Something New

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

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

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

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

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

Christ and the Adulterous Woman (1869) by Domenico Morelli

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

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

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

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

Like Father, Like Son

“A chip off the old block.” “Like father, like son.” “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

We have different idioms to say the same thing: children are often very like their parents. There is the obvious likeness in physical attributes – things like hair color, eye color, etc. – but we also know that children and parents often have similar personalities as well. And even more important than genetics are the qualities that the child implicitly learns from the parent. Through observation, example, and imitation, a child learns from the parent how to be, how to exist.

But while children often take after their parents, we also know of counter-examples as well. Some children rebel against their parents and the values they had taught them, either consciously or unconsciously. Despite being taught well, despite receiving a good example, some children nonetheless choose the more difficult path of wanting to figure things out on their own.

The Return of the Prodigal Son (1773) by Pompeo Batoni

The parable of today’s Gospel is at its heart a story of just such a family, a story that revolves around the dynamic between two children who are very much not like their father. In this case, the apples have fallen far from the tree. The younger son is openly rebellious: he is gluttonous, wayward, and openly dismissive of his father. In desiring immediately his share of the inheritance, he implicitly treats his father as if he is already dead. The older son is a little better, but by the end of the story, he too is revealed to be quite flawed: he is jealous, hard-hearted, and disrespectful. By contrast, the father is generous, merciful, compassionate, and wise. What happened? How could the sons be so unlike their father?

The parable doesn’t tell us directly. But knowing what we know about parents and children, we can make an educated guess. It seems unlikely that such a loving and merciful father would have instructed sons badly or provided them a poor example. We have to conclude then that these sons simply did not know their father well enough. They had not appreciated his goodness or understood his love, and so they did not mimic those qualities according to his example. If only they had known him better, more fully, his goodness could have become theirs.

Perhaps you can see where I’m going with this. Jesus’s parables always tells us something about who God is and what our relationship with him must be like. This one is no different. Our Father in heaven rejoices to welcome back into his merciful love any sinner who recognizes their error, repents, and asks for forgiveness. But if God is always ready to forgive us, we must also ask ourselves why is that we fall; with a God who is so good and loving, why do we turn away from him? Surely, part of the answer is that though we are God’s sons and daughters, we do not know him as we ought. We have not understood his own goodness, the depths of his mercy, and so as in the parable, we seek happiness in created things or we become judgmental of others, self-righteous and self-justifying.

If we wish to know God better, more fully, there is no substitute for prayer. Prayer is the dialogue of relationship, the communion of spirit between ourselves and our Creator. Like a child who observes a parent, and learns from them how to be, prayer is where we come to understand who God truly is, and who we are in relationship to him. Most of us probably recognize we should pray more, and we may even desire to pray more, but we can’t seem to find time in our busy, daily schedules. When prayer is just something we “need to do”, just one more obligation, it’s easy to put off. We must see prayer as essential to our existence as food or drink, as life-giving as communication with our dearest friend, for that is what it is.

We also should not be afraid of wasting time in prayer, for in prayer, there is no such thing as wasted time. We don’t have to always be accomplishing something; we have to move away from that incessant need to have our senses filled and our minds occupied. We have to learn not to judge time spent in prayer by “what we get out of it.” In her book Essence of Prayer, the English Carmelite nun Sr. Ruth Burrows writes, “Prayer is essentially what God does, how God addresses us, looks at us. It is not primarily something we are doing to God, something we are giving to God but what God is doing for us. And what God is doing for us is giving the divine Self in love.” 

Masaccio, The Holy Trinity (1425) [detail]

To learn who our Father is, we have the benefit of a Son to teach us. Christ reveals his Father to us, but he also teaches us how to relate to the Father ourselves, how to pray to him, how to trust in him, how to learn from his goodness and mercy in the way that we encounter others. In and through the Son, we too can reflect his Image of the Father’s love, an image of the divine life present here in this reality. At a minimum, we encounter this way of praying in and through the Son each Sunday at Mass. In the Mass, we are caught up in the Son’s self-offering to the Father, and we receive from the Father his greatest gift, the presence of his Son. The Mass teaches us how to be, how to exist in relationship with God, how to be a son after the Son, how to learn who our Father truly is. What a benefit a few additional moments of prayer in the Mass might do for us: perhaps arriving at Mass a few minutes earlier to prepare ourselves more fully for what we will receive, or perhaps staying just a few moments afterward to offer a prayer for what we have received. In prayer, as in all other things, God is not outdone in generosity.

