Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Category: Easter

  • Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of the Lord: The Easter Vigil

    Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of the Lord: The Easter Vigil

    Tonight’s readings

    We English-speakers have just one word for time, but other languages have more; those languages recognize the different kinds of time.  Most notably for us because it is reflected in the New Testament, the Greek language has two kinds of time: chronos and kairos.  Chronos is the kind of time you can measure.  It’s a day or a week or even the timeline of a project at work.  Kairos on the other hand can be thought of as quality time: a summer afternoon spent with your family, a visit to a sick loved one, or a chance encounter with an old friend.  This kind of time is mostly unmeasurable, and in some sense kairos is always “now.”

    It’s important to keep these kinds of time in mind because the world sometimes sees time in a rather cynical way.   But that’s not how our God sees time.  Did you hear what we prayed at the very beginning of tonight’s vigil?  Listen again: “Christ yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega, all time belongs to him, and all ages, to him be glory and power through every age forever.  Amen.”  And these are important, even brave words for us to offer on this most holy night.  Tonight’s vigil proclaims that all time is holy, sanctified by our God who has walked with us through our yesterdays, remains with us today, and forges on with us toward our tomorrows.  There is not a single moment of our life, not a single moment of our history that is not holy because every moment has been, is now, and always will be imbued with the presence of our God who is holiness itself.  That’s what we gather to celebrate on this holy night.

    But as we have walked through Lent, and especially through this Holy Week, there may even be a temptation, I think, to come to think that the world, and especially human history, was a creative experiment that went horribly wrong, that God sent his Son to clean up the mess only to have him killed for it, and then in a last move of desperation raised him up out of the grave.  But we know that’s not right.  Salvation was not some kind of dumb luck or happy accident.  The salvation of the world had been part of God’s creative plan all along.  Humanity, given the grace of free will had, and has, certainly gone astray.  But God did not create us simply to follow our own devices and end up in hell.  He created us for himself, and so sent his Son Jesus to walk our walk, to die our death, and to rise up over it all in the everlasting promise of eternal life.  That’s what we celebrate on this most holy of all nights.

    There is a cynical view of our world that would have us believe that everything is futile and that the only possible way to endure this world is to cultivate a kind of cynical apathy that divorces us from our God, our loved ones, our communities and our world.  We are conditioned to believe that time, and life itself, is meaningless, that there is nothing worth living for, and certainly nothing worth dying for.  But tonight’s vigil debunks all of that.  Tonight we are assured by our God that our present is no less redeemable than was our past, nor is it any less filled with promise than is our future.

    Tonight we have heard stories of our salvation.  Each of our readings has been a stop in the history of God’s love for us.  God’s plan for salvation, and his sanctification of time, began back at the beginning of it all.  Each of the days was hallowed with precious creation, and all of it was created and pronounced good.  Then Abraham’s faithfulness and righteousness earned us a future as bright as a zillion twinkling stars.  Later, as Moses and the Israelites stood trapped by the waters of the red sea, God’s providence made a way for them and cut off their pursuers, making the future safe for those God calls his own.  The prophet Isaiah calls us to seek the Lord while he may be found, not spending our lives on things that fail to satisfy, but investing in our relationship with God that gives us everything.  The prophet Ezekiel foretells the recreation all humanity will experience as they come to know Christ and are filled with the Spirit.  St. Paul rejoices in the baptism that has washed away the stains of sin as we have died and risen with Christ, and has brought us into a new life that leads ultimately to God’s kingdom.  And finally, our Gospel tonight tells us not to be afraid, to go forth into the Galilee of our future and expect to see the Lord.

    We Christians have been spared the necessity of a cynical view of the world and its people.  Our gift has been and always is the promise that Jesus Christ is with us forever, even until the end of the world.  And so, just as God sanctified all of time through his interventions of salvation, so too he has sanctified our lives through the interventions of Sacrament.  We are a sacramental people, purified and reborn in baptism, fed and strengthened in the Eucharist, and in Confirmation, set on fire to burn brightly and light up our world.  Tonight we recall these three Sacraments of Initiation and recommit ourselves to the promises of our baptism.  Also, for the first time since Thursday, we have the opportunity to celebrate the Eucharist together, drawing strength from the food our God provides.

