One Monk of the Order of Saint Benedict

For Wednesday of the Octave of Easter

2011-04-27T12:01:00.000-07:00

Luke 24:13-35

Emmaus may have been the home of Cleopas and his fellow disciple.
At least it was their goal to spend the night in Emmaus after leaving Jerusalem.
The Gospel testifies that as they drew near to Emmaus they thought the Lord Jesus, whom they did not recognize, was going on farther.
They stopped him, and asked him to stay with them in Emmaus for the night.
He would be their guest, and they would share their lodging or home with him.
Their mysterious road companion had made their hearts burn within them with his unfolding of the meanings of all the old Holy Writings that dealt with the Anointed One.
Now Cleopas and the other disciple wanted to host him as their guest.
This was thoughtful and kind of them, since night was drawing near.
However, surely they hoped also that he would go on speaking.
“So he went in to stay with them.”
By custom, the host was to take a place at the head of the table, break the bread, and give a share to the guest.
Not today, though!
The mysterious guest in Emmaus failed to act as a guest.
He went against custom.
He took over.
He, their guest, broke the bread for them.
In doing this, he overturned their relationships, making himself the host, the householder, the master, and making them his guests and followers.
Cleopas and his fellow disciple recognized in the takeover that before them was their master, no longer dead, but wondrously alive.
Let this be a lesson for us.
If we want him to warm our hearts within us, let us ask the Risen Anointed One to open the Scriptures for us.
Even more, let us invite him to stay with us in the darkness that befalls the world.
Let us invite him to take over our lives— to take over, overturn, and break our old customs of sin— so that we may know him in the breaking of the bread.

For Tuesday of the Third Week of Lent

2011-03-29T15:02:00.000-07:00

Matthew 18:21-35

Although his apostle asked him today how often to forgive a brother, the Lord Jesus answered with a parable likening the Kingdom of heaven to a king settling accounts with his servants.
The Lord did not start the parable by telling of a debt between equals— whether they were fellow servants or brothers.
Rather, the Lord began with a debt a man owed to his king.
The original language of the Gospel gives the size of the debt an actual number equal to the salary for one hundred and fifty thousand years of work.
A debt that might as well be EVERLASTING!
God our King brought us as EVERLASTING souls into being out of nothing but his own goodness.
He forever upholds us in being out of sheer mercy and goodness.
For us merely to live is to be in debt forever to God.
For us to be alive fully is to be mindfully and joyfully grateful to him.
We can never pay back to God the debt we owe for our everlasting souls, but we can choose to live for him lives of upright thankfulness.
Having said all this, I now wonder at how our debt both rebels against itself and multiplies itself blasphemously through any one of our knowing and willful sins.
Mercy indeed holds us in being forever.
How unimaginable and how unbelievable it is that God himself in Christ handed himself over to torture and the death penalty for all our debts against himself.
At the point of fulfilling the SUM— ConSUMmatum est— Christ said, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”
He paid our debt to his Father.
Yet— unbelievably and unimaginably— he also hands over the payment to us.

Take... eat... my body... given up for you.
Take... drink... my blood... shed for you... so that sins may be forgiven.
Do this in memory of me.

By agreeing and daring to take, eat, and drink the payment, memory commits us to give it to the Father to whom it belongs.
We are to give it to him from within our own bodies and blood in the lives we choose to live and in the mercy we bestow on our brothers as a small but nonetheless entirely required imitation of God’s everlasting mercy to us in Christ.
Through him, with him, in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor are yours, almighty Father for ever and ever.

For Monday of the Eighth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2011-02-28T12:54:00.001-08:00

Mark 10:17-27

Today’s Gospel tells us the Lord Jesus looked with love upon a man who had observed the commandments from his youth.
The man had other lovable deeds.
First, he RAN to meet the Lord.
Second, he KNELT down.
He showed eagerness, reverence, and submission, even before telling of his lifelong OBEDIENCE to the commandments.
“Jesus, looking at him, loved him....”
It seems the mood of this love was fatherly, for the Lord turned to his disciples, and said to them, “Children....”
We are the sons and daughters of the Lord Jesus.
As a father he loves us.
Precisely as a loving father he tells us to do the impossible.
It is impossible for men to inherit eternal life, impossible for men to enter the Kingdom of God, impossible for men to be saved.
Like the man who had many possessions, we may be sad at what the Lord Jesus tells us.
Like the disciples in the Gospel today, we may be “exceedingly astonished” at what he requires.
“For men it is impossible....”
He meant what he said, because the Gospel today marked three times that before speaking the Lord Jesus LOOKED at his listeners.
He LOOKED at the rich man, and then told him to sell everything, give to the poor, and follow him if he wanted to inherit eternal life.
He LOOKED at his disciples, and then said, “How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the Kingdom of God!”
Again, he first:

LOOKED at them and said,
“For men it is impossible....”

With fatherly love he looks at us and asks the impossible.
We may be “exceedingly astonished” and tempted to go away sad.

For men it is impossible,
but not for God.
All things are possible for God.

All things are possible for God who is a loving father to us in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Let us RUN to him, KNEEL down before him, and OBEY his commandments.
Though he has all heavenly wealth as God, he sold himself as a slave to sin, and as a man like us he gave his all to our poverty, our impossibility, and our death.
Risen from the dead, God and man have together done the impossible in Christ.
He has himself become our eternal life, our salvation, and our treasure in heaven, the Kingdom of God.
With faith let us look steadfastly to his fatherly love, daring to hope for it, taking courage from it, and making bold to love and follow him in return.

For Tuesday of the Fourth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2011-02-01T14:17:00.001-08:00

Mark 5:21-43

Despite the Lord’s strict orders that no one should know the Lord raised to life the dead daughter of Jairus, Jairus made sure everyone knew.
All came to know it so well that the name of Jairus is preserved here in the Gospel, though we find it nowhere else.
Jairus also made sure everyone knew the words of the Lord, Talithà koûm.
However, perhaps Jairus was so taken with the Lord Jesus that he forgot to tell us his daughter’s own name.
The happenings in today’s Gospel show the power of faith in the Lord.
The woman had been sick for years, but had faith to reach out for the Lord’s power.
For his part, the Lord had power that reached out for her faith.
Faith is power that works together with the power of Christ.
Though he knew “that power had gone out from him,” he told the woman, “Daughter, your faith has saved you.”
In his calling the faith-filled woman “daughter” we see his fatherly bearing.
Her healing unfolded inside another happening of fatherly bearing and faith.
Jairus already had faith that the Lord’s hands could heal and save his young daughter.
On the way to the home, the Lord and Jairus heard she was already dead.
However, the Lord turned to spur on the power of Jairus, the power of faith: “Do not be afraid; just have faith.”
Inside the house, with the faith of Jairus at his side, the Lords stretched forth the power of his hand and his words, Talithà koûm, to raise the dead daughter of Jairus back to life and health.
A few moments before, on the way to the house, the Lord had told a newly healed woman, “Daughter, your faith has saved you.”
In the same way, Jairus could have now said to his own little girl, “Daughter, my faith in the Lord has saved you.”
Both the healing of the woman and the raising of the girl let us see the power that comes out of the Body of Christ to meet the power of faith.
From the Body and Blood of Christ, his power meets, touches, spurs on, and works with the power of our own faith.
The Lord’s words to Jairus— “Do not be afraid; just have faith”— come to us now as we walk through the Mass towards the Body and Blood of Christ.
When the power of his Body and Blood meets the power of our faith, his words to the woman in today’s Gospel are for us also: “Daughter”— Son— “your faith has saved you.”
When he returns, he will wake the dead as well as the living to more life than they had ever known in their own flesh and blood and souls.
By his power and our faith, he will ban from us forever all sickness, pain, suffering, and death itself.
Then, whether or not Jairus had really forgotten to tell us his little girl’s name, the Lord will never let us forget our own joy at his side— Sons and daughters, your faith has saved you.

For the Third Ordinary Sunday of the Church Year

2011-01-23T11:59:00.000-08:00

Matthew 4:12-23
Isaiah 8:23 to 9:3
1 Corinthians 1:10-13,17

Today’s Gospel shows us the beginning of the public life of the Lord Jesus in the fullness of his manhood.
John the Baptist had been preaching the message, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
Then the kingdom showed up in the person of the Lord seeking and undergoing the baptism of repentance at the hands of John.
Then, with the leading of the Holy Spirit, as the Gospel says, the Lord did not begin straightaway his “hands-on” public work and preaching, but withdrew into the desert to be alone with the heavenly Father for forty days.
There he prayed, he fasted, and he withstood temptations by which the devil tried to lead the Lord to repent from the mission the Father gave him.
After the forty days, the Lord went to his home in the hills of Galilee, but, as the Gospel says today, he “left Nazareth and went to live in Capernaum” on the shore of the lake of Galilee.
There at Capernaum, he started his public mission.
He began preaching the same— word for word— as John the Baptist [Mt. 3:2], as today’s Gospel says [Mt. 4:17].

From that time on, Jesus began to preach and say,
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

Calling all to repentance, the Lord was seeking to fish them into life in the kingdom of heaven.
Then he also began to sharpen his message of repentance for specific men.
The meaning of “to repent,” in the original language of the Gospel at its word-for-word roots, is “to change mind.”
While everyone else heard the Lord say, “Repent,” a few Galilean fishermen heard him say to them personally, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.”
For them— Simon Peter, Andrew, James, John— to repent, to change mind, would be to follow the Lord Jesus and to think of themselves as no longer fishing to eat or sell, but as fishing men into the life of the kingdom of heaven.
The Lord would send them to do this new kind of fishing by preaching the same thing that John the Baptist and the Lord himself preached.
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
When the day came for the risen Lord to ascend to his throne at the Father’s side, he told his apostles “that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations” [Lk. 24:47].
Ten days later, with the leading of the Holy Spirit, their public preaching was born from the “upper room.”
That day, Peter told the thousands of Jewish Pentecost pilgrims in Jerusalem what they should do [Acts 2:38].

Repent, and be baptized every one of you
in the name of Jesus Christ
for the forgiveness of your sins;
and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Mark the shift of wording!
It is no longer straightforwardly that “the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
Rather, “at hand” are: the name of Jesus Christ, the forgiveness of sins, and the gift of the Holy Spirit.
To repent, to change mind, as baptized sinners, is to receive the Father’s forgiveness, the Son’s name, and the Holy Spirit’s gift.
The beginning of the Lord’s own preaching, and the beginning of the preaching he gave his Apostolic Church, and thus the beginning of heeding the Lord and his Church is repentance.
It lets us be fished into the kingdom of the life of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
When the Lord Jesus rose from the dead and ascended, leaving his own “hands-on” work and preaching in the hands of his Apostolic Church, the Church, rather than begin straightaway to preach publicly, withdrew for a while into the “upper room” [Acts 1:13], the birthplace and chamber of the Eucharistic Sacrifice.
From the Eucharistic Body and Blood of the Son, the Spirit of the Father brings to birth the preaching and works of the Church, calling all nations to a change of mind.

Take
eat
this is my body
given up for you
drink
this is
my blood
shed for you and the many
so that sins may be forgiven

Do this in memory of me.

The Lord is fishing here in the Church, here at this Eucharistic Sacrifice.
Repent, and let him catch you that you may live.

For Tuesday after Epiphany

2011-01-04T13:49:00.001-08:00

1 John 4:7-10
Mark 6:34-44

The root of the word “epiphany” shows up in the original language of the first reading today.
In this way the love of God was REVEALED to us [“epiphanied” to us]: God sent his only-begotten Son into the world so that we might have life through him.
Each day at Mass this whole week, the Church opens God’s Word to other great and small epiphanies of his “only-begotten Son” whom he sent “into the world.”
These epiphanies reveal the identity, mission, power, actions, thoughts, and even the feelings of God the Son who came to be born a man in Bethlehem.
Today the Gospel reveals that in seeing the vast crowd of humanity the Lord Jesus thought of them as “sheep without a shepherd.”
Although our English version here says “his HEART was moved with pity for them,” the original language uses a root word for a different bodily organ, the SPLEEN.
To us today that sounds quite odd.
It simply means the Lord Jesus had strong and deep feelings when he “saw the vast crowd,” for he thought them to be “like sheep without a shepherd.”
This vast crowd— the original language spells out that counting only the males there are five thousand— this vast crowd is not there by accident.
Rather, they have already seen or heard of the Lord Jesus, his amazing teaching, and his miracles.
Today in the Gospel, he had left behind the towns and the crowds around the lake of Galilee, to be alone with his apostles and to rest.
However, the vast crowd, as the Gospel had told it, went RUNNING after him.
Running!
Running like abandoned sheep eager to have the Lord Jesus be their shepherd!
Without the living experience of sheep, perhaps we would be deeply moved to think instead of a vast crowd of orphaned children desperate to have fathers and mothers, and running, running, running to catch up with the Lord Jesus.
Have you and I come to Mass today, running like love-starved orphans, eager to catch the Lord Jesus?
What would we find in him?
Today’s first reading tells us “God is agápe”— love.
So as to “epiphany” himself to us, reveal himself to us, the first reading goes on to say Love has “sent his Son as expiation for our sins” and also “so that we might have life through him”— and not merely earthly life [Greek “bios”], but even God’s life [Greek “zoe”].
The Son of Love in his Gospel today is moved deeply to see the vast crowd running after him.
The Gospel tells us his first response to these abandoned sheep was “to teach them many things.”
The testimony of God’s Word today is that the Son comes to give us life, to be expiation for our sins, and to be our teacher in “many things.”
Only as the last concern does he bless five loaves and two fish to turn them into more than enough to feed five thousand hungry men.
Even at that, he overdoes it to see to it they have the sacred number of exactly twelve— twelve baskets of leftover bread and fish.
The sacred overflow is a sign that he has come to do far more than fill their bellies.
It is an “over-flow,” just as the Biblical word epiphany is literally “over-show.”
We may be sheep running to find the care of a shepherd in the Lord Jesus.
We may be orphans running to find the deeply moved love of a father in the Lord Jesus.
Let us take care to come running for what he wants to give and to show.
In the testimony of God’s Word, it is far more than food for our bellies.
Rather, he wants to teach us, to give us his Godly life, and to expiate for our sins.
Let us come running for that.

For the Feast of Saint John, Apostle and Evangelist

2010-12-27T11:59:00.000-08:00

1 John 1:1-4 John 20:1a,2-8

In pastures near Bethlehem, an angel told Judean shepherds they would find “in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord,” and that they would find him as “a babe wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger” [Lk. 2:11]— swaddled and in a manger, an animals feeding trough that did not even belong to the baby’s parents.
Today in the Gospel, Galilean fishermen run to the tomb where they had buried the same baby as a grown man— a tomb that did not belong to that man or his parents— and there the fishermen found the empty cloths that had swaddled the dead man’s body and head.
The baby’s swaddling clothes in the manger and the man’s swaddling clothes in the tomb served very different yet similar sets of purposes.
The baby’s swaddling clothes embraced him, calmed him, comforted him, warmed him, and kept him still.
The dead man’s swaddling clothes also embraced him, but could do nothing to warm, comfort, or calm his dead body.
The dead man’s body lay in stillness within the swaddling cloths of the tomb for only two nights, because on the third day he rose, and death would no longer swaddle or even so much as touch him again.
Our faith swaddles him now, or, rather, he swaddles us with eternal life, and St. John who was there at the tomb with St. Peter overflows in telling it by his letter to us.

what we have heard,
what we have seen with our eyes,
what we have looked upon
and touched with our hands
... the Word of life—
... made visible;
we have seen it and testify to it
and proclaim to you the eternal life
that was with the Father and was made visible to us—
what we have seen and heard
we proclaim now to you
so that you too may have fellowship
[“communion,” “oneness,” “participation,” “sharing”]
with us;
for our fellowship
[“communion,” “oneness,” “participation,” “sharing”]
is with the Father
and with his Son, Jesus Christ.

By sharing, participation, oneness, communion, fellowship with the apostles, we hear, see, and touch what they did: the Word of eternal life that now swaddles us.
We hear this in the following poetic lines from the “Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church” [202]:

We believe in God the Creator of the flesh;
WE BELIEVE IN THE WORD MADE FLESH IN ORDER TO REDEEM FLESH;
and we believe in the resurrection of flesh
which is the fulfillment of both the creation and the redemption of the flesh.

He came to save the body of flesh, because, in the same passage the Church says also, “the flesh is the hinge of salvation.”
Also, in her Catechism [1003-1004], the Church says of our fellowship with Christ that:

.... When we rise on the last day we also will appear with him in glory.
In expectation of that day, the believer’s BODY and soul ALREADY participate in the dignity of belonging to Christ....

That we might be swaddled, body and soul, with eternal salvation, we now eat and drink communion now, sharing now, participation now, fellowship now, oneness now in the real flesh and real blood of the man whose first earthly bed was a borrowed manger and whose last earthly bed was a borrowed tomb.
In the same flesh and blood, Christ Jesus the Lord now has his own everlasting throne.
St. John wrote of it in his letter and his Gospel, and we celebrate it now, so that, as he writes, “our joy may be complete.”

2010-12-24T16:30:00.001-08:00

For December 23 in Advent

2010-12-23T15:24:00.001-08:00

Malachi 3:1-4,23-24
Luke 1:57-66

Again in Advent, in today’s first reading, we hear the old prophecy of Malachi— Malachi the last of the prophets before John the Baptist.
The name of Malachi means both “my messenger” and “my angel.”
In Malachi’s prophecy, Christian believers can hear God speaking about John the Baptist likewise as a messenger or an angel.
“Lo, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me....”
The prophecy tells also of one who “will purify the sons of Levi.”
In the tribe of Levi, John’s father, Zechariah, was a descendant of Aaron, therefore a priest.
John’s mother, Elizabeth, was also of Aaron’s family.
Through both his father and mother, then, John was a priest by birth.
Malachi’s prophecy upheld one who “will purify the sons of Levi,” the tribe that oversaw the rites of worship for all the tribes of the Lord.
A descendant of Aaron in the tribe of Levi, John was to call all the tribes to change and turn anew to God.
John was to point out to them the greatest priestly purification sacrifice of all: “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”
The Lamb, Jesus, God and Lord, sacrificed himself to be the cutting open of a new and everlasting covenant so that sins may be forgiven.
By sundown tomorrow, we will be commemorating the human birth of God the Lamb.
Today, fulfilling the prophecy of Malachi, we see in the Gospel the birth and naming of John, the messenger God sent before himself.
The Gospel underscores how startling the people found it that Zechariah did not give his own name to his son.
In all the Word of God, only two persons received their names from heaven before their births: John first, and then the Lord Jesus.
Gabriel the angel of God revealed their names.
“John” is the English version of the Biblical Hebrew Yochanan, which means, “God is gracious.”
That is the message God sent before himself in the person of John, “God is gracious.”
God, in his gracious self-giving, freely hands over himself in covenant commitment for us and to save us.
Yet, how can we take in this free gift, unless we let go of sin, turn away from sin, and turn to face God with our hands empty and our whole beings open?
Even that turning is in the prophecy of Malachi, giving us to understand that John will be as Elijah the prophet to “turn the hearts of the fathers” and also “the hearts of the children.”
Heeding the messenger, John, we turn again from our sins, to face and behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
We are to repent, to open, and to lift up our hearts, so that we are honestly ready for Christ who was born in Body and Blood as the only one by whom our whole being may be healed.

For Thursday of the Third Week of Advent

2010-12-16T14:00:00.000-08:00

Luke 7:24-30

For the last two Sundays, the last six weekdays, and today also, the Church ponders St. John the Baptist in the Gospel at Mass.
Beginning tomorrow, December seventeenth, until Christmas Eve, the Church keeps a special “season with a season” in which her Eucharistic Prayer at Mass has a special daily “Preface” that likewise ponders the Baptist.
That Preface says John announced Christ was about to arrive, and John pointed him out once Christ was present.
The words John voiced in pointing out Christ are part of Mass everyday.

Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.

Today in his Gospel, the Lamb of God, the Lord Jesus, says John is more than a prophet.
The Lord voices a prophecy from Scripture in which his own heavenly Father speaks to him.

Behold, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
he will prepare your way before you.

In the Biblical languages, “messenger” is the same as “angel.”
For this reason, Christian art has at times drawn John the Baptist with wings as of an angel.
God the Father sent John the Baptist to do an angel’s work, to be the Father’s messenger preparing people for the coming of God the Son.
Some heeded the angelic voice of John, and underwent a baptism of repentance at his hands.
Today’s Gospel tells also of some who did not.

... the Pharisees and scholars of the law,
who were not baptized by ... [John],
rejected the plan of God for themselves.

To reject God’s plan for oneself— that was the sin of the angel called Satan, and was also the sin of Adam and Eve.
Satan was the angelic messenger whose lie drew Adam and Eve away from God’s plan for them.
John’s angelic message drew the people back to God so they would be ready for God’s Lamb who takes away the sins of the world.
John’s angelic message had people undertake a metanoia, literally “a change of mind.”
It was to be a change regarding themselves and their choices, to turn away from sin, and back to righteousness or justice towards God and neighbor.
The Gospel says:

All the people who listened, including the tax collectors,
who were baptized with the baptism of John,
acknowledged the righteousness of God.

They are ready to welcome the Lamb of God.
God calls us to the same repentant readiness whether it is in regard to the graces of the Spirit, the second coming of Christ, or the power of the sacramental mysteries, especially the Eucharist.
We give voice to this repentant readiness here at Mass as we face the Body and Blood of the Lamb of God.

Lord, I am not worthy that you should come under my roof;
but only say the word,
and my soul will be healed.

The same repentant readiness is a work that we monks of St. Benedict take up in prayer, chew over in lectio divina, and uphold in our vow of conversatio morum, of lifelong ongoing conversion.
On Monte Cassino, where he drew up his “rulebook” for monks, St. Benedict built two houses of prayer.
He named one for a convert, St. Martin of Tours.
He named the other for the one who called for converts, St. John the Baptist.
In the entryway of this Benedictine church in which we worship at this moment, a plaque invokes the prayer of St. John the Baptist for us.
If with St. John our lives invoke and echo the righteousness of God, then the Lord will receive us according to his word that we may live to receive from him the fulfillment of all our hopes.
Suscipe me, Domine, secundum eloquiuum tuum et vivam; et non confundas me ab exspectatione mea— “Receive me, Lord, according to your word, and I shall live; do not disappoint me in my hope.” [Ps. 118:116, that St. Benedict has each monk proclaim during the ritual for making his vows.]

For Thursday of the Second Week of Advent

2010-12-09T17:45:00.001-08:00

Isaiah 41:13-20
Matthew 11:11-15

Today the Gospel puts a piece of writer’s artistry on the lips of the Lord.
We can reckon in his words today six sayings, but the six are set up like three sets of twin sayings nested inside each other.
The outermost twin sayings, the first and the sixth, are about SAYING and HEARING.
The first is “Amen, I SAY to you,” and the last is “Whoever has ears ought to HEAR.”
SAYING and HEARING.
“Amen, I say to you”— the Lord Jesus invented that expression.
It never appeared in the Old Testament or any other Jewish or Hebrew writing until the Lord Jesus said it.
It has the same force and introduces the same forceful kind of message as when the Old Testament prophets would cry, “Thus says the LORD,” the GOD of Israel.
So, when the LORD Jesus uses this saying of GODLY force, “Amen, I say to you, then “Whoever has ears ought to hear.”
The next twin sayings (the second and the fifth) nest inside the first two, and uphold the outstanding greatness of John the Baptist— John as the greatest man born on earth, John as like to, but greater than, Elijah.
Elijah fought a monarchy and its eight hundred and fifty prophets who turned the people of God to the worship of the idols Astarte and Baal.
Elijah violently demanded that the people repent and return to God’s covenant.
After praying down fire from heaven in the face of the eight hundred and fifty prophets of the monarchy, Elijah personally slit all their throats.
By paradox, John the Baptist had his throat and neck cut through by a monarch whose sins he had publicly condemned.
Zealous Elijah— whose memorial day in the Church is July twentieth— Saint Elijah had violence and blood on his hands out of zeal for the covenant of old.
Saint John the Baptist, in his zeal for the coming of the Lord, did not shed the blood of others.
Instead, he used the violence of words to demand repentance and readiness for the coming of the Lord that would bring on a new and everlasting covenant.
In today’s third and middle pair of sayings we hear about the KINGDOM OF HEAVEN.
Though John the Baptist was the greatest man of earthly birth:

... the least in the KINGDOM OF HEAVEN is greater than he.

From the days of John the Baptist until now, the KINGDOM OF HEAVEN suffers violence, and the violent are taking it by force.

Today’s first reading tells us of such violence.

I will help you, says the Lord;
your redeemer is the Holy One of Israel.
I will make of you a THRESHING sledge,
SHARP, new, and double-EDGED,
to THRESH the mountains and CRUSH them,
to make the hills like chaff.
When you WINNOW them, the wind shall CARRY THEM OFF
and the STORM shall SCATTER them.
But you shall rejoice in the Lord,
and glory in the Holy One of Israel.

After the violent intervention, then comes the glory, and today’s Psalm sings of it.

... O my God and King....

... let your faithful .... speak of your might and the glorious splendor of your Kingdom.

Both help and glory now come and call out to us through the new and everlasting Eucharistic Covenant of the Lord Jesus in his Body violently given up and Blood violently shed for us so that sins may be forgiven.
“Amen,” the Lord Jesus says to us, “Whoever has ears ought to hear.”
If we would at least be born in the Kingdom of heaven, let us stir ourselves into prophetic zeal, fight against our own sins, and repent of them.

For Friday of the First Week of Advent

2010-12-03T18:56:00.001-08:00

Matthew 9:27-31

The two blind men were following the Lord and shouting at him a name for the Messiah: “Son of David.”
So far in this Gospel, the only one to speak that name was the angel who came in a dream to Joseph the husband of the pregnant Virgin Mary, calling Joseph, “son of David.”
The Gospel does not say who told today’s blind men that the Lord Jesus is the Messiah, Son of David.
Even though they are blind, these two men already see something others have not yet seen, told, or come to believe.
Today the Son of David did not answer the two blind men as they followed him and shouted for his merciful attention.
They had to catch up with him after he entered a house.
He, without greeting them, asked straightaway, “Do you have FAITH that I am able to do this?”
When they said, “Yes, Lord,” he reached out, TOUCHED their eyes, and said, “Let it be done to you according to your FAITH.”
They already had the sight of faith.
Now he has given sight to their bodily eyes by the willing touch of his bodily hands.
He also comes to heal us of sin that blinds our spirits and prevents us from seeing the face of God.
He heals us by being wounded and slaughtered for our sins.
His body is broken.
His blood is poured out.
He offers himself up as the ransom of the sons and daughters of God.
Now, whenever we eat his flesh
and drink his blood, we tell of his death until he returns in glory.
This banquet is not spiritual ONLY.
His flesh is REAL food, even to the everlasting good of our BODIES.
His blood is REAL drink, even to the everlasting good of our BODIES.
As for the blind men today, so also for us in his Eucharist!
Today in his Gospel, Christ asks for and grasps the FAITH of two blind men.
Having received their spirits, he stretches out his hands also to touch and heal their bodies.
Having professed their faith, their bodily eyes are now open.
Their first sight is the face of Christ.
Today the Psalm said, “this I seek ... that I may gaze on the loveliness of the Lord.”
As we wait in hope, watching for the loveliness of Christ’s return, we join the voice of the Church in her Eucharistic worship.

Every tear will be wiped away.
On that day we shall see you, our God, as you are.
We shall become like you. [From the funeral version of Eucharistic Prayer III]

Healed from the blindness of sin and death, we shall be one with God whom we shall love, know and see FACE TO FACE as he really is.
Now, especially in Advent, we watch for that day, hoping that the salvation promised us will be ours, when Christ our Lord will come again in his glory.
Until our eyes open to that day, we call out for its coming even by the faithful prayer of two blind men, “Son of David, have mercy on us!”

For the First Sunday of Advent

2010-11-28T18:52:00.000-08:00

[Posted five days after the fact]

Isaiah 2:1-5
Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 24:37-44

In today’s first reading the Word of the Lord points to our coming to this hilltop monastery and its church.
“Come, let us climb the Lord’s mountain, to the house of the God of Jacob.”
Then, it also tells why we are to be here: “that he may instruct us in his ways, and we may walk in his paths.”
It goes on to foretell the end of all war when all nations shall join to follow the God of Israel.
“All nations shall stream toward” ... “the mountain of the Lord’s house,” to learn “his ways” and “walk in his paths.”
“One nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again.”
The second reading, however, calls us to make war indeed.
“Let us then THROW OFF the works of darkness and put on the ARMOR of light.”
If we wish peace among nations, if we wish to be at peace with others and with God, then we each need to make war against sin within our individual selves.

Let us then throw off the works of darkness
and put on the armor of light;
let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day,
not in orgies and drunkenness,
not in promiscuity and lust,
not in rivalry and jealousy.
But put on the Lord Jesus Christ,
and make no provision for the desires of the flesh.

To “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” is to take hold of him as armor against our own sins, so “that he may instruct us in his ways, and we may walk in his paths.”
So here I am having chosen to be in this House of God today.
My flesh may be here, but am I truly open for the provisioning of my soul?
Have I truly chosen to be instructed in God’s ways, to walk obediently in his paths and humbly by his light?
By my own choice to bring my flesh here, I have made my soul answerable.
As today’s first reading foretells, the Lord “shall judge” and “impose terms.”
As we uphold in the Creed here at Mass Sunday after Sunday, the Lord Jesus Christ “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”
How will it be at the coming of the Son of Man?
Will he save us or lose us?
In his Gospel today he tells us we must stand ready, for at an hour we do not expect, he will come.
Like his Eucharist— with the appearance of bread but the reality of his Body, and with the appearance of wine but the reality of his Blood— the day of Christ’s return will remain unrecognizable to eyes of flesh until they see him face to face.
One day, in the sight of all flesh worldwide, to the dismay of history and the delight of faith, Christ will return, as he says in his Gospel today, breaking in like a thief at an unknown hour of night.
If my own death should break in upon me before the Second Coming, then the sooner shall I stand all the same before the Judge of the living and the dead.
One of the “tools for good works” in the teaching of St. Benedict is for a monk “to keep death daily before his eyes.”
On what path will my death or the Second Coming find me?
The choice is mine everyday and in all things.
If I choose the good work of being always ready either for death or the Second Coming, then I will find eternal rest and joy in the perpetual light of paradise face to face with God.
If I have not bothered at all to be ready, God will not bother me at all, any more, and forever.
He will save those who stand ready, but he will leave me to the path I have freely chosen.
He says it ominously in his Gospel today: “one will be taken, and one will be left,” and a second time, “one will be taken, and one will be left.”
“Therefore, stay awake!”
“For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.”
What we do know is that God the Word comes true upon his altar.