Friends, the penitential practices we take up during Lent are good and just, but perhaps there is nothing that is as beneficial for us in this season as a deepened experience of prayer. Cardinal Robert Sarah says, “The most important moments in life are the hours of prayer and adoration. They give birth to a human being, fashion our true identity; they root our existence in mystery.” This Lent, where is the Lord inviting you to come to know him more fully? How is he inviting you to learn more deeply his own goodness, mercy, and love, so that you can mimic his example, so that those qualities can become your own? “Like Father, like Son” – like the Eternal Father, like the Divine Son, let us grow in knowledge, in understanding of who we are in relationship to the Lord and so receive all that he desires to give to us.

God's Favorites

We all like certain things more than others: certain foods, certain sports teams, certain classes, even certain people. And it is part of human nature to treat what we favor differently from what we don’t. We order the foods we enjoy, not the ones we dislike; we cheer if the Razorbacks win, not just any other team.

Because we operate in this way – having favorites, treating our favorite things differently – we sometimes believe that God operates this way as well. God, we imagine, has certain people that he seems to favor more than others: the people who seem to be blessed with success, or fame, or fortune, who seem to achieve exactly what they desire. Because we think that God showers blessings upon those whom he favors, we also fall victim to the opposite idea: that God punishes those whom he doesn’t favor. We think: if something bad happens in my life, it must be that God is punishing me – or, at least, that he doesn’t like me enough to keep that bad thing from happening to me.

Today’s Gospel shows us that this mindset is nothing new. As he is teaching the people, Jesus refers to two unfortunate events: that Pontius Pilate has put to death some people from Galilee, while another group of people died in the collapse of a tower. The implicit attitude of people at the time is that God was punishing those who died: perhaps they were sinful, perhaps he just didn’t like them as much as he liked others, but for whatever reason, they must have had it coming. Jesus tells them flatly they are wrong: God doesn’t seek to punish the sinful by causing bad things to happen to them. God doesn’t play favorites in this way; rather, “he makes the sun shine on the just and the unjust alike.”

But if we recognize that God doesn’t directly cause bad things to happen to us on account of our sins, we should also realize a second, more subtle untruth that Jesus corrects: that because nothing bad has happened to me, I must be OK with God. I think this flaw is much more common in our thinking today – that my relationship with God must be perfectly satisfactory because if it were not, he would let me know. We think, “I’m doing pretty good. Sure, I’m not perfect, but God must be pretty fine with me, since nothing bad has happened to me.”

The problem with that idea is that it lulls us into complacency, and it makes us take our relationship with God for granted. Instead of being appalled by our sinfulness, we ignore the voice of our conscience. Instead of striving to achieve the ultimate goal of union with God in heaven, we begin to arrange our lives around more earthly goals – things like success, fame, fortune – and we think that if we don’t get them, then God doesn’t favor us in the same that he favors other people.

This whole way of thinking is in need of some serious correction, and Jesus gives that to us in today’s Gospel. He says, “I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish.” Those are scary words! But Jesus’s intention is not to scare us so much as to force us to reexamine the way we view our relationship with God. It’s true that God doesn’t play favorites, and doesn't cause bad things to happen to punish us, but that doesn’t mean we are blameless in his eyes. Rather, as Jesus says, we all are in need of repentance. Why? Because repentance is the starting point for growth. We think of repentance as getting on our knees and beating our breast, but repentance at its heart is an openness to change – a willingness to reexamine how we are going about things. God desires to bring each of us to the fullness of life – to give us an abundance of life here on earth and eternal life with him in heaven. But he alone knows how best to do that, and so when we resist the movement of his grace, we are like a tree that refuses to produce fruit: we reject our own nature, our most basic purpose. 

The Gardener (1882) by Georges Seurat

Fortunately, the Lord is patient, as we hear in the second half of today’s Gospel, and so he deals with us patiently. While God does not punish our sinfulness by causing bad things to happen, he does at times permit us to experience challenges and sufferings in order to bring forth some greater good. He is like the careful gardener who at times must prune and trim in order to accomplish a greater flourishing. In a sense, each of us is the favorite of God, but uniquely so, and so he treats each of us uniquely, in the way proper to his purpose. Sometimes we understand how those purposes work, and sometimes not. But always they are for our good, if we are open to understanding that good as God does, not as we would define it.

