The Fruit of the Vine

In the spirit of our university semester drawing to a close, here's a pop quiz! 

What was the first commandment God gave to human beings? Any guesses? Maybe some of you thought of one of the Ten Commandments, the Law given to Moses for the Israelite people on Mount Sinai. But it is before that. Or you might have thought of the covenant God made with Abraham and his descendants, or God’s command to Noah to build an ark. But it is before that. Or maybe you even thought of God’s commandment to Adam and Eve not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Even then, you’d be wrong. 

The first commandment God gave to human beings was given to Adam and Eve, but it was not a warning about sin. Rather, he said, “Be fruitful and multiply.” I always tend to think of this fact about this time of year, when the weather has finally gotten nice, the flowers and trees are blooming, and all of nature seems to be singing. Springtime is an inherent reminder of God’s desire that all of his creation flourish.

Still, what about all of those commandments? Everyone knows that Christianity is a religion with commandments. “Honor your father and mother.” “Do not kill.” “Do not commit adultery.” Don’t eat meat on Fridays during Lent. No sex outside of marriage. Fast for an hour before receiving the Eucharist. And so on, and so on. If God’s desire for us is to flourish – not just to populate the earth, like Adam and Eve – but to prosper in every way, how do a bunch of commandments help us to do that?

We hear the answer in our second reading today. For the past several weeks, this reading has come from the First Letter of John. If you have never read is particular letter straight through, I would encourage you to do so. It is one of the more beautiful explanations of the Christian faith and a simple guide to how to live as a follower of Jesus. The author of the letter – who was most likely either the Apostle John or one of his close followers – speaks about how the apostles and disciples were privileged to follow Jesus in his earthly ministry: to hear him preach, to see him heal, etc. But it was only after his Passion, Death, and Resurrection that they came to understand there is an even more important way of relating to Jesus – through love. Love is the tie that binds every believer to God, whether we have seen Jesus or not. God is love, as St. John says, and we love God because we recognize that he first loved us in Christ. Jesus is the proof of God’s love and the one who has made us like himself, so that we are now called children of God.

Edward Burne-Jones, The Tree of Life (detail), c. 1888

How though do we love God? St. John tells us – by keeping his commandments. That is the heart of the message we have heard in this reading the last few weeks – that the proof of loving God is to do what he has told us. As we heard today, faithfulness is proven not merely in words and speech, through mere lip service. Rather faithfulness is shown by action – by what we do “in deed and in truth” as he says. At the heart of every commandment is the choice of whether to love God in that particular way, to acknowledge that he truly loves us and that apart from him we cannot flourish or prosper. Following the will of God, obeying his commandments – even the ones we don’t like! – are the way in which we remain in the love of God that sustains us.

In the Gospel today, Jesus tells us that apart from him we can do nothing. It sounds almost like an insult; but it is a reminder of how truly we depend upon God's goodness for everything. Think about what commandment of God you are having the most trouble following. Is there a rule of the Church that you don’t like? Is there a commandment that you constantly seem to break? Rather than dismiss that thing as unimportant, or resign yourself to it as something that you can’t overcome, think of it instead as precisely the place that God wants to lift you up and help you to flourish. The life of the Vine is extended to you precisely there, so that as a branch on the tree of God, you can be healed and made whole. Love is the tie that binds you to Jesus, but each of us must open ourselves to receiving the life-giving grace that he wants to communicate.

There is of course a flip side to the image of the vine and branches which is more challenging. As any gardener knows, there are some plants, and some parts of plants that do not flourish. They droop and sag; they do not use the nutrients given to them. They fail to truly bear the life of the Vine within them, and as such, they do not bear fruit. When we fail to keep the Lord’s commandments – when we say, “NO,” to what he asks, or ignore his commandments – then in doing so, we resist the very life that sustains us. The Lord’s command is for us to bear fruit; he wants our relationship with him to flourish so that our life grows and spreads beyond ourselves to touch the lives of others and to communicate to them the same life from the Vine that is within us.

Therefore, we must be pruned. The gardener knows that a plant only truly thrives when it has been formed in the correct way. At times, this means doing something which on the face is counter-intuitive – trimming it back, cutting away parts of its life that are easy and superficial but which prevent fuller and deeper growth. We are pruned as well. Whenever we encounter loss, challenge, grievance, disappointment, hardship, or insult, – in any wound that we suffer – there is a temptation to focus only upon it and upon the pain of that present moment. Instead, the Lord invites us to accept our pruning, to embrace the opportunity of letting go of something – even something good – so that we can cling more fully to him, and stay rooted in the divine life that comes from the Vine.

Friends, our faith does indeed have commandments, and commandments that we must follow, but Christianity is not ultimately a religion defined by rules. Instead, it is the full expression of what God first said to Adam and Eve: “Be fruitful and multiply.” How connected are you to Christ? Have you remained in him, so that he can remain in you? We are branches on the tree of God, but in order to bear fruit, we must be careful not to separate ourselves from the Vine. The fruit that Jesus expects us to bear is the fruit of faith, hope, and love, the fruit of charitable service, the fruit of self-denial, the fruit of Christian mission, the fruit of spreading the Gospel. May the Eucharist we will soon share – when we will partake of the fruit of the vine transformed into the Lord’s Heavenly Vintage to nourish us – help us to remain rooted in him, so that we can bear much fruit.

Jesus the Lawyer

A few years ago, a priest friend of mine sent me a few jokes. They were jokes about lawyers:

Q: How can a pregnant woman tell that she's carrying a future lawyer?
A: She has an uncontrollable craving for baloney.

Q: What do you call a smiling, courteous person at a bar association convention?
A: The caterer.

Q: What's the difference between a lawyer and a trampoline?
A: You take off your shoes before you jump on a trampoline.

Now that I’ve offended any lawyer or law student out there, let me explain why I mention these. I received these as I was heading to Washington DC to study canon law, the law of the Church. Much like regular lawyers, canon lawyers often get a bad rap among priests, and I guess my friend wanted to remind me not to let my studies go to my head.

There was one joke that he sent which especially caught my attention.

Q: What's the difference between a lawyer and God?
A: God doesn't think he's a lawyer.

Now, for any lawyers in the room, the fact that they are in church is probably a pretty good indication that they don’t think they’re God. But that punch line – “God doesn’t think he’s a lawyer” – is that true? You might think, "Of course, it’s true." But if you know your Bible, you might actually start to think it’s not. You might say that God – or more precisely, Jesus – is a kind of lawyer. Let me explain better what I mean.