This is my body ... given up for you.

This is the cup of my blood ... shed so that sins may be forgiven.

However, even in the real Eucharistic coming of the Son of Man, the warning of his Gospel today holds true: “one will be taken, and one will be left.”
What will make the difference?
Again, the Word of Lord tells us in the second reading.

Let us then throw off the works of darkness
and put on the armor of light....

... put on the Lord Jesus Christ....

Take, eat, drink, and put on the giving up of one’s body for the good of others and the spending of one’s blood in seeking the forgiveness of sins.
The light of the Eucharistic armor is God’s new and everlasting covenant, his flesh and blood commitment to our salvation.
We armor ourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ by waking ourselves up and committing our own flesh and blood to the salvation he offers us in his.

For Monday of the Thirty-Fourth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2010-11-22T16:40:00.000-08:00

Revelation 14:1-3,4b-5
Luke 21:1-4

In the first reading, the Word of the Lord takes us forward to Mount Zion at the end of time.
However, the Gospel of the Lord takes us backward to Mount Zion of old.
There in God’s temple, through the eyes of the Lord Jesus, we see a widow offering her worship.
The Lord says her two small coins are all the widow has on earth.
She gives them to God’s temple, sacrificing the last of her worldly welfare.
She hides nothing and withholds nothing from the Lord.
At the end of time she would be worthy to be among the hundred and forty-four thousand standing with the Lamb on Mount Zion.
The Word of the Lord says of them in the first reading: “On their lips no deceit has been found....”

They were singing what seemed to be a new hymn before the throne....

These are the ones who follow the Lamb wherever he goes.
They have been ransomed as the first fruits of the human race
for God and the Lamb.
On their lips no deceit has been found;
they are unblemished.

In the Gospel, the widow is already with the Lord Jesus, the Lamb of God, in his temple on Mount Zion.
As all lambs in the temple are to undergo sacrifice, so the widow chooses to follow and sacrifice all that she has in the world.
Here today, on this small Benedictine mountain, in this temple, this church, at this hour, the Lamb has come since two or three and more are gathered in his name.
He has called us to follow him here, to join him in offering ourselves on his altar in his Church— through, with him, and in him.
In his Body and Blood, Christ puts into his Church far more than the last of his coins.
The Son of God puts into his Church his whole being for the glory and honor of his Father, and “for us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven.”
The Lord is here, and sees all that we offer.
He sees also what we withhold, even if we do not know we are withholding.
Since only his sacrifice of worship and salvation is unblemished, perfect, and total, he lets us eat it and drink it.
He puts his totally self-consuming offering into his treasury, his Church— us— so that from within us his sacrifice is freedom and power to choose and “follow the Lamb wherever he goes.”

For Wednesday of the Thirty-Second Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2010-11-10T19:50:00.001-08:00

[November 10, Memorial of Saint Leo the Great, Pope and Doctor of the Church]

Luke 17:11-19

When the ten lepers asked the Lord for mercy, he sent them to carry out a liturgical rite: “Go show yourselves to the priests.”
Those who recovered from leprosy were to show themselves to the priests who would verify their healing and publicly release them from the status of being unclean.
Then each former leper would make two sacrifices, handing them over to the priest: one sacrifice to atone for sin and the other to thank and worship God.
Nine of the ten former lepers were thanking God with their sacrifices.
One of the ten came back to thank the Lord Jesus, whose answer was NOT, “Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to ME?”
Rather: “Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to GOD?”
The Lord Jesus turned what happened into an upholding of his own Godhead.
The Lord Jesus— a man who claims to be God and truly is God.
More than two thousand years since God became man— and our minds and words still reach out for the meaning.
More than a thousand five hundred years ago, Pope St. Leo gave history a bedrock of thought on the mystery of Christ-God-and-Man.
He wrote a letter whose words mark the basis of all correct teaching on the relationship between the manhood and the Godhead in Christ.
In short: one Divine Person in whom are two natures— the Divine nature and the human nature— the two being forever joined to each other, but without any confusion or mixture between them.
St. Leo’s letter was so masterful that the fourth worldwide council in Christian history, the Council of Chalcedon, upheld that no TRUE Christian HAS ever, CAN ever, or MAY ever wander from or go against the basic facts the letter laid out.
Inspired by St. Leo and one former Samaritan leper, we come here to the Eucharist, to fall in worshipful thanksgiving at the feet of Jesus who is God and Lord.
We come with our sacrifices, to show ourselves to him, the High Priest of heaven and earth, that he might pronounce us clean of our sin and give us salvation for our faith by sacrificing himself.

For Friday of the Thirty-First Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2010-11-05T14:39:00.001-07:00

Philippians 3:17 to 4:1
Luke 16:1-8

After today the Church has only twenty-two days left in her year of worship at Mass.
So she now turns more and more to hear the Lord teach about what will carry weight when each of us goes to stand before him at the last judgment.
Today’s first reading from the Word of the Lord tells of those whose “citizenship is in heaven,” while also telling of those who are “enemies of the cross of Christ.”
St. Paul writes of being “even in tears” over the matter.
Today’s Gospel also upholds two kinds: those who are “the children of light,” and those who are “the children of this world.”
Elsewhere [Mt. 25] the Lord speaks of the two as the sheep and the goats.
In his Gospel today he would have us mark well that the children of this world are sharp-witted in doing whatever it takes to get ahead.
He goes so far as to say they “are more prudent in dealing with their own generation than the children of light.”
What is the wisdom by which the children of light can make the grade?
We already know the many answers the Lord has for that question.
After all, day after day, and year after year, we are always here to celebrate the Church’s year of worship at Mass, we being more than two or three gathered in the Lord’s name, with him teaching his Gospel in our midst.
Here at Mass, besides speaking in his Gospel, he is always going into “flesh-and-blood” action on our behalf.
So what we are going to do with these longstanding and ongoing gifts in our own lives so as to become children of light, rather than enemies of the cross of Christ?
That’s up to each of us.

For the Thirtieth Ordinary Sunday of the Church Year

2010-10-24T14:21:00.001-07:00

Luke 18:9-14

In Israel of long ago, the Pharisee movement and the tax collectors both came into being after heathen outsiders defeated Israel and took over the land.
The Greeks had invaded Israel about one hundred and fifty years before the birth of Christ.
They imposed their ways and their idol worship upon the Jews.
Some of the Jews began a heroic effort to keep separate from the heathen Greek ways and keep faithful to the true God.
That Jewish movement of holiness and faithfulness to God was the original Pharisee movement.
Then, about ninety years later, or about sixty years before the birth of Christ, the Romans invaded and took over.
The Romans also worshiped idols.
Mind you, in the full Biblical way of seeing things, idols in the end are demons.
In the face of the demonic Greeks and now the demonic Romans, the Pharisees kept up their heroic religious faithfulness to the true God whom their fathers had come to know and worship.
Rome made itself rich by imposing taxes on the Israel of God.
Demonic Rome hired lowlifers of Israel to collect taxes from the people of the living God.
However, the tax collectors further enriched themselves by squeezing more than Rome required from their fellow Israelites, God’s people.
For the sake of a share in the money of demonic Rome, the tax collectors were traitors to their countrymen and traitors to the true God.
Thus, the tax collectors were the opposite of the original Pharisees.
By the time the Lord Jesus began to preach God’s kingdom and call men to conversion, the Roman system of Israelite tax collectors had been in place for almost one hundred years, and the Pharisee movement for nearly twice as long.
The tax collectors were as bad as they had always been.
However, the Pharisees, who began as sincere holy men of God, had by now stiffened towards a mechanical system of self-justifying attitudes and observances to which we today might apply the label of “Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.”
In his Gospel today, the Lord Jesus tells of a Pharisee practicing self-worship at God’s temple.

The Pharisee ... spoke this prayer TO HIMSELF,
“O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity....”

Then the Pharisee recited the sins of others, but also bragged of his own religious observances.
The Lord Jesus then told of the tax collector.
The taxman “stood off at a distance and would not even raise his eyes to heaven.”
He knew he had done wicked things against God and country and neighbor.
So now, not daring to look up, the taxman beats himself up— the Lord Jesus says he “beat his breast.”
As he thumped himself, he prayed, “O God be merciful to me a sinner.”
That’s all.
The Lord Jesus says the taxman—not the Pharisee—the taxman “went home justified.”
Another way, a good way, to say it is that the taxman went home “right with God.”
Let us notice what matters to the Lord Jesus as he tells this story.
It does not matter that the Pharisee sincerely avoided acts of greed, dishonesty, and adultery.
It does not matter that the Pharisee fasted two days a week.
It does not matter that the Pharisee tithed, which means he donated one tenth of his whole income to the poor and the priests.
What matters to the Lord Jesus in terms of being right with God is what the taxman did and what the taxman did not do.
The taxman lowered his eyes before God, he beat his breast, he accused himself, he called on God’s goodness, not his own, and he called himself a sinner.
“O God, be merciful to me a sinner.”
That’s what the taxman did; and so he was able— perhaps without even knowing it— to go home right with God.
What was it the taxman did NOT do— and it mattered to the Lord Jesus?
The taxman did not point at or mention anyone else’s sins or lack of integrity.
In the sight of God, who sees all and knows all, each of us is in some way both a Pharisee and a taxman.
In the story the Lord tells in his Gospel today, one thing matters in being made right with God: to confess one’s own self a sinner.
That’s why we always begin the Mass with a public confession of our sinfulness and ask God for mercy; and then we repeat the same at key moments throughout the Mass.
That’s why we offer up the Body and Blood of Christ.
He tells us:

this is my body
given up for you
this is my blood
shed for you
so that sins may be forgiven

“O God, be merciful to me a sinner.”
In the Gospel today, that is as powerful, infallible, and pure a prayer as that of the criminal who confessed his own guilt and Christ’s innocence— as Christ was offering himself up on the cross for sinners: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” [Lk. 23:42].
The Lord canonized him on the spot: “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise” [Lk. 23:43].
I am a sinner, and you are sinners.
We must ask for mercy, if we would one day be with Christ the King in Paradise.
“O God, be merciful to me a sinner.”

I am accompanying my mother in the Holy Land October 4 to 17.

2010-10-04T00:01:00.001-07:00

Monday, October 4
Arrive in Tel Aviv, and take bus to hotel in Ginosar (Biblical Gennesaret) on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.

Tuesday, October 5
Mount of Beatitudes, Sermon on the Mount, ten minutes away from Ginosar, overlooking the Sea of Galilee. Capernaum (in whose hills Jesus prayed. House of Peter. Bethsaida, the ancestral home of Peter and his brother Andrew

Wednesday, October 6
Upper Galilee. Northern border of Israel. Dan River, one of the headwaters of the River Jordan. Dan, ancient site with the remains of King Jeroboam’s tenth century B.C. altar for the golden calf, when the kingdoms of Israel and Judah split. Caesarea Philippi where Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do you say I am?” View Mount Hermon, one candidate for the site of the Transfiguration.

Thursday, October 7
Sailing on the Sea of Galilee which Jesus calmed and upon which he walked.

Friday, October 8
Nazareth, visiting the Church of the Annunciation. The “the brow of the hill” where a mob threatened to throw Jesus down the cliff (Luke 4:14-30). Look out towards Mount Tabor (more traditional site for the Transfiguration) and also the Jezreel Valley where Deborah and her general, Barak, defeated the Canaanites. Megiddo, seeing a layer cake of archeology— the evidence of civilization on top of civilization (MeGiDDO is also “arMaGeDDOn”). Caesarea, the deep-water port built by Herod the Great. Caesarea was the home of the Roman garrison and of Pontius Pilate. Drive to hotel in Jerusalem.

Saturday, October 9
Mount of Olives. Walk the Palm Sunday route of Jesus. Halfway down the hill we reach the Garden of Gethsemane. Enter the Old City through the Damascus Gate and follow the Way of the Cross to Golgotha (Calvary) at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher (Burial and Resurrection)

Sunday, October 10
Western Wall or the “Wailing Wall” (remnant of temple complex built by King Herod) in Jerusalem. Town of Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, where we visit the Church of the Nativity. Herodion, a fortress built by Herod the Great on the outskirts of Bethlehem.

Monday, October 11
Ein Gedi, a lush oasis which served as David’s hideout when he was on the run from King Saul. Masada, the fortress built by Herod, where the Jews made their last stand against the Romans after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Drive to hotel on shore of the Dead Sea.

Tuesday October 12
Swim in the Dead Sea (whose high salt content makes you float more buoyantly than in ocean water. Visit the possible site of Sodom and Gomorrah. Visit the Negev wilderness as guest of nomadic Bedouins.

Wednesday, October 13
We visit Qumran, a retreat center of the Essenes who were copying the Dead Sea Scrolls—also possible area of desert residence of John the Baptist. Drive back to Jerusalem, check into hotel. Visit the southern wall excavations of the Old City.

Thursday, October 14
Drive to Beit Zaman Hotel (built into the stone buildings of an old village) in Wadi Musa in the Kingdom of Jordan.

Friday, October 15
Spend the day at the archaeological site of Petra, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. This spectacular city, carved out of solid rock, was the target of a dreadful prophecy in the book of Obadiah, and it served as the capital of the ancient Nabatean kingdom. In biblical times, Petra was part of the Edomite Kingdom, founded by Jacob’s brother, Esau. We enter Petra through a magnificent gorge, with towering red-rock cliffs on either side. In Petra: the “Treasury” building, made famous as the “temple” in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”

Saturday, October 16
Mount Nebo, where Moses died, with a view of the Promised Land as Moses saw it. Drive to Amman, Jordan, to check into hotel.

Sunday, October 17
Fly home. “California, here I come.”

For Tuesday of the Twenty-Sixth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2010-09-28T13:37:00.001-07:00

Luke 9:51-56

As you may recall, Jerusalem and the Jews loathed the Samaritans as half-breeds and heretics.
Because the Lord Jesus, a Jew, was on his way to Jerusalem, the Samaritan village shut its doors to him.
It is an irony that Jerusalem itself would shove the Lord out of its gates to crucify him.
He already knew it, and his Gospel today says “he RESOLUTELY DETERMINED to journey to Jerusalem” to receive worse than from the Samaritan village— worse also than his hometown, Nazareth, that tried to throw him off its hilltop.
As another irony, the newly risen Lord, everlasting victor over death, showed his apostles his body glorified yet RESOLUTELY DETERMINED to go on bearing the marks of the nails and lance.
The hands, feet, and side of the Risen One show that he is also the Crucified.
In the marks of his suffering and death, we see that, except for sin, the Risen Lord was and remains everything we are even unto suffering and death.
The marks in his flesh also say he is God— for God is Love— and Love in the absolute is the giving up and giving away of oneself.
That is what he shows in breaking open his body and shedding his blood on the cross “for us men and for salvation” as we say in the Creed.
He is still RESOLUTELY DETERMINED in his Eucharist that he first gave at the end of his journey to Jerusalem.
In his Eucharistic Body broken for us, and his Eucharistic Blood shed for us, Love still wounds and marks himself for us, for that is how and what Love is and does.
Two of his disciples wanted “to call down fire from heaven to consume” a Samaritan village for the Lord’s first suffering on his journey to Jerusalem.
He rebuked his disciples, and had them rather journey by his side to his suffering, but later they ran away.
At times we too want God to burn away the inconvenience and pain we suffer; we too run away.
So his rebuke in his Gospel today is for us too.
If we stay at his side, then sufferings on the way become our own journey to the city of God and the resurrection.
In giving us his Body and Blood, he tells us to be RESOLUTELY DETERMINED to journey with him: “Do this in memory of me.”

For Wednesday of the Twenty-Fifth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2010-09-22T19:47:00.001-07:00

Luke 9:1-6

This is the first time in this Gospel that the Lord Jesus sends out his Twelve Apostles.
It is a beginning.
The Apostles have heard him preach the good news of the Kingdom of God, as well as the demands of that Kingdom.
Now he sends them to preach the same.
They have seen him heal the sick and cast out demons even by legion on one occasion.
Now he his Apostles “them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases.”
In this much— preaching God’s Kingdom, driving out demons and diseases, healing the sick— in this much the Apostles are already extensions of the Lord’s own apostolate.
They have seen him do other things that he does not empower or tell them to do— such as command obedience from the wind and the sea, and even raise the dead.
One thing the Apostles have seen him do already is forgive sins.
Not now, but later he will give them the Holy Spirit of power and authority to forgive sins: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven....” [Jn. 20:22-23]
He didn’t bother ever to say anything about giving them his own spectacular power and authority to command wind and sea or to raise the dead.
Such spectacular miracles are as nothing, but what he wanted them to continue in his name was to forgive sins.
In this particular holy Gospel according to Luke, forty days after he rose from the dead, and just before he ascended into heaven, the last thing he said to them was about the power of the Father’s Holy Spirit and the forgiveness of sins.

Thus it is written,
that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead,
and that REPENTANCE AND FORGIVENESS OF SINS should be preached in his name to all nations,
beginning from Jerusalem.
You are witnesses of these things.
And behold, I send THE PROMISE OF MY FATHER upon you;
but stay in the city,
until you are clothed with POWER FROM ON HIGH. [Lk. 24:46-49]

Preaching repentance in his name and having heavenly power to forgive sins in his name— invoking repentance and forgiving sins in the name of Christ is how the Church of the Apostles is to tell and open the Kingdom of God for men and women.
The BEGINNING of the apostolic mission served God’s Kingdom by driving off demons and healing the sick, as we see in today’s Gospel
However, the FULFILLMENT of God’s Kingdom in the lives of men and women hangs on their own repentance, for Christ tells his Apostles in his Gospel today: “as for those who do not welcome you, when you leave that town, shake the dust from your feet in testimony against them.”
Let us open up to repentance, lest the Kingdom of God leave us in the dust.
Only by repentance can we honestly eat and drink the Body and Blood of Christ the King in “the new and everlasting covenant ... so that sins may be forgiven.”

For Friday of the Twenty-Fourth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2010-09-17T19:45:00.000-07:00

1 Corinthians 15:12-20
Luke 8:1-3

The apostles and holy women in the Gospel today and at the end of the Gospel were the kernel of Christ’s Church.
Today’s Gospel says they went with him “from one town and village to another,” as he was “preaching and proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom of God.”
After he died and rose from the dead, he met with his apostles for forty days, speaking again of the Kingdom of God. [Acts 1:2-3]
At their last meeting before he ascended into heaven, they asked, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” [Acts 1:6]
He answered only that all time was in the hands of the Father alone, but while waiting on the Father they would have the power of the Holy Spirit to witness for Christ to the whole world. [Acts 1:7-8]
They were asking about the restoration of the Israelite kingdom.
However, throughout his Gospel, he preached the Kingdom that is more than all races and all lands.
As today’s Gospel says, he went about “preaching and proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom of God,” not the kingdom of Israel.
What is that good news?
Today’s first reading names its fulfillment: “Christ has been raised from the dead, the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.”
In the timing of the heavenly Father, his Risen Son will return to raise and crown with royal anointing the flesh and souls of believers.
That will be immeasurably more than anything the apostles and holy women knew or received from him during their earthly lives.
The Kingdom of God will be the crowning of our flesh and souls.
Never again any need to be “cured of evil spirits and infirmities” as were the holy women.
Even death shall be no more.
Our wills shall cleave unfailingly to God in holiness, so that we never again yield to sin that is the original cause of death.
Our whole being shall be filled with joy in God, and filled with God in joy.
Today’s psalm said it: “Lord, when your glory appears, my joy will be full.”
He calls us to follow him for a Kingdom that is the true greatness of our selves.
Short of taking the risk to believe this good news, it seems only too good to be true.
The Word of the Lord in the first reading owns that risk.

... if Christ has not been raised,
then empty ... is our preaching;
empty ... your faith.

... if Christ has not been raised,
your faith is vain;
you are still in your sins.

If for this life only we have hoped in Christ,
we are the most pitiable people of all.

This risky faith of ours dares us to live for the good news of the Kingdom of God in all the choices of our lives.
God the Holy Spirit is already our power to do so as witnesses of Christ to all the earth.
The Spirit will breathe for us again from the Body and Blood of Christ at this altar today.
It is up to us to obey or waste the power of God who alone can fulfill us.
Believe it or not!

Again: I thank those who have helped my monastery.

2010-09-11T13:39:00.001-07:00

Besides helping us simply to be a monastery, donations also help us serve the needs of others.

We maintain a retreathouse for guests who wish to spend some days of prayer here at the monastery.

Volunteers who work at our monastery collect and provide food for distribution to the poor.

We also assist financially and administratively a multifaceted organization, "The Brother Benno Center" (named for one of our monks who helped the poor for most of his life). The Center provides daily cooked meals, emergency shelter, and other forms of help to the poor and homeless.

We send funds to assist monasteries in less well-off parts of the world.

We also support financially the international Benedictine university in Rome.

We would be grateful for any donation you make. If you click on the "DONATE" button below, it will allow you to use either your credit card or PayPal.

For the Twenty-Second Ordinary Sunday of the Church Year

2010-08-29T15:49:00.001-07:00

Sirach 3:17-18,20,28-29
Hebrews 12:18-19,22-24a
Luke 14:1,7-14

Today in his Gospel the Lord is one of the guests at a Sabbath meal.
He has already put a stopper on the protests any might have had as he worked the healing of a sick man in their midst, despite the religious ban on so-called work on the Sabbath.
Now he tells them two lessons— one lesson aimed at his fellow guests and another lesson aimed at the homeowner hosting the Sabbath meal.
The first lesson is a parable about being humble when choosing a seat at the festal gathering of a wedding banquet.
In the Lord’s teachings, he uses a wedding banquet as a sign of the heavenly reward that awaits the righteous or just after the general resurrection at the end of the world and the last judgment of the just and the wicked.
There can be a practical advantage to choosing a humble seat at the festal gathering of a mere earthly wedding banquet.
However, the Lord’s words, “go and take the lowest place,” also guide us in respect of the last judgment before the everlasting wedding banquet that is to reward the just.
“For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”
To have been exalted is what we hear about in today’s second reading.

... you have approached...
the city of the living God,
the heavenly Jerusalem,
and countless angels in festal gathering,
and the assembly of the firstborn enrolled in heaven,
and God the judge of all,
and the spirits of the just made perfect,
and Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant,
and the sprinkled blood that speaks more eloquently than that of Abel.

It is a wedding banquet, and the wedding is the new and everlasting covenant in the blood of Christ.
When the Son of God first came to wed himself to embodied humanity, he did not exalt himself.
The Word of the Lord in Saint Paul’s letter to the Philippians [2:7-9] tells it.

... he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave....
... he humbled himself
and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.
Therefore God has highly exalted him....

The Most Holy and Exalted One humbled himself unto death.
His blood calls out for mercy from heaven, since it was shed so that sins may be forgiven, whereas the murdered blood of Abel cried out for God to punish his killer.
The Blood of Christ calls out for mercy from the heavenly Father, but also from us.
“Do this in memory of me!”
So we are to show mercy to those who owe us and cannot repay us.
“For,” the Lord says, “you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”
At the end, when the righteous or the just rise from the dead, Christ will repay them for the generous mercy they showed to those beset by inability to repay.
So both the lessons in today’s Gospel are about delaying our earthly advantages for the sake of everlasting advantages in which God exalts us for our humility and repays us for our generous mercy.
The everlasting advantage, everlasting exaltation, and everlasting repayment at the resurrection of the just, the humble, and the merciful will stand in contrast to the judgment Christ will pass against the unrighteous, the unjust, the self-exalting, the ungenerous, and the unmerciful.
We point to that every Sunday here at Mass, as we shall do in a short while, when we all stand up to profess our faith that Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and that we look for the resurrection of the dead when the last judgment will usher in the life of the world to come.
We could end up at a banquet of eating our words.
For now, the wedding banquet of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God [see Rev. 19:9] is already really present here in the festal sign and instrument that we call the Mass, the Liturgy of the Eucharist.
The Word of the Lord in the Acts of the Apostles [2:42] also calls it the communion and the breaking of the bread.
Here, the Lord Jesus Christ gives flesh and blood to both of his lessons in his Gospel today.
He has invited to his wedding banquet us who are unable really to repay him.
Then, even though he is God and our host, he takes the lowest possible place here at his own wedding banquet.
Lower than the slave serving us at table, Christ is here as the slaughtered feast, giving up his body for us, shedding his blood for us, so that sins may be forgiven.
Having accepted his invitation to his Eucharistic wedding banquet, if we follow him in humility now and generous mercy now, he will exalt and repay us at the resurrection.
However, even if we feast on the humility and mercy of Christ in his Eucharist, we can still choose to stay unrighteous, unjust, self-exalting, ungenerous, and unmerciful.
Then, as he tells it today and throughout his Gospel, he will send us downward and away when he comes again in glory to judge the living and the dead.
Are we ready to own up to that, and to say we believe it?
If so, let us stand.
WE BELIEVE IN ONE GOD....

For Monday of the Twenty-First Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2010-08-23T14:32:00.000-07:00

2 Thessalonians 1:1-5,11-12
Matthew 23:13-22

In the first reading from the Word of the Lord, St. Paul says he boasts of the Thessalonians to the churches in other places.
He boasts of their flourishing faith, their great love, and their endurance in all persecutions.
Despite their heroism, St. Paul still prays that they may be made worthy of God’s call, and that they may be considered worthy of the Kingdom of God.
Despite even heroic faith and love, one may never presume on already being worthy— on already having merited— God’s call or his Kingdom.
In his Gospel today, the Lord accuses the scribes and Pharisees not only of being outside the Kingdom of heaven, but also of leading others away from it.
For the scribes and Pharisees, the gold offered in the sacred Temple was something they could swear upon— like swearing on the Bible— the gold, and not the Temple.
Likewise, they would swear upon gifts to be burned on the altar, but not upon the altar that consecrated the gifts.
Gold, food, and animals for sacrifice were things men could trade, buy, or sell, and thus make a profit.
These were more sacred to the scribes and Pharisees than the Temple of God and the Altar of God.
So the scribes, Pharisees, and those they misled kept themselves out of the Kingdom and made themselves unworthy of it.
The Lord— with a hard edge and a sharp tongue— calls them today sons of hell, children of Gehenna.
He closes today’s Gospel passage by swearing that God dwells in his Temple but also is seated as king on his throne in the Kingdom of heaven.
Christ consistently speaks of God as a king and of the Kingdom of heaven.
To say that another way: Christian talk is “kingdom talk.”
The Church crowns the end of her calendar year of Sunday worship with the solemn feast of the Kingdom or Kingship of Christ the King.
Everything the Church does in history is faithful to Christ only if it does not stray from the procession towards Christ the King.
Everything— all service of neighbors and those in need, all teaching, all prayer, worship, and virtue— everything must march on the way to the Kingdom and to worthiness for the Kingdom.
Taking a cue from Christ whose consistent theme is the Kingdom, St. Benedict focuses on Christ precisely as a King leading an army of monks in a spiritual battle for his kingdom.
St. Benedict’s language about Christ the King is “kingdom talk”— the masculine, hard, and military language of merit in war.
In closing his invitation to monastic life, his Prologue, St. Benedict says:

So let us never let go of God’s instructions,
but rather hold fast to his teaching in the monastery until death
and share in patience in Christ’s sufferings
so that we may also merit to have a share in his kingdom.

For Thursday of the Nineteenth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2010-08-12T13:51:00.001-07:00

Ezekiel 12:1-12
Matthew 18:21 to 19:1

St. Peter makes use of the number of the days of creation— seven— to propose an ideal number of times he should forgive a brother who sins against him.
To say the least, the Lord refigures the mathematics for him: not merely seven, but many times more than that.
Today in both readings the Lord tells of punishment either by captivity in exile or by long-lasting torture.
In the first reading, the Lord’s word recalls Israel’s rebellion against him and his punishing Israel with captivity in exile.
In his Gospel today, the Lord tells of a king who handed over for torture one of his debtors who was an unforgiving hypocrite.
The Lord says a horrendous thing: “So will my heavenly Father do to you, unless each of you forgives his brother from his heart.”
This Gospel reading even points to an impossible length of time for the torture.
However, it is hidden behind a translation failure.
Italians say translation is treason, and that is the case with today’s Gospel reading.
This treasonous rendering says the first servant owed his king “a huge amount.”
However, the original language spells out ten thousand talents.
A Biblical talent was the salary for fifteen years of work.
So, ten thousand talents are the salary for the work of one hundred and fifty thousand years.
It is an impossible debt, with no way of being paid back, as the Gospel says.
The servant begged for patience, and claimed he would pay it back in full.
That was impossible; and so the king just forgave the debt.
You and I are each in the same position with God.
We are souls God made from nothing that shall live, not merely one hundred and fifty thousand years, but forever.
Even if we were sinless, our souls are impossibly, everlastingly indebted to God.
What kind of additional, impossible debt must we have since we are, not only alive, but also sinners?
Furthermore, what of God in Christ the King who chose to pay all debts we owe him by his undergoing torture and death in our stead?
He has not merely forgiven our debts.
Rather, he has paid them with his own flesh, blood, soul, and divinity.
The second servant in the Gospel today owes the first what this translation calls “a much smaller amount.”
In fact, the original language says it is “a hundred denarii,” the salary for one hundred days only.
That’s as nothing against one hundred and fifty thousand years.
The sins of our fellow men against us are as nothing against our immortal souls we owe to God and against our sins that disown and dishonor our Creator.
God gives us mercy if we ask it.
However, he lays down the condition that we forgive our fellow men from our hearts.
Otherwise God will withhold his mercy from us.
No— even worse!
The Lord says his heavenly Father will do to us as the king to his indebted and unforgiving servant: hand us over to the torturers until we paid back the whole debt we owe him.
One hundred and fifty thousand years of torture might as well be forever.
You and I are here before the altar to dare to ask Christ our King and God to hand over his Body and Blood to pay the impossible debts we owe him.
What everlasting fools we should be to withhold a lesser forgiveness from our fellow servants.