Friends, at this midpoint of the season of Lent, we are all probably at risk of becoming a little complacent. This season of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving is intended to remind us how far we each have strayed from God, and how much we need his mercy. The Lord is a careful, patient gardener, and thus he is always at work to bring forth good fruit from us. But he cannot do so unless we are open to change, open to repenting of the ways we have gone astray and being set right again on the path to the fullness of life. We cannot know the state of our souls by comparing ourselves with others, but rather only by submitting to the Lord’s patient, persistent efforts to change and renew us.

May this Eucharist reawaken in us the desire never to resist the work of the living God, but to yield to him, he who is Life itself.

Big Journeys and Small

Today, the Church celebrates the Second Sunday of Lent. But because today is March 17, no doubt many Catholics in our country and beyond are also commemorating Saint Patrick’s Day. Since it falls on a Sunday this year, there’s no reason to worry about celebrating with a little Irish fare, in moderation of course.

Everybody knows that St. Patrick is the patron saint of the Irish. But not everyone knows that St. Patrick was actually English by birth. More accurately, he was a Briton, born in what is now the UK under the last days of the Roman Empire. When he was a teenager, Patrick was kidnapped by Irish pirates. He spent some six years as their slave before escaping and returning to his family in Britain. However, after being ordained a priest, he decided to return to Ireland to evangelize the people that formerly had help him captive. Later, he became a bishop and did much to build up the Christian religion in Ireland. The rest is history.

In the first reading today, we hear about another man who is born in one place but finds his destiny somewhere else. Abram, or Abraham as he is later known, has just completed a journey from Chaldea to Canaan, a journey that he undertook at God’s prompting. It is in Canaan that God has promised Abraham that he will make him the “father of many nations,” with his descendants numbering as many as the stars in the sky. For Abraham, God’s plan is unexpected, probably perplexing, and yet Abraham responds obediently with faith in what God says. Like Patrick, he’s willing to go beyond what is comfortable and familiar to seek the fulfillment of what God has envisioned for his life.

Julius Schnoor von Carolsfeld, Abraham Will Be Father of Many Nations (c. 1850)

In many ways, the season of Lent has echoes of this theme: it invites us to respond with obedience to what is unexpected, even perplexing, in God’s plan for our lives. Lent offers us the chance to be purified, not only of our sins, but of every semblance of thinking we have ultimate control over what happens to us. It’s an opportunity for renewed obedience. We are invited to take up practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving as a way of remembering that we are not the center of the universe. Indeed, we shouldn’t even be the center of our own lives. God and those in need have a greater demand upon us. But while penitential practices are good, there is also the need for an interior spirit of obedience. As we heard on Ash Wednesday, taking up exterior disciplines don’t benefit us at all if we are not willing to be disciplined also on the inside.

If I may, I’d like to suggest that one of the best ways of learning interior discipline, and one of the hardest as well, is learning to accept the perplexing circumstances and unfortunate happenings of life – and indeed, not just to accept them, but to accept them joyfully. Fr. Jacques Philippe, a French priest and one of the best spiritual teachers today, writes about just this idea in his book Interior Freedom. He says that when something negative happens to us, our natural impulse in response is usually rebellion, rejecting that thing and trying to avoid it or undo it. If that fails, we respond with resignation, recognizing that the situation is beyond our control and that it’s best to just admit the fact. But while this may be the natural limit for most people, Fr. Philippe says that as Christians we have a further step: consent. In consenting to something negative, something beyond our control, we actually exercise our freedom, and freely choosing what before had seemed so negative, can grant us the joy and confidence that before we had lacked. By consent, we renew our love and trust in God and we deepen our hope in all things working together unto good (Rom 8:28).

Obviously, this is a lot easier said than done, and some negative things are more easily consented to than others. Learning how to accept an unexpected health diagnosis is going to be more challenging than some of the day to day inconveniences we face. But being joyful in consenting to those smaller nuisances and difficulties can help give us the interior discipline, the deeper trust in God, when the bigger challenges come along. We may not always understand God’s will but we can respond with faith in the promises he has made, just as Abraham did. We can be mindful of how God can take something negative – as he did for Patrick, even something as terrible as being kidnapped into slavery! – and utilize it ultimately as a step in our own road to sainthood.

Ultimately, we do this because it is what Christ did. In today’s Gospel, Jesus shows Peter, James, and John his divine glory, but he does so to prepare them for his own coming crucifixion and death. Jesus is the Divine Son of the Father, who has come to fulfill at last the covenant made to Abraham, to accomplish the plan of redemption foretold by the prophets. To do so, though, he must go to the Cross. If the Incarnate Lord obediently, joyfully went to his own death to realize our salvation, should we not seek to accept obediently, even joyfully, the hard things that come our way? 

