Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Tag: Cross

  • The Easter Vigil in the Holy Night

    The Easter Vigil in the Holy Night

    Today’s readings

    We should glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,
    in whom is our salvation, life and resurrection,
    through whom we are saved and delivered.

    During this Triduum journey, I have been reflecting in my homilies on the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. I’ve talked about the fact that this is not a popular thing to do because we as a society are not big on suffering. If we put a sign out on Chicago Avenue that said, “Come suffer with us,” I’m pretty sure we’d be all alone here in church! We certainly do suffer in this life, but no one wants it – as well we shouldn’t. The problem is that we tend to gloss over it, not acknowledge it, be embarrassed by it. Suffering becomes the elephant in the room that no one wants to acknowledge, and that’s too bad, really.

    Certainly it seems odd that I would continue to talk about the Cross on this holy night. I mean, we’ve moved on, haven’t we? We came here for resurrection and want to get on with our lives. Just like we tend to rush through our grieving of loved ones – to our own psychological and spiritual peril, by the way – so too we want to rush through our Lent and particularly our Good Friday and Holy Saturday, so that we can eat our Peeps and chocolate bunnies and call it a day.

    But we can’t, right? If we’ve prayed well this Lent and particularly in these Triduum days, we know how we got here to this moment. We know that we don’t get an Easter Sunday without a Good Friday, that we can’t have resurrection if there hasn’t been death, that we can’t have salvation if there hasn’t been a sacrifice.

    And there sure was a sacrifice. Our Lord suffered a brutal, ugly death between two hardened criminals, taking the place of a revolutionary. He was beaten, humiliated, mistreated and nails were pounded into his flesh, that flesh that he borrowed from us. He hung in agony for three hours and finally, when all was finished, he cried out in anguish and handed over his spirit. The veil of the temple was torn in two, there was a tremor in the earth, and an eclipse of the sun. And no wonder, the light of the Messiah had been extinguished on the Cross.

    Placed in the tomb, he descended into hell. Collecting the souls of the blessed ones of old, he waited while earth mourned and disciples scattered and everyone wondered what happened to this Christ.

    But then came the morning. The Sabbath was over, and the sun was rising in the east on the first day of the week, and the women came with spices to prepare our Lord for burial. But they couldn’t: he has been raised! He is not here! Our Lord is risen and death is defeated! The menacing, ugly Cross has become the altar of salvation! The instrument of horror has become the Cross of glory, and we can do no less than praise our God!

    Saint John Damascene reflected on this salvific reality. He writes, “By nothing else except the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ has death been brought low: The sin of our first parent destroyed, hell plundered, resurrection bestowed, the power given us to despise the things of this world, even death itself, the road back to the former blessedness made smooth, the gates of paradise opened, our nature seated at the right hand of God and we made children and heirs of God. By the cross all these things have been set aright…It is a seal that the destroyer may not strike us, a raising up of those who lie fallen, a support for those who stand, a staff for the infirm, a crook for the shepherded, a guide for the wandering, a perfecting of the advanced, salvation for soul and body, a deflector of all evils, a cause of all goods, a destruction of sin, a plant of resurrection, and a tree of eternal life.”

    It’s so important that we enter into Lent and the Triduum every year. Not just because we need to be called back from our sinfulness to the path of life – yes, there is that, but it’s not primary here. What is so important is that we see that the Cross is our path too. In this life we will have trouble: our Savior promises us that. But the Cross is what sees him overcome the world and all the suffering it brings us. We will indeed suffer in this life, but thanks be to God, if we join ourselves to him, if we take up our own crosses with faithfulness, then we can merit a share in our Lord’s resurrection, that reality that fulfills all of salvation history that we’ve heard in tonight’s readings.

    In these Triduum days, we have seen the Cross call us to service, we’ve seen it stand for our suffering, and tonight we’ve seen it help us on the way to salvation. The cross is brutal and ugly and harsh. But it’s also beautiful, if we have eyes to see it.

    We should glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,
    in whom is our salvation, life and resurrection,
    through whom we are saved and delivered.

