejection of those who say the Church needs to get with the times, or the silent rejection of those who walk way from it altogether; maybe it will be the scorn of those who don’t want to forgive, or work for justice, or seek peace and reconciliation. Often, it won’t be anything overt, but just hardened hearts, fractured relationships, and a temptation to make compromises in what we hold to be true.

In all these ways and more, rejection can be painful, as it surely must have been for Jesus, to have his own friends and neighbors, people who he’d known since childhood, drive him to the edge of town and want to throw him off a cliff. But notice how he responds. He doesn’t let the crowd’s anger and jealousy disturb him, but rather he passes peacefully through the midst of them. Jesus was focused on being faithful to his Father’s will, because he knew that his Father loved him. And that’s how he would have us respond too: with love. St. Paul, in fact, reminds us what that means in the second reading: responding with patience, kindness, not jealousy or rudeness, not being quick-tempered, not brooding over injury, but bearing and enduring all things. If you think about it, that’s a perfect description of Jesus himself, in this Gospel or any other. When we encounter rejection, we too can be Christ-like, confident in the love of the Father and the share we have in that.

There is one last piece to this puzzle, which is this: at times, we are the ones rejecting the Lord. Despite our faith in Jesus, despite our identity as part of his Body, at times we don’t want to accept what God wants to give us. We know that sin still has some hold over us. That’s why it can be okay, even good, for us to experience rejection from others. It can help to humble us, make us more patient and kind, and remind us perhaps of our own faults and sins, those areas of our lives where we need to stop keeping God at arm’s length. In the degree to which we need to still be purified of sinfulness, a little bit of suffering can help us to love the One who was crucified for us a little more and love ourselves a little less.

Friends, as Saint Paul reminds us, we’re all awaiting the day when we see God face to face, and can understand all of the experiences of this life, good and bad, in the way that he does. Until that time, let’s suffer rejection with love, and make sure our love for the Lord never leads us to reject him. For that, and for all of our prayers, may the grace of this Eucharist come to aid us.

No Benchwarmers

Recently someone told me they were excited about a new tattoo they had gotten. I said, “Oh, really? What’s the image?” But it turns out it wasn’t an image of any thing, but just a few short words: a particular saying that this person felt was essential to who they are. This person never wanted to forget that saying’s relevance to how they want to live, and so they had it placed on the inside of their arm so they could be reminded of it any time they needed to be.

I think it’s safe to say that Jesus did not have a tattoo. The Levitical law prohibited them, so they were ruled out for faithful Jews. But, if Jesus had ever thought about getting one, he might have chosen some words from the passage we hear him proclaim in the Gospel today: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.” These words, written by the prophet Isaiah some 500 hundred years or so earlier, are now fulfilled, realized, in the person of Jesus. He didn’t need to inscribe them on his body because they were already written on his heart and his soul. Anointed with the Holy Spirit, Jesus announces to the people of Nazareth that he has come deliver and fulfill what God had promised to his people.

James Tissot, Jesus Unrolls the Book in the Synagogue (c. 1890)

And what is that? As we heard, joy, healing, and deliverance, especially to the lowly. Throughout the Old Testament, God had told his people that he had a special love and attentiveness for the poor, the oppressed, the captive, the widow and the orphan. Now, in Jesus, those who were most downtrodden received what they most needed: the sick will be healed, the blind and the lame cured, the sinner forgiven, even the dead raised. In Jesus, in his words and gestures and actions, those who were most broken and lowly experienced the love and the mercy and the favor of God.

And still today, God extends to us those same gifts of mercy and healing in and through Christ. Wherever we feel ourselves to be tired, downtrodden, sick, sinful, broken, God wants us to receive what we need most – an encounter with the healing and deliverance of Jesus. It’s true that we don’t experience that encounter in the same way as the people of Nazareth. The body of Jesus that they saw and heard and interacted with is now, we proclaim, glorified and at the right hand of the Father in heaven. But we still have access to that same healing and deliverance, that same Jesus, just in a different way: through the graces of his Mystical Body, the Church. In the preaching of God’s Word, in its missions of mercy and justice, in its pastoral care and accompaniment, the prayers and offerings of the liturgy, above all in the vehicles of grace that are the sacraments, Jesus continues to reach out to fulfill what God has promised to those in need. The Church is the living presence of Jesus, and guided by the Holy Spirit, she continues to minister to those in need in the world today.