    These days of Lent have been a sanctifying journey for all of us, as we have walked the Stations of the Cross together, attended our parish mission, celebrated the sacraments, spent time before the Eucharist, gathered as a community for a fish fry or pizza fest or a soup and bread supper, and so much more.  Christ has definitely sanctified this Lenten time for all of us, and has now brought us to the fullness of this hour, when he rises over sin and death to bring us all to the promise of life eternal.

    And it is this very night that cleanses our world from all the stains of sin and death and lights up the darkness.  The Exsultet, the Easter Proclamation that I sang when we entered Church tonight, tells us: “Of this night, Scripture says, ‘The night will be clear as day: it will become my light, my joy.’ The power of this holy night dispels all evil, washes guilt away, restores lost innocence, brings mourners joy; it casts out hatred, brings us peace, and humbles earthly pride.”  What a gift this night is, not just to us gathered here in this church, not just to all the Catholics gathered together throughout the world on this holy night, but to all people in every time and place.  Our world needs the light and our time needs the presence of Christ, and our history needs salvation.  Blessed be God who never leaves his people without the great hope of his abiding presence!

    And so, having come through this hour to be sanctified in this vigil, we will shortly be sent forth to help sanctify our own time and place.  Brightened by this beautiful vigil, we now become a flame to light up our darkened world.  That is our ministry in the world.  That is our call as believers.  That is our vocation as disciples.  “May the Morning Star, which never sets, find this flame still burning: Christ, that Morning Star, who came back from the dead, and shed his peaceful light on all mankind, [the Son of God] who lives and reigns forever and ever.  Amen.”

     

     

  • The Solemnity of Pentecost

    The Solemnity of Pentecost

    Today’s readings

    We believe in the Holy Spirit,
    the Lord, the giver of life,
    who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
    With the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified.
    He has spoken through the prophets.

    You know those words very well; we proclaim them every Sunday, and will proclaim them in a few minutes.  This is the part of the Creed that speaks of the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, whose feast we celebrate today.  Today is the birthday of the Church, the moment when the Spirit descended upon those first Apostles and was passed on through them to every Christian ever since.  The Holy Spirit emboldened those first disciples and continues to pour gifts on all of us so that the Church can continue the creative and redemptive works of the Father and the Son until Christ comes in glory.  That is what we gather to celebrate today.

    At the Ascension of Christ into heaven, which we celebrated last Sunday, the apostles had been told to wait in the city until they were clothed with power from on high.  This is exactly what we celebrate today.  Christ returned to the Father in heaven, and they sent the Holy Spirit to be with the Church until the end of time.  That Holy Spirit is absolutely necessary so that God can continue to work in the world and be in the world while Christ was no longer physically present.

    The Holy Spirit works in us and in the world in so many ways.  But the way that he works in us that jumps out at me today is through language.  The Spirit is speaking powerfully in the world, and our Liturgy reminds us of that.  It is the Holy Spirit that speaks to the world in the voice of God.  Consider what we have heard and will yet hear today:

    In the alternate opening prayer, the Church prays:  “Loosen our tongues to sing your praise in words beyond the power of speech, for without your Spirit man could never raise his voice in words of peace or announce the truth that Jesus is Lord.”

    In our first reading, the Spirit spoke through the apostles.  Even though all of them were Galileans, and spoke some dialect of Aramaic, still people who had gathered in Jerusalem from all over the then-known world, people of every race and language group at that time, all of them came to hear the Gospel proclaimed in their very own language, as though it had been spoken just for them, which of course, it was.  This incredible miracle is often seen as the undoing of the Tower of Babel story, in which men who thought they could build a tower high enough to get to heaven all by themselves were penalized by the invention of all kinds of human languages which prevented people from speaking to each other.  Pentecost, then, was the healing of this ill.

    In our Gospel, words are still used by the Holy Spirit.  Jesus tells the apostles even before the Passion, that he would send the Holy Spirit, the Advocate or Paraclete who would teach them everything, and remind them of all Jesus told him while he was alive.