Throughout the Scriptures, the Bible uses imagery to explain the relationship between God and humanity. A lot of these images we are familiar with, and a lot of them come from Jesus. There’s the vine and the branches, the Good Shepherd and the sheep, the Master of the House and the servants who await his return, the owner of the vineyard and the tenants who work it. You can go on and on.

But there’s another imagery often used in the Bible, and that is legal imagery. The images of the law – judge and trial and sentence – are used especially in the Old Testament to symbolize what it is like when humanity falls astray. As the people of God, we are in covenant with him – bound to him in a heavenly contract, if you will – and when we sin, we violate that covenant, and we are held accountable before the law. We stand before God, guilty of our sins, and we deserve the punishment that is our due. God is infinitely merciful – but he is also infinitely just, and so he must hand down the sentence that the law prescribes.

But today, in the second reading, we heard something very important. In his first letter, the apostle John says, “My children, I am writing this to you so that you may not commit sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous one.” The word “Advocate” there is deliberately chosen: it means “helper” and “intercessor,” but it also has a legal connotation. Jesus, it seems, is a kind of lawyer.

Now, we like to poke fun at lawyers, as I did at the start of the homily. But if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that lawyers are actually very important. They perform very important, very helpful tasks. For one, they interpret the law – judges and legal scholars tell us what the law means and how it applies in our lives. And other lawyers represent us when we run afoul of the law – these attorneys, or advocates, stand on our behalf to argue our case.

When St. John says that Jesus is our "Advocate", he means precisely that. Jesus stands before the Father on our behalf, arguing our case. As we will hear in the Preface of the Eucharistic Prayer today, Jesus “defends us and ever pleads our cause” before his heavenly Father. He does so because he himself is righteous – that is, in the eyes of the law, he is blameless, without sin. We are not – we have sinned – but because a Righteous One takes up our cause on our behalf, we are made righteous too. Once guilty, we are shown mercy because of the righteousness of Jesus. Though we deserve to receive a sentence, we are made innocent instead.

The analogy goes even deeper. Jesus the Lawyer not only has made us innocent; he has himself borne the weight of the Law’s penalty on our behalf. Imagine a legal counsel who willingly accepts the punishment his client rightfully deserves – even the best lawyer would never do that! But Jesus has freed us from the sentence of the old law of sin and death and has written a new law within our hearts: the law of charity, the law of sacrificial love – his Law.

What does God ask in return? Faithfulness, and to be a witness to his great love. In today's first reading, Peter invites the people of Jerusalem to recognize that by their own sins they were responsible for the death of Jesus; but God has shown them mercy by raising him to new life, and so now he calls them to be a witness to this transformation by turning away from sin, embracing the new life that comes from the Resurrection, and bearing witness to the love God has shown us in Jesus.

James Tissot, The Appearance of Christ at the Cenacle (c. 1894)

In the Gospel we heard, the Risen Jesus appears again to his disciples. They are frightened at his coming: unsure perhaps of how he can be alive again, unsure of whether he will hold their past abandonment against them. Instead, he wishes them "Peace." He reminds them that all has happened according to the will of God – of how all that the Scriptures once foretold has at last been accomplished through his rising from the dead. The disciples, he says, are “witnesses of these things.”

So, too, does the Risen Jesus call us to be his witnesses in the world. To do so, we need to stand apart from the sinfulness we see around us. With our Advocate with us, made righteous by his free gift, we must be holy to such a degree that others take notice and are inspired to make Jesus their Advocate as well. That is the mission he has given to us. We should never let the times that we fall short from this calling discourage us from turning back to him – to trust again in our Advocate, who restores us to righteousness so that we can be good witnesses once again. 

My friends, in this Easter season, we remember that we have the universe’s best Advocate in our corner. Even the greatest defense attorney in the world would never do what Jesus has done for us, for he has borne our sentence on our behalf, and restored us to righteousness in the sight of God. But Jesus’s assistance didn’t come to an end with his Passion, Death, and Resurrection. He continues to aid us each and every day – indeed, every moment – interceding for us with the Father, pouring out his Spirit to us, sending us heavenly gifts of grace to inspire us to holiness. The Risen Lord has changed the world; he has changed our hearts; and he continues to lead us – and we are witnesses to these things. And that, praise God, is not a joke.

Easter: The Silent Victory

The American author F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “Show me a hero, and I will write you a tragedy.” While only he knew his exact meaning, his words can be understood in at least two ways. An optimistic interpretation is that every hero has a backstory, some tragic difficulty or challenge that they have overcome in order to become who they are. A more pessimistic interpretation is that every hero is a figure waiting to fall, victorious at one moment but destined inevitably for later decline or defeat. 

According to the values of the world, the life of Jesus of Nazareth was heroic in many ways. He upended narrow ways of thinking, he preached the importance of mercy and compassion, he paid attention to the poor, the marginalized, and the outcast. But as heroic as his life may have been, when viewed through the lens of this world, one cannot help but conclude Jesus’s story ends in tragedy, because despite his goodness he was finally rejected, captured, abused, murdered.

Henry Ossawa Tanner, Two Disciples at the Tomb (c. 1906)

Of course, we are here today because as Christians we do not view things only through the lens of the world. We have because we believe in the Resurrection – that is, to make the claim in faith that after suffering a truly human death, this Jesus of Nazareth was then raised from the dead; not to live for a time and then suffer death again, like his friend Lazarus, but risen in such a way that death no longer has any power over him. For us he suffered the slings and arrows of human sinfulness, for us he shed his blood, but God has raised him to a new and eternal life.

Still, it might occur to us, “But where is Jesus?” In the Gospel from John that we just heard, we can feel this question implicitly in the story. Early in the morning, Mary Magdalene goes early in the morning to anoint the dead Jesus. But he is not there. Simon Peter and the other disciple come to see for themselves, and they too see that he is gone. The Easter account from Mark says that Jesus is not there, because “he has been raised.” How strange! We might expect that after his very public suffering and death, the Resurrection of Jesus would be an event that no one would possibly miss or mistake or fail to recognize. If we were writing the story, we would make certain that all would see that the Hero of God is not defeated, but victorious indeed! And yet the Resurrection of Christ happens silently, in secret. Just what is God up to?