For the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord

2010-08-06T17:39:00.001-07:00

Daniel 7:9-10,13-14
2 Peter 1:16-19
Luke 9:28-36

The roots of the Biblical word “exodus” mean literally “the way out.”
Moses and Elijah, hundreds of years before Christ, had each gone on an exodus to stand before the face of God upon the heights of Sinai.
Now we see them standing on a mountain in the glory of the Lord Jesus.
Moses was of the tribe of Levi.
At Sinai, Moses was the middleman— the ritual priest— of the living God’s Covenant with the twelve tribes of Israel more than one thousand and two hundred years before Christ.
Beginning with Moses at Sinai, God chose the tribe Levi for the priesthood.
Elijah, whose tribe we do not know, was one of the greatest prophets.
Four hundred years or so after Moses, the people of God turned to idols, leaving Elijah as the lone prophet demanding they turn back to the living God and his covenant with them.
Moses the priest of the Sinai covenant, and Elijah its faithful prophet— these two men now stand in the glory of the Lord Jesus.
They speak with him about his exodus by which he is to open the New and Everlasting Covenant.
The Lord Jesus is of the tribe of Judah, the tribe of the kings.
Moses priest and Elijah prophet stand before the King, “the Most High over all the earth” [see the responsorial psalm], who is also Priest and Prophet above them in all things and in all ways.
Peter, who “did not know what he was saying,” said it was good to be there with Moses and Elijah, and offered to pitch camp for them right there.
Straightaway, heaven stopped him.
A cloud shrouded them all, and inside it a voice said of the Lord Jesus that he was the chosen one.
It was right then that Moses and Elijah vanished.
For the New and Everlasting Covenant, God chose not Moses the priest nor Elijah the prophet, but his own Son born into Judah, the tribe of kings.
Peter was not to pitch tents to stay with Moses and Elijah in the ancient covenant.
Rather, Peter, John, James, all the apostles, and the whole Church are to go on an exodus with the Lord Jesus who is Priest, Prophet, and King in enacting the New and Everlasting Covenant.
At the end of our exodus we shall all be transfigured through and through.
The fulfillment of the New and Everlasting Covenant shall make us shine like the sun in soul and body, in all we do, touch, and make— as even the earthly, human, handmade clothing of the Lord Jesus became as dazzling light.
All our human reality, experience, body, feelings, thinking, choices, and activity shall be transfigured.
The transfiguration of the Lord Jesus calls us to listen to him, to follow him on exodus, and to pitch camp with him in his New and Everlasting Covenant by which he makes us in himself the royal tribe of the sons and daughters of God.
Even though the exodus of the Lord Jesus goes the way of the cross, we see that the heavenly Father has committed himself to clothe and fill his chosen ones with the light of his Son.
We profess our faith at every Sunday Mass that the Lord Jesus is “Light from Light,” and so we dare for ourselves to “look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”

For Monday of the Eighteenth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2010-08-02T14:17:00.000-07:00

Jeremiah 28:1-17
Matthew 14:13-21

In both the first reading and the Gospel today we hear about prophets— their words, works, and deaths.
In the first reading, the Lord sends the true prophet Jeremiah to condemn the false prophet Hananiah, and to tell him the Lord would take his life because he raised false hopes among the people and preached to them what made for rebellion against the Lord.
In the Gospel, John the Baptist, a true prophet, has suffered death for speaking the truth against the sins of King Herod.
St. John also raised the hopes of the people for a messiah, pointing them to the Lord Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
Having heard of John’s death, today the Lord Jesus withdrew “to a deserted place by himself.”
That is something he always did for the sake of frequent and regular prayer.
We may wonder if the Lord’s prayerful solitude today is in a spirit of mourning the death of a true prophet, his forerunner, his kinsman, even his friend who had called himself the “friend of the bridegroom.”
The crowds have heard of both John’s death and the Lord’s withdrawal into solitude.
Having put their messianic hopes in the prophet John and now in the Lord Jesus as a prophet as well, they leave their towns on foot and follow him to his solitude.
You and I today at Mass are also a crowd following the Lord Jesus.
Today the Gospel tells us that at the sight of a crowd following him the Lord Jesus is deeply moved.
However, it is not just any crowd that has moved him, but a crowd following him into solitude.
So, he chose to take care of them.
He cured their sick.
He took loaves that could be counted on one hand, and fish likewise, and turned the little into more than enough for five thousand men— “not counting women and children.”
The twelve loads of leftovers were no accident.
Among other things, they signify that his mission is to care for all the twelve tribes of the People of God.
They also show that he is to do more than fill bellies, far more than that.
We who have come to follow the Lord Jesus must open our eyes and our wills to want more than have him meet our needs.
Otherwise we would falsely follow a true prophet.
Remember: Hananiah the false prophet told the people that the sacred vessels of the Lord’s Temple and the People of God would return from captivity in Babylon.
The true prophet, Jeremiah, wanted the same thing, saying, “Amen! thus may the Lord do!”
However, he knew the Lord’s way and the Lord’s timing did not line up with the hopes of the people.
As we put our own hopes in the Lord Jesus, let us mark that he broke the loaves that were the insufficient hope of the crowd today.
He may break our hopes, only to make something much greater come to be.
Let us follow him nonetheless— especially in the solitude of prayer.

For Wednesday of the Seventeenth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2010-07-28T16:50:00.000-07:00

Matthew 13:44-46

From last Wednesday through this Friday, the weekday Mass gives us bit by bit this thirteenth chapter of the Holy Gospel according to Matthew.
Throughout this chapter the Lord says of the “Kingdom” that it belongs to the Son of Man, it is the Kingdom of heaven, it has children, and that it is the Kingdom of the Father of the just or righteous.
Today at Mass in this chapter our Lord stirs us to spend our whole being to land the Kingdom.
It would mean both to gain God himself and to have God rule as King over our whole being.
As the greatest sign and instrument of God the King we have the Eucharist.
In the Eucharist we discover the Lord not in a field but under the seeming of bread and wine.
We cannot earn this treasure, but must hand over all that we are for it, so the Lord may say but the word of mercy, healing our souls of sin, and making us worthy of his Kingdom.
Our daily PARTAKING of the Lord in his Eucharist is just as much a daily LESSON.
We can spend our whole lives giving ourselves away, giving ourselves up.
Still the King always meets us with so much more and outdoes us.
Instead of a farmer or merchant stumbling across treasure, God has knowingly sought us.
He calls us out of the fields and commerce of the world.
He counts us as his treasures and pearls of great price.
God in Christ sold himself into suffering and death to dig and buy us out of the dirt and commerce of sin and death.
The Word of the Lord has all this in strong and unfathomable words.

For our sake God made Christ—
who knew no sin—
to BE SIN,
so that in him we might become the very holiness of God. [2 Cor. 5:21]

In the utter poverty of his death on a cross, God invested his whole being in sinners.
Here in the Eucharist, we eat and drink the King’s flesh and blood, the whole price of our freedom in his Kingdom.
The Holy One trades himself for rebel sinners.
He trades his holiness, wealth, life, and divinity for our emptiness.
Here, even bread and wine are emptied of their own reality, so as to become really the flesh and blood of Christ.
We need to come knowing ourselves poor in spirit, for God alone can fill us with the everlasting joy, goodness, and glory of his Kingdom.

For the Seventeenth Ordinary Sunday of the Church Year

2010-07-25T19:30:00.001-07:00

For the Seventeenth Ordinary Sunday of the Church Year

Genesis 18:20-32
Colossians 2:12-14
Luke 11:1-13

As the Gospel begins today we find the Lord Jesus spending time at prayer.
Then, at the request of one of the first disciples among us, he teaches us his words of prayer to the Father.
He goes on to tell us to persist in prayer.
Lastly, he upholds the heavenly Father’s great readiness to answer our prayer not merely with good gifts but with the very person of the Holy Spirit.
Before today’s Gospel, we listened to Father Abraham’s persistent prayers and God’s answers about the city of Sodom.
Abraham did not want to see men of justice— innocent, upright, righteous— die with Sodom for its grave sin.
He persisted in his prayer until he got the Lord’s promise not to destroy Sodom if there were at least ten just souls in it.
Like Abraham, our father in faith, we have a role to play in asking the Lord for his mercy on behalf of others.
You and I can also take the role of being at least ten upright souls of justice for the sake of mercy upon the world.
In fact, it is our mission to do so.
As today’s second reading from the Lord upholds, we were buried with Christ in baptism, and were also raised in him who obliterated the bond of sin that oppressed us— he “removed it from our midst, nailing it to the cross,” and “he brought you to life along with him.”
Christ is the Innocent and Just One for whose sake and suffering the guilty may be spared.
If mercy, life, and salvation are to prevail in the midst of the Sodom of the world, then God must find justice and holiness in us who are baptized in Christ.
Why is there evil in the world?
One true answer is that not enough Christians are truly living lives of innocence, uprightness, and justice.
The Lord’s Prayer upholds justice from beginning to end.
It begins with reverence for the name of the Father and desire for his kingdom.
It ends with hope for our own persistence amid the final testing of the world.
After giving us the words of his prayer today, the Lord Jesus then unfolded further our need for persistence.
Then, at the end of today’s Gospel reading, he said the heavenly Father’s greatest answer for our prayer is to “give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.”
What happens when the Father gives us the Holy Spirit?
We say it every Sunday in the Creed: “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the GIVER OF LIFE.”
“Giver of Life”— so the first and greatest answer to all prayer is that we come alive as the children of the heavenly Father because he gives us his Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life.
As the children adopted to heaven by the Holy Spirit, we are to pray to OUR FATHER that we may offer justice by our lives.
For to hallow his name and open to the coming of his kingdom and that his will be done is to commit ourselves in our prayer first of all and above all to do justice before our Father who is in heaven.
Otherwise we turn against the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, we foul our own worth as the children of God, and our prayer is as a lying outcry in the hearing of heaven.
It is in our Father’s gift of the Spirit that we receive bread each day, that he forgives us our sins, and that he upholds us through the final testing of the world.
Nonetheless, it remains our choice and responsibility to take hold of the gift and to work with it in our lives.
Sincere persistence in prayer demands sincere persistence in lives of justice.
As long as we face first the constant liability to hypocrisy in our own lives, we can ask honestly what we are to think, say, and do about Sodom and Gomorrah around us in the world today.
We find in the last lines of the Gospel today a path beyond our hypocrisy.
The Lord says: “If YOU then, who ARE wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children....”
Despite our sinfulness, we are to be as fathers and mothers to the world, praying for it, and offering up for its salvation the justice of the lives we choose to live.
In other words and signs from the Word of God, our fatherhood and motherhood for the world is how we are to be kings and priests.
Not only kings and priests, we are likewise to be prophets lifting up our voices against sin.
In the first reading, the Lord honored a prophetic voice by saying, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great.”
The outcry is also our mission.
We must do it with humility and watchfulness against our own hypocrisy.
So it is that in the Lord’s Prayer we are to say, “Forgive us our trespasses.”
The Lord’s Prayer, all his Word, and his Gospel today are fulfilled in the Body and Blood of Christ.
Here in his Eucharistic Body and Blood, Christ is worth more than any number of just and innocent men who might have lived in Sodom.
His Body and Blood bear the breath of God, the Holy Spirit, and so justice and innocence come to dwell in our souls and bodies.
By choosing to accept the Eucharistic Body and Blood of Christ, we commit to offer lodging and honor to justice and innocence in all that we think, say, and do.
If not, Sodom again will burn beginning with us.

For Wednesday of the Sixteenth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2010-07-21T17:49:00.000-07:00

Matthew 13:1-9

“Whoever has ears ought to hear.”
A twist on that saying today could be, “Read my lips!”
This is the beginning of the thirteenth chapter of the Holy Gospel according to Matthew.
We’ll hear this whole chapter bit by bit over the next eight weekdays.
In this chapter the Lord tells several parables about the “Kingdom of Heaven.”
He tells how the Kingdom comes about among us now, and also how the Kingdom shall come in its fullness at the end of time.
Today in his Gospel he tells of seed, and later says it is the word of the Kingdom sown upon the soil of men’s hearts.
Each of us does best to make ready a heart of deep, rich soil, clearing it of weeds and rocks, so that the word of the Kingdom can bear fruit in us “a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold,” he says.
Let us note that the sowing of the seed that is the word of the Kingdom is a work God in his graciousness does for us.
However, we can and must do the work of readying the soil of our hearts so that it is deep, rich, and free of weeds and rocks.
The work of getting ready is something anyone, even a pagan, can do without the grace of God.
The Church calls that the work of the natural or human virtues.
Without working these natural, human virtues, we fail to be ready to work with the supernatural virtues that come from God in his graciousness; we are not doing our part wholeheartedly, even though God does his.
We might take part regularly in Mass and the sacrament of Penance, we might pray regularly, and daily read Scripture and our lives alongside each other, but find ourselves in a spiritual rut.
If that is the lay of the land for us, then we do well to look at the nature of our land, the soil of our lives.
Do we know what the natural, human virtues are that clear out the weeds, the rocks, and ready us to be deep rich soil?
Four of the natural, human virtues make up the key, the heart, the kernel, the marrow, or the hinge— crucial, pivotal, cardinal.
The four [whose names show up together in the Book of Wisdom, 8:7] are Prudence, Justice, Courage or Fortitude, and Self-Control or Temperance.
Those are the “Cardinal Virtues”— natural and human, and anyone can work them, even a pagan who knows nothing of the Word of God, the Church, or baptism.
We who are baptized in Christ can ask ourselves if we do what even a good pagan can do.
If we do not, then we are wasting the graciousness of God, even here in the Eucharist.
“Whoever has ears ought to hear.”

For Saturday of the Fifteenth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2010-07-17T14:13:00.000-07:00

Matthew 12:14-21

The first reading and the responsorial psalm today cry out for the afflicted, innocent, unfortunate, fatherless, the poor.
It was because the Lord Jesus defended the hungry who harvested food on the Sabbath, and because he healed the afflicted on the Sabbath, that on this day in the Gospel the Pharisees began to plot to put him to death.
It was not yet time for his messianic victory, so the Lord withdrew from that place.
Likewise, since it was not yet time for his victory, he warned all the many who followed him and whom he cured not to make him known.
The time for his victory would begin on Palm Sunday, but would quickly turn into his death and seeming defeat five days later.
The plotting Pharisees as well as all the many who eagerly followed him in the Gospel today had no idea or the wrong ideas about what and for whom the messianic victory would really be.
The Pharisees, of course, were of the people of Israel, and so were many or even most of those who eagerly followed the Lord Jesus.
It was Israel that had hope for a messiah.
However, there were also many Gentiles in the crowds that followed the Lord Jesus, and received healing from him.
The surprise for Israel would be that the messianic victory would be for the Gentiles as well, not for Israel alone.
The idea of a messiah for Israel alone had to die with the Lord Jesus.
Only then would his messianic victory rise from the dead for all peoples of the world— for both the Israel of God and the pagans or Gentiles.
The Gospel today voices one of the mysterious, misunderstood, messianic prophecies to the people of Israel more than seven hundred years before the birth of the Lord Jesus.

... he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles.
... he brings justice to victory.
And in his name the Gentiles will hope.

According to this prophetic word from the Lord, the true messianic victory is a victory of justice.
Justice is first of all the holiness of faithful obedience to God.
Justice towards God the Father is a defining quality of God the Son, the Lord Jesus.
The Pharisees failed to recognize true justice, and could not recognize it in the Lord Jesus.
However, the eager crowds who followed him were also in danger of ignoring his God-seeking justice, wanting him instead for handouts and healings.
The Gospel touches on that ignorance today: “Many people followed him, and he cured them all, but he warned them not to make him known.”
They wanted a messiah who would be a “do-gooder” and satisfy all their “gimme this” and “gimme that”.
Instead, they got the Son obedient to his Father first and above all.
So on Palm Sunday they shouted “Hosanna” because they thought they were getting a do-gooder for Israel.
Then on Good Friday they shouted “Crucify him” when he didn’t work the messianic victory their way.
You and I are here in a crowd to follow the Lord Jesus.
Are we here before his altar hoping he will meet our “gimme this” and our “gimme that”?
We have no control over whether or not he will meet any of our wishes for a do-gooder messiah.
What we eat and drink, however, is the justice of the Lord Jesus, his holy and faithful obedience to his Father even unto the giving up of his body and the shedding of his blood.
Even in his Eucharist, the old prophecy in the Gospel holds true: “he will proclaim justice” and “he brings justice to victory.”
Since this is what and this is whom we eat and drink, we too must be willing to proclaim justice and bring it to victory even unto the giving up of our bodies and the shedding of our blood.
Short of that, we are merely shouting, “Crucify him!” with the crowd and plotting his death like the Pharisees.

For the Fifteenth Ordinary Sunday of the Church Year

2010-07-11T15:53:00.000-07:00

[I was out of town, and preached this homily in a parish church.]

Luke 10:25-37

We give the title “Good Samaritan” to someone who helps out in a kind and generous way.
It comes from this story the Lord Jesus told about what it is to love your neighbor as yourself.
The Lord had answered the question, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
There is a “must” in the question— an obligation, a duty, a requirement, a condition.
You are to love the Lord with all that you are, and you are to love your neighbor as yourself— “do this and you will live” is what the Lord Jesus says.
You must meet the requirement— be a Good Samaritan— if you are “to inherit eternal life”.
This is not “news” for you and me.
However, what the Lord Jesus taught about eternal life was new to the men and women of his time.
In the Old Testament, the earliest or oldest beliefs about the afterlife were that there is no resurrection, but that all the dead, both the good and the bad, stayed in everlasting silence and darkness.
That’s all: no punishment or “hell,” and no reward in heaven.
Those oldest beliefs were still around in the days of the Lord Jesus, and the Gospels speak of the Sadducees who held on to those oldest beliefs.
However, by the time of the Lord Jesus, some, like the Pharisees, had come to believe that the wicked would stay dead, while good Jews would rise on the last day.
They would come back to a good life on earth, with Israel as God’s kingdom in triumph over the whole world.
Still: no punishment such as hell; but also no going to heaven, which was the home of God alone.
The Lord Jesus brought news for everyone.
He taught that on the last day everyone, both the good and the bad, would rise from the dead.
Then the final judgment would happen.
Heaven would come about on earth, and the good would rejoice to live forever at home with God.
Although the Pharisees believed in a worldly resurrection, for them the notion of heaven on earth, of men dwelling with God, was one of the blasphemous things for which they hated the Lord Jesus.
However, just as new was the teaching of the Lord Jesus about the resurrection of the wicked and their everlasting punishment in hell.
The clarity and facts about hell made for news that came from the Lord Jesus, not from the Old Testament.
The question he answers in his Gospel today— “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”— is also about how to avoid going to hell.
Without fail, you and I must love God with all that we have and are, and love our neighbors as ourselves if we want to inherit eternal life.
Eternal life is not merely life that never comes to an end.
The eternal life that God has in store for us also means joy that has no measure, knowledge without error, and goodness that never fails.
To inherit that kind of life you must love God “with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind.”
That is hard work.
However, once we finally inherit eternal life, all that work shall turn into enjoyment with all our heart, enjoyment with all our being, enjoyment with all our strength, and enjoyment with all our mind.
God is hard at work to see that we inherit the joy of eternal life.
He asks us to work with him for our own everlasting benefit.
Part of working with God is imitating him.
He tells us to love our neighbors as he loves us.
The question that must constantly guide us as we meet our neighbors is, “What is in my neighbor’s authentic best interest?”
We must also constantly ask the same question on our own behalf.
“What is in my authentic best interest?”
As the sign and instrument of God’s interest in our welfare, he hands himself over to us as food and drink.
In his Eucharist, God gives and commits to us his whole heart, his whole being, his whole strength, and his whole mind.
In his Blood of the new and everlasting covenant, and in the communion sacrifice of his Body, he is committed and literally CONSUMED with giving himself to us for the sake of our joy and eternal life.
For our part, we must be committed and consumed with giving ourselves to him in return.
He commands us, “Do this in memory of me.”
We must do so to inherit eternal life.

For the Feast of Our Lady of Refuge, July 5

2010-07-05T19:24:00.000-07:00

Our Lady, Refuge of Sinners, Patroness of Baja California, Alta California, and the Diocese of San Diego

John 2:1-11

This beginning of the signs the Lord Jesus did, and this beginning of his disciples believing in him, happened through the motherly care of his mother.
She spoke out to him when she saw the wedding— the new life of man and woman as husband and wife— had run into poverty: “They have no wine.”
This Holy Gospel according to John calls this sign the beginning.
This same Gospel will mark the end of the signs, with the Lord saying, “It is fulfilled,” or “It is finished,” or, most literally, “This is the goal.”
At both this beginning of the signs at Cana and the fulfillment, end, or goal of the signs at Calvary, the mother of the Lord is present.
Today at Cana, before the Lord followed the concern of his mother, he upheld that his “hour has not yet come.”
Once his hour had come, his mother followed his concern to Calvary.
There the Lord would speak out to his mother on behalf of his disciple who had begun to believe in him at Cana: “Woman, there is your son.”
In both places, Cana and Calvary, there was a lack of wine.
At Cana: no wine at all until the Lord changed water into it.
At Calvary: no water, but only wine gone bad into vinegar.
Just as at Cana, his mother at Calvary could have said, “They have no wine.”
All these things bind Cana and Calvary to each other.
At the beginning and the goal of the signs of the Lord Jesus, his mother is present.
In both places she serves as a mother to more than her son.
At Cana, she is a watchful mother intervening for man and woman beset by poverty.
There she is also the motherly midwife who oversees the birth of the faith of the disciples of her son.
At Calvary, as the great signs of her Son reach their fulfillment and goal, her own motherly apostolate has a new beginning, as her Son gives her his disciple to mother.
Those who follow the Lord in his Gospel, who see his signs in his Gospel from beginning to goal, who believe in him, will see that the Lord’s mother is also a disciple’s mother.
Indeed, the Gospel itself testifies at the fulfillment and the goal of the Lord’s signs in the presence of his mother: “from that hour the disciple took her into his home.”
The refuge of her motherhood is older than the Gospel text itself.
It began with her pregnancy in Nazareth, and continues now as she still intercedes with her Son for his disciples.
In the Spirit of the Gospel, a papyrus text from about the year of our Lord 300 holds the following prayer to his mother.

We take refuge beneath you,
O holy Mother of God.
In the midst of our needs,
do not despise our pleadings,
but always free us from all dangers,
O glorious and blessed Virgin.

For the Solemnity of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist

2010-06-24T15:18:00.001-07:00

Luke 1:57-66,80

With all the odd things about the begetting and birth of Saint John the Baptist, we can be sure the people of the land watched his life closely.

All who heard these things took them to heart, saying, “What, then, will this child be?”

First of all, with the whole assembly of the people at prayer, the angel of the Lord had come to the temple to tell the priest Zechariah that his wife was to bear him a child.
The Lord’s angel then did something that had never happened: he gave the child a name from God before the child had even come to be.
After that, the only other one in the Bible whose name God told before his earthly life began was the Lord Jesus.
“John” is from the Hebrew Yochanan, meaning, “Yahweh is gracious.”

Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son,
and you shall name him John
And you will have joy and gladness,
and many will rejoice at his birth,
for he will be great in the sight of the Lord.

He will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother’s womb,
and he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God.

... to turn... the disobedient to the understanding of the righteous,
to prepare a people fit for the Lord.

After the birth of John, the Gospel today tells us “all these matters were discussed throughout the hill country of Judea.”
From his birth the people of the land talked about him, and we can be sure they also watched.
We don’t know how old he was when he went to the desert.
It seems he lived there quietly for some time, as the Gospel tells us “he was in the desert until the day of his manifestation to Israel.”
With “the day of his manifestation” John began to preach repentance, conversion, calling the people of the land to turn their hearts from sin and back to God.
All that it takes for us to be what the Gospel calls “people fit for the Lord” is our sincere repentance— an honest and intentional commitment in turning away from sin.
That is one of the vows we make as monks after Saint Benedict.
In the teaching of St. Benedict this vow of a monk is conversatio morum suorum— meaning the frequent, ongoing, lifelong turning of a man’s ways from sin and back to God.
Saint John the Baptist called the people of Israel to conversion as a way of being fit for a new coming of Yahweh who is gracious.
All the land had been talking, watching, waiting, and now many answered and obeyed Saint John.
It was no accident— it was natural, fitting, and God’s will— that the Lord Jesus in the fullness of his manhood first showed up to begin his mission precisely where the people were turning to God in a baptism of repentance at the hands and by the teaching of Saint John.
This is the bedrock and heart of the ongoing truth of Saint John’s teaching and mission.
Namely: that the Lord who is gracious will begin to show up in our lives, and work his mission precisely and only when and where we repent, turning our lives, ways, and deeds away from sin to face him and follow him.

Behold, the Lamb of God,
behold, he takes away the sins of the world.
Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb.

If we answer with our lives, we will see his life become the answer within us.
Then, like Saint John the Baptist, we also will be filled with the Holy Spirit.

For Thursday of the Eleventh Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2010-06-17T14:23:00.001-07:00

Matthew 6:7-15

“Your Father knows what you NEED before you ask him.”
The Lord’s Prayer, then, is a short prayer of NEED.
In the first place, we NEED our Father who is in heaven.
To call on him as Father is to confess ourselves to be CHILDREN who NEED him.
So as to be honest in confessing our need for “Our Father,” we must think and choose and live by knowing that we NEED nothing so much as him, and that all else is nothing if we do not have our Father.
We NEED to let go of all that may stand in the way of seeking to be filled by our Father first and above all.
We then also NEED to ask, “Hallowed be thy name.”
We NEED that.
Yet, how shall it be fulfilled unless we do the hallowing, and become the hallowing?
To say “Hallowed be thy name” is to take a stand on going the way of “all hallows”— a stand on walking the way of all saints.
By saying “Hallowed be thy name,” we command ourselves to be saints for the name of our Father.
After our Father himself, what we NEED next of all is to be saints, or else all is lost forever.
Against that loss we NEED to pray, “Thy kingdom come.”
Our Father is a king, and heaven is his kingdom.
We are his children, his subjects, his
followers, and citizens of his kingdom.
Yet we falsify, nullify, and lose it all unless we see to it that his will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
We NEED to do his will— we NEED it.
We NEED it this day and everyday more than we NEED earthly food.
His will is bread above all being [epioúsion, Mt. 6:11].
As the Lord Jesus says it elsewhere, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to accomplish his work” [Jn. 4:34].
Since we defy our own greatest NEED, we also NEED to ask our Father to forgive us our trespasses.
Even in this, our Father wants that his will be done on earth by our forgiving those who trespass against us.
We NEED to do so, if we are to be children who are with their Father who is in heaven.
We are tempted to go elsewhere than heaven, but are blinded to it by our own FALSE needs by which we lead ourselves into temptation.
We NEED our Father to lead us out of our own self-temptation, and also to deliver us from the evil one who adds his temptations to the ones we make for ourselves.
“Your Father knows what you NEED before you ask him.”
Nonetheless, we ask him for what we NEED so that we know it ourselves, admit it with humble repentance, and commit our whole being to it with faith, hope, and love.

For the Eleventh Ordinary Sunday of the Church Year

2010-06-13T16:11:00.001-07:00

2 Samuel 12:7-10,13
Galatians 2:16,19-21
Luke 7:36 to 8:3

In the first reading, the Word of the Lord upholds that even with the Lord’s forgiveness there is deadly aftermath to David’s sins of adultery and murder.

Thus says the Lord God....
Why have you spurned the Lord and done evil in his sight? ....
Now, therefore, the sword shall NEVER depart from your house,
because you have despised me....
The Lord on his part has forgiven your sin:
you shall not die.

David would not die for his sins, but others in his own house would fall to the sword for David’s sins.
The oldest truth in the first reading is far older than the reading itself.
The Word of the Lord says in the beginning there was no death for man.
Death began through the sin of the original man and woman.
Death is because of the original sin.
God forgave David instead of killing him for the sins of adultery and murder.
Still, David of Bethlehem, like all men of any town, went on to die because of the original sin in Eden of old.
Despite God’s forgiveness, the Word of the Lord testifies that David’s own new sin marked his family forever.

Thus says the Lord God....
... the sword shall NEVER depart from your HOUSE....

David’s “house,” his home, was the town whose Hebrew name, Bethlehem, means “HOUSE of Bread.”
The sword struck at David’s children and all their line down to the youngest boys of the little town of Bethlehem after the birth of the Lord Jesus.
The curse of the sword upon David’s line fell on the Lord Jesus himself through the Roman scourge, hammer, nails, cross, and the blade of a spear.
The Lord Jesus, a son of David’s line, died for David’s sins, for Adam’s original sin, for all sins, for yours and mine.
He is “the Son of God who has ... given himself up for me,” as the Word of the Lord says in the second reading.
Sin ALWAYS bears a penalty.
It ALWAYS does damage.
God’s forgiveness is an open door, an invitation, and power to walk again with him.
Nonetheless by each new sin we ALWAYS make the walk longer and ourselves weaker in the walking.
The last part of the Gospel today is about sinners who walked in the footsteps of the Lord Jesus.

... he journeyed from one town and village to another....
Accompanying him were the Twelve
and some women....

The first and longer part of the Gospel today is about another woman, one whose town-mates know her for what even the Lord Jesus calls “her many sins.”
Her feet have strayed many well-known times from the way of holy God.
She now bends over the holy feet of the Lord Jesus, and she weeps.
She now does what the end of today’s Gospel says other women will also do: namely, provide for the Lord “out of their own resources.”
The sinful woman— out of her own resources— her tears, her hair, her kisses, her alabaster flask of ointment— out of her own resources she showers outlandish veneration upon the feet of the Lord.
He names three things about this woman: “her many sins,” her “great love,” and finally her faith.

“So I tell you, HER MANY SINS have been forgiven
because she has shown GREAT LOVE.”
.... He said to her,
“Your sins are forgiven.”
.... “Your FAITH has saved you....”

