Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Tag: resurrection

  • Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion

    Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion

    Today’s readings

    Today’s celebration reminds us that Lent has been taking us somewhere, and now we see where that somewhere is: Calvary. These days have led us to the cross, which is a place to which, quite frankly, few of us ever want to go. The Psalmist today captures the feeling of our hearts as we arrive here at the cross: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

    And haven’t we all asked that question at least once in our lives? As we sing those words, they can quite frankly bring back painful memories, whether they be memories of past hurts, or reflections of current ones. Maybe it’s the time when you were sexually abused and felt abandoned because you were convinced no one would believe you. Maybe it’s the time you received a frightening diagnosis and you felt abandoned because you couldn’t enter into daily life with the same carefree attitude you previously had. Maybe it’s the occasion of the death of a loved one and you felt abandoned because everyone on the planet seemed joyful, except you. Maybe it’s the time you were laid off from your job and you felt abandoned because it seemed that no one valued your skills and talents.

    And so we pray with the Psalmist, with Jesus, and with every person who has ever felt lost and alone: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” It’s natural that we would prefer to avoid the cross. It’s painful, it’s embarrassing, and it ultimately alienates us from the world. But, the cross is what joins us to Christ. Christ did not shun the cross on the way to accomplish his mission. He took up that cross, died on it, taking with it all of our pain, all of our shame, all of our loneliness, all of our abandonment, all of our sin, and most of all, our death.

    Without the cross, there is no resurrection. Not for Jesus, and so also, not for us. Jesus certainly had his moment in the Garden of Gethsemane when the knowledge of his impending death filled him with dread; so it will be for us, countless times when we are called on to take up the cross. But as we enter this Holy Week, we are reminded gently that the cross, while significant, is not the end of the story. There will be a resurrection for Jesus, and so also a resurrection for all those who believe in him, have faith in him, and follow him. And that is what gives us all the confidence to take up our cross and journey on.

    I invite you all to enter into these Holy Days with passion, with prayerfulness and in faith. Gather with us on Holy Thursday evening to celebrate the giving of the Eucharist and the Priesthood, and the call to service that comes from our baptism. On Good Friday afternoon and evening, 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, on the evening of Holy Saturday, we will gather to keep vigil for the resurrection we have been promised. We will hear stories of our salvation, we will celebrate our baptism as we welcome new members to our family, seeing them fully initiated into the life of the Church, rejoicing with them in the victory of Christ over sin and death. No Catholic should miss the celebrations of these Holy Days, for these days truly sustain our daily living and give us the grace to take up our little crosses day by day.

  • Second Sunday of Lent

    Second Sunday of Lent

    Today’s readings

    You know, that last line of today’s Gospel reading always gets me thinking “well what did they think ‘rising from the dead’ meant?” Of course that’s easy for us to say, with the eyes of people who know how the story ends, but Peter, James and John didn’t have that vision quite yet. When you think about it, up to this point, they’ve been basking in the glory of Jesus’ fame. They too have been excited to see what Jesus will do next: what miracles he will work, what healings he will affect, what wonderful words he will speak. They have kind of been caught up in the excitement of the crowds who have been following Jesus, at times not understanding things any better than anybody else. Until now.

    The Transfiguration is kind of a defining moment for Jesus and his closest disciples. They see Jesus and with him Elijah and Moses … symbols of the Law and the prophets. This gives them a little light, a glimpse of the real Jesus, an insight into who he was that they didn’t have before. And, honestly, it’s an unsettling glimpse. Things had just gotten started and were going well. They weren’t ready to talk about how it was going to end. Jesus had just started speaking to them about his passion and death, and they weren’t ready to hear it.

    And now here they are, on the mountain, and they get to see how things were going to be after Jesus’ death and resurrection, only they weren’t ready to see that just yet. But just because they’re not ready doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen, sooner rather than later. The Gospel story is at a turning point now. God is revealing to Jesus’ closest followers the exact nature of Jesus’ mission in the world. He hasn’t come just to work miracles, say wonderful things, and make people feel good about themselves. He has come to turn the world upside down and make of it a place … well a place that it was always supposed to be in the first place.