But who is the Church? The Pope and the bishops? Yes, partly, but not the only part. In today’s second reading, St. Paul emphasizes to the Corinthians that the Church is made up of many parts, because as the Body of Christ, it has many members. “As a body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body… You are Christ’s body, and individually parts of it.” So what does that mean? It means that along with the Pope and the bishops, all of us also are doing the work of the Church, because we are the Church too. We have been baptized into Christ. We have received the Holy Spirit. And so, we necessarily share in the Church’s identity and mission; we are part of that encounter between Christ and those in need.

And that, in the end, is why today’s Gospel is so important. It tells not just who Jesus is and what he is about, but also who we are and what we should be about too:“The Spirit of the Lord is upon us, because he has anointed us to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent us to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.” Jesus has healed and freed us in order to become sharers in his ministry to others. We might call this passage the Church’s mission statement – the purpose we are called to be faithful to, to never to forget its relevance for us, but to inscribe it in our hearts and our souls. In Jesus, God reaches out to heal and lift up those who are in need, and he calls us by our baptism to become part of that work, the work of the Body of Christ, the whole Church. Baptized in Jesus, sharing in his Spirit, we participate in preaching God’s word, in offering prayers and sacrifices, in working for justice and offering mercy, in accompanying those who are in need and leading them to the fullness of grace in the sacraments. None of us do that by ourselves; none of us can individually represent the whole Christ. It's only by all of us,  according to our own vocations, in the circumstances proper to each of us, that the ministry of the Lord is fulfilled. The Christian faith has no benchwarmers; we are all active, in the game, working together in our different ways, but united to each other, and above all united to Jesus in and through the Holy Spirit.

Friends, let’s approach this Eucharist today with hearts full of thanksgiving for what God has done for us and what he’s doing through us for others. He is allowing us, together – in many parts, but one Body – to fulfill his promise of healing and deliverance to those most in need. Let’s ask him to again renew us with his healing and mercy so that, renewed, we can be vehicles of those same gifts to those to whom he sends us.

Miracle in the Mundane

I was chatting with some folks this past week about how short the Christmas season was this year. Part of that is because whenever we have a long Advent, as we did this year, the Church’s Christmas celebrations will necessarily be shorter. But part of the reason too why Christmas might feel like ages ago – even though Christmas Day was just three weeks ago yesterday – is that we’ve gotten back to the normal routine of daily life, with its various worries and difficulties. And now the new year has brought new challenges, too, like the recent surge in covid cases, that’s affected our lives and the lives of family and friends. It’s enough to leave us feeling stressed, maybe even a little depressed, wondering where all the joy of the holiday season went.

Fortunately, for those of us feeling a little down in the dumps, our readings today bring us some Good News. These first few weeks of Ordinary Time still contain vestiges of Epiphany-tide, a season we used to celebrate after Christmas where we continued to reflect upon what means to have God’s presence among us in the person of Jesus. One of the episodes for reflection in Epiphany-tide is precisely the story that we hear in the Gospel, the wedding feast at Cana.

Adam van Noort, Wedding at Cana (c. 1620)

At first glance, this first miracle of Jesus may seem a little unimpressive, perhaps even embarrassing for pious Christians. Is Jesus using his divine power to simply keep the party going? This superficial way of looking at things underestimates the value of what it means to have the God-Man fully with us and among us. His power is able to touch our reality – and yes, transform our lives – not only in big and showy ways but even in the more ordinary realities of daily life. It’s true that transforming water into wine is not as critically important as some of Jesus’s later miracles: healing the sick, curing the blind and the lame, raising the dead. But this first miracle of Jesus shows us the degree to which God desires to make even the ordinary parts of our lives extraordinary, and to bring his power to even the mundane challenges of our experience.