Something else he does not put into words for her: his feet that she so honors will tread for her the way of the cross where he will freely pay a horrible, deadly price for her many sins.
The woman “has shown great love,” but the Lord Jesus has shown the greater love in laying down his life for her.
Again: he is “the Son of God who has ... given himself up for me,” as the Word of the Lord says in the second reading.
The woman’s many sins matter much to the Lord in his greater love for her and his deadly suffering for her.
What matters more is her faith in him, and so he tells her, “Your FAITH has SAVED you.”
Her faith in him led her to great, loving, public repentance in a ritual, a liturgy, of veneration in tears, the lowliness of kissing his feet, wiping them with her hair, and bestowing on them a sweet-smelling oil worthy to fill an alabaster jar.
We, too, are here to pour out on his feet a liturgy— kissing his altar and his Gospel, breaking bread and pouring wine in precious vessels upon his altar, bowing, kneeling, and burning there incense that of old was worth its weight in pure gold.
All these things, signs, and rites are precious to him only if we suffer to fill them and all our life with faith, love, and repentance— thereby fulfilling the Word of the Lord in the second reading.

I have been crucified with Christ
... insofar as I now live in the flesh,
I live by faith in the Son of God
who has loved me
and given himself up for me.

For Tuesday of the Tenth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2010-06-08T19:07:00.001-07:00

Matthew 5:13-16

Salt brings its own goodness to food, but also helps the goodness food already has.
So it is with the Son of God from all eternity who came in time to be born a man of flesh and blood.
He brought his Godly goodness into our humanity.
In himself, he restored, awakened, and strengthened the human goodness that God gave us in the beginning when he made man and woman.
He rose from the dead as a man, and ascended thus to the heavenly throne, the beginning and fulfillment of humanity’s everlasting glory.
Since he is God and also truly a man, he is the salt of all creation, and can tell his disciples— those who learn from him— that they also “are the salt of the earth.”
Since he is God and man enthroned above, he is the light of the world, and calls his students to be the same.
He does NOT tell us we are salt of HEAVEN, or light of HEAVEN, but salt of the EARTH, and light of the WORLD.
We are to make a difference HERE and NOW.
Nonetheless, once all is said and done, the difference we are to make must in the end rise above, beyond, and hereafter, since he says:

your light must shine before others
that they may see your good deeds
and GLORIFY YOUR HEAVENLY FATHER.

We are here to salt and light the world, but we can do so only if and because we glorify our heavenly Father.
For all eternity before the world or anything else was, the Son of God was utterly for the Father in the oneness of the Holy Spirit.
Before we set out to salt and light up the world, we must receive and carry salt and light from prayer and the worship of the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Throughout the testimony of the Gospels, the Lord Jesus is often at prayer in lonely places or the mountains; and on the Sabbath he is always to be found at prayer and worship in the synagogue.
The Church did not go out into the world until the head of the Church, Christ, ascended into the glory of the Father, having commanded the Church to pray for power from on high.
The Church obeyed for ten days of prayer together with Mary the mother of Jesus in the Upper Room that had seen the birth of the Body and Blood of Christ as food and drink, and would then see on Pentecost the public birth of the Body of Christ the Church.
Without having within us the salt and light that come only from prayer and worship that glorify the Father— above all, in the Body and Blood of Christ— we are not the disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ who tells us today:

But if salt loses its taste,
with what can it be seasoned?
It is no longer good for anything
but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.

For Wednesday of the Sixth Week of Easter

2010-05-12T14:21:00.000-07:00

John 16:12-15

Christ had more to tell or give his disciples, but he held back, for it would have been unbearable for them until the coming of the Spirit of truth.

I have much more to tell you,
but you cannot bear it now.
But when he comes, the Spirit of truth,
he will guide you to all truth.

What is this truth that is unbearable without the Spirit?
Christ says that the Spirit:

will take from what is mine and declare it to you.
Everything that the Father has is mine

Everything that the Father has belongs to Christ, and it is to be ours as well, but we cannot receive or bear it alone.
Only the grace of the Spirit’s presence and guidance can receive and bear for us what belongs to Christ who himself says, “Everything that the Father has is mine.”
It is the Spirit that empowers us to bear up as sons and daughters of the Father of Christ, the only-begotten Son of God.
In Christ— BY THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT— all that the Father has is ours, and— BY THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT— we can bear it.
Christ calls the Spirit “the Spirit of truth”— who “will guide you to all truth.”
Adam and Eve were no longer able to bear all that God gave them in truth because they followed the guidance of the spirit of lies.
They fell from communion with God.
If we want communion with the Father and the Son— which is the highest meaning of “the communion of saints” (communio sanctorum)— if we want the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting, in other words, if we want to be with Christ in Paradise, then we must be open to the Spirit coming, calling, and guiding us to all truth, even truth we may be tempted to think unbearable.
Here in the offer of Holy Communion in the Body and Blood of Christ, everything that the Father has belongs to Christ and comes to us as food and drink.
However, this sacramental mystery is not merely a gift, but also a mission: the Spirit of truth calling us to obedient holiness in the new and everlasting covenant.

For Thursday of the Fifth Week of Easter

2010-05-06T13:12:00.001-07:00

John 15:9-11

Today’s Gospel picks up from yesterday’s [15:1-8], in which Christ said his Father is a vine grower, Christ is the vine, and we are his branches.
Without pruning, a grapevine grows many thinner branches that do not support as much fruit, but sap the overall strength of the vine.
The word, teaching, or commandments of Christ are the pruning hook or knife of the Father’s love by which the Father cuts back or prunes his children, to guide our growth for greater strength and more plentiful fruit.
Christ says in today’s Gospel:

As the Father loves me, so I also love you.
If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love.

The Lord says three things work together to bind his us to his Father: LOVE, COMMANDMENTS, and JOY.
He says love and commandments need each other.

IF you keep my commandments,
you will remain in my love,
just as I have kept my Father’s commandments
and remain in his love.

IF we do not keep his commandments, we will not remain in his love.
He tells us today what wished-for end is to drive the love that keeps the Father’s commandments.

I have told you this so that my JOY might be in you
and your JOY might be complete.

The Lord’s joy filling us and fulfilling our joy is the goal that drives the love that keeps the commandments that prune us for strength and fruitfulness.
LOVE, COMMANDMENTS, and JOY!
That is the parable, the natural logic, of the grapevine that is stronger and more fruitful because of pruning.
However, it is a natural logic that sin and unbelief reject.
LOVE, COMMANDMENTS, and JOY!
The opposite three— HATRED, DISOBEDIENCE, and SADNESS— are the very things the Son of God chose to suffer on earth at the hands of us sinners.
As he says in tomorrow’s continuation [15:12-17] of this Gospel: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
God himself has suffered the cutting and pruning at our hands, thus keeping his Father’s commandments and remaining in his love— for the sake of filling and fulfilling our joy with his.
In the Body and Blood of Christ we can harvest, eat, and drink the joy of the Lord, only if we also eat and drink the same willingness he had to undergo the pruning that cuts out sin and keeps the Father’s commandments so as to remain in his love.

For the Feast of Saints Philip and James

2010-05-03T13:24:00.000-07:00

1 Corinthians 15:1-8
John 14:6-14

In his Gospel today, the Lord Jesus Christ says we must look to him if we want to see and know God the Father.
The words and deeds of Christ show us the fatherly face of God.
However, Christ has ascended to the Father and is no longer here in the same way as before.
He left behind more than five hundred witnesses who saw him after he rose from the dead.
From the Father to Christ, from Christ to more than five hundred, and from them to us: starting with Christ, it is a string from witness to witness to us, and requires faith and more faith.
The greater work is that of the lesser witnesses.
The greatest witness of the Father is Christ.
We are more ready to believe him than to believe lesser witnesses.
Furthermore, lesser witnesses are not one with the Father in Godhead, and did not come down from the Father in heaven, as did Christ.
So, again: the lesser witnesses have the greater work to do in showing the Father by their words and deeds.
That is what Christ says in his Gospel today.

Amen, amen, I say to you,
whoever believes in me will do the works that I do,
and will do greater ones than these,
because I am going to the Father.

Christ showed the face of the Father.
Since Christ has ascended to his Father, lesser witnesses must do the greater work of words and deeds that show BOTH the Son AND the Father.
The Church acknowledges that Christ gave her the mission “to render God the Father and his incarnate Son present and, as it were, visible...” [Vatican II, Gaudium et spes, “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,” 21].
When he ascended into heaven, the risen Son of God left behind a Church of more than five hundred who witnessed him after he rose from the dead.
Among them of course were the apostles, including Philip and James whose feast is today.
By words and deeds, the Church of more than five hundred witnesses handed on what they heard and saw in Christ, whose own words and deeds showed the fatherly face of God, the face of God the Father.
Today’s first reading also sums up and sharpens to a point the words and deeds by which Christ showed us the Father, namely that for our sins Christ died and was raised.
It is a father’s mission to give life to his children, to uphold what they need to live and grow, and to withhold or withstand what harms their life and growth.
Sin is the root of all harm to the fullness of life and growth.
For that reason, Christ died for our sins, and he rose with the Spirit of fatherly power to be our undying life and growth.
As members of his apostolic Church, we are the witnesses of Christ the Son of the heavenly Father.
If anyone asks us, “Show us the Father and the Son,” we must do so with the witness of our own fatherly words and deeds.
Since that is a greater work, something more is necessary.
“For it is the function of the Church to render ... the Father and ... Son present and ... visible, WHILE CEASELESSLY RENEWING AND PURIFYING HERSELF UNDER THE GUIDANCE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT” [Vatican II, Gaudium et spes, “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,” 21].
If the greater works of our words and deeds are to show the Father and the Son, then we must ask for the Holy Spirit ceaselessly to guide us, renew us, and purify us.
We are to ask as the Lord says in his Gospel today.

And whatever you ask in my name,
I will do,
so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.
If you ask anything of me in my name,
I will do it.

In the name of the Lord Jesus, may we always have guidance, renewal, and purification by the Spirit, so that the Father and the Son may be glorified in the apostolic Church, in us, in all our words and deeds!

For the Memorial of Saint Joseph the Worker

2010-05-01T14:03:00.001-07:00

Colossians 3:14-15,17,23-24
Matthew 13:54-58

“Is he not the carpenter’s son?”
The carpenter St. Joseph is of the house and lineage of King David from the town of Bethlehem where the Lord Jesus Christ also was born.
The first time God sent an angel to St. Joseph, the angel called Joseph, “Son of David.”
St. Joseph’s full Biblical name would have been “Joseph son of Jacob”— but the angel called him “son of David.”
God gave St. Joseph a royal mission.
St. Joseph was to serve as a father for Christ, to take a Biblical father’s role of lawfully naming the boy, and thus give the boy membership in St. Joseph’s own royal family tree.
By the law of God’s people, the Son of God on earth bore the name “Jesus” and belonged to the royal house and lineage of David because St. Joseph, serving as his father, publicly said so.
King David himself did not come from a royal house, but was king because God sent a man, a prophet, to say so.
Now the Lord Jesus belongs to the royal house because God had St. Joseph say so.
St. Joseph, the carpenter who lived and worked in Nazareth, gave to the Son of God a share in the title “Son of David.”
Everything we know about St. Joseph was wrapped up in the work of obedient service to the mission of the Son of God.
Today’s first reading calls us to the same obedient work that St. Joseph fulfilled.

And whatever you do, in word or in deed,
do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus

be slaves of the Lord Christ

Obedient as a slave in the name and the mission of the Lord Jesus, St. Joseph worked as a carpenter for the Nazareth townsfolk, who turned out un-neighborly and small-hearted, as we see in the today’s Gospel.
In sundry ways, St. Joseph the worker foreshadowed the work of Christ.
St. Joseph is a carpenter whose ancestral home is Bethlehem, a name meaning “house of bread.”
Christ was born there to be the “Bread of Life from Heaven.”
As a child on earth, his life depended on bread earned by the work of St. Joseph.
As St. Joseph worked for the un-neighborly and small-hearted of Nazareth, so Christ serves the un-neighborly and small-hearted everywhere, including us.
We have the Bread of Life and the Cup of Salvation in the Body and Blood of Christ.
For his part, Christ in flesh and blood lived, grew, and flourished on earth because he had a breadwinner, fatherly love, and good example in the person and work of St. Joseph.
By the work of St. Joseph, Christ the King grew to manhood, and has now named us royal sons and daughters of the house of God.
While we yet work on earth, may the prayers of St. Joseph the Worker uphold us in the work of salvation!

And whatever you do, in word or in deed,
do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus

be slaves of the Lord Christ

For Wednesday of the Fourth Week of Easter

2010-04-28T17:51:00.001-07:00

Acts 12:24-13:5a
John 12:44-50

Today in the Gospel it is late in the day on Palm Sunday.
Earlier that day, the crowd shouted “Hosanna!” as Christ entered Jerusalem.
Afterwards, as he spoke to the crowd, he suddenly said, “Father, glorify thy name!”
Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” [Jn.12:28]
Only a few other times does the Gospel say the voice of God the Father rang out on earth.
Today’s first reading tells us a thing more rare, words the Holy Spirit has spoken: “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.”
The words of the Spirit and the voice of the Father have rung out upon the earth.
Today in the Gospel, the Lord Jesus also speaks out loud.
In fact the original language of the Gospel says the Lord Jesus SHOUTED today.
The Gospel used the same word to say crowds SHOUTED “Hosanna!” earlier in the day and “Crucify him!” later in the week.
In today’s Gospel Christ is shouting back to the Palm Sunday crowd:

that he is the one who speaks and acts for God and as God;
that to reject him, the Christ, is to reject the Father who sent him;
that to reject Christ is to resist the command of the Father and to stand condemned.

By the standards of some in our culture today, his message is arrogant, non-inclusive, unacceptable, and made worse by shouting.
It is the message he shouts in his Gospel— and he shouts more than once throughout his Gospel.
If we want the joy and fulfillment of eternal life, we must turn to God.
If we want to find God, we must look to Christ, to see and find in Christ what God wants for us.
Over and over in both his Gospel and his Eucharist we meet, hear, touch, and consume the Son of God.
By his Eucharist he shouts his sacrifice for the communion of The New and Everlasting Covenant, My Body GIVEN UP for You, My Blood SHED for You.
His real presence in his Eucharist also shouts his flesh-and-blood resurrection in this world.
Today in his Gospel he shouts that he “came into the world as light.”
In his Eucharist he comes into the world as light shouting in ACTION— straight, swift, on the spot.
His body he gives up, his blood he sheds— his Eucharist is a shout and a light.
The shouting light of availability, intimacy, self-surrender for our taking and swallowing!
The shouting light of new and everlasting commitment and forgiveness!
The light shouting, “Do this in memory of me!”
“Do this”— there is WORK to be done.
In the first reading today, we heard the Holy Spirit call for men to be set apart “for the WORK to which I have called them.”
“Do this in memory of me”— of HIM who shouts in his Gospel today:

Whoever rejects me and does not accept my words
has something to judge him: the word that I spoke,
it will condemn him on the last day,
because I did not speak on my own,
but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and speak.
And I know that his commandment is eternal life.

Eternal life— thus his politically incorrect shouting opens the possibility of our receiving his gift of everlasting joy, goodness, beauty, and fulfillment in God.
In answer, the last words of the Bible [Rev. 22:20-21] are the shouts of believers.

Amen!
Come, Lord Jesus!
The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints!
Amen!

For the Fourth Sunday of Easter

2010-04-25T11:50:00.000-07:00

Acts 13:14,43-52
Revelation 7:9,14b-17
John 10:27-30

In the first reading, Paul and Barnabas were in a city of the pagan land of Pisidia, in today’s land of Turkey.
They were preaching to the city’s Jewish synagogue on the Sabbath.
They won such interest among Jews and pagans that “almost the whole city gathered to hear” them on the Sabbath of the following week.
In the second reading, countless men and women, “from every nation, race, people, and tongue”— so including Jewish and pagan converts— all stand in heaven at the end of time.
They worship before the throne of the Lamb, the Lord God Jesus Christ.
They have suffered for him and his Gospel.
In the third reading, the Gospel, Christ is at the Jerusalem Temple.
It is the week of the Hanukkah festival, recalling the re-consecration of the Temple about two hundred years before, after invading pagans had desecrated it.
All three readings have to do with eternal life and a place and time of worship.
All three also have to do with Jews, pagans and Christians.
As for Christians, the first reading says “the Lord has commanded us” to serve as “a light to the Gentiles” that we “may be an instrument of salvation to the ends of the earth”— for both Jews and pagans.
For those who sincerely receive Christ— in mystery or openly— the second reading holds a great promise.

They will not hunger or thirst anymore,
nor will the sun or any heat strike them.
For the Lamb who is in the center of the throne will shepherd them
and lead them to springs of life-giving water,
and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

The last eight weekdays of daily Mass have taken us through a single Gospel chapter [Jn. 6] where Christ makes the same promise.

I am the bread of life;
he who comes to me shall not hunger,
and he who believes in me shall never thirst. [6:35]

The will of him who sent me
is that I should lose not one person of all those he has given me,
but raise each one up at the last day. [6:39]

That promise is in today’s Gospel also.

My sheep hear my voice;
I know them,
and they follow me.
I give them eternal life,
and they shall never perish.
No one can take them out of my hand.

Invincible, everlasting life and the guarantee of his invincible hand and the Father’s invincible hand— that is quite a promise for a mere man to make.
So Christ adds a claim to be endlessly more than a mere man.

No one can take them out of my hand.
My Father, who has given them to me,
is greater than all,
and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand.
The Father and I are one.

The Jews heard that as a blasphemous claim to be God equally with the heavenly Father.
The Gospel goes on to say they picked up stones to pound Christ to death.
On that day they did not pull off hurting or killing him.
That had to wait until the first Christians betrayed, abandoned, disowned, denied, and lied against him.
The Christians did it first: allowing him to die in their hearts to save their own skins.
The wicked— or holy— irony is that in his heart Christ chose to suffer death to save our skins and our hearts.
The second reading said it of Christians: “they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”

For this reason they stand before God’s throne....
They will not hunger or thirst anymore....
For the Lamb... will shepherd them
and lead them to springs of life-giving water,
and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

By his own invincible hand, he will end every kind of hunger and thirst.
By his own invincible hand, he will uphold us beyond sadness and fear.
By his own invincible hand, he will, give us life, joy, and glory without measure or end.
However, our receiving the fulfillment of his promises depends on our fulfilling the first two lines he says in his Gospel today.

My sheep HEAR my voice;
... and they FOLLOW me.

We have come to this temple consecrated to God in Christ, and to this altar of the sacrificial Lamb of God.
He gives his word— both in his Gospel and in his Body and Blood.
So we hear his voice.

My sheep HEAR my voice;
... and they FOLLOW me.

Is that true of us?
If I want to be truly faithful in following Christ, then I must consecrate my every free and knowing choice to serve as “a light to the Gentiles” and “an instrument of salvation to the ends of the earth.”
If I want to be truly faithful in following Christ, then I must consecrate my every free and knowing choice to fit into the Spirit-filled temple of Christ’s invincible hand.
Only then may I hope to stand before his throne, to hear him say to me again, “The Father and I are one,” as both of them take me into their hands forever.

For Wednesday of the Third Week of Easter

2010-04-21T16:35:00.001-07:00

21 April, the Memorial of Saint Anselm of Canterbury

Acts 8:1b-8
John 6:35-40

Today’s first reading recalls the first attempt to destroy the Church.
It began with Israel’s High Priest and Sanhedrin trying and killing St. Stephen, the first to die for the Lord Jesus.
The Sanhedrin was Israel’s highest council and court of justice.
During his trial, Stephen saw a man at God’s side in heaven, and told the High Priest and Sanhedrin what he was seeing.
They held that no man was able or worthy to look into heaven, to be in heaven, or much less stand next to God.
They took St. Stephen’s words as a most foul insult against God.
After Stephen’s execution, the High Priest authorized Saul (the future St. Paul) to hunt house to house and jail men and women who shared St. Stephen’s faith in the Lord Jesus who said in his Gospel today, “I came down from heaven.”
The Son of God came down from heaven as a man,
He died, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
From thence he shall keep the promises he makes in today’s Gospel.

I am the bread of life;
whoever comes to me will never hunger,
and whoever believes in me will never thirst.

We have three kinds of hunger and thirst— three kinds of need.
Our bodily needs are real, but they are the least of our needs.
Greater is our need for relationships with other human beings.
Our greatest need is for God.
St. Anselm of Canterbury wrote of this [in his “Proslogion”].

My soul, have you found what you are looking for?
You were looking for God,
and you have discovered that he is the supreme being,
and that you could not possibly imagine anything more perfect.
You have discovered that this supreme being is life itself,
light, wisdom, goodness,
eternal blessedness and blessed eternity.

Those who die for God die for what we all need the most.
That is not to say our lesser needs do not matter, or cannot be reconciled with our need for God.
St. Anselm’s words [in his “Proslogion”] call for the coming together of all our needs in God-centered hope.
“Let my soul hunger for it, my body thirst for it, my whole being yearn for it.”
The Lord in today’s Gospel promises to satisfy all our hunger and thirst.

I am the bread of life;
whoever comes to me will never hunger,
and whoever believes in me will never thirst.

I shall raise him on the last day.

At the end of all things he will give us back our bodies together with all who have gone to him in faith.
He says today:

this is the will of the one who sent me,
that I should NOT LOSE ANYTHING of what he gave me,
but that I should raise it on the last day.

He shall NOT LOSE ANYTHING, but shall raise up our bodies, our capacity and need for relationship, and bring our whole being to fulfillment by giving us himself— God the Son at the right hand of God the Father.
We celebrate here and begin to receive him who is the food and drink to satisfy forever all our needs.
Outside of this place and this hour, we need to know and want what he promises.
Then, we need also to live as knowing what we and want.
St. Benedict tells monks to mind whether a monastery newcomer knows what he wants and wants the right thing, that is, “if he most truly seeks God” [St. Benedict, 58:7].
It is right to hunger and thirst.
However, nothing less than God will do.
That is because, as St. Anselm put it, nothing greater than God can come to mind [“that than which nothing greater can be thought” (id quo nihil maius cogitari possit)— from Anselm’s “Proslogion”].

For Friday of the Second Week of Easter

2010-04-16T15:29:00.001-07:00

John 6:1-15

Today’s Gospel begins eight weekdays of hearing our risen Lord at Mass tell the holy news of his Body and Blood.
Death and the stone seal of the tomb failed to keep the Lord from his mission to rise from the dead in his real Body and Blood with the power of the Spirit at the bidding of the Father.
Likewise bread and wine have their fate sealed upon the stone of the altar, and they fail to keep the Lord from rising there in his real Body and Blood.
In today’s Gospel the five barley loaves and two fish are a dead plan for five thousand men who have bodily hunger in their blood.
Yet the Lord makes a heaping wealth of food rise up from it.
From the dead handful of bread and fish he raised up for the five thousand men not only their fill— “as much ... as they wanted”— but twelve basket-loads more than they needed.
God always has endlessly more to give than we want, more than we think we need, more to give than merely satisfying our hungers, more to give than merely healing our wounds.
He gives us himself, and he is more than we humanly need.
At the end of today’s Gospel we see that the men thought they needed the Lord Jesus as their king.
That also was a dead plan.
He withdrew from it, only to offer more than they thought they needed.
As this Gospel goes on for another seven weekdays he shall offer himself in his own Body and Blood as real food and real drink.
That goes unbelievably beyond what hungry men think their bellies can stand.
Yet the Lord will uphold in this Gospel [6:53] that we have simply NO life in us without the real eating and the real drinking of his real Body and his real Blood as real food and real drink.
This defies all our earthly hungers, all our earthly needs, all our earthly wounds of body and mind.
He has more to do and more to offer than simply to fill or heal us.
At the end of all things, he heals, he saves, he fulfills, and he glorifies us by filling us with SACRIFICE.

Take ... eat
This is my Body GIVEN UP
Take ... drink
This is ... my Blood SHED

If the end of our poverty and hunger is our final goal, it is a dead plan.
If the end of our sadness is our final goal, it is a dead plan.
If healing is our final goal, it is a dead plan.
God’s answer beyond our needs is self-sacrificing love: “Do this in memory of me.”
We are his sons and daughters in his image and likeness; and we are the chosen of his new and everlasting covenant.
“Do this in memory of me.”
He calls us to join him in the freedom of giving ourselves up and pouring ourselves out— and thus to have life in us [Jn. 6:53], “for in him we live and move and have our being ... for we are indeed his offspring” according to the Word of the Lord [Acts 17:28].
It says also, “For freedom Christ has set us free” [Gal. 5:1].
While the dead plan of this world still writhes in agony until its end, we already begin to live, move, and have our being in the freedom of the Sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Christ.
Even if we are not fully or perfectly able to do so in memory of him, he has already done it and still does it.
He asks our faith and willingness.
The Body of Christ, Amen!
The Blood of Christ, Amen!

For Monday of the Second Week of Easter

2010-04-12T19:34:00.001-07:00

John 3:1-8

Twice in today’s Gospel we hear the Lord Jesus invoke again his Godly self and Godly right with the saying, “Amen, amen, I say to you.”
What does the Lord God say?
He says we can enter and see the Kingdom of God only by birth from above of water and the Spirit.
Mark it well: birth from above is in BOTH earthly water AND God the Spirit— because a human being is BOTH earthly flesh AND spirit from God.
If it were birth of Spirit alone, then our flesh would lack meaning and be of less worth or none at all.
Rather, our flesh has everlasting meaning and everlasting worth.
Today the Lord also says, “The wind blows where it wills.”
In the Gospel language, “wind” and “Spirit” are the same word.
“The Spirit blows where it wills.”
God the Father sent God the Son in the power of God the Spirit and in the watery flesh of the human race.
God the Spirit blows where it wills.
In the Lord Jesus Christ, in his birth and life, in his suffering and death, in his rising and glory— in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Spirit has willed to blow within our watery flesh.
The Lord Jesus said so when his Father had newly sent him to rise from the dead, to tell and hand on to his apostolic Church what his Father had done for them in doing for him [Jn. 20:21-22].

“As the Father has sent me,
even so I send you.”
And when he had said this,
he breathed on them,
and said to them,
“Receive the Holy Spirit.

Even in his resurrection, the Lord Jesus is newborn of watery flesh and powerful Spirit.
The Baptismal rite he commanded his apostles to use pours out water and Spirit upon the human flesh and the human spirit, giving them birth from above.

Receive the Holy Spirit.
If you forgive the sins of any,
they are forgiven;
if you retain the sins of any,
they are retained. [Jn. 20:22-23]

In our human flesh and our human spirit— emotion, thought, and will— we are distorted and weighted by sin.
It is by forgiving sins that Baptism of water and the Spirit gives us new birth from above.
We have everlasting meaning and worth in both spirit and flesh.
The Sacred Chrism of Confirmation is a prophetic testimony, a priestly consecration, and a royal commissioning of our meaning and worth.
The Body and the Blood of the Risen Christ are full of the Spirit so as to be the Father’s covenant commitment to our meaning and worth.
They are also the covenant commitment that we make to the untold worth and meaning of God.

For Easter Friday

2010-04-09T14:22:00.001-07:00

John 21:1-14
Acts 4:1-12

The Lord Jesus raised his beloved friend Lazarus from the dead.
Shortly thereafter came the Lord’s messianic Palm Sunday procession into the nation’s capital.
Then, his Last Supper, arrest in Gethsemane, interrogations by the nation’s High Priest and elders, Roman governor, and King Herod, his crucifixion, and now his resurrection!
After that whirlwind of dramas, suddenly in today’s Gospel we see what starts out as the return of something relatively ordinary in the lives of the apostles.
The apostle Peter decides to go fishing.
He used to make his living doing so.
After his rabbi rose from the dead and turned out to be not merely the Messiah but the Lord God himself, Peter going fishing seems banal and anticlimactic.
Was it an accident that he caught nothing at all that whole night, or was it God’s plan?
No matter what the case might have been, what followed at dawn was no accident.
The Risen Lord Jesus, whom they do not recognize, calls out to them from the shore.
He does not call out, “Men!” or “Friends!” or “Brothers!”
Rather, he calls out, “Children!”
With the knowing stance of Lord God and Father, he calls to them as to children.
This Gospel will continue tomorrow and show us the fatherly plan the Lord Jesus has for the vocation of Peter.
For now the Lord asks these fishermen, “Children, have you caught anything to eat?”
“No.”
So their plans and efforts have failed again— their earlier messianic aspirations about the Lord Jesus, and now their plan to go back to ordinary fishing— all their plans have failed.
Now the Lord Jesus takes over their lives once more.
He commands them where to cast the net, and he states as a fact that they shall have a catch.
They obey without speaking.
Right away they pull in an overwhelming catch.
It wakes up one man, the disciple whom the Lord Jesus had touched with his love.
Waking up, he says to Peter, “It is the Lord.”
When they get to shore, they find the Lord Jesus has no need for their miraculous success, because he already has fish cooking on a fire, and he has bread.
Nonetheless, he commands them to bring over some of their catch.
They obey in silence.
The Gospel reports no words as they watch him prepare and cook the fish for them.
Also, it seems they stand away from him, because the Gospel reports he “came over” to give them the bread, and that he did so again to give them the fish he cooked.
Among them is Thomas, who had put into words the knowledge they all have now: “My Lord and my God!”
On the day he rose from the dead, their Lord and their God fed them the Holy Spirit with his own breath.
Their Lord and their God, risen from the dead, is now cooking their breakfast for them and serving it to them.
Perhaps they remember now with shock that at his Last Supper with them their Lord and their God had washed their feet.
Their own ideas and plans about him failed.
Their own ideas and plans about ordinary fishing have failed.
Now they let him ask the questions, they let him take command, they let him go into action, and they wait for him to speak.
He called them “children.”
He knew they needed him to be a father.
They need everything he does.
Apart from him they can do nothing.
That’s what he said to them at his Last Supper in this Gospel [15:5] on the night one of their own betrayed him.
Apart from him they can do nothing; but abiding in him, and he in them, they can bear much fruit or net an overwhelming catch.
The overwhelmingly successful catch they have made is due not to their own efforts in the dark of night, for on their own they have failed.
They owe their miraculous success to the dawning of his presence, fatherly concern, command, and their childlike obedience even without being awake to his presence and identity.
The Lord Jesus will go on to command more from them, beginning with Peter, more than their own plans and their own strength can conceive and realize apart from childlike obedience to him as their father.
He himself, the Lord Jesus, called his own resurrection an act of obedience to a mission he received from his Father in the power of the Holy Spirit.
He said so in his first words to them after his resurrection [20:21-22].

“As the FATHER has SENT me,
even so I SEND you.”
And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and said to them,
“Receive the Holy Spirit.”