    He is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

  • Tuesday of the Fifth Week of Lent

    Tuesday of the Fifth Week of Lent

    Today’s readings

    Just as the saraph serpent was lifted up on a pole in the desert for the people to see, and thus live, so the Son of Man, Jesus Christ, was lifted up on the cross for the salvation of the world.  In these late Lenten days, as we look upon the cross, either here in church or in our homes, our hearts surely must be stirred to remember the painful price our Lord paid for our salvation.  With hearts filled with gratitude, we come to this Eucharist, with our eyes fixed on our Lord lifted up for us, who pours himself out for us again and still.  When we see him lifted up, we remember that he is “I AM,” our crucified and risen Lord, and whenever we look to him, we are saved from all that ails us, from our sins and brokenness, and we ourselves are lifted up to eternal life.

  • Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord

    Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord

    Today’s readings

    I’ve always felt that the celebration of Palm Sunday was a little strange.  We start out on a seemingly triumphant note.  Jesus enters Jerusalem, the city of the center of the Jewish religion, the city he has been journeying toward throughout the gospel narrative, and he enters it to the adulation of throngs.  Cloaks are thrown down in the street, the people wave palms and chant “Hosanna.”  This is it, isn’t it?  It seems like Jesus’ message has finally been accepted, at least by the crowds who have long been yearning for a messiah to deliver them from foreign oppression.

    Only that wasn’t the kind of salvation Jesus came to offer.  Instead, he preached forgiveness and healed people from the inside out.  He called people to repentance, to change their lives, to hear the gospel and to live it every day.  He denounced hypocrisy, and demanded that those who would call themselves religious reach out in love to the poor and those on the margins.  It wasn’t an easy message for them to hear, it wasn’t the message they thought the messiah would bring.

    And that’s what brings us to the one hundred and eighty degree turn we experience in today’s second gospel reading.  Enough of this, they say, the religious leaders must be right: he must be a demon, or at least a troublemaker.  Better that we put up with the likes of Barabbas.  As for this one, well, crucify him.

    Who are we going to blame for this?  Whose fault is it that they crucified my Lord?  Is it the Jews, as many centuries of anti-Semitism would assert?  Was it the Romans, those foreign occupiers who sought only the advancement of their empire?  Was it the fickle crowds, content enough to marvel at Jesus when he fed the thousands, but abandoning him once his message was made clear?  Was it Peter, who couldn’t even keep his promise of standing by his friend for a few hours?  Was it the rest of the apostles, who scattered lest they be tacked up on a cross next to Jesus?  Was it Judas, who gave in to despair thinking he had it all wrong?  Was it the cowardly Herod and Pilate who were both manipulating the event in order to maintain their pathetic fiefdoms?  Who was it who put Jesus on that cross?

    And the answer, as we well know, is that it’s none of those.  Because it’s my sins that led Jesus to the Way of the Cross.  It’s my sins that betrayed him; it’s my sins that have kept me from friendship with God.  And so he willingly gave his life that I might have life.  And you.  He gave himself for us.

  • Holy Thursday: Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper

    Holy Thursday: Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper

    Today’s readings

    We should glory in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,
    i    n whom is our salvation, life and resurrection,
    through whom we are saved and delivered.

    That is the proper entrance antiphon, also known as the introit, for this Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper.  It is taken from Paul’s letter to the Galatians in which he says “May I never boast about anything other than the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which I have been crucified to the world and the world to me.”  As you know, the Church considers these three days – the Sacred Triduum – as just one day, one liturgy.  When we gather for Mass tonight, and reconvene tomorrow for the Liturgy of the Lord’s Passion, and finally gather for the great Easter Vigil in the Holy Night on Saturday, it’s just one day for the church, one great Liturgy in three parts.  And the only part that has an entrance antiphon is tonight’s Mass, so the Church has chosen this text to set the tone for our celebrations for these three nights, and to draw all of them together with the cross as the focal point.

    I think what the cross teaches us in these days, and what this evening’s part of the Liturgy says in particular is summed up in the Latin word, caritas.  Caritas is most often translated into English as either “charity” or “love.”  And, as in the case of most translations, both are inadequate.  When we think about the word “charity,” we usually think of something we do to the poor: we give to the poor, we have pity on the poor, that kind of thing.  And “love” can have a whole host of different meanings, depending on the context, and the emotion involved.  And that’s not what caritas means at all.  I think caritas is best imagined as a love that shows itself in the action of setting oneself aside, pouring oneself out, for the good of others.  It’s a love that remembers that everything is not about me, that God gives us opportunities all the time to give of ourselves on behalf of others, that we were put on this earth to love one another into heaven.