We can summarize his purpose in one word: faith. Recently, I saw an interview with former President Jimmy Carter about a new book that he has written on faith. The interviewer asked him why faith was so important, and he said he thought faith was the key to existence. He referenced the eighteenth chapter of Luke, and Jesus’s words, “When the Son of Man returns, will he find faith on the earth?” The former president then went on talk about it’s important to have faith in ourselves, in other human beings, in our ability to make the world a more decent place.

With all due respect to Mr. Carter, that is not the faith that Jesus was talking about. If there is one thing that Jesus desired to do throughout his life, it was to move us to faith – not faith in some abstract, general sense, but faith personally in him, faith that he was sent by God for our salvation. All of those things that he did in his ministry – reaching out to the marginalized, preaching compassion and mercy – those things which even non-believers can admire: all of them were intended to bring us to believe in him. Even his death on the Cross was an invitation to faith. Why? Because faith ultimately is what saves, faith is what reconciles us to God, faith is what gives us eternal life. Without faith in the Son of God, we could see the Resurrection itself happen and it would profit us nothing. What Jesus wants, then and now, for us to have faith in one thing: that he is Risen from the dead, physically, in the flesh, and that having Ascended he sits at the right side of his Father in heaven and continues to intercede for us. It is an extraordinary claim – something so amazing that it is almost unbelievable. But it is believable, with faith, and we are the ones who believe it.

Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Three Marys (c. 1910)

At the Easter Vigil last night, our church rejoiced to welcome into full initiation in the Christian mysteries those men and women who through months of discernment and prayer have come to have faith in the Risen Jesus and who have found a new and fuller relationship with him in our Catholic communion. By the power of Christ, they were sealed with the gifts of the Holy Spirit so that the faith that has brought them here will now move them, and us, to give witness to the Lord in how we live.

Like them, our presence in this church today is a sign that we stand ready to give testimony to this faith we possess. We have come to believe in the Resurrection; now we strive to bring others to the same faith. So many today are looking for a reason to hope; so many want to believe in a good and merciful God, who will answer the evil we see so evident; so many feel within themselves a longing that is unfulfilled, a desire to find something in life that really is momentous. To them and to all, we are ready to answer, to respond in faith that: “Death is not the final word! The Grave is not our final resting place! Oblivion is not the fate that awaits us! For the Tomb is empty; he has been raised, as he said.” There is no work we can do that is more important, more essential than continuing to share that Good News, which we have come to believe. And share it we must until the Day we and indeed all the world see the Risen Christ return in his Glorious Body at the end of all things.

So, “where is Jesus?” Right here. With eyes of faith we can see him – present in our hearts through the power of the Holy Spirit, present in the midst of this assembly, and especially present in the sacramental signs which are instruments of his grace. We hear his voice in the prayers we offer through his Sonship; we see him in the works of charity we do in his Name, in the service we render to others out of love for him, in the daily living out of that vocation by which he has called each of us to holiness and newness of life. As we await his glorious Second Coming, we look for him not in some far-off place, but in faith, we recognize he is still here.

Friends, perhaps it is true like Scott Fitzgerald thought that every human story, even a heroic one, ends in tragedy. But in the divine story, announced by the mouth of God, and written anew upon our hearts in faith, there is no longer any tragedy. There is only the victory that our Hero has won. May the Risen Christ, truly here, present among us, strengthen us in our faith, that we may always announce his triumph to others, and by our manner of living point the way to his fullness of life.

Good Friday: The Atonement of "I AM"

When I was about eight years old, I saw Cecil B. DeMille’s classic film The Ten Commandments for the first time. The movie has come to be associated in my mind, as it is for many others, with the Easter holiday, probably because ABC has shown it on this weekend every year since the late 1960s. I remember though, the first time I saw it, how impressed I was by the visual artistry of that movie. Its special effects are certainly dated by modern standards, but somehow they still amazed me as a kid. 

The scene I remember best is the one in which Moses encounters God in the burning bush. The idea of a bush that was on fire but not consumed by it was one that impressed me, even as a child, just as it amazes Moses in the movie. If you recall the scene, Moses comes to realize he is in the presence of the divine. He removes his sandals, recognizing that he is on holy ground. The Lord tells him that he is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and commands Moses to go to Pharaoh and say to him, “Let my people go.” Before Moses departs, he asks the Lord what name he should give for the god who has sent him. The Lord responds, “I Am That I Am” … or as is more commonly said in our tradition, “I Am Who Am.”

Much has been written about that saying, that name, “I Am Who Am.” It is something of an enigma – a declaration of God’s identity as being equivalent to his power, his majesty, his infinite glory. God is he who IS – who exists, period – and nothing further needs to be said. In the Jewish tradition, this name was accorded such great respect to this name of God that it was never said or written; instead they used alternative descriptions, like Adonai, “Lord” or El Shaddai, “God Almighty.” Only the high priest of the Temple was allowed to pronounce the name of God, and only then once per year, on the Day of Atonement.

Mihály Munkácsy, Golgotha (1884)

In the narrative we just read from the Gospel of John, you might have noticed that something a little strange happens right at the beginning of the story. When Judas arrives with a group of soldiers to arrest Jesus, he asks them whom they are looking for. They respond “Jesus the Nazorean”, and he then responds two times “I AM.” The Gospel then says that those who heard him turned away and fell to the ground.

If Jesus is just saying that he’s the one they are looking to arrest, it seems strange for them to turn away and fall over. But of course, his response is more than that – his response, “I Am,” is composed of the same words as what Moses heard on the mountain, “I AM Who Am”. We can understand now why his listeners were so aghast; Jesus has used the personal name of God in reference to himself. At this critical moment of the story, on the verge of his arrest, Jesus forces those who hear him to make a choice – either he is God himself, as he has claimed, or he is not. If he is not, then he has committed blasphemy and rightly will be sentenced to death. If he is, then those arresting him are about to put to death God himself.

We are, of course, forced to consider the same choice. Good Friday is about the death of one man, a man who claimed to be God. If he was not, then this day is no different than any other, since thousands even millions die every day, some in ways as terrible as a crucifixion. But if he is God – and we as Christians certainly reaffirm today our act of faith that he is – then Good Friday is the day we solemnly remember that He who is Existence itself, whose very Essence is what it means “To Be”, offered himself up to death for our sins.