    And the way that would happen is by his passion and death … there is no getting around that. And as difficult as that may be for his closest friends to hear, they have to hear it and come to terms with it. This experience of the Transfiguration was supposed to give them hope that Jesus’ passion and death wasn’t the end, that God still had wonderful things in store for Jesus, for them, and for the world.

    This is where that first reading comes in. Abraham and Sarah, as you might remember, were childless until God intervened in their lives at a very old age. Finally, they receive Isaac, a real gift from God, a sign that the promise that God made to Abraham – that he would be the father of many nations – would be fulfilled. And now, God asks him, – no, tells him – “Take your son Isaac, your only one, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah. There you shall offer him up as a holocaust on a height that I will point out to you.” So now Abraham has to weigh his trust in God’s promises against the loss of his only beloved son. And we heard how the story ended, God did not allow Abraham to harm Isaac, but instead provided a lamb for the sacrifice himself.

    What we miss in this reading is the conversation between Abraham and Isaac on the way. At one point, Isaac asks, “Here are the fire and the wood, but where is the sheep for the holocaust?” I can’t imagine how heartbroken Abraham was in that moment. His answer might have been misdirection, or maybe it was faith: “Son, God himself will provide the sheep for the holocaust.”

    There’s a wonderful song by Michael Card which makes the symbolism very clear here today:

    God will provide a Lamb
    To be offered up in your place
    A sacrifice so spotless and clean
    To take all your sin away

    And Abraham was absolutely right – God himself will provide the lamb for the sacrifice – the perfect lamb, Jesus Christ. He came to suffer and die for our sins, and that’s significance of today’s Gospel event. The world never looked so bright as it did on that Transfiguration day on top of the mountain. But that’s not the last glimpse of that kind of light. That light was just a tiny sample of the glory of the Resurrection. And the Resurrection was just a sample of the Glory of God’s heavenly kingdom, for which we all yearn with eager anticipation as we muddle through here on the other side.

    This is a chance for us all to see in Christ what Peter, James and John did. It’s a chance to see what Abraham did up on that mountain. God did what he asked Abraham to do – he offered his only son. To take all your sin away.

  • CREEDS Retreat Conference III: Salvation through the Cross and Resurrection

    CREEDS Retreat Conference III: Salvation through the Cross and Resurrection

    Scriptures: Matthew 27:33-56; Matthew 28:1-10

    Godspell: “Finale”

    Ask a bunch of church type people what their favorite celebration of the Church year is, and inevitably most of them will tell you that it’s the Paschal Triduum.  That period from the evening of Holy Thursday to the Evening of Holy Saturday, celebrating the giving of the Eucharist and the establishment of the Church on Holy Thursday, observing the memorial of our Lord’s Passion and the Veneration of the Cross on Good Friday, and cutting loose – in a Liturgical way of course – with the Vigil of all vigils – the great Easter Vigil Mass with its service of light, proclamation of the Exsultet, extended Liturgy of the Word, Baptism of catechumens and celebration of the Eucharist – that three-day Day of all Days is by far the most incredible of all the days of the Church year.

    I remember my very first time going to the Easter Vigil Mass.  I was in high school, and a friend of ours was being received into Full Communion with the Church.  I was hooked – the joy of that night was palpable, all the more so in welcoming someone who was a friend into the Church which was my home.  If you’ve been close to anyone received into the Church like that, you know what I mean.

    Typically, the Church lets it all loose on these wonderful days.  We pull out all the stops, have all the best music, exquisite decorations, incense, processions, reverence beyond anything we display all year long.  And for good reason.  As the Exsultet sings,

    This is the night,
    when first you saved our fathers:
    you freed the people of Israel from their slav’ry,
    and led them dry-shod through the sea.

    This is the night,
    when the pillar of fire destroyed the darkness of sin.