    And I bring this up not just as a lesson in Latin or semantics.  I bring it up because caritas is our vocation; we were made to love deeply and to care about something outside ourselves.  We are meant to go beyond what seems expedient and comfortable and easy and to extend ourselves.

    Two parts of this evening’s Liturgy show us what caritas means.  The first is what we call the mandatum: the washing of the feet.  Here, Jesus gets up from the meal, puts on a towel and begins to wash the feet of his disciples.  Washing the feet of guests was a common practice in Jesus’ time.  In those days, people often had to travel quite a distance to accept an invitation to a feast or celebration.  And they would travel that distance, not by car or train or even by beast of burden, but most often on foot.  The travelers’ feet would then become not only dirty from the dusty roads, but also hot and tired from the long journey.  It was a gesture of hospitality to wash the guests’ feet, but it was a gesture that was usually supplied not by the host of the gathering, but instead by someone much lower in stature, usually a servant or slave.  But at the Last Supper, it is Jesus himself who wraps a towel around himself, picks up the bowl and pitcher, and washes the feet of his friends.

    We will reenact that Gospel vignette in a few minutes.  But I have to admit, I’m not a big fan of this particular ritual.  Not because I don’t like washing feet or don’t care to have mine washed.  It’s just that I think this particular ritual should be reenacted outside of church.  Every day, in every place where Christians are.

    For example, maybe you make an effort to get home from work a little sooner to help your spouse get dinner ready or help your children with their homework.  Maybe at work you try to get in early so that you can make the first pot of coffee so that people can smell it when they come in to the office.  Or maybe after lunch you take a minute or two to wipe out the microwave so it’s not gross the next day.  If you’re a young person, perhaps you can try on occasion to do a chore without being asked, or at least not asked a second time, or even wash the dishes when it’s not your turn to do it.  Or if one of your classmates has a lot of stuff to bring to school one day, you can offer to carry some of his or her books to lighten the load.

    This kind of thing costs us.  It’s not our job.  We’re entitled to be treated well too.  It’s inconvenient.  I’ve had a hard day at work – or at school.  I want to see this show on television.  I’m in the middle of reading the paper.  But caritas requires something of us – something over and above what we may be prepared to do.  But, as Jesus says in today’s Gospel, he’s given us an example: as he has done, so we must do.  And not just here in church washing each other’s feet, but out there in our world, washing the feet of all those in our lives who need to be loved into heaven.

    The second part of our Liturgy that illustrates caritas is one with which we are so familiar, we may most of the time let it pass us by without giving it a thought, sadly.  And that, of course, is the Eucharist.  This evening we commemorate that night when Jesus, for the very first time, shared bread and wine with his closest friends and offered the meal as his very own body and blood, poured out on behalf of the world, given that we might remember, as often as we do it, what caritas means.  This is the meal that we share here tonight, not just as a memory of something that happened in the far distant past, but instead experienced with Jesus and his disciples, and all the church of every time and place, on earth and in heaven, gathered around the same Table of the Lord, nourished by the same body, blood, soul and divinity of our Savior who poured himself out for us in the ultimate act of caritas.

    We who eat this meal have to be willing to be changed by it.  Because we too must pour ourselves out for others.  We must feed them with our presence and our love and our understanding even when we would rather not.  We must help them to know Christ’s presence in their lives by the way that we serve them, in humility, giving of ourselves and asking nothing in return.  That is our vocation.

    And sometimes that vocation is not an easy one.  Sometimes it feels like our efforts are unappreciated or even thwarted by others.  Sometimes we give of ourselves only to receive pain in return; or we extend ourselves only to find ourselves out on a limb with what seems like no support.  And then we question our vocation, wondering if it is all worth it, wondering if somehow we got it wrong.

    Many of you know that I’ve been there, recently; you had probably felt it when you saw me or talked to me.  It was a difficult summer and fall, and I did ask God if I could leave my vocation behind.  I asked him because I knew, however difficult it was, my vocation really belongs to him (that’s true for all of us, by the way).  Right about the time I asked that question, a very good friend of mine lent me this wood carving, which sits on the shelf in my office.  It’s Jesus carrying the Cross – you know, the one we should glory in.  And when I looked at him and asked whether I could leave my vocation, he said no.  And the second time I asked him, he said no, and stop asking.  So I had my answer.  Caritas isn’t something from which one turns away.  We embrace our little crosses and journey on, knowing that Jesus carried the big Cross for our salvation.