    In the Preface to the Eucharistic Prayer, which I will sing in a few minutes, the Church prays: “Today we celebrate the great beginning of your Church when the Holy Spirit made known to all peoples the one true God, and created from the many languages of man one voice to profess one faith.”

    The Holy Spirit speaks to us to give us what we need, and speaks through us in order to bring the world to God.  The Spirit is the voice of the Church proclaiming the one, true faith, and the voice of each disciple courageously living that faith day in and day out.  Jesus tells us elsewhere in the Gospel that when we are challenged for our faith, we need not fear that we do not have the words to speak in those moments, because the Holy Spirit will speak through us more eloquently than we could on our own.

    The Holy Spirit is also the voice of our prayer.  Saint Paul reminds us of what we certainly know: we do not know how to pray as we ought.  But he also reminds us that we need not worry when words fail us and we cannot pray, because the Holy Spirit groans within us and speaks the language of God who hears us and hears the Spirit in us.

    I am not a master of languages.  I tried but failed to learn French, Spanish and Greek at various times in my life.  Some days I even have trouble with English!  And so not having the words to speak is very real to me in my Spiritual life.  But I certainly learned what Saint Paul taught in my second year in seminary, when both my mother and father were diagnosed with cancer within about a month of each other.  When that happened, I had no idea what to even say to God any more.  The only prayer that I had in me was “help.”  And that, along with the Spirit’s groaning, was enough.  Fellow seminarians prayed for me and with me and over me, and I was eventually able to pray again.  That was the Holy Spirit.

    The Holy Spirit speaks to us all the time, I think, and we would do well to tune in and listen closely.  The Spirit speaks when we are about to embark on a venture or come to a decision and gives us pause because we have not prayed the issue well enough. The Spirit speaks to us when we are agitated or worried or upset or frustrated or dejected, and gives us peace to know we are not alone, that God is there with us in the storm.  The Spirit speaks to us when we are discerning and helps us to know the way we should go.

    Then too, the Holy Spirit speaks in us and through us all the time. The Spirit speaks through us when we know something is wrong and gives us the courage to say so.  The Spirit speaks through us whenever we offer someone kind words, even if we’re not sure that our words are helpful – the Spirit even speaks through us if we have no words, and are just there to be present to those in need.  The Spirit speaks through us when we perceive the injustice in our world and reach out to those in need, to those who are marginalized, and to those the world has forgotten.  The Spirit sings in us when we join with the Church in prayer and praise to God, especially when we gather to celebrate the Eucharist, the greatest prayer of the Church.  The Spirit is the one who puts the prayers we offer in our hearts in the first place, and who gives us the words to offer them to God, even groaning for us when our own words are not adequate.

    When we are one, united in the Spirit, we speak to a world that is not inclined to understand the language of faith, in a way that moves them and brings them back to God who created the many peoples of the world to be one with him forever.  That is the great project of our lives, the great project of the Church, the mission that owns us and defines us as disciples.  As Cardinal George is fond of saying, the Church does not have a mission; the Mission has a Church.  And it is that Church that speaks words of the Spirit to proclaim the truth, that Jesus is Lord, and that he is the way, the truth and the life.

    In the Creed, we proclaim that the Holy Spirit has spoken through the prophets.  But that prophetic word is far from over.  The Spirit-spoken prophecy goes on, in the words and actions of people of faith, every day in every place, so that all people can have the opportunity to know the truth that God is alive and fully intends to love his people into heaven.

  • Saturday of the Seventh Week of Easter

    Saturday of the Seventh Week of Easter

    Today’s readings

    One of the greatest obstacles to the Christian life is comparing ourselves to others. Because, and I’ll just say it, discipleship isn’t meant to be fair. At least not as we see fairness. The essence of discipleship is doing what we were put here to do, we ourselves. We discern that vocation by reflecting on our own gifts and talents, given to us by God, by prayerfully meditating on God’s will for us, and then engaging in conversation with the Church to see how best to use those talents and gifts. That’s the process of discernment, which is always aided by the working of the Holy Spirit.