The Lord Jesus rose from the dead because the Father sent him in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Like his own Father, the Lord Jesus also sends his “children” in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Only the work and the will of the Lord Jesus with the power of the Holy Spirit that he himself, like a father, prepares and feeds to them in his Body and Blood, only that can bring from their childlike obedience a mighty catch and abundant fruit where mere human plans and efforts are doomed to fail.
On the day we recalled the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, how right and necessary that we renewed the promises of the Baptism most of us received as children.
May we abide committed to him as he abides committed Bodily to us in the Blood and Spirit of the new and everlasting covenant.

For Easter Tuesday

2010-04-06T18:47:00.003-07:00

Acts 2:36-41
John 20:11-18

The two angels inside the tomb were not sitting just anywhere.
One sat where the head of the Lord had lain in death, and the other where his feet had rested.
The open tomb in the garden shows us “heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man” [Jn. 1:51]— one at his head and one at his feet.
In this new “Garden of Eden,” the angels do not speak Mary’s name, but use a title, “Woman.”
This is strange, because in the Word of the Lord the angels of God always know our names, or give us new names for a special mission.
“Mary” is a name, but “Woman” is a mission.
After the angels, the Lord himself, who has always known her name, will first call her, “Woman.”
She, without being awake to it, is now in the new Eden, the garden of the resurrection that the Lord God has planted.
There ought to be no weeping in this place, for the Lord God says:

Behold, the dwelling of God is with men.
He will dwell with them,
and they shall be his people,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe away every tear from their eyes,
and death shall be no more,
neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more,
for the former things have passed away.
Behold, I make all things new. [Rev. 21:3-5]

So, the Lord God asks her as did the angels, “Woman, why are you weeping?”
She has not yet awakened to the newness of all things.
So, she yet speaks of the old, her old mission, her “dead” mission.
“Sir, if you carried him away, tell me where you laid him, and I will take him.”
She still holds on to his death.
He now reaches into her dead mission, and calls her by her old name, “Mary!”
This is the first time she has heard her old name spoken by a voice that has triumphed over death.
She awakens now, turns again to him, and gives him a title, a new one that has not yet sounded in the Gospel: Rabbouni.
Others have called him Rabbi, a title for a teacher.
Its literal meaning is “my great one.”
Rabbouni is the same, except it is more deeply respectful, and is another way of addressing him who is “my Lord and my God” [Jn. 20:28].
Now her Lord and her God tells Woman her mission.
She is not to hold onto him as if he were merely dead and risen.
She may hold onto him, however, as one ascended to the Father.
“Stop holding on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father.”
For now, Woman’s mission is to go into the heart of the Church, not out to the world.
Inside the Church she is to testify to the resurrection and the ascension of the Lord upon whom angels ascend and descend.
He tells Woman:

... go to my brothers and tell them,
‘I am going to my Father and your Father,
to my God and your God.’

In those words the Lord gives another new name.
In the Gospel, he has never called his apostles his “brothers”— not until now.
Now he calls them “my brothers,” sharing with them his resurrection, his ascension, his Father, his God.

... my brothers...
I am going to my Father and your Father,
to my God and your God.

In his resurrection and his ascension he has renewed and commissioned Woman, and he has renewed and commissioned Man.
He sends Woman into the heart of the apostolic Church, having her let go of mourning but hold on to faith in his ascension.
As for the Men of his Church, he would have them know that his Father is also their Father.
As to the Men’s apostolic mission to the world, the Lord does not tell that to Mary Magdalene, but will himself tell them and empower them for it by breathing the Holy Spirit upon them.
For now, Mary— Woman Renewed— comes to know her dignity and her mission within the Church.
Centuries later, St. Therese of Lisieux awakened sharply to the same mission of Womanhood, and wrote [in her autobiography]:

my call is love....
In the heart of the Church, my mother, I will be love,
and thus I will be all things....

With words of love and faith, words holding on to hope in the ascension of the Lord, Mary, now Woman Renewed, stands in the heart of the Church, and tells the brothers of the Lord, “I have seen the Lord.”
All of us in the Church, Men and Women, we have our dignity from the Lord whose Father is our Father.
We do not expect to him to satisfy us on earth.
Rather, we let go in honor of his ascension, whereby he enthrones our dignity, not in the tomb where his head and his feet had lain, but at the right hand of his Father and ours.
With faith, hope, and love— a trinity of power from God— we stand as his Church, and we own our dignity higher than the angels: “I have seen the Lord” who had died, but has risen, and has ascended to his Father and my Father.
Upholding our dignity in Christ, St. Peter spoke on the day of Pentecost what we heard in the first reading today.

Repent and be baptized, every one of you,
in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins;
and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

My sisters in the Church, my brothers in the Lord, he has made all things new for us.
This is the day the Lord has made— let us rejoice in it and be glad!

For Monday of Holy Week

2010-03-29T14:09:00.003-07:00

John 12:1-11
Isaiah 42:1-7

Every Sunday Mass, we profess our faith in the Godhead of the Lord Jesus.

the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God,
Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
one in being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.

We have a fullness of faith-filled words that the Bethany siblings, Lazarus, Martha, and Mary, did not have even after the Lord raised Lazarus from the dead.
As the Lord made his way to the cave holding Lazarus’s body, both Martha and Mary told him what they believed.
Martha said:

Lord, if you had been here,
my brother would not have died.
And even now I know that whatever you ask from God,
God will give you. [Jn. 11:21-22]

I believe that you are the Christ,
the Son of God ... coming into the world. [Jn. 11:27]

Mary then came before him, and repeated Martha’s first words, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
Mary spoke after having thrown herself down at the Lord’s feet.
We have seen her at his feet before.
In fact, she is in the Gospels three times, and always at the Lord’s feet.
When we first met her, she was seated at his feet listening to him teach.
A “Liturgy of the Word”!
Then, just before the Lord called Lazarus out of death, Mary was at the Lord’s feet again, voicing her belief in his power to prevent her brother’s death.
A “Creed” or “Profession of Faith”!
Finally, in today’s Gospel, she heaped extravagant worship on the Lord’s feet.
Eucharistic Adoration!
She used genuine spikenard ointment worth three hundred days’ wages.
By our minimum wage today, that would be near twenty thousand dollars or more.
As if that were not enough, she lowered herself to use her hair as a towel for his feet.
The Lord accepted and defended her excess of groveling, thankfulness, and even worship of his mere feet with spikenard and her hair.
We cannot say that at the time she had the theological fullness of our knowledge that Jesus is Lord God.
Yet who among us has ever poured out worship so lavish, so humble, and so bodily real as her worship of the Lord?
She and her siblings were dear to the Lord.
The Gospel says the Lord loved Lazarus, called him his friend, and wept openly on the way to his tomb.
Yet never did Lazarus, Martha, or Mary ever call him by his first name.
They always called him “Lord”— a title befitting God.
Their Lord Jesus, as God who alone has power to do so, shouted at the rotting corpse of Lazarus a command to come out of death into life.
He accepted from Martha the title “Son of God.”
He accepted and defended the prodigal, supremely sacrificial veneration Mary spent on his feet.
Lazarus, Martha, and Mary regard him as far more than a personal friend.
Mary’s spikenard and hair silently outdid the shouting Palm Sunday crowd that spread garments and leafy branches to carpet the road for the Lord.
The Most Holy Lord of hosts— heaven and earth are full of his glory— hosanna in the highest!
The Church’s daily Eucharistic rite of worship and salvation always repeats the song of Palm Sunday.
Throughout Holy Week the Church’s rites repeat several times part of a song St. Paul wrote into his Letter to the Philippians [2:8-9].

Christ became obedient for us unto death,
even death on a cross.
Therefore God has highly exalted him,
and bestowed on him the name which is above every name.

The song goes on to say, “Jesus Christ is Lord” [2:11].
The Name that is above very name spoke itself to Moses from out of the burning bush: I AM WHO AM.
That Name is so sacrosanct that Biblical awe veils its sound with the title, “Lord.”
“Jesus Christ is Lord.”
The song St. Paul sent to the Church at Philippi also tells [2:6-8] how Christ the Lord far outdid the humility of Mary in Bethany.

Christ Jesus ... was in the form of God.
He did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped.
He emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
born in the likeness of men.
In human form he humbled himself,
and became obedient unto death,
even death on a cross.

This is the week of his death on a cross.
It is also a week rich in words and rituals to acknowledge he is Lord God.
This week and all the days of our lives, let us honor his Lordship and Godhead with our own freedom, in our thoughts, in our words, in what we do, and in avoiding what we ought.
At his name every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that he is Lord. [Cf. Phil. 2:10-11.]
Doing so is our duty and our salvation, ushering in the everlasting joy he has humbled himself to win for us.

For the Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord

2010-03-25T13:37:00.001-07:00

Hebrews 10:4-10
Isaiah 7:10-14 & 8:10
Luke 1:26-38

Today the Word of the Lord tells us he has given us the “sign ... deep as the nether world ... high as the sky!”
The sign is Emmanuel— “God Is with Us”— in person as a man of human flesh and blood, human emotion, human intellect, and human will.
As such, he grew to the fullness of manhood, “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried” [Apostles’ Creed].
After dying on the cross, Christ joined the poor ranks of the souls of the dead.
In the mystery of Good Friday and Holy Saturday, Christ is the “sign ... deep as the nether world”: God who is with us as a man freely and faithfully even in death.
Through all of it, he is God consecrating himself to man in a new and everlasting covenant, and he is man consecrating himself to God in a new and everlasting covenant.
As the Word to the Hebrews said today, “we have been consecrated through the offering of the Body of Jesus Christ.”
We belong to God in life and in death.
However, the sign from the Lord is also “high as the sky.”
On the third day that would have known his death, Christ rose to new life.
In Christ, man has conquered sin, suffering, sadness, and death, has “ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father.”
In Christ, our human identity is no longer merely “deep as the nether world,” but is now “high as the sky.”
In Christ and in his Mother human identity is utterly “full of grace.”
We borrow Mary’s question, and turn it to our own use.
“How can this be...?”
Can we be full of grace “high as the sky”?
We know we still freely throw ourselves down beneath sin.
How should sinners ever come to be sons and daughters of God?
In the same way that a virgin came to be virginal mother and mother of God!
“The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.”
Because of the gift of his power, sinners can be reborn as holy sons and daughters of God, if they but choose freely to live as servants of the Lord, so that it may be done to them according to the angelic word.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God,
by the will of the Father and the work of the Holy Spirit,

— you came to be born flesh and blood from the Virgin Mary, and—

your death brought life to the world.
By your holy Body and Blood,
free me from all my sins and from every evil,
keep me faithful to your teaching,
and never let me be parted from you. [The priest’s private prayer of preparation for Communion at Mass]

In the victory of his faithfulness, God is with us in his Body and Blood, so that by our own willing, flesh-and-blood faithfulness to him, we can be with him forever as his sons and daughters.

For Thursday of the Fourth Week of Lent

2010-03-18T15:08:00.001-07:00

John 5:31-47
Exodus 32:7-14.

In the same place where days before they had consecrated and covenanted their undying faithfulness to the Lord God, the Israelites turned to worship a golden calf.
Moses then heard and questioned the Lord God’s intention to “exterminate them from the face of the earth.”
Moses “implored the Lord, his God” to lessen the punishment.
The Lord God acted according to the intercession of Moses.
However, in the Gospel, the Lord Jesus says Moses now will not intercede.
Instead, Moses will accuse those who hoped in Moses but disbelieved Christ Jesus about whom Moses had written.
Everything Christ the Lord says in his Gospel today is dangerous.
Moses testified to the Israelites on behalf of the Lord God.
However, the Lord Jesus says Moses “wrote about ME,” and the Scriptures “testify on MY behalf.”
More dangerously, Christ says, “the Father who sent ME has testified on MY behalf.”
He goes on.

you think you have eternal life
But you do not want to come to ME to have life.

you do not have the love of GOD in you
you do not accept ME

For that kind of talk, men sought his death.
The daily Gospels now as we draw nearer to Good Friday dwell increasingly on his dangerous words.
However, behind his death is more than his dangerous talk.
While Moses was a mere man chosen to mediate between God and Israel, Christ Jesus is truly both God and man.
He is mediation, intercession, reconciliation and perfect union in PERSON, in FLESH and BLOOD.
In him, God and man lived faithfully as one, died faithfully as one, and rose invincibly as one beyond death and sin.
In him, the union of God and man is glorified and enthroned in undying flesh and blood at the side of the heavenly Father.
Our joy, our homecoming, our victory, and even our true identity are already fulfilled in Christ at the right hand of the Father.
The trouble is that we still turn away to make and worship the golden calf.
We worship the golden calf of false or lesser joys.
We make the golden calf of being at home in a lifestyle far from God.
We worship the golden calf of selfish and arrogant victories.
We make the golden calf of identities that are gilded, artificial, unrealistic, temporary, incomplete or immature.
We need truth— the true God who gives us our true identity.
Venerable Pope John Paul II often quoted the following from the Second Vatican Council [Gaudium et spes, 22].

In reality it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear.

Christ... fully reveals man to himself and brings to light
his most high calling.

Our “most high calling” is the truth that “is seated at the right hand of the Father in heaven” [Nicene Creed].
The Lord Jesus has covenanted and consecrated himself to that truth for us.
On the Eucharistic night before he died, he interceded for us.

Father....
Make them holy in the truth.
For their sake I consecrate myself,
that they also may be consecrated in truth. [Jn. 17:17,19]

That is always his intercession for us in his Eucharist.
We are baptized into the life, truth, and holiness of God.
We are anointed to be his mediators for the world.
We come to believe and obey Christ in his Eucharist that consecrates us in Christ for worship of the Father’s glory.
By living faithfully our worship of the true God, we begin to find our true selves, and shall finally be at home in the Promised Land.

For the Fourth Sunday of Lent

2010-03-14T13:12:00.001-07:00

Joshua 5:9a,10-12
2 Corinthians 5:17-21
Luke 15:1-3,11-32

In each of the three readings today, something tough comes to an end as something wonderful opens up.
In the first reading, the forty years of Israel’s wandering in the desert have come to an end.
After freeing his chosen people Israel from slavery in Egypt, God promised to be faithful to them.
In return, he asked them to promise likewise to him and to keep their promise.
Within days they broke their marriage bond with the Lord, turning to worship instead a golden calf.
For that and other sins, God made them wander forty years in the wild until the death of all who were older than twenty when they left Egypt. [Num. 14:29-33; Num. 32:11; Jos. 5:6]
Everyday for forty years, they had no food except the quail God sent each evening and the manna he sent each morning.
No food came on the weekly Sabbath, but what they saved from the day before.
Each day for forty years they had to trust that God would feed them.
After the wilderness swallowed the last of the sinful generation in death, their offspring crossed the Jordan River into Canaan, the Land of Promise.
Then, as the first reading says, “No longer was there manna for the Israelites, who that year ate of the yield of the land of Canaan.”
They did not wait for their new dough to take in yeast from the air.
Rather, as the first reading tells, they ate unleavened loaves and roasted grain from their first harvest.
It wasn’t a juicy “Thanksgiving dinner,” but was nonetheless a homecoming and a change from forty years of quail and manna.
Today’s Gospel also tells of a homecoming and new food.
The younger son could not wait for his old man to drop dead, but demanded his share of the inheritance ahead of time.
Off in a faraway land, he squandered it with prostitutes.
Famine came, leaving him starved and craving even what the hogs ate.
The story, however, is really about the incredible, extravagant father to whom he returned.
The father did not hold on to any anger he might have had, but opened his welcoming arms with rich blessings.
We see that he had been in mourning: “this son of mine was dead, and has come to life again; he was lost, and has been found.”
Though the younger man had stopped acting like a son to his father, the old man never stopped wanting to be a father to him: “this son of mine.”
The Lord Jesus has told this story to teach that Heaven’s King is like a father mourning and eager to welcome back richly his children lost in deadly sin.
If they turn back to him, God takes them into the promised land of his fatherly arms— “not counting their trespasses against them,” as the second reading says.
The parable’s father took back his disrespectful, scornful, ungrateful, demanding, impatient, selfish, squandering, whoremonger son.
Welcoming him back, he clothed him with his own finery, and feasted his return with a “Thanksgiving dinner” of freshly butchered, richly marbled veal.
It is not fair.
The second reading tells just how terribly unfair is the mystery of God.
For our sake, God the Father made Christ “to be sin”— Christ “who did not know sin”— so that in Christ “we might become the righteousness of God.”

Whoever is in Christ is a new creation:
the old things have passed away;
behold, new things have come.
And all this is from God,
who has reconciled us to himself through Christ....

We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

“We implore you on behalf of Christ.”
With the parable in today’s Gospel, Christ implored two groups of listeners.
First: “Tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to listen to” him.
Tax collectors were Israelites squeezing the inheritance of their own fatherland and brother Israelites for the idol-worshiping, greedy Romans— “the swine” and “prostitutes” from “a distant country.”
The parable’s horrendously selfish younger son shows how terrible was the sin of the tax collectors in the eyes of Christ.
With the words of the younger son, Christ told the tax collectors and sinners how to make an abject apology to God.
“Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you; I no longer deserve to be called your son.”
The other group listening to Christ was the Pharisees and scribes.
The whole parable upholds that anyone— be he rebel, or be he loyal— anyone who turns willingly to God shall receive everything God has.
We believe that promise, and we say so every Sunday here at Mass.

We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come.
Amen.

Our faith in that calls us to let go of selfishness and lesser inheritances, not letting them hold us back from turning to God our Father.
We believe also that our Elder Brother, the Oldest Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, has always fleshed out the last words of the Father from the parable.

My son,
you are here with me always;
everything I have is yours.
But now we must celebrate and rejoice,
because your brother was dead
and has come to life again;
he was lost
and has been found.

The Oldest Son heeds our Father by vesting the repentant and the loyal in the robe, ring, and sandals of the Holy Spirit.
The Oldest Son sacrificed his real Body and Blood as the new and everlasting covenant feast that is the guarantee and beginning of our share in his inheritance.
It is not fair.
It is God’s prodigal mercy.
“We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”

For Thursday of the Third Week of Lent

2010-03-11T13:26:00.001-08:00

Jeremiah 7:23-28
Psalm 94(95):1-2,6-9
Luke 11:14-23

Not counting the Sundays, today is the twentieth day of fasting since Ash Wednesday; so the forty days are now half over.
At this turning point, today’s first reading, psalm, and Gospel call us to turn to God with open loyalty and unswerving faithfulness.
When men and women turn to God by asking for Baptism, the Church spends months teaching, readying, and praying with them and for them.
First the Church gives them a public welcome, asking them to say aloud that they want to receive the faith of the Church.
At this welcome, and at least four more times before Baptism, the Church’s full rituals act and pray to drive the spirits of evil away from these men and women.
These rituals are minor exorcisms.
The first has a dramatic form, with the priest imitating the Lord who breathed the Spirit upon mankind at both creation and resurrection.
The priest breathes toward the face of each candidate for Baptism.
He then holds up his right hand, and he says:

By the breath of your mouth, O Lord,
drive away the spirits of evil.
Command them to depart,
for your kingdom has come among us.

The priest’s words recall today’s Gospel: “if it is by the finger of God that I drive out demons, then the Kingdom of God has come upon you.”
At least four other minor exorcisms take place in the months before Baptism.
Then, on the day of Baptism, the candidates must first vow openly that they reject Satan and sin.
Today the Gospel tells us to take openly the side of the Lord Jesus, and to oppose demons openly.
He shuts out neutrality, agnosticism, and lack of commitment, saying, “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.”
To be against him is to be on the side of Satan.
God abides by our freedom, while Satan and demons do not.
In his Gospel today, the Lord Jesus upholds that he wields “the finger of God” to drive out demons and make the Kingdom of God come upon men.
Outside of today’s Gospel, the Word of God uses the saying “finger of God” three times.
The first time it says the “finger of God” turned all the dust in Egypt into biting gnats [Ex. 8:19].
The other two times it says the “finger of God” wrote his Ten Commandments on stone slabs [Ex. 31:18 and Dt. 9:10].
Now in Baptism, the finger of God, the Holy Spirit, writes inside us a character that spells “Son of God.”
The Son of God speaks of himself in his Gospel today as “one stronger” who “attacks and overcomes” Satan.
At the lower edge of the Prince of Peace icon behind our altar is the Greek word NIKA, which means, “he overcomes.”
With his cross the Lord breaks and overcomes the chains of Satan, evil, sin, and death.
He is Love personally alive in flesh and blood by the power of the Holy Spirit— by the finger of God.
He has suffered and died for the sins of the world.
He is Love stronger than death.
Out of his Flesh and Blood risen from the dead he breathes the Holy Spirit for his Apostolic Church.
In Baptism, Christ and the Holy Spirit mark us forever for the Father.
We must testify openly to this with all our mind and choices, or else— as the Lord warns right after today’s section of his Gospel— we are empty houses open for demonic invasion.
By the Flesh and Blood of the Son of God may he abide in us and we in him, that by the Holy Spirit— Breath and Finger of God— we may live forever as sons and daughters in the house of God the Father.

For Saturday of the Second Week of Lent

2010-03-06T14:54:00.000-08:00

Luke 15:1-3,11-32

After telling us the Pharisees and scribes complained that the Lord Jesus welcomed tax collectors and sinners, and ate with them, the Gospel says the Lord told three parables for all to hear.
The lectionary today leaves out the first and second parables, and gives only this one about a father and his sons.
The first two parables teach the meaning of this third one.
God is searching for those who belong to him but are lost in sin.
When they repent, and God finds them, he rejoices greatly.
Moreover, he invites others to share his great rejoicing at regaining his own who were lost.
However, today’s third parable adds at its end an appeal of tenderness, openness, and even respect for the Pharisees and scribes.
“My son, you are here with me always; everything I have is yours.”
Though we call it the parable of the prodigal son, it is really about the father who is prodigal to both his sons, opening lavishly to both of them all his goodness, wealth, and glory.
To his sinful and lately repentant younger son, he gives a fine robe, a ring, sandals, and a feast of freshest fattened veal.
By those signs he says, “My son, you are here with me AGAIN; everything I have is yours.”
He then actually voices much the same to his elder son, “My son, you are here with me ALWAYS; everything I have is yours.”
In this season of penitential preparations to celebrate the solemn festival of the Lord’s resurrection, many are preparing for a new beginning as sons and daughters of God in the Church through the sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation, and the Eucharist.
Others, who have been Catholic longer, are turning anew to God through the sacrament of Confession and Absolution.
In the Easter solemnity of the Lord’s resurrection, all, both the newest Catholics and the elder, will celebrate the goodness of the Father— My son, you are here with me; everything I have is yours.
In the celebration of the Risen Son’s Eucharistic Body and Blood, the heavenly Father runs forward to meet us and put on us the fine robe, ring, and sandals of filial dignity by the Holy Spirit.
However, the heavenly Father slaughters for us no mere calf, fattened or otherwise.
He feasts us with the Body, Blood, Soul, and Godhead of his own Son who is without beginning or end.
In a paradoxical way, the Lord Jesus is somewhat in the role of the elder brother, the elder son of the parable, to whom the heavenly Father speaks.

My son!
You are here with me always.
Everything I have is yours.
Now we must celebrate and rejoice.
Your brother was dead
and has come to life again.
He was lost
and has been found.

Both Father and Son, in one Holy Spirit, celebrate and rejoice when we, the younger children, turn back to the Father.
As we dare to eat and drink the Body and Blood of the Son of God today, let it be as our committed covenant to remain always with the Father in faithfulness and thanksgiving by the power of the Holy Spirit that invests us.

For Wednesday of the Second Week of Lent

2010-03-03T14:52:00.000-08:00

Jeremiah 18:18-20
Matthew 20:17-28

Today in his Gospel, the Lord Jesus was going up to Jerusalem for the last time.
On the way, he took his twelve apostles aside, as if to see to it no one else would hear.
To the twelve alone he foretold for the third and last time that in Jerusalem the chief priests and scribes would have the Gentiles kill him on a cross.
It seemed to be a secret he wanted his apostles alone to know.
Now the whole world knows.
He called the secret “the chalice.”
He also told the twelve that the third day of the chalice would see him raised from the dead.
So it happened, but not everyone in the world believes it.
Not everyone drinks the chalice.
No one likes to drink a chalice of suffering and death.
Perhaps most want to drink a chalice of some kind of resurrection— but likely not if it comes by suffering and death.
Even the twelve apostles changed the subject from death to being first in line for thrones in a kingdom.
So the Lord challenged them with another secret in his chalice: the secret of ruling, having authority, being great and first among men.
He is telling this secret directly to his apostles whom he has taken aside.
This is the chalice for all who have his apostolic anointing as bishops and priests.
The chalice of the Son of Man is “to give his life as a ransom for many.”
He has drawn men aside, and sent them in his own name as a ransom for others.
To repent in place of those who don’t.
Believe in place of those who don’t.
Want God in place of those who don’t.
Love God in place of those who don’t.
Pray in place of those who don’t.
Worship in place of those who don’t.
Sacrifice in place of those who don’t.
Serve in place of those who don’t.
Be holy in place of those who refuse.
Even be a slave, he says.
Die that others may live, even that they may “be raised on the third day.”
That is the chalice the Lord gives to bishops and priests as his apostles.
“My chalice you will indeed drink.”
Together with bishops and priests, all the Church, all the Body of Christ has his bidding to share in ransoming many others.
“Take this, all of you, and drink from it ... so that sins may be forgiven.”
We are members of his Body to be given up, and members of his Blood to be shed.
If his is the chalice we truly drink, if his is the life we truly live, then the first words he spoke in his Gospel today will come true beyond the measure of the world.
“Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem.”
“Jerusalem,” meaning “Vision-of-Peace,” shows the way to a heavenly vision at the side of the Lord Jesus, as he says, “for those for whom it has been prepared by my Father.”
“Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem.”
“And he said to all, ‘If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.’” [Lk. 9:23]

For Friday of the First Week of Lent

2010-02-26T14:50:00.000-08:00

Ezekiel 18:21-28
Psalm 130:1-8
Matthew 5:20-26

Whenever we hear the Lord Jesus say, “Amen, amen,” or, “Amen, I say to you,” we would do well to mark his words.
It appears as a historical fact that no one until the Lord Jesus used the word “Amen” in that particular way.
It would be, then, a mannerism he himself invented.
When he uses “Amen, amen, I say to you,” he goes above and beyond the ancient prophetic prologue, “Thus says the Lord.”
In other words, his “Amen” is a sign of speaking directly as God himself, not merely as a go-between prophet.
“Amen, amen,” what does God want us to hear?
Today, in the first reading, the responsorial psalm, and his Gospel, God insists there are consequences for our sins.
If a wicked man repents, turns to God, “and does what is right and just, he shall surely live,” but a virtuous man who turns to do evil shall suffer deadly consequences. [First reading]
In his Gospel today, the Lord voices a litany of consequences for sin.

... you will not enter into the Kingdom of heaven.
... you ... will be liable to judgment....
... answerable to the Sanhedrin....
... liable to fiery Gehenna.
... thrown into prison.
Amen, I say to you, you will not be released until you have paid....

That last line about a prison from which one will be released after paying for one’s sins is a Gospel description of purgatorial payment— purgatory.
“Amen, I say to you, you will not be released until you have paid....”
The sins whose consequences today’s Gospel addresses are those against one’s brother.
In his Gospel today, the Lord Jesus makes the altar the place where we undergo judgment for sins against a neighbor.
We are to make amends with our fellow man before daring to approach the altar, or else we shall face the grim consequences.
The Word of the Lord to the Corinthians [1 Cor. 11:27-29] says that to receive the Eucharist unworthily is a profanation that brings deadly judgment upon us.
The Lord Jesus profaned himself, giving up his body for us, and shedding his blood for us, by receiving deadly judgment in place of us, so that our sins may be forgiven.
As we now dare to approach his altar, he upholds in his Gospel today that, “Amen,” we are first to make amends for our sins against others.
Otherwise, we profane the atonement for our sins, the atonement he makes in his Body and Blood.

For the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter

2010-02-22T16:27:00.000-08:00

Matthew 16:13-19

Yesterday in the Gospel [Sunday 1 of Lent, Lk. 4:1-13], we witnessed the devil tempt the Lord Jesus to jump from the utmost height of the Temple.
If the Lord had done so, the high priest and all the people could have seen him floating on the hands of God’s angels.
It would have been a mighty wonder of God, the sight of it hitting men hard over their heads, driving them to shout against their own disbelief, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God!”
The Lord Jesus did not do it.
Even after he rose from the dead, passing through the solid stone of the tomb, leaving angels there to open it for his followers to see, he did not go to the Temple nor send other angels there to stare down and frighten the high priest, elders, nation and world with his glory and triumph over death.
Instead, he sent them mere human witnesses who had already believed in him before he died.
With rare exception, the salvation of men depends not on glory clobbering them, but on believing the testimony of tradition other men hand on.
Even the Word of God in the Scriptures is the testimony of tradition that inspired men have written down and handed on.
Before them, even God the Word came in mere flesh and blood as a man, asking men to accept his own testimony as handed down from God the Father.
It was asking terribly much, and men clobbered him with crucifixion for it.
He made it all depend on testimony.
In the beginning, in Paradise, God gave his life-giving face-to-face testimony to the man and woman, but they turned away, accepting the false testimony of the serpent.
It makes sense— it is right and just— that man’s return to God depends on the humility of accepting the testimony of sinful men outside of Paradise.
Today in the Gospel, we are humbled to stand before several scandals.
The Lord Jesus calls himself a man, “Son of Man.”
Yet, he also calls God, “my heavenly Father.”
He accepts for himself and blesses the title, “Son of the living God.”
He also dares to speak of the keys to heaven as his to give away.
The worst of it is that he spoke of giving heaven’s keys to a man who would be a cowardly runaway and a liar— a mere sinner like us.
A sinful weakling with the keys to bind anything in heaven and to loose anything in heaven!

I will give you the keys to the Kingdom of heaven.
Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven;
and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

This is a scandal from the Son of God.
Scandalous also his homeless birth in a Bethlehem stable, his body and blood as real food and real drink, and his miserable death as an outlaw!
Nonetheless, it is most fitting— it is right and just— that man and woman who turned away from the face-to-face testimony of God himself in the delight of Paradise must now be saved by the humility of faith in the testimony of their fellow sinners outside Paradise.
The Catholic Church is an earthly scandal as was the Son of God.
So we say “Yes” with humility to the Lord Jesus, and we echo his testimony.

Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah.
For the living God has revealed to you that he is the heavenly Father
and Jesus is his own Son, the Christ.
You, Simon, are Peter.
It is the will of Christ to build his Church upon you.
The gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against the Church of Christ—
for the Church is the gate of heaven
whose keys are in your hands, Peter,
to bind or loose anything in heaven as on earth.

The Son of God, asks us to believe humbly the testimony of one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church that he builds on Peter, the testimony handed down in tradition from the Son of God to our own day.
The scandal continues.
It comes from the Son of God.
Believe it or not!
Paradise is at stake.
In the beginning, and in the end, the gates of the netherworld prevail against our pride, but not against the Church.
St. Peter, please bind our pride on earth, and loosen our humility in heaven!

For Thursday after Ash Wednesday

2010-02-18T12:55:00.001-08:00

Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Luke 9:22-25

Yesterday in his Gospel, our Lord told us each to share secrets one on one with our heavenly Father.
Our Father rewards the prayer, fasting, and almsgiving we secretly offer him.
He himself is the greatest reward.
Believing and hoping for deep closeness with God is the inspiration for our prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.
St. Benedict tells monks to offer daily Lenten sacrifices with the “joy of the Holy Spirit ... while we look forward to holy Easter with joy and spiritual longing.”
Holy Easter begins with the vigil we keep after dark has fallen on Holy Saturday.
On that night, Christians all over the face of the earth stand together before the altars, and with one voice they renew the oaths of baptism.

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
who suffered, died and was buried.
on the third day he rose again in fulfillment of the scriptures.

The Lord spoke of his resurrection in today’s Gospel.
He said anyone wishing to come after him into the resurrection “must deny himself and take up his cross DAILY....”
DAILY!
So, then, the life of EVERY Christian is to be a CONTINUOUS Lent, just as St. Benedict said it for monks.
However, who is strong enough for that, and why do it?
The reasons for lifelong daily penitential sacrifices are JOY and LIFE.
The first reading from the Word of the Lord today said, “Choose life ... by loving the Lord ... and holding fast to him.”
Penitential sacrifices can train us to stop trying to grab life and joy as objects to imprison in our hands.
Sacrifices can train us to hold fast to God himself.
Adam and Eve instead let go of God, and tried to grab life and joy for themselves.
Until then, God himself was their life and joy.
Once they chose to grab for themselves, they condemned their own grabbing hands to keep on working just to stay alive on the earth— though only for a while.
They condemned their own grabbing hands to work just to have anything earthly to enjoy— though only for a while.
Life and joy that are free, open-ended, and eternal can only come from the Creator.
If we would have them, we must stop grabbing.
Because of sin’s hold on us, we need deliberate effort to stop grabbing.
Penitential sacrifices train us to stop grabbing.
Christ did not grab at all.
He let go.
He let men TAKE, eat, and drink his body and his blood.
He let men GRAB his earthly life and joy.
He suffered and died.
In baptism we have chosen, entered, and embraced his suffering, death, and resurrection.
“We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.” [Nicene Creed]
Baptism is a washing, a drowning, a birthing, and a resurrection.
By baptism we as sinners are drowned into the death of Christ.
Then, the water breaks, and we are washed and born into his resurrection as children of God.
God has again freely put life and joy into our hands by putting us— baptizing us—into his life and joy.
Whoever stops grabbing, whoever lets go, or— as the Lord says in his Gospel today— “Whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.”
Our secret penitential sacrifices are acts of love that call forth and strengthen our intention to stop grabbing, to let go, to lose our lives for the sake of Christ, so that by Christ we save our lives.
Since we believe him, we have hope: “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.” [Nicene Creed]

For the Sixth Ordinary Sunday of the Church Year

2010-02-14T14:17:00.000-08:00

Luke 6:17,20-26

Today’s Gospel opens telling us “Jesus came down.”
Everything the Gospel gives us comes down from where the Lord Jesus was.
Everything the Gospel asks from us takes us up where he was.
He has come down a mountain where he spent the night awake with his Father.
The Lord Jesus at prayer is God the Son at one with his Father in their Holy Spirit.
The Blessed Trinity of God at prayer has overtaken the night.
When the morning found them, the Lord Jesus chose twelve of his disciples to be apostles— a word meaning “men who are sent,” “emissaries,” “envoys,” “men with a mission.”
The oneness of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit— their oneness began to reach into the world from the prayer of the Lord Jesus who chose and sent twelve apostles.
With his apostles, he came down the mountain, whereupon today’s Gospel shows that the intimacy of the Blessed Trinity began immediately to spread into bigger circles:

first from the Lord Jesus to his twelve apostles;
then, to “a great crowd of his disciples;
next, to the bigger circle of the Jewish people “from all Judea and Jerusalem;
lastly, to the people coming from the pagan world of “the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon.”

Then, making clear what the Lord wanted for the pagans and Jews, the Gospel immediately shows him “raising his eyes toward his DISCIPLES.”
He began to tell his DISCIPLES, “Blessed are YOU....”
He told them the blessed though difficult way up the mountain to the Father.
“Behold, your reward will be great in heaven.”

Blessed are you who are poor....
Blessed are you who are now hungry....
Blessed are you who are now weeping....
Blessed are you when people hate you,
and when they exclude and insult you,
and denounce your name as evil
on account of the Son of Man.

To be poor, hungry, weeping, hated, excluded, insulted, denounced as evil— the blessed path of the Lord’s disciples can be lonely and dark, like a night atop a mountain.
The darkness is real, but so is the prayer of the Son in the Spirit to the Father.
Real also are God’s presence and blessing for those who follow and pray alone in darkness.

Blessed are you who are poor,
for the Kingdom of God is yours.

As disciples of the Lord Jesus, we are to take to heart that God offers us his Kingdom that is endlessly great beyond all the riches of the world.
If we sincerely treasure his Kingdom, then the Spirit of gratefulness can dwell in us.
Even when we lack what is good in this world and are poor, we are the blessed of the Lord if we shun self-pity, envy, greed, and false means of self-enrichment.

Blessed are you who are now hungry,
for you will be satisfied.

Those who choose to be his disciples choose to hunger for the satisfaction that heaven alone can give.
In another place, the Lord tells of the blessed hunger and thirst for righteousness.
Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness give themselves over to zeal, devotion, piety, reverence, respect, and justice.
The blessed way that climbs the mountain of the Lord turns away from injustice, dishonesty, sin, and cynicism.

Blessed are you who are now weeping,
for you will laugh.

God’s goal for us is a joy we cannot begin to imagine— a joy that cannot be undone by poverty, hunger, weeping, hatred, exclusion, insult, and false denunciation.
We can hope for joy from God, and we can prepare for it.
At times, we might even taste or see a hint of it.
When we weep, our faith and hope in God who promises us joy can spur us to suffer patiently, to pray throughout the night with openness to deeper faith, deeper hope, and deeper love.

Blessed are you when people hate you,
and when they exclude and insult you,
and denounce your name as evil
on account of the Son of Man.

Behold, your reward will be great in heaven.

To follow the Son of Man up the mountain to the Father is to enter and embrace the Spirit that makes us willing to suffer on account of the Lord Jesus.
ON OUR ACCOUNT, “for us men and for our salvation,” the Son of God freely chose to be hated, excluded, insulted denounced as evil, and crucified on Mount Calvary.
He suffered, died and was buried.
“Behold, your reward will be great in heaven”: “he rose again in fulfillment of the scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.”
Even in the earthly prayer of the Lord Jesus, the Blessed Trinity sat at home with itself.
God’s goal for us is that we be seated at his right hand as sons and daughters in his Son by the power of the Holy Spirit.
The path that climbs to that goal may wind through poverty, hunger, and weeping.
That path may bring upon us the same hatred, exclusion, insult, and evil denunciation that befell the Lord Jesus.
The path to the mountain of God also calls us to pray much, for we are the envoys and disciples of the Lord Jesus, a man intensely given to frequent and long prayer.
We stand before a stone altar, a mountain of God, upon which the Lord Jesus in flesh and blood will be at prayer in communion with his Father in the unity that is the Holy Spirit.
He will let us take all that he is into ourselves, but we must thereby commit all that we are to be his envoys and disciples.
Blessed are you who commit yourselves to him.
“Behold, your reward will be great in heaven.”

For Tuesday of the Fifth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2010-02-09T13:48:00.001-08:00

1 Kings 8:22-23,27-30
Mark 7:1-13

In the first reading, we witness again the prayer of King Solomon at the qorban— the dedication or consecration— of the Temple he built for God.
In Solomon’s prayer and in the responsorial psalm today, the Word of the Lord calls us to honor God— to yearn, pine, and cry out for him in our souls, hearts, and flesh— to do so in his temple and before his altar.
The Lord also calls us to honor him in all the places, moments, deeds, and relationships of our lives.
He makes clear in his Gospel that we are not to separate his honor from the honor rightly owed to others, for example, to those who were his servants in bringing us to life— father and mother.
Otherwise, the honor we might pay to God at his altar in his temple would actually put us far from God.
“This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”
We run the danger of boxing up or shutting God inside his Temple, but of failing to honor him in our relationships with others.
We also run the danger of boxing up different parts of our own selves.
One example of that is our use of the word “brain.”
Did you know the word “brain” does not occur in the Bible?
Today we link the brain with intellectual activity; whereas we tie the heart to feelings.
However, the Bible does not separate thinking from feeling, nor box up thinking in the brain and feeling in the heart.
The Bible does not have the word “brain.”
Rather, in the Bible, the heart is everything and does everything.
In the Bible, the heart thinks and does intellectual work.
It also is the spring of the feelings— of love, hatred, desire, fear, joy, sadness, and anger.
In the Bible, the heart also decides, chooses, wills.
The Biblical heart is the whole of our interior life: emotion, intellect, and will.
In fact, in the next lines after today’s Gospel, the Lord points out that the heart THINKS, FEELS and ACTS WILLINGLY.
He says that, “from within, out of the HEART of man, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness.” [Mk. 7:21-22]
Thoughts, feelings, and willing actions all come from the heart.
Today the Gospel says, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”
In other words, they separate and box up different parts of themselves; they give God only a small piece; they really keep their whole being far from God.
You and I have come here today, inside this temple and before this altar, to honor God with our lips.
He wants us to open all the separate boxes, and offer our whole united being in his honor— to love and willingly serve the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength.
All of one’s life is God’s Temple.
St. Benedict tells monks that everything in the monastery is as a vessel of the altar.
Everything can give honor to God, and everything can bring God’s gifts to us.
We, too, can join Christ, in obeying the commandment: “Honor your father and mother, as the Lord your God has commanded you, so that you may live long....” [Dt. 5:16]

Take, O Father,
eat and drink my whole being.
I give it up and pour it out for you,
for you are the forgiver of sins.
You, O Lord, honor me with your mercy.
I honor you with all my being,
for you are God my creator.

“Receive me, Lord, as you have promised, and I shall live; do not disappoint me in my hope.” [Ps. 118:116, as in the Benedictine ceremony for the vows of a monk]

For Friday of the Fourth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2010-02-05T14:10:00.000-08:00

Mark 6:14-29

The Gospel says Herod knew John to be just and holy, even in speaking openly against Herod’s own sins.
So Herod had an emotional traffic jam, both FEARING John and LIKING his words.

Herod FEARED John, knowing him to be a righteous and holy man,
and kept him in custody.
When he heard him speak he was very much perplexed,
yet he LIKED to listen to him.

He FEARED him, but LIKED to listen to him.
John [Mt. 3:7; Lk. 3:] told ALL who came to him for the baptism of repentance: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”
If those were John’s words for the REPENTANT, then what kind of hellfire must have come from his mouth for Herod who chose to stay in his sin?
However strong it may have been, Herod LIKED to hear it.
After he beheaded John, then learned of the “mighty powers at work” in the Lord Jesus, Herod reckoned: “It is John whom I beheaded. He has been raised up.”
So Herod would have thought and felt the same things for Christ as for John: that Christ was a just and holy man, whom Herod both feared and liked.
So John prepared the way even for Herod to consider Christ.
John baptized with water, but said another— whom we know to be the Lord Jesus— would come to baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire, burning the chaff with unquenchable fire [Mt. 3:11,12; Lk. 3:16,17].
Christ says the Holy Spirit comes to convince the world concerning sin, justice, and judgment [Jn. 16:8].
That Spirit filled John before his birth, and filled John’s voice in manhood.
To be convinced about sin, justice, and judgment is something both to fear and to like— even as Herod feared and liked it.
It is something we may fear, because it calls for painfully hard work.
It is also something to like, because such work is the narrow gate to everlasting joy and blessing in the kingdom of heaven on earth.
The Gospel does not show Herod choosing to repent of sin and change his life— even though he knew that “mighty powers” were “at work” in Christ.
Si revera Deum quaerit [St. Benedict 58:7]— if a man truly seeks God, then he lets the Lord Jesus baptize him with the Holy Spirit and fire, convince him of sin and burn it off like chaff, so that the mighty powers at work in Christ will raise him up in the kingdom of God.
For that to happen for us, we must make the choice Herod never made.
To know of the Lord Jesus and to have feelings about him only makes us the same as Herod.
To end up different, we must take action in the choice of conversatio, ongoing conversion [St. Benedict 58:17], every moment of our lives.

For the Feast of Saint Meinrad, Benedictine Martyr

2010-01-21T14:25:00.000-08:00

Matthew 10:28-33
James 1:2-4,12

St. Meinrad was a monk of the Benedictine monastery of Reichenau Island on Lake Constance.
Later in life, with the permission of his monastery superior, he went to live as a hermit in a valley in the mountains above Lake Zurich.
He died there at the hands of robbers in the year 863.
Exactly eight hundred years later, in 1663, St. Joseph of Cupertino passed away.
Historically documented crowds numbering hundreds of person had witnessed St. Joseph levitate and even fly about indoors and outdoors.
In 1917, just ninety-three years ago, thousands of persons, including members of the media, witnessed the sun dancing in the sky over Fátima, Portugal, where three children said the Blessed Virgin Mary was visiting them.
By contrast with the hundreds of eyewitness of St. Joseph Cupertino, and the thousands of witnesses at Fátima, when we read about the life of St. Meinrad, we may wonder who reported all the strange things that happened to him as a hermit.
In 1981, government workers digging in the area of St. Meinrad’s hermitage found the remains of wooden shacks in which other hermits lived around the time of St. Meinrad.
It may have been those other hermits who witnessed the strange things that happened when St. Meinrad was at prayer.
Reports remain that when St. Meinrad prayed visible demons attacked him, as if to break his fidelity to prayer.
Even his murder, his martyrdom, was connected with his fidelity to prayer.
While at prayer during Mass, it was shown to him that robbers were coming to kill him and take what little he had, perhaps the chalice and paten for celebrating the Eucharist.
After Mass, instead of running away, St. Meinrad remained at prayer, so that we may say he was “killed in the line of duty”— duty to God in prayer, making St. Meinrad a martyr of prayer.
When the robbers finally arrived, he received them as guests, and told them he knew their plan.
St. Meinrad had committed himself to stay with God by praying and living as a hermit.
Demons, robbers, and murderers failed to stop St. Meinrad’s simple faithfulness to his duty of prayer.
He suffered death in the line of duty.
Ordinary duties in daily life, daily work, and daily relationships are the absolute first step in loving God and surrendering to him.
It is by ordinary things that we begin the intimate and full change and renewal of our whole being— all our opinions, judgments and choices.
We let ourselves be moved and committed to undertake such work because we believe in God’s holiness and loving goodness that he showed and gave us fully in his Son.
Simple faith in God’s surpassing gift to us makes prayer one of our ordinary duties.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2725, tells us:

Prayer is both a gift of grace
and a determined response on our part.
It always presupposes effort.
. . . prayer is a battle.
Against whom?
Against ourselves
and against the wiles of the tempter
who does all he can to turn man away from prayer,
away from union with God.
We pray as we live,
because we live as we pray.
If we do not want to act habitually according to the Spirit of Christ,
neither can we pray habitually in his name.
The “spiritual battle” of the Christian’s new life is inseparable from the battle of prayer.

The “spiritual battle” and the “battle of prayer” sound like high drama.
There is enough drama in prayer that is ordinary and faithful— as simple as monks and hermits voicing the Psalms in the Divine Office, as simple as going off by ourselves to pray and reflect as we read the Bible, or, even more, as simple as a child sincerely mouthing the words of the Lord’s Prayer.
The Catechism, 2797, says, “Simple and faithful trust, humble and joyous assurance are the proper dispositions for one who prays the Our Father.”
St. Meinrad went to heaven because he was faithful to God in prayer, and his faithfulness carried over into the ordinary things of daily life.
It could be the same for any of us.

For the Second Ordinary Sunday of the Church Year

2010-01-17T15:54:00.001-08:00

Isaiah 62:1-5
1 Corinthians 12:4-11
John 2:1-11

In less than one hundred eighty years after the resurrection of Christ, there was already a yearly festival on January 6 to commemorate his Baptism at the Jordan River.
Within her first five hundred years, the Church had developed the chain of celebrations of the birth of Christ, the visit of the magi to the newborn in Bethlehem, his Baptism in the Jordan River, and his first miracle at the Cana wedding.
All of those festivals, at one time or another were called Epiphany.
The word EPIPHANY means MANIFESTATION, REVELATION, or even APPARITION.
On Christmas Day, we celebrated his epiphany in the manger to the shepherds.
Sunday before last, we celebrated his epiphany to the Eastern magi, who were the first pagans to pay him homage.
Last Sunday, we celebrated his Baptism, which was the first epiphany of the Trinity in history: heaven opening over the Son of God on earth, the Father’s voice acclaiming the Son, and the testimony of the Spirit overshadowing him with the sign of a dove.
Today, the Gospel celebrates an epiphany to the disciples of Christ, an epiphany of his glory through the first of his miraculous signs, the changing of water into superabundant, superior wine.
The Gospel says, “Jesus did this as the beginning of his signs at Cana in Galilee, and so REVEALED”— literally EPIPHANIED— “his glory, and his disciples BEGAN to believe in him.”
Throughout the rest of the Church year, we follow:
+ the epiphany of his preaching the Kingdom and calling men to repentance,
+ the epiphany of his forgiving sinners,
+ the epiphany of his Body and Blood as food and drink,
+ the epiphany of his suffering and death,
+ the epiphany of his rising from the dead and ascending into heaven,
+ and the Pentecost epiphany of the Spirit in the Church.
Finally, late in the year, the Church even celebrates the epiphany of the Second Coming (or Advent) of Christ the King.
We are at the beginning of a new year of epiphanies of Christ.
Today’s Gospel miracle takes us to the beginning of faith among his disciples.
“Jesus did this as the BEGINNING of his signs at Cana in Galilee, and so revealed his glory, and his disciples BEGAN to believe in him.”
It is a BEGINNING in so many ways.
First, this reading is from John’s Gospel that starts with the same words as the book of Genesis, “In the beginning.”
The Gospel is a new Genesis.
In the old book of Genesis, at the first known meal in history, the first groom and bride impoverished and saddened themselves by disobeying God to eat what he had forbidden.
Today in the Gospel, a new husband and wife are at their first married meal but fall into unexpected poverty: “the wine ran short.”
At that point the mother of the Lord steps forward.
She appears in this Gospel only twice: here at Cana and again at Calvary.
In both places, the Lord calls her, “Woman.”
Here at Cana, she is already the first believing disciple of Christ— before the faith of other disciples has even begun.
She does three things for the newly impoverished newlyweds.
First: she notices they are in need.
Second: she prays to her Son, telling him the plight of the poor.
Third: with faith, knowledge, and obedience, she tells those serving her Son to “Do whatever he tells you.”
In the Garden of Eden, the first woman gave the first man what God had forbidden, thereby telling the man not to serve God, but to “Do what ever the snake tells you.”
In the Gospel today, the mother of the Lord overturns the words of the first woman by telling those serving her Son to do whatever her Son says.
In Eden a banquet of sin; in Cana a banquet of obedience!
Following his mother’s concern, the Lord tells the servants what to do.
However, before his mother spoke to the servants, he said to her: “Woman, how does your concern affect me? My hour has not yet come.”
Later in this Gospel, when his “hour” came at Calvary, he called his mother “Woman” for the second time, and he united her concern with his own.
In the hour of his cross, looking upon his mother and his disciple, he said, “Woman, there is your son.”
To his disciple, “There is your mother.”
From his cross, he renewed his poor mother as a mother by giving her a new son; and he renewed his poor disciple as a son by giving him a new mother.
More beginnings, more epiphanies!
At the cross, they had no wine, just like at Cana.
Rather, at the cross they had vinegar, which is wine gone bad.
At Calvary, the Lord’s mother could have said what she said at Cana: “They have no wine.”
However, she is silent.
Her Son’s concern is to drink all the ruined wine of humanity.
With an immeasurable thirst and poverty that swallowed all human poverty, the Lord Jesus drank the vinegar of Calvary.
With that, he summed everything up, saying, “It is finished.”
Calvary and Cana echo each other.
The beginnings that are in today’s Gospel of Cana tell us something about what the Lord fulfilled at Calvary.
At Cana, the stone jars altogether held roughly one hundred twenty and one hundred eighty gallons of water for religious purification rites.
The Lord turned all of it into superior wine.
Poverty into overflowing abundance!
Marital sorrow into a honeymoon with one hundred fifty gallons of excellence and joy!
And from Calvary: the bereavement of a mother and a disciple turned into their new life as mother and son; death turned into resurrection; suffering into glory.
Like his mother and the servants at Cana, we all have roles to play in the epiphanies of the Lord.
If we take notice of need as his mother did, if we intercede as his mother did, if we exhort to service as his mother did, if we do whatever he tells us as they did at Cana, and if we go to the Calvary as did his mother and one disciple, then the Lord will work joyful signs and abundant superior beginnings.
“Jesus did this as the beginning of his signs at Cana in Galilee, and so revealed his glory, and his disciples began to believe in him.”
Everyday let us choose to begin to believe and serve.

For Wednesday of the First Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2010-01-13T19:26:00.001-08:00

1 Samuel 3:1-19,19-20
Mark 1:29-39

In the first reading, God sought and called out to the boy Samuel in the Temple.
Then, in the Gospel, all the people and the apostles were seeking and calling out for the Lord Jesus.
Meanwhile, the Lord Jesus himself was seeking, calling, and finding God his Father in prayer.
The boy Samuel mistakenly thought Eli the priest was calling him.
Samuel did not know God was calling.
Eli worked that out, and told Samuel to answer: “Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.”
In the original writing, it is actually, “Speak, YAHWEH, for your servant is listening.”
A “dance” of words is playing.
God said, “Samuel, Samuel!”
The name “Samuel” means “God HEARS.”
“Samuel, Samuel!”— “God HEARS, God HEARS!”
Samuel answered God, “Speak, for your servant is LISTENING.”
Then Samuel began to hear the God who hears.
God had Samuel speak for him, and all the villages of Israel “came to know that Samuel was an accredited prophet of the LORD” [YAHWEH].
All the villages— it was the same with the Lord Jesus in the Gospel.
“Let us go on to the nearby villages that I may preach there also. For this purpose have I come.”
After listening to his Father alone in prayer, the Lord Jesus, the Word of the Father, went to all the villages “throughout the whole of Galilee.”
The Gospel today singles out the village synagogues as the places where the Lord Jesus preached the Word of his Father “throughout the whole of Galilee.”
As of old, and still today, a synagogue is where God’s chosen people worship him by singing the Psalms, where they listen to the reading of his Word, and where they receive the lessons or commentaries of religious teachers.
The Galileans did not know the Word of God was personally in their midst, the Lord Jesus.
They did not know, as the Lord Jesus knew, that a dance of God’s Word was happening in their synagogues.
They sang the Psalms, God’s Word.
They heard the readings of God’s Word.
Now, unbeknownst to them, God’s Word was made flesh, and dwelt among them, he full of grace and truth, joining them in singing God’s Word in the Psalms and listening to readings of God’s Word.
A dance, but also a war that made all Galilee a battlefield, because “he went into their synagogues, preaching AND DRIVING OUT DEMONS THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE OF GALILEE”!
The demonic invasion began in the home God made for man in the Garden of Eden.
There the serpent led man and woman to doubt and disobey the word that YAHWEH had spoken to them.
A war against the Word of God!
The boy Samuel became a prophet, a warrior for the Word of God.
“Speak, YAHWEH, for your servant is listening.”
But now the Word of God became flesh, and dwelt among us.
In the house of God, the Lord Jesus, the Word of God in person, still joins us at prayer and in hearing the Word of his Father.
The Word is among us as we listen to him in his Gospel, and so is the Spirit.
The Word and Spirit pray with us to the Father, pray for us to the Father, receive our prayer on behalf of the Father, and answer our prayer with the Father.
Yet they are also here to do battle, driving out demons from the landscape of our lives, as the Lord Jesus once did in the synagogues “throughout the whole of Galilee.”
He offers us to eat a communion in his Body, and drink a covenant in his Blood.
The covenant of God also made men his warriors.
The spiritual warfare that we are about has struck a deadly blow to our souls, but also a deadly blow against the Lord Jesus.
He suffered, died, and was buried.
He rose as victor over sin and death.
He ascended as Man Glorified, ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.
From the Father, the Word of God breathes the Spirit of holy victory upon the remnant of the battle that goes on.
If we are to receive the victory that God has already won for us, then we must make it honestly true when we say to the Lord, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”
Are we honestly listening, and do we honestly obey?

For December 31, the Seventh Day in the Christmas Octave

2009-12-31T19:06:00.000-08:00

1 John 2:18-21
John 1:1-18

Among earthly men, we look in admiration upon a son who is a credit to his father, or a father who is devoted to his son.
It would moves us even more to learn of a father and son who are men of wisdom, justice, courage, and balance, who honor, love and boast deservedly of each other.
It may be rare to find such a father and son among earthly men.
The Gospel today calls us to gaze and dwell upon something unspeakably rare that has anointed the world of flesh and blood.

. . . God . . . the Word became flesh
and made his dwelling among us,
and we saw his glory,
the glory as of the Father’s only-begotten Son,
full of grace and truth.

The score of Gospel verses today is a litany of the glory of the Son.
He is the Word.
He is God.
He always was before the beginning of all that came to be.
He is the True Light.
He is glorious.
He is the Father’s only-begotten Son.
He is full of grace.
He is full of truth.
He is at the Father’s side, and “we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only-begotten Son.”
In the very middle of today’s admiring litany of glory for the Son of the Father, you and I find the reason for all our hope.

to those who did accept him
HE GAVE POWER TO BECOME CHILDREN OF GOD,
to those who believe in his name

He— the Word, God, the True Light, the Glorious One, the One Full of Grace, the One Full of Truth, the One at the Father’s Side— he, the Father’s Only-Begotten Son gives power for others to become sons and daughters of God.
The power is, as today’s first reading puts, “anointing that comes from the Holy One.”
The anointing Spirit becomes the voice of believing souls to cry out the Word of the Son, “Abba, Father!” from within their every deed and even within their silence and rest.
By the Spirit, the faithful soul and the Father credit and glorify each other.
If we remain true to the Spirit anointing us, and to the Son dwelling among us, both guarantee that in the resurrection we shall ascend into heaven and sit at the right hand of the Father.
A new Gospel could then sing about us.

You are sons and daughters by God’s decision.
You are light.
The true light that came into the world has enlightened you.
Your flesh became the dwelling of the Word among you.
See your glory as the Father’s children!
Now you are filled with grace and truth.
You have all received grace beyond grace
from the fullness of the only-begotten Son.
With him you have revealed God your Father,
and see him face to face,
and are at his side forever.

God has given his Word that glory awaits us.
Faith believes it.
Hope desires it.
Love works for it.

For the Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph

2009-12-27T15:38:00.000-08:00

Luke 2:41-52

This is the last time in the Gospel that Jesus, Mary, and Joseph appear together.
It is the fulfillment of their mission as a family.
At merely twelve years of age, the boy Jesus already has questions, understanding, and answers that astound the teachers in the Temple.
He also has forthright self-knowledge to uphold God as his true Father, and his Father’s house as his own rightful place.
He even asks Mary and Joseph why they looked for him anywhere else but the Temple.
It is as if they should have already known the boy’s ways.
We can wonder if throughout his childhood in Nazareth he spent his spare minutes and hours in the synagogue.
The Gospel does not say.
However, later, when he is a grown man, the Gospel says over and again it was his custom to be in the synagogue every Sabbath— as if unfailing weekly attendance made him unique.
In the Old Law there is no obligation to go to the synagogue or Temple every Sabbath.
Nonetheless, Jesus did so.
In the Gospel today, the boy speaks to Mary and Joseph as if they should have known where to find him.
“Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”
As if they should have already known Jerusalem meant only one thing to him: the Temple, his house of prayer, his Father’s house!
Years later he would use manly violence to cleanse the Temple of men who did not pray in it, but used it as a religious goods mall.
The boy Jesus— the worship-filled, prayer-filled boy, manly and wise beyond his years and those of the Temple teachers— lived with Mary and Joseph in Nazareth, subjecting himself to them, submitting to them, obeying them.
Mary—“his mother kept all these things in her heart.”
The angel Gabriel had told her the Holy Spirit would overshadow her with the power of the Most High, and she would conceive the Holy Son of God while remaining a virgin.
She was to call the boy “Jesus” from the Hebrew words, “Yahweh is salvation.”
He would be king of Israel forever.
Now twelve years have passed since she bore him.
Every year, she and Joseph have gone to Jerusalem for the feast of Passover.
Most likely they have brought Jesus with them every year to the Passover in Jerusalem.
Their annual Passover pilgrimage to Jerusalem is the only regular feature of their family life that the Gospel gives us.
A holy family whose identity is Passover pilgrimage to Jerusalem!
Today in the Gospel it is Passover time, and the boy is twelve years old.
He is at the doorway of Israelite manhood, the age for taking on a man’s responsibility for the commandments, the age for taking on a man’s official roles in the rituals of the synagogue.
The doorway of manhood for Jesus is the Passover in Jerusalem, a sign of things to come.
The Passover!
The night when God killed all the firstborn sons of the slave-driving Egyptians, but passed over the firstborn sons of the Israelite slaves who had shut themselves in behind doorways marked with the blood of a lamb of God!
The manhood of the boy Jesus lies through a bloodstained Passover doorway.
He has stepped through it at age twelve, taking on the responsibilities and roles of manhood under the life-and-death bloodstains of Passover.
Mary “kept all these things in her heart.”
Even though Jesus goes back to Nazareth with her and Joseph, and subjects himself to them, submits to them, obeys them, things are never the same.
The rest of the Gospel shows us only the grown manhood of Jesus—culminating in the bloodstains of Jesus himself, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
Jesus is both the Lamb and the bloodstained doorway for all the people of God to enter, that they might be free of sin’s slavery and be free to live forever as sons and daughters of God in the heavenly Jerusalem— heaven on earth.
In their yearly Passover pilgrimage to the earthly Jerusalem of old, Mary and Joseph have done what is humanly possible to ready Jesus for his own Passover to end all Passovers.
All Christian families, all monasteries, all the Church— we all have the mission of raising the sons and daughters of God and of being raised as sons and daughters of God.
We are his children, whom he calls through the bloodstained Passover Doorway that is Christ.
The dark night outside the door is the slavery of sin.
Through Christ, with him, in him, is the exodus to bright freedom in his Father’s house.
May the prayers of St. Joseph help us on our obedient pilgrimage!
May the prayers of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, help us to keep all the mysteries of Jesus in our hearts as she keeps them in hers!
Obedient to Mary and Joseph, even Jesus the Lord “advanced in wisdom and age and favor before God and man.”
Together with Jesus, with his example and power, we can choose to “man up,” and thereby become free in taking responsibility for the commandments and for offering our lives in the worship of his Father and ours.