    This is night,
    when Christians ev’rywhere,
    washed clean of sin and freed from all defilement,
    are restored to grace and grow together in holiness.

    This is the night,
    when Jesus broke the chains of death
    and rose triumphant from the grave.

    These are the central mysteries of our faith.  Without the Cross and Resurrection, none of the rest of it makes any sense.  Without the gift of salvation, the Incarnation is just an act of divine curiosity or snooping.  Without salvation, even the creation of the world is meaningless.  But salvation was always God’s plan from the very beginning.  There was never a time when God was making it up as he went along.  Age after age, we were sent prophets and given miracles and we constantly turned away from God.  We had created this huge chasm between us and God that kept us apart.  But all those prophets and miracles prepared us for the coming of our God, for the incredible act of divine grace that would re-create the world in astounding ways.

    Many have noted that this was an awfully strange way to save the world.  Certainly our God did not have to debase himself to take on our corrupt human nature, but he did.  He didn’t have to come and take on all our human frailty, walking our walk and living our life, but he did.  He certainly did not have to die our death, the most miserable, humiliating death reserved for the lowest of the low and the commonest of criminals, but he did.  And because he did, God raised him up, destroying death and its miserable chains forever.  Because of this great act, as the Preface to the  Eucharistic Prayer for funerals tells us, “For those who believe in Christ, life is changed, not ended.  When the body of our earthly life dwells in death, we gain an everlasting dwelling place in heaven.”

    I think Godspell appropriately gets the earth-shattering nature of the Cross, but pretty much soft-pedals the Resurrection.  As the Gospel readings show us, both events included violent earthquakes.  That’s because in those two events, everything changed – everything.  But the movie does make a strong point that even though God died – and make no mistake, God did die on that Cross – even though God died, God lives forever through the Resurrection: “Long live God!”  Curiously the singing at the end of the movie moves from “Oh God, you’re dead” to “Long live God” to “Prepare ye the way of the Lord” to “Day by Day.”  I think that’s interesting, and I think there’s something very right about it.

    In the Resurrection, Christ lives forever, paving the way for us to do the same.  And because he lives forever, we need to prepare the way for the Lord day after day after day, or “Day by Day,” if you will.  The end of the movie mimics the rather cyclical nature of our Church year.  And it is very true that the Salvation event, the Paschal Mystery, brings us back to the Advent of Christ in whole new ways.  Preparing the way of the Lord is not something we do just in the four weeks of Advent.  It is the project of a lifetime, the project of the ages of the Church, a project to be lived out day by day as we see God more clearly, love him more dearly and follow him more nearly.

    At my mom’s house we have one very simple ornament for the Christmas Tree.  Among all the others, you’ll find it hanging on a back branch to remind us of the truth of it all.  It’s a nail, a spike really, hung from a green ribbon.  It reminds us that at Christmas we celebrate something that doesn’t get wrapped up until the Easter days.  The wood of the Christmas tree and the wood of the manger become the wood of the Cross.  Birth leads to death leads to Resurrection leads to re-creation.  All things are made new.  The misery of a dark world is replaced by Christ, the light of the world.  The grace of this wonderful mystery makes possible our flame of faith.  The Exsultet says of that flame:

    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,
    your Son, who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.

  • Friday of the Twenty-fifth Week of Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Twenty-fifth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Our first reading this past week has been taking us on a kind of tour of the Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament.  Today’s pearl of wisdom, from the book of Ecclesiastes, talks about the seasons of a person’s life.  In some ways, the book of Ecclesiastes can seem to be the most pessimistic of the books of Scripture.  Based on the conjecture that the book may have been written by wise king Solomon, some say this was the book he wrote late in life, looking back on where life has taken him with a tired and cynical heart.  You can get that feeling as you read through the book of Ecclesiastes, but if you stay with it, you often unearth some treasures like today’s selection.