    What causes us to get off track, though, is looking at other people and what they are doing, or the gifts they have, or the opportunities they have received. We might be envious of their gifts or the opportunities they have to use them. We may see what they are doing and think we can do it better. We might be frustrated that they don’t do what we would do if we were in their place. And all of that is nonsense. It’s pride, and it’s destructive. It will ruin the Christian life and leave us bitter people.

    That’s the correction Jesus made to Peter. Poor Peter was getting it all wrong once again. He thought Jesus was revealing secrets to John that he wanted to know also. But whatever it was that Jesus said to John as they reclined at table that night was none of Peter’s business, nor was it ours. Peter had a specific job to do, and so do we. If we are serious about our discipleship, then we would do well to take our eyes off what others are doing or saying or experiencing, and instead focus on the wonderful gifts and opportunities we have right in front of us. As for what other people are up to, as Jesus said, “what concern is that of yours?”

    As always, the Psalmist has it right. We don’t look at others, we have only one place to look: “The just will gaze on your face, O Lord.”

  • Friday of the Seventh Week of Easter

    Friday of the Seventh Week of Easter

    Today’s readings

    Jesus’ words to Peter in this Gospel reading are a mixture of comfort, challenge, and warning. Peter had just messed up in the worst way possible by denying his friend not once but three times. But then comes the question not once but three times: “Peter, do you love me?” This is comfort because with each asking, Jesus is healing Peter from the inside out.

    Then words of challenge: “Feed my sheep.” When we are forgiven or graced in any way, we, like Peter, are then challenged to do something about it. Feed my sheep, follow me, give me your life, come to know my grace in a deeper way.

    And then words of warning: “when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.” When we give ourselves over to God, that necessarily means that we might have to go in a direction we might not otherwise choose.

    But then Jesus brings Peter back to comfort and healing once again by saying “Follow me.” No matter what we disciples have done in our past, no matter how many times we have messed up or in what ways, there is always forgiveness if we give ourselves over to our Savior and our friend.

  • Thursday of the Seventh Week of Easter

    Thursday of the Seventh Week of Easter

    Today’s readings

    Sometimes we get an idea and it seems well, a little uncomfortable.  We may well have had a call or even a gentle moving from the Lord, and are afraid to act on it.  Today’s Scriptures speak to those of us who are sometimes hesitant to do what the Lord is calling on us to do.

    I think St. Paul must have been exhausted by this point in his life.  As we hear of him in our reading from Acts today, he is saved from one angry mob, only to learn he is to go to another.  Out of the frying pan and into the fire.  He has borne witness to Christ in Jerusalem, but now he has to go and do it all over again in Rome.  And underneath it all, he knows there is a good chance he is going to die.

    In the Gospel today, Jesus prays for all of his disciples, and also for all those who “will believe in me through their word.”  And that, of course, includes all of us.  He prays that we would be unified and would be protected from anything or anyone who might seek to divide us from each other, or even from God.  He says that we are a gift to him, and that he wishes us to be where he will be for all eternity.

    What we see in our Liturgy today is that God keeps safe the ones he loves.  If he calls us to do something, he will sustain us through it.  Maybe we’ll have to witness to Jesus all over again or we’ll have to defend our faith against people in our community or workplace – or wherever – who just don’t understand.  We might well feel hesitant at these times, but we can and must go forward, acting on God’s call.  When we do that, we can make our own prayer in the words of the Psalm today: “Keep me safe, O God; you are my hope.”

  • Wednesday of the Seventh Week of Easter

    Wednesday of the Seventh Week of Easter

    Today’s readings

    The stewardship of the truth has always been the special care of the Church.  Error and lies can destroy us, and so we must constantly be vigilant that we are protecting the truth as Jesus gave it to us, as it has been revealed by God through Scripture and Tradition.  In our first reading, Paul pounds that message home, pleading with the Ephesians and recalling the tears with which he taught them.  In the Gospel, Jesus too, praying for the fledgling Church, asks the Father to “consecrate them in the truth.”  We are told that the truth will set us free; the converse then is that it is error and lies that enslave us.  We then, must be custodians of the truth too, so that the Church can continue to preach the word in freedom.