James Barry, The Baptism of the King of Cashel by St. Patrick (c. 1780)

Friends, as we continue our traverse through this season of Lent, the lives of Abraham, Patrick, and even Jesus show us how we should navigate our own lives. The unexpected, perplexing, and even negative circumstances and happenings of our lives afford us the chance also to journey beyond what is comfortable and familiar and into a place of deeper trust, deeper faith in God. Whether those journeys are big or small, we can learn not just to accept them, but even to consent to them in joy because we believe that through them God is drawing us one step closer in our path toward him. That ultimately is our greatest journey, the destiny to which God calls each of us: from sinner to saint, from earth to heaven, from this life to life with him.

Keep Your Friend Close

Fifty years ago today, Mario Puzo’s classic novel The Godfather was published. It was made into a movie three years later, which is probably how many of us became familiar with it. Its the story of a mafia family in the mid-20th century, a story about power, corruption, and temptation. It’s something of an institution in American culture. I know young people today who have never seen the movie but are still familiar with quotes like: “Don’t ever take sides with anyone against the family again,” or “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse,” or “Leave the gun; take the cannoli.”

Maybe the movie’s most notable quote is: “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” In many ways, the Gospel we just heard presents us with a similar idea: that to defeat an enemy, you need to know him well and know the tactics he will use. At the beginning of his ministry, the Holy Spirit leads Jesus out into the desert to face the forces of darkness. Jesus has come after all to undo the devil’s hold on the world – his grip on humanity – and so the Lord goes out to encounter him at the beginning of his ministry. Jesus knows fully well who the Enemy of humanity is and what tactics he uses to tempt our nature, and so he is not tricked by the devil’s enticements. In the words of one of the prayers from Ash Wednesday, Lent is about “taking up battle against spiritual evils,” and so as we begin it, it’s good for us to remember to be on guard against our Adversary.

 The Temptation in the Wilderness (1824) by John St. John Long

But here’s a question: what does this story have to do with us? Yes, Jesus is victorious against the devil. But he’s the Son of God, right – and we are not! We are not even tempted in the same way as he was. The devil does not appear before us, offering us certain things; instead, we are usually tempted in far more mundane ways. And we know from experience that we often fall to temptation, whereas Jesus resisted and did not sin. So, what exactly are we supposed to learn?

The key to understanding this story’s relevance to us is that it occurs right after Jesus’s baptism. As John baptized the Lord in the Jordan River, a voice from heaven declared “This is my Beloved Son,” and as we enter into journey of Lent, we should recall that we share in that identity. We know we are not perfect – but by the grace of baptism, we too are God's beloved sons and daughters. In a sense, all of Lent is a meditation upon how our lives mimic the life of Jesus. He became Incarnate to share our human nature, and through baptism, we have been made partakers in Jesus’s divine nature. Thus, he shared our human life, and as we go through our human lives, we can share in his divine life.

Jesus was really tempted. Yes, in ways different from us – and yes, he did not fall to temptation, while we often do. But because Christ was tempted and overcame that temptation, then by his grace we too can overcome the devils’ assaults when they come. We share in who Jesus is and in what he has done. This is true for every part of our earthly life – whether we are coming face to face with evil, or whether we are subject to much more mundane forms of trial and temptation, we can bring the presence of Christ to bear within us and be victorious. We don’t have to wait until heaven to begin to live a life that is very much infused with divinity.

The question, of course, is how do we resist temptation? The logic of the world – the logic of The Godfather – would be that we need to learn all about the devil and his ways: “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” But in this case, the opposite is true: we have to stay close to Jesus in order to turn away from temptation when it comes. It’s true that we need some awareness of ourselves – e.g., what kinds of temptations we are most subject to, particular times and places and even persons that may be a source of temptation – and some awareness of the devil’s wiles. But the devil is a Deceiver, and if we try to outsmart him, we are going to fail. It’s much better to turn to Christ to help us in a moment of weakness.

So how do we do it? First, we have to recognize in the moment that we are being tempted. We are familiar enough with the kinds of temptations: anger, jealousy, resentment, gossip, lust, greed, sloth, petulance, immoderation, indulgence, fear, self-centeredness – the list goes on and on. But while temptation often arises, we are not powerless against it. That’s one of the great lessons of Lent – that we can learn to train our will, through self-restraint, to withstand the impulses of temptations when they come. It’s always with God’s grace, and never by ourselves, but our own agency is always involved.