    Today we hear that there is a time for everything.  And you can well imagine Solomon saying this at an old age, looking back on his life.  We all know that life takes us all sorts of places, some good and some bad, some pleasant and some unpleasant, some joy-filled and some laden with sorrow.  We need the one to appreciate the other, I think, and we pray for short times of unhappiness mixed with generous portions of joy.  Life ebbs and flows, and ultimately leads us to the God who made us.  I love the line toward the end of the reading: “He has made everything appropriate to its time, and has put the timeless into their hearts…”

    Jesus too realized that his own life would be mixed with joy and sorrow.  After asking who they said he was, he instructed them carefully that he would suffer, be rejected, would die and then rise.  Here he links the sorrow in his life and in ours with the Cross, and the joy in his life and in ours with the Resurrection.  We can’t have one without the other, and through it all God is glorified.

    The protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr summed it up aptly in his famous serenity prayer.  You’ve heard the beginning, but the ending is truly brilliant:

    God, give us grace to accept with serenity
    the things that cannot be changed,
    Courage to change the things
    which should be changed,
    and the Wisdom to distinguish
    the one from the other.

    Living one day at a time,
    Enjoying one moment at a time,
    Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
    Taking, as Jesus did,
    This sinful world as it is,
    Not as I would have it,
    Trusting that You will make all things right,
    If I surrender to Your will,
    So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
    And supremely happy with You forever in the next.

    Amen.

  • Ss. Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang & Companions, Martyrs

    Ss. Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang & Companions, Martyrs

    Today’s readings

    Korea was introduced to Christianity in the late 1500s when some Koreans were baptized, probably by Christian Japanese soldiers who invaded Korea at that time. It was not until the late 1700s that a priest managed to sneak into Korea, and when he did, he found about 4000 Catholics, none of whom had ever seen a priest. Seven years later there were over ten thousand Catholics.  So he was one busy priest!
    In the 1800s, Andrew Kim became the first native Korean to become a priest when he traveled 1300 miles to seminary in China. He managed to find his way back into the country six years later. When he returned home, he arranged for more men to travel to China for studies. He was arrested, tortured and finally beheaded.
    St. Paul Chong was a lay apostle who was also martyred. During the persecutions of 1839, 1846, 1866 and 1867, 103 members of the Christian community gave their lives for the faith. These included some bishops and priests, but for the most part they were lay people, including men and women, married and unmarried, children, young people and the elderly. They were all canonized by Pope John Paul II during a visit to Korea in 1984.
    Today’s first reading speaks of a kind of “everything old will be made new again.”  This is the hope of all the martyrs, those like Andrew Kim and Paul Chong and their companions who gave their lives so that the Gospel would be known in every corner of the earth.  What they gave was merely their corruptible body.  No one could take from them their souls, which had been made gloriously white and gleamingly new as they washed them in the Blood of Christ.

    Many of us have to deal with frustrations and ailments of all kinds.  So hearing about a new, incorruptible body is a source of joy.  But the words of St. Paul are also a cause for peace, that even in the midst of persecution, we will never lose anything we don’t need for all eternity.  Because our body “is sown corruptible; it is raised incorruptible.  It is sown dishonorable; it is raised glorious.  It is sown weak; it is raised powerful.  It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.  If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual one.”  No matter what may come to us in our life, we can be at peace with the words of the Psalmist, “I will walk in the presence of the Lord in the land of the living.”

  • The Exaltation of the Holy Cross

    The Exaltation of the Holy Cross

    Today’s readings

    Chicago priest and theologian Robert Barron speaks of what he calls a “beige” Catholicism. This is how he describes the Church during the years following the second Vatican Council. It was a time, he says, when “Christianity’s distinctive qualities and bright colors tended to be muted and its rough edges smoothed, while points of contact and continuity with non-Christian and secular realms were consistently brought into the light and celebrated.” Now, to be fair, Vatican II did indeed rightly bring to light the points of contact we have with our protestant brothers and sisters, and even our non-Christian friends. We do, in fact, have some things in common. But the downside of this emphasis was this kind of “beige” or blasé religion which challenged no one. “As a result,” Barron says, “the Christianity into which I was initiated was relatively bland and domesticated, easy to grasp and unthreatening.