    The ultimate act of caritas will unfold tomorrow and Saturday night as we look to the cross and keep vigil for the resurrection.  Tonight it will suffice for us to hear the command to go and do likewise, pouring ourselves out for others, laying down our life for them, washing their feet and becoming Eucharist for them.  It may seem difficult to glory in the cross – it may even seem strange to say it.  But the Church makes it clear tonight: the cross is our salvation, it is caritas poured out for us, it is caritas poured out on others through us, every time we extend ourselves, lay down our lives, abandon our sense of entitlement and do what the Gospel demands of us.

    We should glory in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,
    in whom is our salvation, life and resurrection,
    through whom we are saved and delivered.

  • Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord

    Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord

    Today’s readings

    This is it.  Today’s liturgy brings us to the place we’ve been journeying toward all during Lent.  These past forty days have seen Jesus tangle with the established religion, all the while healing the sick and preaching repentance.  We have participated in that by participating in the Anointing of the Sick Mass, in receiving absolution in Confession, and by our fasting and works of charity.  And so it seems quite fitting that our Mass today begins on a high note: with Jesus entering triumphantly into the city of Jerusalem.  But just three chapters later in Mark’s Gospel, all of his good work becomes his undoing as he is arrested, tried and put to death.  It doesn’t seem fair, does it?

    We know that’s how life is.  We offer our works of charity and fasting and prayer and we hope for a better life, but sometimes that’s not how it works out.  Sometimes we too end up denounced, the victims of gossip and calumny, and we have to take up that rough, heavy cross and travel to our own personal Golgothas.  And so perhaps today we find ourselves in all-too-familiar territory, and find it difficult to hear.

    The trouble is that the Cross is an in-your-face reminder that pain is part and parcel of our life of salvation.  Jesus did not come to take away our pain, he came to redeem it.  Not only that, he came to take it on himself.  Far from being embarrassed by our sin and pain, Jesus took it to the cross, redeeming our brokenness, and leaving us an everlasting promise that there is no pain too great for our God to bear and there is no way we can ever fall so far that our God can’t reach us.  Jesus took our every hurt, our every pain, our every sin, our every shame, our every resentment, our every emptiness, and left them all there at the foot of the Cross.  So if we find the Cross and Golgotha a difficult place to be, maybe it’s no wonder.

    I know there are many among us now who are carrying pain with them each day.  I hear it all the time, whether it’s the patient in the hospital who’s been away from the Church and estranged from their family and is facing death, or the young parent who wants to live a spiritual life but the demands of family and perhaps a job are all that he or she can accomplish in a day.  For some it’s very serious stuff: the diagnosis of an illness that is frightening, the loss of a loved one, the ending of a job or career, or even a marriage.  Broken relationships, upheaval in our lives, uncertainty in our future are crosses that are so very familiar to so many of us.

    But as horrible as those things are to deal with, and as dejected and frustrated and fearful as they may make us feel, the one thing we should never entertain is a feeling of loneliness.  Because for all of us who are hurting in any way, all we have to do is look at the Cross and realize that there is nothing our God won’t do for us.  No, it’s not pretty, and God may not take away our pain right away, but he will never ever leave us alone in it.  In fact, he helps us bear it, and ultimately, he will raise us up out of it.  As we enter this Holy Week, we are reminded gently that the cross, while significant, is not the end of the story.  Yes, we have to suffer our own Good Fridays; but we confidently remember that we also get an Easter Sunday.  And that is what gives us all the confidence to take up our cross and journey on.

    These are not ordinary days – they are absolutely not for business as usual.  I beg you all to enter into these Holy Days with passion, with prayerfulness and in faith.  Gather with us on Holy Thursday at 7:00pm to celebrate the giving of the Eucharist and the Priesthood, and the call to service that comes from our baptism.  On Good Friday at 3:00 in the afternoon, we will have the opportunity once again to reflect on the Passion, to venerate the cross that won our salvation, and to receive the Eucharist, which is our strength.  Finally, at 8:00 on Holy Saturday night, we will gather outside on the piazza to keep vigil for the resurrection we have been promised.  We will hear stories of our salvation, we will celebrate our baptism and welcome five people into our family, rejoicing in the victory of Christ over sin and death.  No Catholic should ever miss the celebrations of these Holy Days, for these days truly sustain our daily living, give us the grace to take up our little crosses day by day, and gift us with strength to continue the journey.