  • Monday of the Seventh Week of Easter

    Monday of the Seventh Week of Easter

    Today’s readings

    In these days after the Ascension, the Liturgy calls us to turn and find our hope in God.  Even though he is unseen, he is still very much with us.  He may be in the heaven of our hopes, but he also walks among us.  We are sustained by the hope that we will join him one day in the place he is preparing for us.  The world may very well scatter us and give us trouble; Jesus said as much.  But we can take courage in the fact that Jesus has overcome the world and has not abandoned us.

  • The Ascension of the Lord

    The Ascension of the Lord

    Today’s readings

    For the early Apostles and disciples, today’s feast had to be a kind of “now what?” experience for them.  Think about what they’ve been through.  Their Lord had been betrayed by one of their friends, he had been through a farce of a trial and put to death in a horrible, ignoble way, they had been hiding in fear thinking they might be next, they had questioned what they were supposed to do without their Lord, and then they witness the Resurrection: Christ walks among them for a time, appearing to them and making himself known.  They had seen redemption of a way of life they almost had abandoned, and now, on this feast of the Ascension, their Lord is leaving them again.  In our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, you can almost feel the amazement and desperation they are experiencing as they stare up into the heavens, incredulous that their Lord is gone, again.

    So once again, God sends two messengers, two men in white garments, to set them straight.  God had sent two men in dazzling garments to the women at the tomb on the day of the Resurrection as well.  That time, the men reassured the women that the Lord had not been moved or stolen, but had risen from the dead.  This time, the men appear to the Apostles, assuring them that the Lord would return in the same way as he had just departed from their sight.  Both times, it was the same kind of messengers, with the same kind of hopeful message.  Go forward, don’t worry, God is in control.

    One of the great themes of Catholic theology is the “already, and not yet.” Basically, that means that we disciples of Christ already have a share in the life of God and the promise of heaven, but we are not yet there. So we who believe in Jesus and live our faith every day have the hope of heaven before us, even if we are not home yet. And this hope isn’t just some “iffy” kind of thing: it’s not “I hope I’ll go to heaven one day.” No, it’s the promise that because of the salvation we have in Christ, we who are faithful will one day live and reign with him. This gives us hope in the midst of the sorrows that we experience in this world.

    Another great theme of Catholic theology is that our God is transcendent, but also immanent. Transcendent means that our God is higher than the heavens, more lofty than our thoughts and dreams, beyond anything we can imagine. Whatever we say about God, like “God is love” or “God is good” – those things only begin to scratch the surface of who God is, because God is transcendent beyond anything our limited words can describe. But our God is also immanent. God is not some far off entity that has brought the world into existence and set the events of our lives in motion and then drops back to observe things from afar. No, our God is one who walks among us and knows our sorrow and our pain and celebrates our joy. Saint Augustine said that God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. Our God may indeed be mysterious and beyond us, but he is also the one we can reach out and touch.  If that weren’t so, the Eucharist would be pretty meaningless.

    As you can see, Catholic theology is generally speaking not exclusive. We are not either already sharing in the promise or not yet sharing in it, but we are “already and not yet.” Our God is not either transcendent or immanent, but both transcendent and immanent. These two great theological themes come to a kind of crossroads here on this feast of the Ascension.

    Today, as Christ ascends into heaven, our share in the life of God and the promise of heaven is sealed. We have hope of eternal life because our Lord has gone before us to prepare a place for us. If he had not gone, we could never have shared in this life. So, although Jesus has left the apostles yet again, they can rejoice because they know that the promise is coming to fulfillment. We do not possess it yet, because we are not home yet, but we share in it already, because Christ is our promise.

    Today, as Christ ascends into heaven, he once again, with the Father, is transcendent, because we, along with the Apostles, can no longer see him. But he remains immanent by his promise to be with us always. Again, I will quote St. Augustine who said of Christ that “He did not leave heaven when he came down to us; nor did he withdraw from us when he went up again into heaven. The fact that he was in heaven even while he was on earth is borne out by his own statement: No one has ever ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man, who is in heaven.” St. Augustine teaches that the notion of time is that everything is present to God all at once. This explains how our celebration of the Eucharist in a few minutes brings us to Calvary at the moment when Jesus gave his life for us. And it explains how Jesus can ascend into heaven and yet remain among us. Time is a limitation for us humans, but not for God who created time in the first place.