Of course, whether God will do that is partly dependent upon our response. “Do whatever he tells you,” Mary says to the servers. Maybe these servants had other thoughts about how to fix the problem, but they put their trust in the power of Jesus, even if it seemed pointless to believe wine could somehow come from plain water. Sometimes, we want God’s help in the really big matters – to fix that relationship, to get that big promotion, to help that family member with their illness or addiction, whatever it may be – but the rest of the time, we think we can handle things on our own. That’s not really an attitude rooted in faith, however. The likelihood is that unless we put ourselves in God’s hands in the smaller moments, with the more mundane matters, then we probably won’t really have sufficient faith that he can act in those larger ways. As Jesus tells the disciples in another part of John’s Gospel, “Without me, you can do nothing.” 

And friends, perhaps, that is the most important takeaway for us today. More than any thing God might fix in our lives, what we most truly need from him is he himself. It’s fine to ask for God’s help in big matters and small, in things that are very important and in the day-to-day things that we need routinely. But we should realize that what really keeps us going is not any blessing we may ask for, but rather our communion with him, and learning to rely totally upon that, and not anything else.

As we prepare to receive his Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar, let’s deepen our faith in his ability to do that: to help us to rely completely on him and on him alone. “Without me, you can do nothing,” Jesus says, and may we respond, “Yes, Lord, and with you, we can do anything, and with you, we need nothing more.”

Your Attention, Please

If you want to get someone’s attention, you can do lots of things: you can shout, wave your arms about, call out the person by name with a bullhorn. But if you want to keep someone’s attention, you need to do something more. You have to convince them that what you have to say is for their good – that it will benefit them in some way to keep listening to you.

In today’s Gospel, John the Baptist tells the crowds that, in effect, he is only God’s bullhorn. John was not the Messiah, as the people expected, but had come only to get their attention in advance of Someone coming who was mightier than he. It was this One who would truly bring the message of Good News, a blessing of peace for God’s People. And as we heard, in this very Gospel, that Someone arrived on the scene: Jesus came to be baptized, and we heard not John but a voice from heaven declaring who he is: “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”

There is a clear continuity between what John had preached and the ministry of Jesus, but there are also some notable differences as well. John ministered in the desert, preaching repentance, and gathering large crowds. Jesus, on the other hand, was milder, perhaps gentler, traveling to towns and villages and often letting his actions speak louder than his words. As we recall him healing the sick and forgiving sinners, we see how he perfectly embodies what Isaiah had written about him: “Here is … my chosen one with whom I am pleased, upon whom I have put my spirit; he shall bring forth justice to the nations, not crying out, not shouting… a bruised reed he shall not break, and a smoldering wick he shall not quench.” John had gotten the people’s attention in boisterous ways, but Jesus holds it, not with ostentation but with acts of compassion and a patient demonstration of the love of God brought forth visibly into time.

The Baptism of the Lord (1940) by Pedro Subercaseaux

Today we mark the conclusion of the Christmas season and, in a certain sense, its pinnacle as well. In the Baptism of Jesus, we see how everything that we have been celebrating the last several weeks – the Lord’s birth in Bethlehem, his manifestation as God’s Son to the Magi, his presence in the Holy Family – all of that has been aimed ultimately at making clear the care and concern that God has *for us*. The life of the Son of God made man gains our attention, and holds it, because in his life, we see God reaching out and touching the lives of real people. And this is how God comes to save us – not shouting, not crying out in condemnation – but by healing, forgiving, giving freedom, and having compassion. In Jesus of Nazareth, we see the love of God revealing itself for each of us. And that, to quote that immortal line from Linus to Charlie Brown, is what Christmas is all about.