    So what we were left with was a Catholicism in which one could come and go, there were no demands made of anyone so that they didn’t feel bad, and everyone was welcome to gather around and sing “Kumbaya.” And there may be a time and a place for all that, but it’s not what our religion is ultimately about.

    And so we have today this relatively strange feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, sometimes called the Triumph of the Cross. This feast enters into our Liturgical year and rips us from our complacency to gaze on the awful, disfigured body of our Lord, writhing in pain, nailed to the cross. There is nothing beige about this moment. We are forced to look at this horrible scene and try to figure out how it can ever be glorious. What is exultant or triumphant about such a horrible, painful, humiliating death?

    Now, to be fair, we have looked at the cross so many times in our lives that it may no longer be shocking to us. But in order to recapture the significance of this feast, indeed in order to recapture the significance of our faith, we must look once again at the cross and be repulsed. The book of Lamentations is a wonderful invitation to the cross: “Come, all you who pass by the way, look and see whether there is any suffering like my suffering, which has been dealt me when the LORD afflicted me on the day of his blazing wrath.” (Lamentations 1:12) If the thought of our God nailed to a cross and suffering an agony that can only be relieved by death doesn’t evoke strong feelings in us, then we cannot possibly ever come to a true acceptance of our faith.

    What we should see on that cross is that our faith is not so much about our quest for God as much as it is about God’s relentless quest for us. As Fr. Barron says, his quest for us is a quest even to the point of death. And that’s the triumph we see on that horrible cross. The truth is that our God simply loves us too much to let sin and death have any kind of permanent hold on us. So he sent his only Son into our world to walk among us, to live our life and bear our temptations and frustrations, and to die our death in the most horrible and shocking way possible so that we could be relieved of the burden of our sins and come at last to everlasting life.

    That’s the message of today’s Gospel. That one verse, John 3:16, which we see on placards and posters at so many sporting events, has been called the “Gospel in miniature.” “For God so loved the world that he sent his only Son, so that whoever believes in him might not perish but have eternal life.” And sadly, we can get pretty bland about that too. We can accept the fact that our believing brings us to eternal life to the point that we never give it a second thought. But the cross makes that kind of beige faith impossible. It shows us that the eternal life of our expectation came at a price; a horrible, painful, humiliating price.

    We are an Easter people who dwell, as well we should, on the Resurrection of our Lord. But we must not ever forget that the Resurrection would never have been possible without the Cross. Without the Resurrection, the cross is definitely that awful reminder of a meaningless death. But without the Cross, the Resurrection would never be the joyful relief that it is. We are never a Church that is about just one thing. We are always about Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

    Which is good news for us because, as I’m sure you can tell me, every day of our lives isn’t Easter Sunday. We experience all sorts of death: the very real death of a loved one, failures of all sorts, sickness and infirmity, broken relationships, disappointments and frustrations – all of these are deaths that we must suffer at one point or another in our life. No life is untouched by hardship at some point. This feast, though, reminds us that God’s love can embrace all of that death, take it to the cross and rise up over it. Our life’s pain is not the end for any of us; those who believe in Christ can have eternal life, as John the evangelist eagerly reminds us today.

    And so, as much painful as it is to look with horror on the cross today, our eyes of faith can also see great beauty, exaltation and triumph. But we have to see both things. If we cannot bear to walk through the pain of the Cross, we’ll never get to the joy of the Resurrection – it’s both or nothing.

    So this feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross has us seeing anything but beige. Instead we see the black darkness of sin and death, the red blood of Christ shed for that sin, and the gold glory of the Resurrection. This feast must find us bending the knee at the cross of Christ, and proclaiming with our lips that Jesus Christ is Lord – Lord of our pain and Lord of our triumph – to the glory of God the Father.