After the reading of the Passion Narrative, this Good Friday liturgy has three important elements, each of which is directly connected to the sacrifice of Christ upon the Cross. First, we will pray the Solemn Intercessions, approaching the Father and daring to ask him to grant us what we ask, precisely because we have faith in his Son and in the sacrifice by which he reconciled us to God. Second, we will venerate the Cross, showing it a supreme reverence because of the Body of the One who used it to offer himself for our sake. If you notice, we priests will remove our shoes when we kiss the Cross, recognizing like Moses that we stand upon holy ground. Finally, we will receive in sacramental form the Body of Christ himself in the Eucharist, he who once was dead but now lives forever.

My friends, as we prepare to celebrate the Easter festivities once again, let us first pause and renew our faith today in the saving death of Jesus. Good Friday is our eternal Day of Atonement, the day on which, gathered in this temple, priests by our baptism, we utter with reverence and faith the Name which is above every name. Jesus the Nazorean was no mere man; he is the God-Man. He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the One who Is, whose Essence is Existence itself – and also the one who submitted himself to betrayal, arrest, crucifixion, and death, all for love of us, all to redeem us from our sin. With the fire of divine love, he hung upon the tree; but like the bush that did not burn away, he could not be consumed by Death. Rather he lives anew, and his death is the demise of Death itself for all who believe in him. So it is; so let us believe.

A Soliloquy on Suffering

At one time or another, every high school English student has to study the works of Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet – these works and more are classics of our English language and great studies also in the human condition. When I was in high school, each year we studied a different one of the Bard’s plays, and we always had to memorize a soliloquy – that is, a speech by a character who is alone or speaking only to themselves. Each of them remains etched in my memory somewhere: Romeo contemplating the beauty of Juliet; Macbeth grappling with his murderous desires; Hamlet pondering the pros and cons of continuing to live with his burdens and griefs.

Looking back, I realize that we did this for a few reasons. Certainly, we came to appreciate Shakespeare’s masterful use of language. We appreciated his ability to gain insight into human nature. Most importantly, though, studying those soliloquies gave us an insight into the stories themselves, into the character’s circumstances and motivations at that moment of the plot. Understanding the thoughts and feelings of those characters at a critical moment in the story helped us to understand better what would happen next.

In our Gospel today, we hear Jesus give voice to his inner thoughts and feelings. Like a Shakespearean character, he considers the circumstances of his coming Passion and Death and responds with the sentiments in his heart. Jesus, though, is more than a character; he also speaks with the authority of the Author, with the knowledge of God himself who has constructed the story. Like a good teacher, Jesus wants his students – his disciples – to understand more fully what is playing out before them, not on the page but in real life.

We might include ourselves also among the intended audience of Jesus’s words. It’s pretty rare in the Gospels to get a glimpse into the inner life of Jesus, but in John’s Gospel, these long addresses become more frequent the closer Jesus draws to the Passion. As his “hour” approaches, the tension in the story builds until the climax of the drama at last unfolds in the road to Calvary. Jesus does not want his disciples, nor us, to mistake what is truly happening – to miss the meaning of the story before us. As terrible as the sequence of Jesus’s Passion and Death is, it is also fully the will of Father, the love of God for humanity on display. As Jesus says, it is the purpose for which he has come into the world, the hour for which he was sent.

At times, we might ask ourselves, “Why did the Lord need to die? Was it necessary?” St. Thomas Aquinas responds to that question in a few ways which might be of help to us. He says that we should not think of the Lord’s suffering as necessary, in the sense that God was forced to make things that way, or as if Jesus himself had no choice in the matter. God is all powerful and could have chosen to accomplish our salvation in some other way; and Jesus had a truly free will and so could have rejected what his Father called him to. And yet this was always God’s plan; Christ’s suffering was necessary therefore in the sense that it most perfectly accomplished the redemption he desired to work for us. The word the Church Fathers use is “fitting” – the Passion and Death of Jesus fittingly show us both the true result of our sinfulness and also the total obedience that Christ shows to his Father out of love for humanity.

We would do well to keep these considerations in mind as we prepare to enter into Holy Week, with Palm Sunday one week from today. But I think they also can be helpful for us in approaching our own sufferings, our own invitations into sharing in the mystery of the Lord’s Cross. One of the great advantages of our faith is that the Lord has taught us how to understand our suffering, but too many Christians today seem to have forgotten what that lesson is or to have rejected its value. What we need perhaps is to study again the Lord’s own suffering as a lens through which we can view our own.

Notice in the Gospel today that Jesus has a certain heavy-heartedness as he looks ahead to the Passion. It is not that he goes to his death unwillingly; far from it. But he says that his heart is troubled, and understandably so. Jesus is in the prime of his life, not ill, not weakened, only some 33 years of age; to face an impending death seems almost impossible to believe. This sadness – at the necessity of dying, at the rejection he has encountered – does not, however, in any way diminish the resolve he has to fulfill the mission entrusted to him by the Father. He has trust in his Father’s will, and that through his act of obedient suffering “the ruler of this world [Satan] will be driven out.” 

Anatoly Shumkin, The Humility of Christ (2013)

In our own lives, none of us likes to suffer, and rightfully so. Suffering always involves something bad; whether it is physical pain, or emotional distress, or the suffering of loss, in some way or another, we encounter something in suffering that we would rather avoid. Jesus shows that suffering can also be transformative. Remembering Christ on the Cross, we can unite our own sorrows to his, and so make them offerings to God as recompense for our sins. The suffering may be particularly challenging at times, but it is always only temporary. Like grains of wheat, we anticipate a future transformation, and we believe that what we endure here will allow us bear fruit for what awaits us. In the meantime, we embrace the various “deaths” that are the passageway to newness of life – death to our desires and our ambitions, death to our grievances and our hardness of heart, death to our attachments to things, and to people, and even to this earthly life. But suffering, and even death itself, do not have the final word; God has proven that in Christ as well.

Friends, soon we will celebrate again the most important mysteries of our faith, the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus. These events are the story of our salvation, something far deeper and richer than even Shakespeare, and thus they are worthy of our study and reflection. But they are also mysteries to be entered into, performed so to speak in our own lives. Jesus knows well the sorrows we face and the sufferings we endure, and he invites us to share in his Cross, so that we might have a share in the glory of his Resurrection. His words to us in the Gospel today teach us patience, inspire in us obedience, and most importantly encourage us in perseverance, so that at each moment we may seek to follow after him. May our own sufferings be for us a further step down the road of discipleship, closer to Calvary, but closer also to heaven, so that where he is, we may one day be.