    All of this theology can be heady stuff, but what it boils down to is this: because Jesus died, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven, we now have the hope of heaven and of sharing in the very life of God. Even though we do not possess heaven yet, we know that it belongs to all who have faith in Christ and live that faith every day. And even though we do not see Jesus walking among us, he is still absolutely present among us and promises to be with us forever. The preface to the Eucharistic prayer which I will sing in a few minutes makes this very clear; it says:

    Christ, the mediator between God and humanity,
    judge of the world and Lord of all,
    has passed beyond our sight,
    not to abandon us but to be our hope.
    Christ is the beginning, the head of the Church;
    where he has gone, we hope to follow.

    Jesus, having explained the Scriptures to his Apostles yet again, tells them “You are witnesses of these things.” And so they don’t have the luxury of just standing there, staring up into the sky for hours, dejected and crushed because the One who had been their hope had disappeared. No, as the Gospel tells us today, they “returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and they were continually in the temple praising God.” They are witnesses, “clothed with power from on high,” and they must be filled with the hope and joy of the resurrection and ascension of the Lord.

    We disciples are witnesses of these things too. We must witness to a world filled with violence and oppression and sadness that our God promises life without end for all those who believe in him. And we have that hope already, even though not yet. We must witness to a world languishing in the vapidity of relativism and individualism and New Age Oprah and Dr. Phil philosophy that it is Jesus Christ, the Lord of All, who is one with us in heaven, and present among us on earth, who fulfills our hopes and longings and will never leave us. We must be witnesses to all these things, living with great joy, continually praising God because, as our opening prayer said so eloquently, Christ’s “ascension is our glory and our hope.”  We too might hear those men in dazzling white garments speak God’s words of hope to us: go forward, don’t worry, God is in control.

  • Saturday of the Sixth Week of Easter

    Saturday of the Sixth Week of Easter

    Today’s readings

    Today we’re gathered on what is, for us, the eve of the Ascension.  While the reading that we have in today’s Gospel is from John’s account of the eve of the Passion, the words could well have been spoken to the Apostles on the eve of the Ascension too.  Jesus speaks of leaving the world and going back to the Father, this time until he returns in glory.  The Twelve had to be broken hearted all over again.  They had lost their friend and Lord briefly to death, but had been encouraged by him as he appeared to them after the Ascension, and now he is preparing to leave again.

    But the truth of it is that nothing will happen with the fledgling Church until he does leave.  Only then will the Father send the Holy Spirit to be with the Church until the end of time, giving the early disciples and us later disciples the grace and strength to go forward and proclaim the kingdom and call the world to repentance and grace. If God’s purpose is to be advanced on this earth, then Jesus has to return to the Father. If the Spirit does not descend, the Church would not be born. If the Church were not born, the Gospel would be but an obscure footnote in the history of the world.

    The Good News for us is that the Holy Spirit continues to work among us today, as often as we call on him.  “Ask and you will receive,” Jesus says, and so we ask and receive the indwelling of the Holy Spirit for the glory and praise of God. We disciples, we friends of Jesus, can count on his blessing, the rich gift of the Holy Spirit, the great witness of the Church. Our lives are enriched by our faith and our discipleship. What we do here on earth, what we suffer in our lives, what we celebrate — all this will bear fruit for the glory of God.

  • Wednesday of the Sixth Week of Ordinary Time

    Wednesday of the Sixth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Today’s first reading finds Saint Paul proclaiming Christ to the Greeks at the Areopagus.  These people were Gentiles, of course, even pagans.  But, as Paul noted, they had an altar to “an unknown God,” and so he finds them very religious.  And so he connects Christ to that unknown God, making him known to them, and is able to convert a few there.  At the heart of this event is the truth that God known, in some way, by most people, even if they don’t know it.  Some have said there is a God-shaped hole in our lives, and we can only ultimately fill it with his presence in our lives.  This gives us the mandate to witness to Christ, helping to make him known to all those who don’t know how much they need him.  We know that in Christ, we “live and move and have our being.”  We have to make sure everyone else knows that, too.