Second, once we have recognized we are being tempted, we have to remember that every temptation is a lie. Every temptation is an attraction to something good, or something that seems good in the moment. But because the devil is a Deceiver, giving into temptation will never give us that seemingly good thing, at least not without costing us something much more important in return. After fasting for forty days, Jesus’s hunger must have made the idea of turning stones into bread very attractive. But to do so, he would have had to show a lack of trust in his Father’s love and in his Father’s care, something he valued much more highly than food.

And so, third, after we recognize we are being tempted, and after we realize the temptation is a lie, we invite Jesus’s strength to become our own and we powerfully dismiss the temptation present to us. We see the falsehood for what it is, and we reject it. It’s very helpful at this time to do something to counteract the temptation – maybe to turn to prayer; maybe to do something kind for someone else, especially if they're the ones aggravating us in the moment; if nothing else to get up and change our surroundings and try to remove the immediacy of the temptation so that we can recall the goodness of our relationship with God. 

Ilya Repin, The Temptation of Christ (1890)

Will this always work? No, not always – not because the method is flawed, but because we are. Sometimes we will give into temptation against our better judgment. In many ways, we will continue to struggle against some form of sin all of our lives. But by God’s grace, we can at least learn to reject the big sins – those grave sins that rupture our relationship with God and strip us of his grace. Because we are connected to Christ by our baptism, we can keep from falling into mortal sin again and again. And above all else, we can resist the devil’s most pernicious temptation of all: to despair, to give up hope and believe that we are not capable of turning away from sin and so it is pointless to try. We are capable, because Jesus makes us capable! And even if we fall, we need never despair of the power of the Lord’s mercy to pick us up, dust us off, and set us aright again.

Friends, as we begin Lent, the Gospel today reminds us to call upon our baptismal graces in our struggles against sin and temptation. Our Enemy may be close – but our Friend, Jesus, is even closer. Temptations to sin at times may seem ever-present, but the Lord’s presence is also always at hand, always more powerful, always ready for us to call upon him in our time of need. His protection is greater than that of any Godfather. So, don’t be afraid to brave your own wilderness this Lent – don’t fear doing spiritual battle with the weapons of self-restraint, prayer, and works of charity. But more importantly, let this Lent be a time to come to know in a deeper and fuller way your dearest Friend, Jesus Christ, the only One in the end who makes us an offer too good to refuse. This Lent, let’s strive to model our lives more and more after the life of Christ, beginning with resisting every temptation that comes our way. May the Lord’s Body and Blood, which we come forward to receive in this Mass, fill us with the knowledge and the wisdom of God so that we can prefer nothing to the love of Christ.

"Rend Your Hearts": Ash Wednesday

St. Jerome Doing Penance in His Study (c. 1618) by Luis Tristán

“Rend your hearts and not your garments,” the prophet Joel says to us today. Seems like kind of a strange thing to say, right? But if you read the Old Testament, you will disover that the tearing of one’s clothing was a traditional way to express extreme mourning. For example, when Job finds out all of his children have been killed, he tears his garments and prays for death. To rend one’s clothes was understood as a sign of devastation, utter loss.

The ashes we will receive on our foreheads today signify much the same thing. The ashes are not just a reminder about our own mortality; they tell us that we have lost something of immense importance. What have we lost? For what are we in mourning? That special gift from God that we call grace: a sharing in God’s divine life. When we sin, we reject that gift – we fracture that relationship with God. And when we recognize that fact, when we realize what we have lost, we feel sorrow and we mourn.

Fortunately, our God is a merciful God, and he never wants us to remain in that place of sorrow. Instead he calls us back into relationship. When we repent, we receive anew his grace: his love, his freedom, his joy. But we don’t just go back to being the same as we were before – we should be changed, transformed, wiser for where we have gone astray and where God has brought us back.

The ashes we receive will be an exterior sign of our sinfulness, but exterior signs are not enough. As the prophet Joel says, what God really wants is a transformation of our heart. We can go to great lengths in our exterior penance – tearing our clothing, covering ourselves in ashes, or fasting and praying visibly as Jesus says in the Gospel. But none of that will do us any good at all unless we are also changed on the inside, unless we become aware of just how destructive sin is for our relationship with God. We tend to focus a lot on the individual sins we commit, but those are just indicative of the deeper problem: that too often you and I prefer our sins to the love of relationship with God. And so it is that we must learn to “rend” our hearts, to tear them away from the sinful things that they cling to. We cannot learn to love the Lord God as we should until we learn to hate the false things our hearts so often prefer.