Friends, the challenge for us – in this time, and every time, in this year, and every year – is whether we know the love of God in that way, and whether we know it well enough to make it known then to others. Do you believe God comes to you with tenderness and mercy and compassion? And can you make that kind of love known to others? Think about the situation in your life, or the person in your life, where the Lord might be calling you to express that kind of love. If you tried by yourself – with your own power, with your own way of loving – there’s no way you could do it. But in the Lord Jesus, you can – not with your power but with his, not with your love but with his. Once the Lord Jesus walked the earth doing good: comforting the distressed, lifting up the downtrodden, visiting the sick, forgiving sinners. Now, he does those very same things in and through his Church, in and through us. He gains the attention of those in need, not by our shouting or waving our arms about, but by our love.

As we prepare for this Eucharist, may the grace of our baptism be renewed in each of us, so that as we reveal the love of Christ to others, the Lord may always be with us “well pleased.”

Kingly Gifts

I hope everyone has been having a blessed Christmas, and especially I hope you received some great gifts. Maybe you got some of the gifts that we all heard about in endless ads and commercials. Or maybe you found yourself receiving, and grateful for, other gifts that don’t have a dollar value: your life, good health, blessings through the year, the presence and love of family and friends. Those gifts don’t have a price tag attached, because there’s no number that could quantify how much they mean to us.

In today’s Gospel, gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh are brought to the newborn Jesus – items that would have been very high dollar in the ancient world. We’re not told whether the Magi brought these gifts intentionally or gave them spur of the moment. But whether planned or impromptu, ultimately those gifts probably felt a little inadequate. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh were fitting gifts for a king, which is whom the Magi had come to venerate. But who they actually found was not just the newborn King of the Jews, but the true and living God in the person of a small Child. In the face of the One who has created everything and sustains everything in being, a bit of precious metals and aromatic balms must have seemed insufficient. That’s why, in the end, it’s the Magi themselves who receive the greatest gift in this Gospel story. More precious than the gold, frankincense, and myrrh they bring, they receive a glimpse of the Lord of all, present right here among us.

Adoration of the Magi (c. 1515) by Gerard David

Today, we come to celebrate anew that reality: that in the Child born in Bethlehem the Lord God has made himself manifest, visible in our midst. In his Epiphany, he has appeared among us, as One of us: living a human life while remaining Almighty God. That’s a difficult idea to try to wrap our minds around, but imagine if we beheld the Child, as the Magi did: if we understood the Epiphany not as a theory but by sight. To behold God himself, in human flesh – what awe, what joy, what fear might that have occasioned in us? And yet when the Magi beheld that sight, they understood that God has come into our midst not to terrify us, not to intimidate us, not to overwhelm us, but to assure us of his love, his tenderness, his abiding presence. He was born as a little Child, not because he is weak and helpless, but to make manifest to us the depth of his love – a love so powerful he came down from heaven to make it visible.

Perhaps we might feel envious of the Magi to not be able to see with our physical eyes the sight of that Child who is God. But our faith teaches us that we can behold just as truly as they did: by the light of faith, through the power of grace, in the eye of our mind and the center of our soul, we can encounter and adore Emmanuel, God-with-us, as truly as if we beheld him face to face. What’s more, we can remain there. The Magi eventually had to leave Bethlehem, returning to their own land, but we never need depart from the Lord’s Presence. We can make our home there with him, He who has made his home with us. Because God’s Son has come to share our human life, we can share – even now, even here on earth – in his divine life. How? Precisely by offering him the gift of ourselves and all of our experiences. Because Jesus shares our humanity, then every aspect of our lives – our joys, our sorrows, our hopes, our trials – they all become avenues of growing in his grace, and ways that we can deepen both our love for him and our awareness of his love for us.

Friends, as we begin a New Year, let's rededicate ourselves to encountering the Lord who loves us so deeply. Let’s offer him the kingly gifts that he truly desires: not gold, frankincense, or myrrh, but the gift of our adoration, our presence, all of our experiences. Let’s make our own these words of St. Gemma Galgani, found in our bulletin today: “During this new year, I resolve to begin a new life. I do not know what will happen to me during this year. But I abandon myself entirely to you, my God. And my aspirations and all my affections will be for You. I feel so weak, dear Jesus, but with Your help I hope and resolve to live a different life, that is, a life closer to You.”