For the Feast of Saint Stephen, First Martyr

2009-12-26T14:38:00.000-08:00

Matthew 10:17-22
Acts 6:8-10; 7:54-59

In the space of a day, we have gone from the beginning of Christ’s newborn life on earth, through the fullness of his manhood, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension, past Pentecost, into the days of the first deacons and the first martyr.
We join St. Stephen who is “filled with the Holy Spirit” and “who looked up intently to heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.”
The vision and its testimony, for which St. Stephen underwent martyrdom, echo in the Church’s profession of faith that the Lord Jesus “ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.”
Stephen’s vision has four things in it.
First: he saw heaven opened up.
Second: he saw the glory of God in heaven.
Third: he saw the Lord Jesus as a man in heaven.
Fourth: he saw that the Son of Man is also God at the right hand of the Father in heaven.
St. Stephen had his vision in the presence of Israel’s high priest, other priests, scribes, and elders.
He dared to tell them what he was seeing.
Upon hearing it they dragged him out for death by stoning.
As he suffered the deadly hail, he dared to testify again with the words that are the first known prayer to the name of Jesus in heaven.
“Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.”
Stephen prayed to the Lord Jesus whom he knew to be at the right hand of the Father.
Was it the first time that a Christian prayed to the ascended Lord Jesus by name?
We don’t know.
The Lord Jesus had taught us to pray to his Father and ours, “Our Father who art in heaven….”
The Lord Jesus had also spoken of the Holy Spirit and of himself in terms of their both being our intercessors, our paracletes, our advocates at the throne of the Father.
If not in St. Stephen, then by his time, Christian prayer became peculiarly or properly Christian.
That is, it was not merely prayer to God, not only prayer to the heavenly Father, but also prayer to the person of Christ.
It became Christian in another sense.
Already to say, “Our Father,” is to pray as Christ prayed.
With the dying words of Stephen we see Christian prayer begin to imitate Christ in other ways as well.
On the cross the Lord Jesus prayed aloud to the Father.

Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.

Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.

St. Stephen spoke his own dying prayers to the Lord Jesus.

Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.

Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”

With that last prayer, St. Stephen, like all other saints in heaven, is also a paraclete, an advocate, an intercessor.
He seeks the salvation of sinners by the forgiveness of their sins.
The forgiveness of St. Stephen was not about ending the suffering of Stephen.
The forgiveness of the Lord Jesus was not about ending the suffering of Jesus.
Christian forgiveness seeks the everlasting welfare of sinners in reconciliation with God.
As the vision of Stephen upholds, Christian forgiveness is about heaven being opened in hope that sinners and unbelievers might receive reconciliation with God.
Finally, St. Stephen’s Christian prayer and forgiveness are Eucharistic.
Stephen made the deadly sacrifice of his own body and blood into a prayer that handed himself over to the Lord, and a prayer for the salvation of others.
You and I are here with faith’s vision, faith’s knowledge— St. Stephen’s vision and knowledge.
We too are called to Eucharistic sacrifice and Eucharistic intercession.
We are not here for ourselves alone, but for all who sin and all who do not believe.
Through the intercession of St. Stephen, may the Holy Spirit fill us that the Lord Jesus may receive us into the heavenly glory of God.
Lord Jesus, receive our spirits!
Lord, do not hold our sins against any of us!

For December 21 in Advent II

2009-12-21T14:05:00.000-08:00

Luke 1:39-45.

In the Gospel here at Mass today and tomorrow, the Blessed Virgin Mary, newly bearing our Lord in her womb, visits Elizabeth, John and us in the house of Zechariah.
The angel Gabriel has told Mary that old Elizabeth has been with child already six months.
Elizabeth knows an angelic secret of the Holy Spirit: that Mary herself is the Mother and the Ark of Elizabeth’s Lord.
Since when has Elizabeth known?
The Gospel does not say.
Nonetheless, at the sound of Mary’s greeting three persons spring into action.
First, the infant leaps for joy in Elizabeth’s womb.
Second, Holy Spirit floods Elizabeth.
Third, Elizabeth “cried out in a loud voice.”
The word in the original language is the same as “shout,” “yell,” or “scream.”
That’s what came from Elizabeth’s mouth.

Most blessed are you among women,
and blessed is the fruit of your womb.
And how does this happen to me,
that the mother of my Lord should come to me?
For at the moment the sound of your greeting reached my ears,
the infant in my womb leaped for joy.

The infant jumping for joy in the womb of Elizabeth is John.
John and the Lord Jesus are the only two in all the Word of God who received their names from heaven even before their mothers begot them.
“John”— from the Hebrew Yochanan, meaning, “Yahweh is gracious.”
“Jesus”— from the Hebrew Yehoshua, meaning, “Yahweh is salvation.”
John’s birth is yet three months away, and his coming to the “age of reason” is years away.
Nonetheless, the Gospel has told us he is “filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother’s womb.”
He already has speechless knowledge of the truth dwelling in his name and that of Jesus: God is gracious salvation.
That truth is the only cause of the real joy that alone lasts forever: God is gracious salvation.
When Mary greets us in the new heavens and the new earth, we may well outscream, outyell, and outshout old St. Elizabeth, and we may well outleap St. John the Baptist.
If that is to happen, then what St. Elizabeth has said of Mary will have to become true of us also.
“Blessed are you who believed that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.”
The Lord has spoken to us.
May it be done to us according to his word.
May the Holy Spirit bless and fill us that we may always choose to believe.

For December 19 in Advent II

2009-12-19T09:16:00.000-08:00

Luke 1:5-25

God the Son became a man on earth just over two thousand years ago.
God had been readying the world for thousands of years before.
He chose to reveal his monopoly on Godhead to Abraham.
Abraham’s grandson, Israel, fathered twelve sons, the tribes of Israel that God hallowed to his worship alone.
Out of the tribe of Levi in the days of Moses, God chose Aaron to father the line of priests.
Hundreds of years later, out of the tribe of Judah, God chose the kings of Israel.
Of the royal tribe of Judah, the Lord Jesus was born.
As God bent to anoint the day for the Blessed Virgin Mary to bear the world’s Last King, he created John the Baptist.
[On September 23, nine months before the Church’s June 24 Solemnity of the Birth of St. John the Baptist, the Church commemorates his parents, Sts. Zechariah and Elizabeth.]
John’s father, Zechariah, was a priest, therefore a descendant of Aaron.
Zechariah’s elderly wife, Elizabeth, was also of Aaron’s line.
So, from father and mother, from the womb, long before he spoke any prophetic word or did any prophetic sign, John the Baptist was a flesh and blood priest.
John the Baptist, John the Priest!
Years later as a full-grown man, John used the words of priestly rites to point out the Lord Jesus for the first time.
“This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”
John’s father, Zechariah, greeted his son’s birth with a song from the Holy Spirit, “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel.”
In the Church, the daily morning prayers of every deacon, priest, and bishop, the pope, and every monk, nun, sister, canon, and friar, always includes the Spirit-song of Zechariah.
It upholds that Zechariah’s son was to prepare the way of the Lord, “to give his people knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of their sins.”
“Knowledge of salvation” is knowledge of the Lord Jesus, whose Hebrew name [Yehoshua] means “Yahweh is salvation.”
John gave God’s people knowledge of Jesus— “knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of their sins.”
The Holy Spirit filled John in his mother’s womb for that mission that was both priestly and prophetic.
The angel in the Gospel today said what the Holy Spirit would do with John.
“He will be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother’s womb, and he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God” … and … “prepare a people FIT for the Lord.”
The Lord Jesus, at his Last Supper before his death, said the work of the Holy Spirit is to “convince the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment” [Jn. 16:8].
On Pentecost, filled with the Holy Spirit, the Church publicly convinced three thousand Israelites “concerning sin, righteousness and judgment.”
The three thousand repented, believed, and received baptism from the Church.
To be convinced by the Holy Spirit concerning sin, righteousness and judgment is to be “people FIT for the Lord.”
Having already filled John in his mother’s womb, the Holy Spirit spoke and worked through John to “convince the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment.”
At John’s Spirit-filled insistence, the people went to John confessing their sins and receiving at his hands a baptism for repentance.
Because of that, even the priestly rites of the Day of Atonement found their greatest end in John the Baptist, John the Priest: to prepare a people FIT for the Lord.
“This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”
We answer John’s Spirit-filled words with other words that the Holy Spirit also spoke through the Gospel.
“Lord, I am not worthy”— I AM NOT FIT— “that you should come under my roof; but only say the word, and my soul WILL be healed.”
He makes us worthy if we let the Holy Spirit convince US, “convince the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment.”
Convince me, Holy Spirit— say the word with the Lord Jesus, and my soul will be healed!
Convince me concerning judgment, righteousness, and sin!
Convince me; make me worthy; prepare me to be fit for the Lord as you did to Israel through John the Baptist, John the Priest!

For Tuesday of the Third Week of Advent

2009-12-15T17:48:00.000-08:00

Matthew 21:28-32

Today in his Gospel the Lord holds up five of the thick threads he weaves throughout his teachings.
There is his own use of the word “Amen”— “Amen, I say to you.”
No one in the world had ever used “Amen” that way.
When he says it— “Amen, I say to you”— he then speaks words with more self-knowing boldness and weight than the old prophetic, “Thus says the Lord.”
With his “Amen” today he pulls in a second thread: the Kingdom of God.
Then he stitches in the thread of righteousness.
“Righteousness” is an Anglo-Saxon word that takes turns with the Latin word “justice”.
The fourth thread in today’s Gospel shows up twice.
The naysaying second son “changed his mind,” but the Lord tells the chief priests and elders, “you did not … change your minds.”
“Change of mind”— that is the literal meaning of the ancient Gospel word, “metanoia”— for which English also gives “repentance” and “conversion.”
The last and fifth thread today is belief or faith.
Not the chief priests nor the elders, but well-known sinners have believed John the Baptist, and have repented, converted, changed their minds, and are entering the Kingdom of God.
They have followed John into “the way of righteousness,” the justice of God and his Kingdom, the justice that serves the glory of God and the rights of neighbors.
When, in the fullness of his manhood, the Lord Jesus finally began to preach, he opened his way by telling the people the Kingdom of God was at hand, that they were to repent and to believe in the Gospel [Mt. 4:17; Mk. 1:15].
When he sent out his own followers to preach ahead of him for the first time, he had them tell the same to the people: to repent because God’s Kingdom was near [Mt. 10:7; Mk.6:7-12; Lk. 10:1-11].
On the day he ascended to his kingly throne at the right hand of the Father, he told his apostles “that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations” [Lk. 24:47].
“Now we watch for the day, hoping that the salvation promised us will be ours when Christ our Lord will come again in his glory” [Preface of Advent I].
“He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end” [Nicene Creed].
In his flesh and blood, Christ the King rules in the service of his Father’s glory and so that sins may be forgiven.
“This is my body … given up for you…. This is … my blood … shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven.”
John the Baptist came in the way of righteousness, calling us to stand ready for the justice of Christ the King, the justice that is also freedom to be children in the image and likeness of the Son of God.
We need to repent and believe, if we would live in the Kingdom of God that is at hand in the Body and Blood of Christ.

For Wednesday of the Second Week of Advent

2009-12-09T16:17:00.001-08:00

Matthew 11:28-30

Here in his Gospel today, the Lord offers a goal of “rest” for those “who labor and are burdened.”
“Come to me … I will give you rest … for your souls.”
In leading up to these words today, the Lord marked the road to the goal of rest.
First, he told of his doing mighty works among us, expecting us to turn and come to him with faith, open minds, and willingness to change [11:20-24].
He bemoaned those who saw his mighty works, but did not repent.
Then, he spoke a prayer of thanks to his Father that some indeed had turned and opened up to what the Father wants to give in the Lord Jesus [11:25-27].
You and I see and believe his mighty works, especially in his sacraments, most especially in his Eucharist.
He calls for us to turn and come to him with faith, open minds, and willingness to change.
If we do, we shall learn from him to be meek and humble of heart, and he will reveal the Father to us.
We will come to know the Father, and the Father will give us all things.
That the Father would give us all things in the Lord Jesus was the last thing the Lord said in leading up to today’s Gospel.

All things have been delivered to me by my Father;
and no one knows the Son except the Father,
and no one knows the Father except the Son
and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him [11:27].
Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened….
… and learn from me….

We are about to come to him in his Eucharistic Flesh and Blood.
However, the Eucharist is not merely a goal at which to rest.
He tells us today, “Come to me…. Take my yoke… LEARN from me.”
The Eucharist is a beginning of bearing the yoke of Christ upon the road of learning from him.
After all, the Eucharist is one of the three sacraments of Christian INITIATION.
INITIATION, not the finish!
Baptism, Confirmation, and the Eucharist— the first two are never repeated.
However, the Eucharist must be repeated throughout our lives as the sacrament of ONGOING Christian initiation.
At this moment, here at this altar, we are NOT about to “arrive” at the Eucharist.
No, we are about to start all over again.
We are about to initiate our conversions again, to repent again, and we must do so throughout the rest of our days.
To start again to bear the yoke of Christ!
To start again to learn from him with open minds and willingness to change!
That is the only road at whose end we can find rest in seeing and receiving from Christ all things that his Father has delivered to him [11:27].

For the First Sunday of Advent

2009-11-29T11:48:00.001-08:00

Jeremiah 33:14-16
1 Thessalonians 3:12 to 4:2
Luke 21:25-28,34-36

The readings and prayers at Mass these first days and weeks of Advent dwell heavily on the Second Coming.
Not until the seventeenth day of December— not until eight days before Christmas do the Advent prayers and readings turn to give over all their thought to the birth of Christ.
This year, two days after “Black Friday,” today is a “Violet Sunday,” the first of the Advent season.
Black Friday’s fever of spending goes against today’s Word of the Lord telling us to get ready for the wrenching end of the world, the Second Coming, the Last Judgment, the new heavens, and the new earth.
Today the Lord’s Gospel tells us when that time draws near all the nations, the land, the seas, the winds, the skies, the stars “will be in dismay, perplexed... roaring” and “shaken.”
“People will die of fright.”
We will need to be watchful, wise, sober, steadfast, prayerful, and strong, because suffering and persecution will eat away at our faith.
We will be in danger of crumbling and falling away from God.
So, the second Word of the Lord today tells us to outdo ourselves in pleasing God, so that we will be blameless in holiness in his sight when the Lord Jesus returns.
Today in his Gospel he says the day of his return “will surprise like a trap,” and “will assault everyone.”
Yes, the day of Christ’s return will bring on the joyful ascension and glorification of all who had already chosen to be holy in his soul-rending sight.
However, that day will dawn as the Word of God paints it today.
It will break in upon the world gone baleful, forbidding, and dark.
From today’s readings of the Word of God, we might call today “Black Sunday.”
Black.
Since the early ninth century, when there was no religious order besides Benedictines, we have daily clothed ourselves in black.
Black to teach rejection of the colorful fashions of the world.
Black to teach readiness for the Kingdom that is not of this world— the Kingdom in fullness with the Second Coming of Christ.
Black-clad Benedictine monks are not the only Christians who must stand watch for the Second Coming.
For all Christians, there is nothing to measure against the Second Coming, and little to wait for except the Second Coming.
Black Friday’s eagerness for worldly discounts and worldly gains is a distraction and a danger.
Yes, Christmas is coming.
However, we only celebrate Christmas as the birthday of Christ so as to stir ourselves another way and another time in readiness for his Second Coming.
We may be buying gifts to give away on Christmas.
Let it remind us that God gave away his Son to free us for life, joy, wisdom and holiness at his Second Coming.
Let Christmas gift-giving remind us to give away ourselves to God so that we are ready for the Second Coming.
There are many ways to train for surrendering to God.
Every year on a particular Wednesday we blacken our heads with ashes, and hear that Wednesday’s Gospel tell us to give ourselves away to the Father by prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.
It is the same today, God’s Words telling us:

Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy
from carousing and drunkenness

Be vigilant at all times
and pray

May the Lord make you increase and abound in love
for one another and for all

be blameless in holiness before our God and Father

conduct yourselves to please God

stand erect and raise your heads
because your redemption is at hand

Our “redemption”— our “buy-back” is at hand.
Every celebration of the Body and Blood of Christ is a kind of “Black Friday,” with Christ spending, spending, and spending his very self to buy us back out of sin and death.
In his Body and Blood, Christ sells himself to buy our freedom.
In his Body and Blood he gives us our freedom.
Our freedom remains intact and grows only if we choose to live a life of holiness ready for “Kingdom Come.”
The day of your death or the day of Christ’s return— whichever comes first for you is the day of “Kingdom Come.”
In his Body and Blood Christ is always ready.
Are you?

[Official Church teaching about the end of the world.]

For Friday of the Thirty-Fourth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2009-11-27T10:42:00.000-08:00

Luke 21:29-33

The Lord Jesus has already told us [in yesterday’s Gospel]:

they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.
... when these signs begin to happen,
stand erect and raise your heads
because your REDEMPTION is at hand.

Today he continues right from there:

when you see these things happening,
know that the Kingdom of God is near.

Heaven and earth will pass away....

The Kingdom of God— Christ the King!
In her Catechism, the Church teaches that:

When he comes at the end of time to judge the living and the dead,
the glorious Christ will reveal the secret disposition of hearts
and will render to each man according to his works
and according to his acceptance or refusal of grace. [CCC, 682]

Then the just will reign with Christ for ever,
glorified in body and soul,
and the material universe itself will be transformed.
God will then be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28),
in eternal life. [CCC, 1060]

This perfect life with the Most Holy Trinity—
this communion of life and love with the Trinity,
with the Virgin Mary, the angels and all the blessed....
... is the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings,
the state of supreme, definitive happiness. [CCC, 1024]

There is a price for all of this.
The Lord Jesus calls it our REDEMPTION.
We let sin overtake us; we let sin enslave us.
The Lord Jesus REDEEMED— he BOUGHT BACK our freedom.
However, he did so by letting the slavery of our freely chosen sin impose its full mastery and exact its price.
He let the slavery of our freely chosen sin kill us.
He himself— “Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity”— freely chose to enter into “Holy Communion” with our enslavement and our death.
He let the enslavement run its course and spend itself on him until he died.
In the death of Christ True God and True Man, both heaven and earth passed away.
So was paid the greatest ransom possible.
The Lord then rose with the invincible freedom of God in Holy Communion with a new creation: God alive as King in man’s resurrection to life and freedom forever impervious to sin and death.
Heaven and earth have already passed away in the death of Christ True God and True Man.
He said it in today’s Gospel before he died.
“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”
His words remain.
“This is my body... given up for you.”
“This is... my blood... of the new and everlasting covenant.”
His “new and everlasting covenant,” his “words will not pass away”.
Let us take him at his word, let us honor the untold price he has paid, and let us work to remain faithful, whether the days left us be few or the years many.
The “fulfillment of the deepest human longings” and “supreme, definitive happiness” [CCC, 1024, as above] are at stake.

For Wednesday of the Thirty-Fourth Ordinary Week of the Church Year— the Last Week of the Church Year

2009-11-25T10:40:00.000-08:00

Luke 21:12-19

The Lord foretold his followers would suffer much before his second coming.
In the United States, we have had some persecution of Catholicism throughout our history.
In the 1600’s, in the founding of the English colonies in North America, many wanted to ban Catholicism.
From 1835 to 1855 in the city of New York, it was necessary to post armed guards at the Catholic cathedral and parishes because anti-Catholic organizations and demonstrators were numerous, powerful and violent.
In 1844 in the city of Philadelphia, more than a dozen persons died when anti-Catholic rioters burned down two Catholic churches and more than 50 Catholic homes.
In that same century, U.S. Protestant missionaries convinced the monarchy of Hawaii to ban Catholicism, exile Catholic priests, and to imprison, enslave, work and starve to death Catholic Hawaiians.
In 1928, Alfred Smith ran for U.S. president, and lost, denounced publicly because he was a Catholic.
In 1961, John F. Kennedy won the U.S. presidency only after publicly stating that his Catholic faith would have no impact on his integrity as president.
In the year 2000, the U.S. House of Representatives erupted in quarreling over the appointing of the first Catholic chaplain in its history.
Last year, 2008, many in the country raised the alarm that there were too many Catholics on the Supreme Court.
Prejudice, discrimination, destruction, violence, murder— the Church has always known persecution.
Things will get much worse before Christ returns.
Today in his Gospel, he tells us we will secure our lives— even the hairs of our heads— by our perseverance in giving public testimony to his name.
The Word of the Lord tells us that before he returns the Church will undergo one last test that will upset the faith of many.
[See 675-677 in the “Catechism of the Catholic Church” concerning the final testing of the Church.]
Evil will launch a crafty last attack on the Church.
Yesterday, the Lord told us, “See that you not be deceived.”
A pseudo-religion will deceive men with an offer that will seem to solve all difficulties.
It will take men away from the truth, away from God, away from Christ, away from the Church.
Some of our fellow Catholics, family and friends in the Church, will fall to the deception, and, as the Lord tells it in his Gospel today, they will hand us over even unto death.
The fullness of the Kingdom of God will come NOT with the earthly Church gradually rising in triumph, but with the Church suffering.
Everlasting victory will come only because Christ the King will return, he will break in, he will judge the living and the dead, and he will banish evil forever.
He will throw back the bridal veil, to reveal to the naked eyes of the world that the Church is his own Flesh and Blood.
The battle-weary, earthbound Church will rise in peace to join the Church Triumphant of saints descending from heaven.
The mystery of Christ’s final victory breaking into the Church’s suffering is celebrated in every Mass.
In the crushing of wheat into bread and the crushing of grapes into wine, the Church sees a sign of her own self-sacrifice, her life, her strength, her need, her work, her joy, her suffering that she puts upon the altar.
Then, by the will of the Father, and the work of the Holy Spirit, Christ breaks in, and what was the offering of the Church is changed: Body of Christ and Blood of Christ!
Remember: the resurrection of Christ did not prevent his suffering and death, but broke into them!
The resurrection of Christ burst into the Church that was sorrowing and hiding in the Upper Room— in the same place where they last rejoiced with him, the place where he committed himself to them in his Body and Blood.
In that room, the newly risen Lord breathed the Holy Spirit out of his scarred but triumphal body.
In that room the newly risen Lord breathed the Holy Spirit upon the sad and fearful body of his apostolic Church.
Christ will burst into our lives, whether in a place that has known rejoicing, or a place that is full of sorrow and fear.
If we hold fast in giving public testimony to his name, no matter sorrow or joy, no matter danger or wellbeing, he tells us today in his Gospel, “By your perseverance you will secure your lives.”
The victory is his alone, but he breathes the victory of the Spirit upon those who hold fast in his truth.
Christ the King will break in, and by the power of the Spirit he will make heaven, earth and all things new again for his persevering faithful.

For Wednesday of the Thirty-Third Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2009-11-18T15:59:00.000-08:00

Luke 19:11-28

A parable is an image and likeness.
The Gospel today says Jesus told this as a parable about the coming of the Kingdom of God.
It begins with a man returning to his land as king.
He had trusted his servants to trade on his investments.
He gave bigger rewards to those who brought bigger profits.
He took his investments away from those who did nothing with them. [This all makes him sound like Donald Trump.]
He wanted to collect interest from his bank deposits.
Finally, he put to death those who rejected him as king. [That's a lot worse than, "You're fired!"]
It is not a pleasant or pretty image and likeness of God and his Kingdom.
If we reject this as an image and likeness of our king and God, then we stumble right into the story, right where Jesus says, “Now as for those enemies of mine who did not want me as their king, bring them here and slay them before me.”
Yes, “The Gospel of the Lord” is very ugly today, but at the end of it we all called out, “Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.”
So let’s invest our money where our mouth is.
Each of us holds investments that belong to God.
He invested us with our own selves, our lives, our bodies, and our abilities to have feelings, to think, and to make choices.
We need to train and cultivate these investments for the glory of God who made us, because in the end he will ask for them.
He wants us to give everything back to him after we make a profit with it.
Through our sins, we cover up, contradict, distort, or reject this truth about God and ourselves.
In the beginning and in the end, making profit that gives glory to God is what opens us to our own real, greatest and everlasting joy.
In the end, and forever, our fulfillment and happiness will be no less than God and the honor of God.
So, there is another investment God gave each of us.
He has invested and continues to invest HIMSELF in each of us.
He chooses to give himself TO us, IN us and THROUGH us.
The silver lining of the Gospel’s ugly picture today is that God gives himself away in total freedom and goodness.
His freedom and goodness is the parable, image and likeness in which he made us.
We are made in the parable, the image and likeness of the self-giveaway of freedom and goodness.
If we choose rather to be takers all the time, we have no time for goodness or freedom.
If all we do is take, we shall only become emptier.
We come into real goodness and freedom by giving ourselves away to God.
Freedom and goodness are the work and investment of God in us.
It needs the willing work of our bodies, feelings, thoughts and free choices.
If our human efforts did not count for profit in God’s eyes, then the HUMAN suffering of Christ is just another ugly Gospel story.
Rather, the truth is that the HUMAN suffering of God in Christ invests all human effort and human suffering with the freedom and goodness of God.
In the resurrection of Christ STILL HUMAN, God has again invested himself in our humanity and glorified our humanity.
In the Eucharistic Body and Blood of Christ, God commits and invests himself in our flesh and blood, our lives, our feelings, our thoughts, and our freedom.
As he commits his Eucharistic investment to us, he expects profit from us.
If we make a profit, he will not take it away, because he does not need it.
In his ugly Gospel today he reckons his accounts with his servants only to increase any profitable rewards they may have already begun to bring forth.
Their overflowing and everlasting resurrection in joy and glory is the untold reward he has in mind for his good and faithful servants.
They shall come into their own as images and likenesses of God when Christ the King returns at the end of time.

For the Feast of Saint Martin of Tours, 11 November

2009-11-11T18:55:00.000-08:00

Matthew 25:31-40

Two Sundays from now is the Solemn Sunday of Christ the King.
Today in his Gospel, the King says he will return to separate all men into two groups: the “sheep” to his right and the “goats” to his left.
The blessed sheep shall be those who chose to serve the real needs of their fellow men.
Christ the King will make them heirs of a kingdom God prepared for them from the beginning of the world.
He brought us into being out of nothing.
He has been good to us who were nothing.
So, he expects us to imitate him and serve him by serving those who have nothing or less than ourselves.
If we do so, he will give us a share in his glory as his sons and daughters.
We were nothing, and he would make us his royal heirs.
We were nothing, and he gives us himself as our food and drink.
We were nothing, and he welcomes us as his children.
We were nothing, and he clothes us in his own image and dignity.
We were nothing, and he has given us life, salvation and holiness.
We were nothing, and he has visited us with his mercy.
For us, then, to give food and drink to the hungry and welcome to strangers is nothing compared to what he has done for us.
To clothe the naked, comfort the sick and visit prisoners is nothing compared to what he has done for us.
For us to do any of these things is a bare reflection of the light of his goodness shining upon our own nothingness.
St. Martin knew this and practiced it.
While still a young soldier, and preparing for Baptism, he cut in half his uniform, his military cape, to share it with a freezing beggar.
After Baptism, he went on to become a monk by helping to start the first monastery north of the Alps.
He founded other monasteries and also became a bishop.
In the year 397, he died already famous for his great goodness to everyone.
The old cape that St. Martin had split with a beggar years before became a cause of many miracles after his death.
In the centuries that followed, kings would take the cape of St. Martin on their travels, and set up a temporary shrine to house the cape wherever they were.
Such a shrine came to be called a “little cape”— in Latin, cappella, which gave us the word “chapel.”
All because St. Martin split his little cape, his cappella, with a beggar!
Here in the Eucharist, in the mystery of a tiny bit of food and drink, it is no torn, secondhand garment that God bestows on us.
It is God himself, the Body and Blood of the King.
We, who were nothing, now have God himself as our food and drink and our unending royal inheritance.
As he commits himself to us here in this covenant, he expects us to commit ourselves to his glory in serving the real need of the least of his brothers.