Herein Is Love

When was the last time you had a truly meaningful conversation? They say that the average American talks somewhere between three and five hours a day, women on average a little bit more than men, children a little bit more than adults. If you add in the conversations we have in other forms, like texting and email, then surely those numbers go up even more.

Most of this communication is not what we would probably consider all that meaningful. It serves a purpose in the moment – an exchange of viewpoints or information, or just a chance to catch up with someone we know. But it is ephemeral; once it is over, it doesn’t stay with us and we don’t return to it. However, there are times in life when we find ourselves engaged in a conversation that can be truly meaningful, even life-changing.

In the Gospel today, a man named Nicodemus has a meaningful conversation with Jesus. A little context for you for the passage we heard: Nicodemus is a Pharisee, who has been impressed by Jesus’s teaching and his miracles. He comes to Jesus to discuss things with him further, but he comes to him at night, under the cover of darkness, afraid of what the other Pharisees might think of him taking Jesus seriously. Nicodemus is interested to find out what Jesus means when he says that we must be “born again”. He asks Jesus, "How is it possible for a person to be born twice?"

Visit of Nicodemus to Christ (1880) by John La Farge

What results is a conversation that is anything but ephemeral. In fact, St. John the Evangelist records their dialogue as one of the key exchanges of his Gospel account, an insight into the purpose behind Jesus’s mission. In short, Jesus tells Nicodemus that human beings are sinful and headed for destruction because of our sin; however, God loved us, despite our sinfulness, even to the point of sending his Son. Jesus refers to himself in the third person, directing Nicodemus’s attention to the sacrifice on the cross that he will undergo as a sign of the profound love of God and as the remedy for human sinfulness. It is through faith in him and in what he will do that human beings are born again and can enter into the presence of God.

We have reached the Fourth Sunday of Lent, more or less the midpoint of this season of renewal and purification. Each of our readings today speak to us about the same theme: God’s love for humanity. The first reading, from the Second Book of Chronicles, reminds us that his love for us persists, even when we have sinned. The second reading, from the Letter of Paul to the Ephesians, tells us that it is a free gift, not one which we earn but offered out of sheer grace. And the passage from John’s Gospel that we just looked at states that God’s love must be accepted in faith for it to be salvific, that is, to save us from eternal death.

The Church gives us this theme of God’s love midway through this season for two reasons: first, to remind us why we are in this penitential season and second, to encourage us to be renewed in our efforts. After about a month of Lent – and the more intensive fasting, prayer, and almsgiving that this season calls us to – it can be easy to forget why we are doing this, or perhaps to be discouraged if our efforts have been lacking in some way. Rather than focus on our shortcomings though, the Church bids us “Rejoice” – remember God’s everlasting love, offered freely to us as a gift, and one that, accepted with faith in Jesus, merits our eternal salvation.

The question, of course, is whether we take this encouragement – this invitation – to heart. Too often, when Jesus bids us to come and be renewed by the knowledge of God’s love, we are hesitant to accept. For one, we can’t overcome our doubts that he really means what he says: "that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son," who took upon himself all of our sins and crucified them on the cross in order to give us life. We just fail in some way to really believe that that can be so. Others of us believe all of that in a half-hearted way, but it doesn’t really inspire within us anything in response; it fails to really ignite anything from us in return.

This was Nicodemus’s problem. The Church Fathers saw Nicodemus as a half-hearted disciple; he believed in Jesus, but he wanted to do so in secret only. He could have become as openly a follower of Christ as the Apostles, and yet the only time we see him again is after Jesus has died, when Nicodemus helps prepare his body for burial. We might say that Nicodemus is the first in a very long line of people, including many of us, who could be great followers of Jesus if only we weren’t so limited by what others might say in response.

What Nicodemus needed, and what we need too perhaps, especially at this point in Lent, is a reminder of the profound love of God. We’ve heard it in the readings, but we also must be convinced of it in our own hearts. The great writer C.S. Lewis, in his book The Four Loves, says that love is not so much something God does, but something that he is. This is seen most fully when we look at Jesus on the cross. He writes:

“God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing… the buzzing cloud of flies about the Cross, the flayed back [of Jesus]…, the nails driven through…. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves.”

Lewis’s profound words remind us that God knew – before all time, from all eternity – that mankind would fall into sin, and so doom itself to death, and that to save it, he would send his Only Son, who also would be rejected, and who would be put to death in a terrible way. He knew all of that before he ever created a thing, before he ever said, “Let there be light…” He did it all anyway, because he loves us – because he loves you, personally, by name – with a love that is everlasting.

Friends, take a moment this week to have a meaningful conversation with God. Take a break from the busy grind of work or school, and get away for a little while, just yourself and the Lord. Speak to the Lord a bit about where you are at in your relationship with him, and let him speak to you. He went to the cross 2000 years ago out of love for you; with that same love, he desires to renew your spirit this day. In this Eucharist which we celebrate in a few moments, may we rush forward to meet the Lord, not with doubts or half-hearted conviction, but with confidence, with thanksgiving, and with rejoicing.

A Call to Arms

Godfried Guffins & Jan Swerts, The Temptation of Christ (c. 1870), Sint-Joriskerk, Antwerp

There has been a little tension in our church office over the last few weeks. Adam, one of our campus ministers, and Fr. Jason, our associate pastor, are both signed up to race in the Hogeye Marathon on April 14th. A bit of a friendly rivalry has developed in their preparations. Adam is training in a traditional way: running different mileages and slowly building up over time. Fr. Jason is taking a different approach: he’s working on sheer muscle strength and training with different martial arts techniques. It is almost as if he is training more for a fight than a race! I have even seen a pair of brass knuckles on his desk – he tells me it is just a paperweight, but now I am a little afraid to make him angry!

In the Gospel today, Jesus begins his public ministry with a fight. Following his baptism in the Jordan, he is driven by the Spirit out into the desert to encounter the devil. At its heart, it is a spiritual struggle. We know from the other Gospels that the devil is trying to tempt Jesus to betray his mission, to interiorly falter in his willingness to dedicate himself completely to the will of the Father who has sent him. There also, however, material aspects to this contest. It takes place in the wilderness of Judea, where Jesus is alone, fasting, submitting himself to the elements, surrounded by wild beasts. Mark’s account draws our attention to how there is truly a battle being fought: between Jesus, the Son of God, filled with the Holy Spirit and all of the forces of darkness, earthly and otherwise, everything that represents chaos and disorder and violence. These spiritual powers converge upon Christ, and he bests them all.