  • The Third Sunday of Lent [B]

    The Third Sunday of Lent [B]

    Today’s readings

    Most of us have probably experienced at least one time in our lives when it seemed like our whole world was turned upside-down.  Maybe it was the loss of a job, or the illness or death of a loved one, or any of a host of other issues.  It probably felt like the rug was pulled out from under us and that everything we believed in was toppled over.  Kind of like the table in front of the altar, like the story we just heard in the Gospel.

    You may have heard the interpretation of this rather shocking Gospel story that says that this is proof that Jesus got angry, so we shouldn’t feel bad when we do.  That sounds nice, but I am, of course, going to tell you this interpretation is flawed.  First of all, there is a big difference between the kind of righteous indignation that Jesus felt over the devastation of sin and death that plagues our world, and the frustration and anger that we all experience over comparatively minor issues from time to time.  It might make us feel better to think that Jesus acted out in the same way that we sometimes do, that he felt the same way we do about these things, but that doesn’t mean it’s right.

    So feeling better for being angry isn’t the theme of this reading, or the intent of today’s Liturgy of the Word.  And I do think we have to take all of the readings as a whole in order to discern what we are being invited to experience.  Our first reading is extremely familiar to us all.   The ten commandments – we’ve heard them so often, violated them on occasion, perhaps we don’t even think they’re relevant any more.  But the mere fact that they are read at today’s Mass tells us that the Church says they are.  And while every one of them is certainly important, one of them stands out as having top billing.  And that one is the very first commandment: “I, the LORD, am your God … you shall not have other gods besides me.”

    That one commandment comprises the whole first paragraph of the reading, a total of thirteen lines of text.  I think that means we are to pay attention to it!  It’s the commandment that seems to make the most sense, that it’s the most foundational.  We have to get our relationship with God right and put him first.  But this commandment is rather easy to violate, and I think we do it all the time.  We all know that there are things we put way ahead of God: our work, our leisure, sports and entertainment, and so many things that may even be darker than that.  Don’t we often forget to bring God into our thoughts and plans?  Yet if we would do it on a regular basis, God promises to bless us “down to the thousandth generation!”

    Saint Paul is urging the Corinthians to put God first, too.  He complains that the Jews want signs and the Greeks want some kind of wisdom, but he and the others preach Christ crucified!  We are a people who want signs.  We almost refuse to take a leap of faith unless we have some overt sign of God’s decision.  And we are all about seeking wisdom, mostly in ourselves.  If it makes sense to us and it feels right to us, it must be okay to do.  But nothing could be further from the truth.  We get tripped up in our own wisdom and sign-seeking all the time, then we wander down the wrong path only to end up several years down the road, wondering where it all went wrong.

    And then we have the really challenging vignette at the end of the Gospel reading.    Jesus knows how long it took to build the temple.  But he wasn’t talking about the temple.  He was talking about his body.  His body is the new Temple, and that was the Temple that would be torn down and in three days raised back up.  Because Jesus is the new Temple, none of the money changing and animal selling was necessary.  It was all perfectly legitimate commerce for the old temple worship.  But worshipping the new Temple – Jesus Christ – would require none of that, and so he turns it all upside-down.

    It’s not easy to put God first.  It’s not easy to glory in Christ crucified.  What a horribly difficult and unpopular message to have to live!  But that’s what we are all called to do if we are to be disciples of Jesus, if we are to yearn for life in that kingdom that knows no end.  Glorying in Christ crucified, putting God first, that’s going to require that some time or another, we are going to have to take up our own cross too, and let our entire lives be turned upside-down.  God only knows where that will lead us: maybe to a new career, maybe to a fuller sense of our vocation, maybe to joy, maybe to pain.  But always to grace, because God never leaves the side of those who are willing to have their lives turned upside-down for his glory.

    There’s no easy road to glory.  You don’t get an Easter without a Good Friday.  Jesus didn’t, and we won’t either.  Our lives will be turned upside-down and everything we think we know will be scattered like the coins on the money-changers’ tables.  But God is always and absolutely present to those who pray those words the disciples recalled:

    Zeal for your house will consume me.