Friends, this Lent, let’s take up our different penances and spiritual practices not just with the intention of trying to be a little bit better, a little bit holier, but instead with the desire to be completely new. Recognize what sin always does, what it costs you, and reject it completely. Allow God to transform your heart completely – indeed, to give you a new heart, a new way of living with him. “Rend your hearts, not your garments, and return to the LORD, your God. For gracious and merciful is he.”

Rooted in Faith

At the end of 2017, the Collins English Dictionary announced its annual selection of the Word of the Year. It was actually two words – “fake news”. Those words have taken on a new life of their own in recent years, used not only in political contexts by elected officials but even in media, sports, culture, and daily life. The words “fake news” express quickly and easily something that we are all familiar with – something artificial, mere hype, a story that is a non-story.

But while “fake news” is certainly a thing, sometimes real and important events are discredited in the same way. For example, perhaps no other event in history has been as frequently written off as just “fake news” as the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Just like in Jesus’s time, many people today believe the Resurrection didn’t occur – even people who claim to follow Jesus as Christians! They may think the Resurrection story is symbolic or allegorical, some kind of spiritual phenomenon but one that doesn’t involve the Body of Jesus in the Tomb actually being raised from the dead.

But the Resurrection is a real occurrence, something which actually happened: the person Jesus, having suffered and died on the Cross, rose again after three days so that we might share in his eternal life. To believe in that is at the very heart of the Christian faith, and for the last several Sundays, we have been hearing St. Paul speak about exactly that idea in the second reading of the Mass. The readings have come from the fifteenth chapter of the First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians. The letter we call “the First Letter” is actually at least his second letter to the Corinthians, since he references a previous letter he had written to them. Apparently, they then wrote back with several questions about the meaning of the Christian faith. While we don’t have those original two letters, we do have Paul’s letter which answers those questions they ask – we call that letter “the First Letter” and it is from that which we have been hearing.

The central point of St. Paul in these excerpts is that Jesus’s Resurrection is not just something nice to think about, or something that we hope happened – it is the cornerstone of our entire faith. Jesus rose from the dead and lives still now at the right hand of his Father, and we too can share in his life. We believe in that more fully than we believe the sun will rise tomorrow morning! St. Paul even goes so far as to say that Christian faith has no meaning, no point if Jesus did not really rise; our faith would be totally in vain. But as we profess in faith each Sunday, Jesus really did rise, and so our faith is not in vain. In fact, though it occurred 2000 years ago, the Resurrection is the most important thing that has ever happened, not just in the world’s history, but in each of our lives as well. St. Paul writes to the Corinthians, and to us, to explain how the Resurrection changes everything for us. By it, God’s love has triumphed over the power of sin and death, and the victory of Jesus is something that can be extended to us as well. It is the Resurrection which allows us to look at every sorrow, every suffering as impermanent, to even look at something as fearful to all of us as our own death and to turn up our noses at it, to say: “Where, O death, is your victory… your sting?”

The Ecstasy of St. Paul – painted for Paul Scarron (c. 1650) by Nicolas Poussin

If faith in Jesus’s Resurrection should shape how we view our deaths, then it should also shape how we view our lives as well. To have faith in the Resurrection of Jesus means to see every part of our lives in light of the goal of sharing in Christ’s new Risen Life. That is the goal, and Jesus tells us in the Gospel today that those who live with that goal will live differently than others. Each of our lives is like a tree, he says, and we will be judged by the kind of fruit our tree bears. Of course, the good news is that we don’t have to produce good fruit all by ourselves; in fact, we always rely upon God’s grace to produce the good works that he calls us to do. As God draws us to share in the eternal life of his Son, he helps us to begin to live that life even now, allowing us to flourish and to glorify him by the good works that we do. But to bring forth abundant fruit, our tree must be rooted in faith – it must be rooted in a radical dependence on Jesus and on what his Resurrection means for us, not just at the close of our lives but here and now as well.

Friends, in just a few days, we’ll begin the season of Lent once more. The forty days of penance will be a great time for each of us to do a bit of self-examination. What kind of fruit is my life producing? Is my life rooted in faith – in Jesus and in his Resurrection – or in something else? Do I live my life differently because of my faith, in a way that is visible and apparent? The message of Jesus is Good News, not “fake news,” because it is the path to sharing in his Resurrection, the only thing in the end that truly matters. May this Eucharist which we are about to share be a sign and a promise of the Lord’s Risen Life that we hope to share one day.

Power and Splendor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Into Deep Water

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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