Each year, as we begin Lent, we hear about this testing of Jesus – this period of struggle that he undergoes in the desert and from which he emerges victorious. But only in the Gospel of Mark do we hear what happens next: that having defeated the devil and resisted his temptations, Jesus goes to Galilee and begins proclaiming the Good News. It is as if Mark is suggesting that Jesus’s proclamation of the Gospel is a continuation of what he began in the desert – an extension of the battle against the forces of sin and darkness.

The Church Fathers saw this very clearly. All of Jesus’s public ministry – his preaching, his miracles, the encounters with particular people – all of it is a battle to win back creation, especially humanity, from the darkness that has enslaved us through sin and dysfunction. At each turn, Jesus encounters the devil and at each turn he beats him back, healing this person, forgiving that one, casting out a demon from that one, and strengthening the faith of another. Jesus is on a mission of liberation, one ultimately that is headed for Jerusalem, where the last great battle must be fought and won on the hill of Calvary.

If we look at all of Jesus’s ministry in that way, then his words today “Repent and believe in the Gospel” also take on a new meaning. They are not mere moralizing; Jesus is not just admonishing us to be a little better, a little holier. Rather, he is issuing a call to arms – he is inviting us to come and join him in the battle and share with him in the victory over darkness. Unfortunately, our world still affords us many reminders, too many, that evil is real; we know from our newscasts, and Facebook feeds, and our gossip around the water cooler and dinner table that sin and dysfunction did not disappear with Jesus. Evil still must be confronted and defeated, and the first place to engage with it is in our own hearts. Repentance therefore is part of the rhythm of our Christian life – while we have a claim on the final victory to come, the battle still continues.

With what then do we fight? Prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. These weapons may not sound as fearsome as sword or steel, but the Christian tradition has long seen these penitential practices as the most effective ways of combating the forces of evil. They help sharpen our spiritual attention and heighten our moral awareness, and each of them contribute to making us more free. Prayer reminds us that it is our relationship with God that most truly defines who we are, not the circumstances or even the relationships of our day to day. Fasting reminds us that we are not slaves to our physical impulses and corporeal desires; we have a free will. Almsgiving and works of charity free us from being possessed by the things we own.

Often we tend to see Lent as something serious, and maybe a little gloomy, but really it should be a time that invigorates us and reawakens us our faith. Some five hundred years ago, Ignatius of Loyola encouraged the young men who wanted to join his new group, the Jesuits, to imagine themselves in the middle of a great plain. Assembled there are two great armies. Under the banner of Satan, are the proud, the self-serving, the self-reliant. Under the banner of Christ are the humble, the modest, those reliant upon God, the penitential.

It is a powerful meditation because it is so counter-intuitive. The side of Satan seems much stronger, and for that reason more inviting; the side of Christ seems weak and maybe even a bit pathetic. And yet we know that it is those under the banner of Christ that ultimately are victorious. What Ignatius wants to show us is that often what attracts us, what seems to us most appealing, is precisely what can lead to our ultimate ruin. Eternal life comes rather through self-denial, through penance – through a recognition that we must constantly be purifying ourselves from the desire for the things of this world so that we can be more attuned to the deeper longing for what is eternal.

Friends, as we begin Lent again, our Lord reminds us that we have a fight on our hands, one for which brass knuckles will not be effective. God still desires to cleans our world of its sin and dysfunction, but rather than act on a grand scale through a purifying flood as in the days of Noah, he now acts at the individual level through the transformative power of his Holy Spirit. Lent affords us a chance not just to tweak one or two things in our moral life, but above all to remind ourselves on which side we are fighting. Jesus offers nothing less than emancipation from all that holds us back, so heed his call! Invite the Holy Spirit to do battle in your heart. Arm him with the weapons of penance and spiritual discipline. Take up your stand anew under the banner of your Savior, and begin to share again in the victory only he can give.

Lent: A Love Story

What one word best sums up today? If you were to ask that question on campus today, you’d probably get a straightforward answer: love. It’s February 14, after all, Valentine’s Day. We know that behind all of the flowers and chocolate and jewelry and other commercializations, there is the simple idea of telling someone you care about that you love them. 

Believe it or not, that same single word – love – is also at the heart of our celebration of Ash Wednesday. Yes, it is the start of Lent, that season of penance and purification. We will mark our foreheads with ashes and ask for God’s forgiveness. We think about what penitential practice we might want to take on – giving something up that we enjoy, doing something charitable or sacrificial for another, or both. But beneath it all is the theme of love: God’s love for us and our love for God. 

It is precisely because God loves us that he calls us to repentance. “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” Those words are from the Book of Genesis, spoken by God to Adam, reminding him that this life is finite, and that we must use this time well to prepare for our judgment. God wants nothing less than for us as his creatures to flourish, to thrive in every way, especially at the level of soul. Our sinful habits and attitudes hold us back from being the temples of the Holy Spirit he has created us to be, and so he calls us to repentance so that we might leave behind our old ways apart from him and embrace the new life that comes from Christ. 

Of course, as the old saying goes, the best intentions oft go astray. How often do we begin Lent with a firm intention to improve our relationship with God only to find that halfway through we have lost that determination altogether? Or worse, we simply never had it in the first place? In the Gospel today, Jesus knows that it can be hard to truly change, hard even at times to truly want to change. What we need is motivation – a reason to carry on with these things that are difficult. When the going gets tough, what will keep us going? 

David O'Connell, Stations of the Cross: Fifth Station: Simon Helps Jesus (c. 1960), St. Richard Church, Chichester, UK

The only answer is love. Only out of love for God do we endure that which is hard, that which needs perseverance. We may be tempted – when the going gets tough – to put on a good show for others, to appear pious and penitential on the outside without truly giving it our all on the inside. But as Jesus says, God sees through such a false pretense. The Lord judges the heart, not the exterior appearance. Ashes on our foreheads are not enough to claim repentance; they must be accompanied by a true recognition of how far we have fallen astray. Our deepest motivation must always be the love of God – remembering constantly his love for us and renewing at each moment our love for him. If we seek his mercy, if we desire to do penance not to impress others or to better ourselves in a self-serving way but merely out of love for him, then Jesus assures us our heavenly Father sees our contrition and forgives us.