  • Friday of the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Today’s readings ask us to ponder the question, “what do we have to do to remain in covenant with God?”  And the question, I think, is an important one.  We would want to respond to God’s gracious act of making covenant with us first.  We see in today’s readings that he chose us first, and calls us out of love for us.  Moses recites the mighty acts of God in which he remembered the promises made to the people’s ancestors and kept them, even though the people certainly didn’t deserve it.  Even though they often broke the covenant, God still kept it anyway, loving the people even when they were unlovable.

    So for Moses and the people Israel, the response to God’s gracious act was to keep the law.  The law itself was wonderful, given to the people out of love, to help them walk the straight and narrow, and to remain in relationship with God and others.  Moses contends that no other nation had gods that were loving and wise enough to provide something like that for their people.

    Jesus, of course, takes it several steps further.  “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”  Following the law was the first step, but it was pretty basic.  Even if the people obeyed it – which they often did not – it was still a matter of will mostly, and not heart.  The Pharisees especially took pride in keeping the minutiae of the law.  Jesus, however, calls us to make the same sacrifice he did: lay down our lives for one another out of love.

    “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”  And isn’t that the truth, really?  When we get so caught up in ourselves and our own pettiness, how quickly life slips away and we wonder what it all meant.  But when we lose our lives following Christ and loving God and neighbor with reckless abandon, well, then we have really found something.

    God loved us first and best, and always seeks covenant with us.  The law is still a good guide, but the cross is the best measure of the heart.  How willing are we this day to lose our lives relentlessly spending the love we have received from our God with others?

  • Saturday of the Twenty-fifth Week of Ordinary Time

    Saturday of the Twenty-fifth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    One of the most important spiritual tools is that of mindfulness.  You could translate that as a kind of being in the moment; being aware of what is happening, what God is doing here an now.  This is a difficult concept for us modern people to get, because we fly from one thing to another so quickly, we hardly give things a moment to register.  Before we can focus on what’s happening around us, our cell phone rings, or the television takes us to a different place and time, or it’s time to herd the kids into the car and take them to whatever the next thing is.

    Mindfulness requires stillness, quiet and focus, and those things come to us in rather short supply.  As frustrating as this may be for us, we find the first disciples today in pretty much the same boat.  They don’t have the distractions of modern convenience, of course, but they were seeing incredible things from Jesus: miracles, healings, casting out demons, incredible words at war with the Scribes and Pharisees, walking on water, transfiguration on the mountain, all these just to name a few.  Their minds had to be reeling trying to figure out what to make of it all.  They hardly had time to process one thing before the next thing happened.

    To them, and to us, Jesus says in the gospel today: “Pay attention.”  He wants them to know that the cross stands ready for him, that he will have to suffer and die.  We too, have to live in the shadow of the cross: we will have our own suffering, our own pain and sadness.  None of us gets to the resurrection without the cross – Jesus didn’t, the disciples didn’t, and we won’t either.  And so it would serve us well to be mindful, to pay attention, to what is happening in the present moment, to what God is doing now.  If we miss that, the cross will overwhelm us and crush us in despair.  But if we are mindful of God’s presence even in suffering, even in the shadow of the cross, then we will never be crushed under the weight of the cross, because we will be buoyed up by the hope of resurrection.

  • Twelfth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Twelfth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Who we are is something many of us spend a lifetime trying to figure out.  Our identity is important to us: it tells us how we fit into the social structure as well as what makes us unique from others.  Until we really know who we are, we are very unlikely to accomplish anything of importance or even be comfortable in our own skin.  And so when Jesus asks the disciples “Who do the crowds say that I am?” it is a question with which we all resonate on some level, some time in our lives.

    Now, I’m not suggesting Jesus was having an identity crisis.  Clearly, his asking that question wasn’t so much for his own information or even to see where he was in the social structure of Israel, but more for the disciples to begin thinking about what Jesus meant to them and to the world.  Jesus knows who he is and why he is here, but it’s for us and for those first disciples to begin to see Jesus in deeper ways.

    The answers the disciples give to that question are interesting.  John the Baptist risen from the dead, Elijah returned from the whirlwind, or that one of the ancient prophets had arisen.  Clearly he had no parallel on earth at the time; all their answers involved the return of someone from the dead or the beyond.  The reason this is significant is because, at the time, the possibility of there being anything beyond death or any kind of resurrection was in great dispute.  The Pharisees believed in a life after death, the Sadducees did not; that is the reason many of the Gospel stories show those two groups in opposition to each other.