Thus, it is out of love that we take up again the penitential practices of Lent, not because they are fun but because they help us to love well. Prayer helps orient us toward God, remembering our love for him. Fasting helps us to love ourselves properly, training us to look away from worldly delights and to yearn for what nourishes our souls. Giving alms, or works of charity in general, help us to love those around us, helping us to remember the duty we have to care for those in need.

Friends, the season of Lent reminds us again that the greatest love story ever told is not a story of romance, told with valentines, but rather the story of God’s love for us – told most fully in the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of God’s Son for us. It is the celebration of that wondrous event, the Easter story, that Lent prepares us for. As we receive ashes on our heads, remembering the mortality of this body, may we also yearn to be enlivened by the power of Jesus’s love to hope one day for eternal life. May the Lord who loves us so deeply inspire in us a love to turn back to him, to be renewed by his grace in these forty days, to echo his love in all that we do.

Christ on Campus: the Feast of Saint Thomas Aquinas

Time sure seems to be passing quickly lately. Can you believe we have already finished two weeks of the university’s spring semester? One more week, and we will already be about 20% to its conclusion. Not that I'm keeping track! No doubt our students and our teachers are now getting down to the important work of the semester, especially as that first exam is scheduled and that first paper looms on the horizon.

Studying is hard work. The great Southern writer and historian Shelby Foote once said, “A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.” As much as we might like to think about life at the U of A as defined by what happens in the sports arenas, or in the dorms or the dining halls, or on Dickson Street, it is what happens in the library that is most important for our time here. After all, the purpose of a university after all is to learn. Sure, you can look at it as just a place to go and get a degree, a piece of paper that allows you to move on into the working world. But as an entity, as a community, a university is a place where you come to gain that which you do not have: to be instructed in what is real and useful and good, so that when you leave here you are able to better yourself and the world around you. To do that, you have to put in the work, the hours of study to master what you seek to know. The great English cardinal and academic John Henry Newman once wrote that the goal of every university course should be to train good members of society, to help them to understand what is true and what is not true so that they can use that to better the world.

Of course, there is also a kind of knowledge that comes not from studying but from direct, personal experience. In the Gospel today, Jesus enters the synagogue in Capernaum and begins to teach. There were no universities in Jesus’s day; but there were schools, associations of masters and students, of those who had studied and learned and those who wanted to be taught. What amazes the people in Capernaum is that the force of Jesus’s teaching is unlike any they had ever known. He was, as far as they were aware, the unschooled son of a carpenter, and yet he taught with power and authority. Of course, as we know, Jesus was unschooled; he spoke with a knowledge that had not come from study or from reflection, but from the intimate personal knowledge that came from being the Son of his heavenly Father.

As we heard, what the people hear astonishes them. They are more than impressed; the Greek word used could be translated something like “dumbfounded”. Is Jesus just showing off? Certainly not. Rather, he is demonstrating that the kingdom of God is at hand; he is the “the Holy One of God,” the one who can speak with knowledge about God because he is himself God, the one who can interpret the meaning of the Scriptures because he is their true author. As if to confirm who he is and what he speaks of, Jesus casts out the unclean spirit present in their midst, befuddling the people all the more.

Francisco de Zurbarán, The Apotheosis of St. Thomas Aquinas (1631) [detail]

There is a great truth about our Christian life, one that we have to remind ourselves about again and again: it is possible to know much about Jesus without truly knowing him. The people in the synagogue at Capernaum knew much about Jesus – where he came from, what line of work he was in, who his relatives were – but when they were confronted with who he was in himself, they were astounded. For us today, this is perhaps even more of a danger. One can study all of the works of theology and understand their meaning, one can associate with Christians and come to church, one can live a life that seems on the outside completely directed toward God – but yet still lack interiorly that relationship with Christ that should enliven and animate us each day.

Today we celebrate the feast of our parish’s patron saint, St. Thomas Aquinas. In the mind of the Church, it is an opportunity for us to celebrate our faith community, and to be grateful for how God has acted and is still acting in our midst, among us and in us. It is also a chance to ask for the intercession of our patron, and to understand something of his life that perhaps might be influential for our own. Admittedly, a Dominican friar of the 13th century might seem a little difficult to relate to. Thomas Aquinas was a man of great intellect, a man of great learning, a man who wrote deep works of theology and explanation for the Christian faith. He was without a doubt one of the greatest thinkers in the history of our faith, and it is thus appropriate that the works of Thomas Aquinas are recommended by the Church to those who wish to understand better the mysteries of our faith.

But Thomas was not just a brainiac. He was also a man of deep faith, a man who knew Jesus personally and who loved and worshipped him as his Lord, especially in the Holy Eucharist. Those who have passed down to us details of his life all agree that he began and ended his studies each day by praying before a crucifix, asking for wisdom and insight and to glorify God in his work. His study aided his prayer, and his prayer aided his study. In that way, he came to understand the person of Jesus, the Holy One of God, not in an abstract, theoretical sense, but as a friend and a Master.

Like the students and faculty here at the U of A, St. Thomas spent much of his time in and around universities; he studied first at the University of Naples and later was on the faculty at the University of Paris. There is no doubt that those medieval places of learning were in many ways vastly different from the university setting of today. Yet, at their heart, they share the same purpose: to be a place of study, to be a community of learning, to probe the depths of reality to learn what is real and useful and good, to better ourselves and the world around us. St. Thomas ceaselessly asked the “What” of the realities of the universe in order to better understand the “Who” is their source of them all.

Friends, St. Thomas once wrote: “If you are looking for a goal, hold fast to Christ, because he himself is the truth… If you are looking for a resting place, hold fast to Christ, because he himself is the life…” Perhaps the best way we can honor our patron today is for each of us to remember what he knew above all: that knowledge is useless without understanding, that learning is nothing without love. We do well to study hard, to labor vigorously at our various endeavors, whether here on campus or whatever we do once we leave here; but we must also always keep before our eyes the one who is Truth himself. All of the books of Mullins Library cannot lead you to a personal relationship with Jesus. They can teach you about Jesus, but to truly know him, you have to encounter him for yourself. May our patron St. Thomas Aquinas help us to meet Jesus anew, the Holy One of God, the One “to whom and for whom and through whom all things are,” so that by his gifts and for his glory we may achieve what he wills.

Whose Kingdom?

A few months ago, a study was released that compared the general views of Americans on a range of social and political issues. It concluded that Americans today are more polarized than at any time since the Civil War. Even if you think that is a bit too sweeping of a conclusion, it is hard to argue that recently it seems our social and cultural discussions have risen to a fever pitch. Just this past week, we’ve seen a government shutdown, a debate about immigration and the future of DACA, three different marches in Washington, and continued disappointing and even discouraging words and actions from our elected leaders. We have seen new movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp sweeping the country. We still hear about the usual contentious issues, like abortion and gun rights and climate change, and we hear about growing concerns like the opioid crisis and renewed fears over nuclear conflict. In short, it seems as if there is no shortage of things about which to be alarmed, be afraid, or be angry.

Maybe these issues are ones that speak to you, or maybe not. But all of us see things in the world that we think are wrong or broken or harmful, and for the sake of ourselves, the sake of our children, the sake of society, we want to make them right. As Christians, this takes on a special significance: seeking to make our world more a reflection of the kingdom of God. We’re not just altruistic we see striving for peace and justice as what Jesus commanded us to do.

Edward Armitage, Christ Calling the Apostles James and John (1869) 

In light of all of this, what we hear St. Paul say in our second reading likely strikes us as very strange: “I tell you, brothers and sisters, the time is running out… The world in its present form is passing away.” Paul’s words are in response to a letter the Christian community in Corinth had sent to him. Living in a major cosmopolitan city, surrounded no doubt by all kinds of immorality and social injustices, they wrote to Paul to ask him how they should live as disciples of Jesus. Paul answers many of their questions: how to remain united as a community, how to resolve internal disputes, whether to marry or to remain single, etc. But he also reveals for them this amazing, startling conclusion: that this reality is passing away.

Nowadays, if you start talking as Paul did – about a world to come, a life beyond this one, a reality that is not yet fully present – people tend to have one of two reactions: either their eyes glaze over and they tune you out, or they think immediately about heaven. Paul, however, wasn’t talking about heaven, at least not as we typically think of it. For a person steeped in the Jewish tradition, as Paul was, the kingdom of God was not something that was going to happen someday, in another dimension; rather it would be ushered in here, on this earth, when God would reveal to the whole world his saving power and remake it in his image. For Paul, everything that he understands about God and the world flows from his experience of encountering the Risen Christ, of seeing the man Jesus, who had been tortured and crucified as a criminal, visibly alive again, risen in power and glory.

For two thousand years, our Christian tradition has always held in tension two ideas that seem contradictory: we must work urgently for justice and peace, and yet we await a kingdom not of this world. You can gain a lot of traction by being a Christian these days who talks about the need for more justice, a better peace, a deeper regard for human dignity, and a more meaningful, purpose-filled life for all. Those words will get you somewhere because anyone can appreciate them; they have a built-in rationale that doe not challenge us beyond the here and now. The problem is that we can sometimes lose sight of the second idea, which is really the more important one: that the Risen Jesus will return to establish his reign over all things, vanquishing every foe and judging each of us by what we have done in his name.

What Paul encouraged the Christians in Corinth to understand – and what I think we are called to understand in this moment as well – is that our efforts for peace and justice, as critically important as they are, must be rooted in a more foundational reality: that our hope lies not ultimately in our own efforts but in what the Lord is doing and will do at his return. This is especially important to remember when our efforts seem to be futile, when progress seems to stall, when we are tempted to become discouraged or anxious or afraid. It is precisely then that we should remember that this world is passing away, and while we struggle to do good here and now, our efforts will remain incomplete. Some might call this romanticism or idealism: that by placing our hopes in a reality beyond this one, we are not as committed to working hard to make this world better. But the Christian understanding of the world has always been that what we labor for is not a perfect world as we would make it but the kingdom of God.

So what does that mean, in the here and now? First, we as Christians must always be asking ourselves, “By what lens am I viewing the world? Whose kingdom am I striving for?” We naturally feel attraction to certain causes and commitment to certain issues, but we need to always see if these are in accord with our Christian faith. There are a lot of voices out there that are seeking to shape our worldview but whose social and cultural and political platforms are not always consistent with our Christian identity. We have to look to what our Church teaches and to our own conscience to examine whom we are allowing to truly influence our worldview.

Second, we can’t grow complacent, by thinking that either the world is too broken to struggle for, or that we are too helpless to make a difference. We are called to work for peace and justice, but always bearing in mind what is most important. Recently, I read an article that analyzed the connections between an individual’s social consciousness and happiness. What it found was that, in general, the more committed and invested an individual was in a particular social cause, the more likely they were to identify with feelings of isolation, alienation, frustration, anxiety, even despair. Honestly, I can’t help but think that those feelings are the result of us rooting our hopes in the wrong thing: the idea that justice comes from our own efforts. When our efforts then are unsuccessful, the bottom falls out, and we lose all hope. Such should never be the case for a Christian. As daunted as we might feel at times, we never lose hope, because the Resurrection is our fundamental reality that undergirds everything we strive for. Jesus has already won the definitive battle over evil, and thus we await with joy and hope the full manifestation of his victory. In the meantime, no discouragement or defeat will change the end result. 

In the Gospel today, Jesus calls his first disciples and announces the kingdom of God is at hand. There’s no doubt that we are in "a moment," as some have phrased it, in our country. But whether it’s in Hollywood, or Wall Street, or Washington, we are not going to solve all of our problems by slogans and marches, as important as those might be. We will not be able to create a better world because we strive hard enough; this world is passing away. Instead, as St. Paul encourages us, we must look at every moment, every occasion, every relationship as one defined by our discipleship. The disciples could have said, “Let me go fix this problem first, Jesus, and then I will be your disciple.” But ultimately, Jesus calls them to give it all up, as he does us – to leave behind what is familiar and comfortable, and even to let go of things that are important and part of our identity, in order to discover a new and truer identity in him. God does not ask us to right every wrong. He doesn’t measure us by our accomplishments, but rather by our faithfulness, our hope, our conversion.

As we prepare to celebrate to share in the Eucharistic sacrifice, let us remember that the work of praise we render to God in this Mass is more powerful and effective than anything else we do in the name of what is good. Strengthened by the One whom we receive, the Risen Christ, the One who has vanquished darkness and death, may we be renewed in faith and hope, to keep following him faithfully each day and to await with hope and joy his return.