    But the real significant part of their answers lies in what is going on in the disciples’ minds as they answer Jesus.  You can almost hear the excitement in their voices.  They had been seeing Jesus healing diseases and casting out demons.  Not only that, they had just returned from their own missionary journey in which Jesus gave them authority to do those same things.  Clearly they were in the presence of a superstar, and his charisma was rubbing off on them.  They were ready for the glory.

    But now Jesus wants to dig a little deeper.  “But who do you say that I am?” he asks them.  Peter speaks for the disciples and gets the answer right the first time: “The Christ of God.”  I think he answers that with deep reverence and awe, but unfortunately, he didn’t know the half of it.

    Jesus affirms his correct answer, but then goes on to reveal what that means for him.  Yes, he is the Christ of God, but the Christ isn’t what they were expecting.  This was not going to be simply some glory trip.  The Christ would have to suffer, be rejected, be killed, and then … then be raised from the dead.  And that whole being killed part is the sticking point, but it’s absolutely necessary, he can’t be raised from the dead if he isn’t killed; that’s not a step one can skip.

    When you think about it, the disciples’ early answers as to who the crowds said Jesus was had some merit.  They all spoke of someone who came back from the dead, which Jesus the Christ would indeed do.  But not just yet.

    This all had to be pretty hard for them to digest.  But it’s nothing compared to what Jesus reveals next.  Those disciples who thought they were on the glory train could also expect to suffer:

    “If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself
    and take up his cross daily and follow me.
    For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
    but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.”

    We don’t get to skip a step either.  We too will be called to the cross.  If we want eternal life, we have to be willing to give up this life.  There is no resurrection without a cross; there is no Easter Sunday without a Good Friday.  Not for Jesus and not for his disciples, not even for you and me.

    We know that suffering is part of life.  We have experienced illness, injury, pain, loss of a job, death of a loved one, physical or psychological abuse – the list is long.  So often all this suffering seems pointless.  We might even be tempted to quarrel with God: if God is loving, why to innocent people have to suffer, why do we have to suffer?  Why can’t it be the guy who cuts us off in traffic while he’s drinking coffee with one hand and talking on a cell phone in the other?

    The truth is, the justice of suffering is beyond us.  Who knows why bad things happen to good people?  Suffering can often seem so capricious, so random, so devoid of meaning.  And it is, if we let it be.  You see, sometimes we just get it wrong.  We sometimes think that Jesus came to take away suffering and we get mad when that’s not what happens.  But if Jesus came to take away suffering, he certainly wouldn’t have had to go through it himself.  He didn’t come to take away suffering, but to give meaning to it, to redeem it.

    We can see in the cross that the path to glory and the path to life leads through suffering to redemption.  There’s no way around it.  The cross Jesus took up will be ours to take up daily if we wish to follow Jesus to eternal life.  Our own identity as disciples and followers of Christ is bound up in the ugliness of suffering and the agony of the cross.

    That flies in the face of our culture that wants us to take a pill for every pain and medicate every burden.  Jesus says today that that kind of thinking is simply losing our lives trying to save them.  The rest of life passes us by while we are self-medicated beyond our pain.  But, if we lose our life for the sake of Jesus, if we take up our crosses and follow him, if we bear our burdens and our sorrows and our pain and our brokenness, if we join our sufferings to the suffering of Christ on the cross, then we too can experience what he did: the glory of eternal life.  That was the only hope of those first disciples, and it is our only hope too, fellow disciples of the Lord.

  • Wednesday of Holy Week

    Wednesday of Holy Week

    Today’s readings

    “The Son of Man indeed goes, as it is written of him…” The gospels tell us in many places that Jesus willingly laid down his life. This was the mission the Father gave him, and this was the mission he had taken up on this earth. In these final days of Holy Week, Jesus lives up to the mission he has freely taken up. Isaiah says of him: “And I have not rebelled, have not turned back. I gave my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who plucked my beard; My face I did not shield from buffets and spitting.” There would have been precious little grace had it happened any other way. “For your sake I bear insult,” the Psalmist says, “and shame covers my face.” In what way are we being called to willingly take up our cross today?