For the Thirty-Second Ordinary Sunday of the Church Year

2009-11-08T16:00:00.000-08:00

1 Kings 17:10-16
Hebrews 9:24-28
Mark 12:38-44

After today, the Church has only two more Sundays left in her year of worship.
In these remaining days the Mass on Sundays and weekdays will increasingly remind us that all time will come to an end.
So here at Mass today we hear the Word of the Lord tell of the end of the ages.
The Word of the Lord in the second reading today reminds us that after we die we undergo judgment.
Now is the time for me to cooperate in the taking away of my sins, now, not later.
The Word tells us the second coming of Christ will be “not to take away sin but to bring salvation to those who eagerly await him.”
So, if we are to receive salvation, we must live mindful that we will undergo judgment after death, and we must also live as “those who eagerly await” the return of Christ.
In the first place, what is salvation that I would want it, and would eagerly keep myself ready for it?
Also, why can I not just have salvation without undergoing judgment?
“Salvation.”
By the Word of God, we rise and come to worship with the Church on the day the Lord rose from the dead— today— and here we rise to say of Christ in the Creed that “for us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven.”
That was his first coming: “for us men and for our salvation.”
The Word of the Lord in the second reading today tells us his second coming will be “to bring salvation to those who eagerly await him.”
So it is not enough to be just any man at all.
A man must also be one of “those who eagerly await” Christ.
Really to be eager for Christ means to ready one’s ENTIRE self for Christ, because salvation is for one’s ENTIRE self: body, emotions, reason, and will.
The word “entirety” and the word “integrity” both come from the Latin word integer, meaning “the whole” or “the entire.”
Christ has come for the whole man and for the salvation of the whole man— body, emotions, reason, and will.
For my body: to live forever, never again imperfect, never weak, never injured, never disabled, never sick, never declining, never in pain, never suffering, never dying.
For my emotions: never again to be in conflict, never out of proportion, never fearful, but forever fulfilled, serene, and rejoicing.
For my reasoning mind: never again to be mistaken or in doubt, but forever recognizing and knowing unfailingly what is true and good.
For my will: forever free without hesitation or weakness in choosing and adhering to all that is true and good and holy.
Yes, everlasting salvation for my whole being, body and soul!
Then I need to ready my whole being for it, eagerly to ready my whole life for it.
The poverty-stricken widow in the Gospel today, having only two puny copper coins, threw her whole life into the treasury— and the Gospel is talking about the treasury of God’s Temple.
In today’s particular translation, the Lord tells it as follows.

Amen, I say to you,
this poor widow put in more than all the other contributors to the treasury.
For they have all contributed from their surplus wealth,
but she, from her poverty, has contributed all she had,
her whole LIVELIHOOD.

In the original language of the Gospel, the Lord says the widow put in her whole, literal LIFE.
In that moment, Christ passed judgment on her soul, and he saw what no one else recognized: that she had held nothing back from God, but gave him everything— her last penny, the safety and well-being of body, all her feelings, her reasoning mind, her freedom and will, her whole life.
THAT is eagerness.
With eagerness, let’s hear again from the second reading of the Word of the Lord today.

Just as it is appointed that human beings die once,
and after this the judgment,
so also Christ,
offered once to take away the sins of many,
will appear a second time,
not to take away sin,
but to bring salvation to those who eagerly await him.

Salvation is for the whole of my being.
The coming judgment is about whether or not I really want salvation.
I get to choose or reject what is offered.
The choosing is work, but it belongs to me and to my knowing use of my freedom.
God does not force his salvation on me, but dignifies, respects, and glorifies me by giving me my freedom to choose the salvation that he offers.
In my free choosing, God grows my salvation, my dignity, my glory.
When Christ first came down from heaven “for us men and for our salvation,” he became a man, and he handed over human freedom to God, he handed over his own human freedom and his body and his blood and his feelings and his thoughts.
By accepting crucifixion, he handed over everything through the hands of men.
When Judas threw into the Temple the blood money he had asked for betraying Christ [Mt. 27], Judas unwittingly showed that Christ had thrown his whole life into the Temple that is the human race: “for us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven.”
Here in his Eucharistic Body and Blood, Christ again and again throws his whole being into our lives.
It’s up to us freely to do something with it.
Christ “will appear a second time, not to take away sin but to bring salvation to those who eagerly await him.”

For Tuesday of the Thirty-First Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2009-11-03T14:34:00.000-08:00

Luke 14:15-24

Our Lord’s parable today makes two points among others.
First: many are called since God has thrown wide open the doors of his house for the whole world.
Second: not all accept the invitation.
The first point is that God does his part.
The second point is that he leaves us responsible for doing ours.
We must always keep these two points together.
In Christian history, perhaps every distortion, mistake or heresy in spirituality or morality involves the partial or complete denial of one of these two points.
First point, God does his part.
Second point, he leaves us responsible for doing ours.
How do we our part?
How do we move towards happiness in the banquet of God’s kingdom?
We do so by setting priorities.
When God invites, we leave everything to follow him.
When God commands, we leave everything to obey him.
When God promises, we leave everything to believe and hope in his promises.
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your soul, all your heart, all your mind and all your strength.”
In Christ, we recognize that God lavishes on us what is better than anything else: he lavishes on us his very own self.
All his soul, heart, mind, and strength!
We begin to enjoy the all, the fullness of God only by imitating him, by handing ourselves over to him in return.
“For us men and for our salvation, he came down from heaven.”
In exchange, we— for God’s sake and for his glory— we work our way on the road to heaven’s banquet.
Faith believes in such an exchange.
Hope wants it to happen.
Love makes the exchange.
We are free to reject the offer God makes us in his Gospel.
If we turn down his invitation, we leave ourselves shut out of the Kingdom of God.
The alternatives to his kingdom do not offer much that is genuine or anything that is lasting.
The world just as it is offers in itself no permanent or real foundation for hope, trust or love.
We may try to escape through pleasure and distraction that avoid looking either beneath or above the surface of anything.
The only way to lay a foundation for lasting and honest happiness is the work of faith, hope, and love in the wonderful exchange to which God invites us.
Here in the Eucharist, we are about to take that risk.
Here in the Eucharist, God opens for us the doors of the royal wedding banquet of heaven.
He sends out his servants, the angels, the saints and ordinary members of the Church to search for us.
He searches us out in the streets, highways, alleys and fields of our lives.
He searches for us in the poverty of our sins.
He searches for us when we are spiritually maimed, blind and lame.

Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town,
and bring in here the poor and the crippled,
the blind and the lame.

Go out to the highways and hedgerows
and make people come in
that my home may be filled.

He certainly expects us to be eager for his invitation.
We must take hold of what God freely offers, and count no other relationship, possession or activity so important that we cannot set it aside at the invitation of God.
At this very minute we are attending the Wedding Banquet of the Lamb of God.
If we attend with hope, with faith and with love, treasuring, obeying, imitating and living out what we receive, we shall also rejoice in it forever in the Kingdom of God.

For Saturday of the Thirtieth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2009-10-31T14:33:00.000-07:00

Luke 14:1,7-11

Everyone!
“Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”
Everyone!
Everyone including Jesus!
He came into our world first of all as a servant of his Father’s glory.
“Glory to God in the highest!”
That’s the first thing the angel army sang at his birth.
He was born to give glory to God in the highest.
Secondly, Jesus made himself the servant of the human race.
He is peace on earth to us— he is God’s good favor resting upon us, among us and within us.
For the sake of the Father’s glory, and for the sake of bringing us into peace with the Father, Jesus humbled himself, obeying for our sakes, obeying even unto death, death on the cross.
For humbling himself as a man, the Son of God received exaltation as a man: he rose from the dead.
By his cross, the Son of God fulfills honest humility in the name of the human race.
By his resurrection as a man of flesh and blood, he personally began the exaltation of the human race.
In flesh and blood he died on the cross, in flesh and blood rose from the grave, in flesh and blood ascended into heaven, in flesh and blood sits at the right hand of the Father— through and through he is at the service of his Father’s glory and our welfare.
In his Body and Blood, he humbles himself and exalts others.
He brings peace and favor to the human race.
He gives glory to the Father in the highest.
If we truly do the same, then we are already exalted in communion with him.

For Tuesday of the Thirtieth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2009-10-27T14:16:00.000-07:00

Luke 13:18-21

Today Jesus tells us the kingdom of God is like a small thing that a man or woman may use in an ordinary way, and it slowly makes a big difference.
A mustard seed, a man working his garden, shrubs and trees, bird nests, yeast and dough, a woman baking— we know these things, and they are not unusual.
The kingdom of God may not be so familiar.
God, the Almighty, the Maker of all, the King of heaven!
We’d like him to do much more than plant seeds and make bread, and we’d like it now, not later.
We want the promised end result now: the end of sin, the end of suffering, the end of death, the coming of the new heavens and the new earth, the unending fullness of life and beauty and joy without measure.
That’s the promise in which we put our faith.
That’s what we hope to have.
The work of faith and the work of hope both need the greater work of love.
The work of faith is to believe God and his promises.
The work of hope is to want God and what he promises.
What is the work of love?
Believing and hoping, a man who loves God is a man who plants the kingdom of God in his daily work.
Believing and hoping, a woman who loves God works the kingdom of God into her daily baking.
Love plants and mixes faith and hope into daily life and work.
It calls for wisdom that searches out the good.
It calls for justice in giving God and neighbor what one owes them.
It calls for courage that stays the course.
It calls for balance or right measure in the use of time and the good of the world.
Those are human virtues.
Indeed, they are the four pivotal or cardinal human virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.
They are the work we do to make nature available for the work of grace that comes from God alone.
“Grace builds on nature,” and by working the natural human virtues we show up for grace to do its work.
The cardinal human virtues are the indispensable, earthly, human soil and flour into which we are to plant and mix what God alone can give: the kingdom of God and the powers of faith, hope, and love.
It is up to us men and women to commit the work of our daily lives to the unseen kingdom of God who tells us we are his partners in the work.
We may see some of the results in our own day, but then again, we might not.
None of us shall see all the results until God brings on the new heavens and the new earth.
Until then, Christ the King tells us what to do in his memory.
We are to be as food and drink served up and ready for eating and drinking.
Christ the King does so himself in his Eucharistic Body and Blood.
Here is the King whom we are to plant and work into the soil and the dough of our daily lives where he will one day reveal the fullness of his kingdom.

For the Twenty-Ninth Ordinary Sunday of the Church Year

2009-10-18T09:15:00.000-07:00

[Though back from Europe since the fourteenth, I'm not all caught up yet with a backlog of meetings and work. Here's a reworking of a homily from the past.]

Mark 10:35-45

This is the tenth chapter of the holy Gospel according to Mark.
Earlier in this chapter, our Lord teaches things that challenge our own culture today, namely:

that in marriage “God made them male and female”;

that authentic marriage is for life;

that children are a blessing in the kingdom of God;

that wealth is a big stumbling block in following Christ and entering his kingdom;

that poverty and celibacy for the sake of Christ and his Gospel bring rewards now and in the life to come.

This chapter tells us that after the Lord’s followers heard those teachings they were amazed and afraid [10:32].
His teachings are demanding.
However, he does not spare himself.
In this chapter he said he himself would undergo torture and execution, but that he would rise from the dead.
Today he called his coming violent death “the cup that I drink,” and said he came “to give his life as a ransom.”
Having heard both the harsh demands of following Christ and the harsh destiny awaiting Christ himself, the apostles clearly seem to have tried to change the subject.
Two of them today asked the Lord for first-place thrones of glory, and the other ten jumped in for the competition.
Each of the twelve is looking greedily and past the finish line, but none wants to look at where the marathon starts or what way it takes.
Christ has already put in their faces the fact of his full sharing in our human reality of suffering and death.
Being God and also human, Christ gives suffering and death a new meaning and a new possibility.
In Christ, the pit of human suffering and death has become the home and the fountain of deepest union and intimacy between God and humanity, between spirit and flesh.
Natural human life is already both physical and spiritual.
Suffering and death are when we come face to face with the reality of being both physical and spiritual.
Suffering and death put in our faces the fact that the physical and the spiritual are sometimes in conflict, but are always together.
In response to suffering and death, our shattered culture today offers us false, temporary escapes.
Mindless partying, empty talk shows, drugs, recreational sex and relationships, contraception, abortion, and euthanasia!
At least the apostles wanted to compete for thrones of glory as their mistaken escape from the suffering and death Jesus was talking about.
Suffering and death have never gone away.
They shall end only when the return of Christ brings on the new heavens and the new earth.
Long ago God shaped the human body from the dust of the universe, and then breathed his eternal Spirit within us.
Not long afterwards, we chose to sin, and so began suffering and death.
Though we do suffer and die, we shall rise body AND spirit.
We shall rise from death, truly free in real body and spirit forever.
Today in his Gospel, the Lord tells us: YOU WILL DRINK MY CUP.
We do not ever escape from reality, both material and spiritual.
Suffering, death, the cross and the glory of the resurrection are bridged and reconciled in the person of Christ, bridged and reconciled by God AND man, because Christ is God AND man.
At the cost of his own life, Christ who is God and man used his freedom to serve the Father and the world.
Because of that, his human freedom rose from the dead never to be lost or diminished again.
By believing and following Christ, we face and serve reality and truth in the deepest and highest way possible.
We may suffer for doing so.
However, unless we do so willingly, we allow our freedom to collapse down to what is merely pleasurable, merely convenient, and merely comfortable.
There we shall stay.
Merely!
We shall lose our freedom and we shall not rise from death into glory.
If you were to go lie in bed, and move yourself only for what is pleasurable, convenient, or comfortable, your muscles would shrivel, and you would become a prisoner in your own body.
Even the freedom of our bodies requires that we push our bodies beyond what is merely pleasurable, convenient or comfortable.
It is the same with our spiritual freedom of spirit: we lose our spiritual freedom unless we push beyond pleasure, comfort and convenience.
Christ took his human freedom— our human freedom— to the limit.
He took our human freedom to the cross, through the cross and up into the resurrection.
“This is my body … GIVEN UP for you.”
“This is … my blood … SHED for you.”
The cross of Christ— and our willing share in it— opens up to us our salvation, our meaning, our destiny, our reality, our vocation, our obligations, our joyful consummation and fulfillment in glory.
There is no real other way.
To receive the Eucharist is to say “Amen” to a share in the cross for our own freedom, glory, and joy.

I am away in Rome from October 1 to 14.

2009-09-30T20:43:00.000-07:00

For Wednesday of the Twenty-Fifth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2009-09-23T17:45:00.000-07:00

Luke 9:1-6

In this Gospel we see the beginning of the mission, of the “apostolate” of the Twelve Apostles.
It is a mysterious beginning because it also shows the end and fulfillment of all things.
As Christ sent his Twelve Apostles out for this beginning, he gave them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases as they proclaimed the Kingdom of God.
At the end and fulfillment of all things, the Kingdom of God will make our bodies whole and fulfill our souls with freedom from sin and the sway of demons.
This beginning of the apostolate, of the apostolic mission, did not come from the apostles.
It came from the power and authority Christ put into their hands.
He sent them out carrying nothing they could call their own or the world could give them.
“Take nothing for the journey, neither walking stick, nor sack, nor food, nor money, and let no one take a second tunic.”
They went with nothing but the power and authority of Christ that freed bodies and souls.
That was the beginning, and so it will be at the end when Christ opens the fullness of his Kingdom in the world through the Apostolic Church.
In the meantime, we are to hold onto nothing except our own obedience to the power and authority that come from Christ.
Without his power and authority, and without our obedience to him, we shall have no beginning and no fulfillment for our bodies and our souls.
Here in his Eucharistic Body and Blood, the King our God is present empty-handed by the measure of the world— empty-handed and poor but for his power and authority, as well as his own obedience to his Father.
In his Body and Blood he hands over to us his dignity, power, authority, and obedience.
His Body and Blood shall be as nothing for us, unless we answer with our own obedience.
Obedience to Christ demands that we leave everything behind.
“Take nothing for the journey, neither walking stick, nor sack, nor food, nor money, and let no one take a second tunic.”
It is the same journey— the way of the cross— that Christ undertook in obedience and self-denial.
If we do the same, then at the end all shall be fulfilled.
By empty-handed obedience to his power and authority, we shall come to the freedom of our bodies, the freedom of our joy, our knowledge, and our will, the freedom of our whole being in the Kingdom of God.

I am grateful to those who donate to my monastery.

2009-09-21T13:07:00.001-07:00

For the Twenty-Fifth Ordinary Sunday of the Church Year

2009-09-20T14:03:00.001-07:00

Mark 9:30-37

The last words of this Gospel reading tell the Christian what he is most truly to seek.
St. Benedict tells monks the same: that a sincere man moves his whole self to “most truly seek God”— whom Jesus today says is “the One who sent me”— God the Father.
Does anyone here today most truly seek God?
The followers of Christ in the Gospel today were not seeking God.
Instead, they were arguing about who among them was the great number one.
This is the Holy Gospel according to Mark.
It brings to the fore that the followers of Christ very often did not understand him or the way on which he was leading.
By now in the Gospel, they have already seen him throw demons out of several persons, heal the sick and disabled, scold the storm and the sea into stillness, turn a few pieces of bread and fish into enough to feed crowds in the thousands.
They have seen him raise the dead.
They knew they were following a man whose mere words had power over life and death, over wind and sea, over demons and disease, a man who dared to take God’s prerogative in forgiving sins.
He has told them they would see the kingdom of God come with power in their own lifetimes.
Now three of his closest followers have just seen him transfigured.
On a mountain they saw heaven shine out of his body and his clothes, with saints of old standing by speaking to him.
Surely the followers thought they were close to God’s chosen king of glory, the anointed one who would lead God’s people to win their rightful place at the head of the world.
Perhaps the temptation came too easily to wonder, even argue, about their places in the line of worldly greatness.
They really did not grasp the three mysterious lessons he gave shortly before and after his Transfiguration: that he was to suffer many things, be rejected by the elders and chief priests, treated with contempt, handed over and killed.
He also told them he would honor them in glory only if for his sake they also would take up their crosses, follow him, and lose their lives for him and his gospel.
He has bounced them off the walls, one wall being transfiguration and glory, and the other wall being suffering, shame, and death.
It was all too much for their understanding yet.
You and I would not have gotten it either.
Even if we know and believe it now, it is still hard to follow the way of Jesus, and we often live as if we still don’t get it.
He promises his way leads us to freedom, joy, glory and greatness.
It most truly leads us to God.
If we most truly seek God and wish to find him, today Jesus says not to seek our own worldly greatness, but to open ourselves to those who are least in the world.
Whoever receives a little one in the name of Jesus, receives Jesus; and whoever receives Jesus, receives God the Father who sent him.
Give food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, welcome to the stranger, clothing to the naked, company to the sick and prisoners.
As you do to the least of his brethren, you do to him.
As you neglect the least of his brethren, you neglect him. [Cf. Mt. 25]
God himself freely faces death to be the willing servant of the lowest.
In his Body and Blood, God is committed unto death to be the slave of the least of his brethren.
If you most truly seek God, commit yourself to do the same in memory of him.

For Thursday of the Twenty-Fourth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2009-09-17T14:14:00.001-07:00

Luke 7:36-50

The Gospel does not tell us the name of the weeping woman who lavished messianic honor on the feet of Jesus.
However, the Gospel gives us the name of Simon the Pharisee.
Clearly the Apostolic Church, in writing the Gospel, remembered who Simon was.
Perhaps Simon the Pharisee became a member of the Church.
Perhaps he himself provided the wealth of details that the Gospel holds today, even telling what Simon was saying just to himself.
Perhaps out of tender respect for this poor woman whose sin is well-known in the city, the Gospel, perhaps Simon himself, leaves out the woman’s name from the telling.
However, the Gospel bothers to tell us that her ointment flask was made out of alabaster, a costly vessel itself.
The knowledge that it was alabaster is one more sign of a living memory in the Gospel.
However, the Gospel today is not just a living memory.
It is also a LIFE-GIVING memory.
The Lord tells Simon a little story in which he upholds that one who has greater love is one who knows he has received forgiveness for a greater debt.
Then Jesus says of the woman that “her many sins have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love.”
She “has shown great love” by weeping for her sins at the feet of Jesus, kissing his feet, and anointing them with precious oil.
Out of great love— and with saving faith— she humbly gave him a “messianic anointing.”
Great love, but also humility— she lowered herself to anoint his feet, rather than stand over him to anoint his head.
These details of Gospel memory are life-giving, because of who Jesus is, what he says, and what he does.
He said to the woman, “Your sins are forgiven.”
The others at table said to themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?”
He is the One who recognizes great love, recognizes faith, saves, and gives peace.
He said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”
God the Son, Jesus Christ, the Messianic-Anointed One, comes this day to dine with us in his Body and Blood.
If we come with sorrow for our sins, with ready willingness to abandon our earthly treasures at his feet, with humility, with reverence, with great love, and with faith, Jesus will know it and answer.
“Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

For the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 14 September

2009-09-14T08:25:00.000-07:00

Numbers 21:4b-9
Philippians 2:6-11
John 3:13-17

The early Christian faith held that the Lord, his body, and his clothes showed the light of transfiguration and glory on a mountain forty days before his crucifixion and death.
From of old, Christians have celebrated the Lord’s Transfiguration on the sixth day of August, that is, forty days before today’s feast, the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.
On this day in the year of our Lord 335, the Emperor Constantine dedicated a new church to house the Lord’s tomb in Jerusalem.
To the early Church this sacred day was one of the hinges, one of the turning points of the Christian year.
St. Benedict tells us monks to do what Christians did on this day.
From the start of Lent until Easter, Christians fasted until sundown each day.
From Easter until Pentecost: no fasting at all.
From Pentecost until September 13, the vigil of today: fasting every Wednesday and Friday, until three in the afternoon.
From today until the start of Lent: fasting everyday until three in the afternoon.
Why did the Christian year exalt this feast of the Cross?
When we started the Church’s daily schedule of worship at 5:30 this morning, we read from the Word of the Lord to the Galatians.
The Word said it again and again: the preaching of the Cross, the preaching of the Cross, the preaching of the Cross.
Just as much, it told of our faith in the Cross, our faith in the Cross, our faith in the Cross.
Over and over it said that because of our faith in the Cross, God poured out his Spirit upon us to heal us from sin and death, and give us eternal life.
“God so loved the world that he gave his only Son .... that the world might be saved through him.”
The Son of God says in his Gospel that he received himself from the Father, and that he came from the Father in heaven down to the earth.
He suffered on the Cross, died, and was buried.
He rose from the dead.
He “has gone up to heaven” again, just as he says in today’s Gospel.
Earlier in this Gospel we hear how the Spirit of the Father works in us through the Son.
Because of sin and death, our lives are misshapen.
The water of Baptism and the Holy Spirit overturn all of that.
The water of Baptism and the Holy Spirit give us new birth into the Son of God.
They give us rebirth into his life as a man, new birth into his death, rebirth into his resurrection, ascension, and exaltation.
The water of Baptism and the Holy Spirit enthrone us in Christ as newborn royal sons and daughters at the right hand of the Father in heaven.
The loving, saving, life-giving will, the work, the power, the sign and the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit come to us in the Cross of Christ.
In Christ, unto the Cross, God chose freely to dwell inside of every human suffering and death.
What happened on the Cross has power to pull to itself our feelings, thoughts, and strength, if only we choose to let it be so.
For that to happen, we need to believe, we need to know, and we need to pay back the love that chose to give up its own flesh and pour out its own blood on the Cross.
In the lowly and exalted Body and Blood of Christ: the Spirit gives us rebirth in God; the Father shows himself to us and loves us; and the Son goes back to the Father as one of us and from within us, full of obedience and thanksgiving.
It behooves us to glory in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.

For Friday of the Twenty-Third Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2009-09-11T16:35:00.000-07:00

Luke 6:39-42
1 Timothy 1:1-2,12-14

All of us have some blindness— physically, psychologically, intellectually, or spiritually.
All of us know what it’s like to be a student, disciple, or trainee trying to learn something hard.
The Lord is telling us about students and blindness as a warning about ignorance and hypocrisy in our attitudes and actions towards others.
The Lord has his own attitudes and actions towards sinners— us.
In the Word of the Lord today, St. Paul says:

I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and an arrogant man,
but I have been mercifully treated
because I acted out of ignorance in my unbelief.
Indeed, the grace of our Lord has been abundant

The Lord Jesus is the only man in history without any ignorance or blindness in his actions, his decisions, his thoughts, or his feelings.
Whenever he points at splinters and beams in our eyes, he is always the only one who is innocent.
Jesus, God the Son, came down from heaven to save us from the blindness of sin and from death.
Purely innocent, he is the Lamb of God, who took the guilt of our sins onto himself on the wooden beams of the cross and in the blind darkness of death.
He gives the resurrection of his own body, his innocence, and his sight to us in Baptism.
God looks upon us as his children because Christ has given us the gift of his own innocence.
That is what Christ wants, promises, and does.
We may be sad, angry, or fearful because of spiritual, moral, or bodily blindness and darkness within us or around us.
We need to grab onto our faith that the Lord has taken these things as his own.
He is present in all of them because of his cross, and they belong to him.
Faith lets us see our suffering as a receipt or invoice telling that Christ paid for us to share in his innocence and glory.
We must have the same faith when we receive his Eucharistic Body and Blood that give us all that belongs to him.

For Labor Day in the U.S.A., the First Monday of September

2009-09-07T15:09:00.000-07:00

Mass for the Blessing of Human Labor
Matthew 6:31-34
Genesis 2:4b-9,15

Our heavenly Father knows all that we need on earth.
“But seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides.”
“Righteousness”— an Anglo-Saxon word— it is God’s Justice.
It is God’s holiness in action, whereby he acts justly against evil and against evil works, and he justly rewards with glory the good and their good works.
Work for and seek first the Kingdom of God and his justice, and your earthly needs will be satisfied.
We know that is the way it will be when Christ returns with the new heavens and the new earth.
Until then we may find instead much difficult labor and little satisfaction.
Before the Original Sin, there was a time when and a place where work and satisfaction were a garden of delight.
After making our earthen body, and giving us a share in his breath of life, the Lord God worked at planting a garden to be our home.
The Lord God worked as a gardener to make us a home, to give delight to our eyes, and to feed us.
In that garden, in the beginning, all was righteousness and justice between God and us, and all our earthly needs were satisfied.
Even our nature to be like God and to work like God was satisfied, for as the Word of the Lord tells us, he settled us “in the garden . . . to cultivate and care for it.”
Perhaps as a sign of Paradise, St. Benedict in chapter 66 of his Rule wants the monastery to “be so constructed that within it all necessities, such as water, mill and garden are contained, and the various crafts are practiced.”
If we would belabor a literal translation of St. Benedict, such a self-contained monastery would make our souls “footloose,” whereas going outside would do the opposite [non expedit animabus eorum].
Whether inside or outside a monastery, the human race no longer lives footloose in God’s garden.
Man and Woman went on to choose to sin against God in the garden.
God in his justice put them out of the garden.
Work became also drudgery, and it is now hard to come by satisfaction delight.
To restore the work of creation, God the Son came to the earth in flesh and blood, Jesus Christ, to take a personal share in our labor, our suffering, and our death.
His dead body was settled in a garden.
In that garden, God the Father gave Christ a new share in the breath of life for us men and for our salvation.
Christ is the beginning, the presence, the fulfillment and the promise of the new heavens and the new earth alive, breathing, working, and delightful in our flesh and blood.
Christ shows us we still have the nature and the need to be and work like God.
Through the flesh and blood of Christ, and through God’s Breath of Life, his Holy Spirit, we have the blessing and the power to collaborate with God.
Even if our labors may seem a crucifixion, as long as they are an honest and faithful seeking of the Kingdom of God and his justice, we have his promise: “This day you will be with me in Paradise.”

For the Feast of Pope St. Gregory the Great, September 3

2009-09-03T15:07:00.000-07:00

Luke 22:24-30

Several things in Pope St. Gregory’s life seem to have been foreshadowed in the various details of this particular Gospel.
In this Gospel, the Apostles argued “about which of them should be regarded as the greatest.”
In St. Gregory’s day, the bishop in Constantinople was trying to give himself a relatively new patriarchal status greater than that of older, Apostolic, patriarchal churches in the East.
St. Gregory, as the Patriarch of Rome, answered the controversy by coining the description of his own status as “The Servant of the Servants of God.”
Also in the Gospel today, Jesus tells the Apostles that the greatest, the leader, is to be as a table servant to others.
St. Gregory himself used to serve daily meals to the poor.
He did this even though he was both the pope and the civil administrator of the Roman empire in Italy.
By political title, by Church title, by example and hard work, St. Gregory was the greatest man in the Roman empire of his day.
On this day, the third of September, in the year of our Lord 590, Gregory, the prefect or viceroy of the Roman empire in Italy, became pope.
It was a troubled time.
The Roman emperor had abandoned Italy to go live across the sea in Constantinople.
The Lombard tribes were invading Italy from the North, bringing death, poverty, but also a falsified version of Christ and of the Christian faith.
St. Gregory spoke out constantly for the poor and the victims of violence.
St. Gregory— imperial viceroy, pope, soup kitchen worker, and international diplomat— also lived as a monk, scholar, and teacher.
He organized the evolving Roman Church ceremonies and liturgy of his day.
He promoted as part of the liturgy the form of chant that has come to be called Gregorian chant in his honor.
He sent a band of monks as missionaries to Britain.
He wrote the lives of saints, including the only biography we have of St. Benedict, who died when St. Gregory was a child.
St. Gregory was also a man of prayer and a man of Scripture.
One of his insights concerning devotion to and study of Scripture surely comes out of his own experience.
St. Gregory said, “Scripture grows with the reader.”
The Holy Spirit breathed within the hearts and minds of the human authors instrumental in revealing God through the words of the Scriptures.
As the reader himself grows in the Spirit, so too grows his recognition of the Spirit of revelation contained in the text of Scripture.
Such growth— all Christian growth— requires conversion, penance, prayer, charity, study and worship.
St. Gregory’s insight can serve us as we now celebrate God’s revelation of himself here in the liturgy.
The liturgy can grow for us, if we grow for it.
We must bring to the liturgy our daily and lifelong efforts of conversion, study, penance, worship, prayer and charity.
Together with St. Gregory, we turn to worship Christ our Lord and Master, who approaches now to serve at the table and altar of his Eucharist.
Here, the Most Holy One takes upon his innocent self the punishment for the sins of the twelve tribes of Israel and the sins of all the tribes of our human race.
The Great One serves up himself as the saving food and drink of eternal life for sinners and as a living sacrifice of praise to the honor and glory of the Father.
He is in our midst as one who serves— serving as the “Servant of the Servants of God His Father.”

For the Twenty-Second Ordinary Sunday of the Church Year

2009-08-30T15:05:00.000-07:00

Mark 7:1-8,14-15,21-23

We witness today another conflict between Jesus on one side and the Pharisees and scribes on the other.
Jesus criticizes their hypocrisy and hollow lip service.
He quotes the prophet Isaiah.

This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.

Then Jesus adds, “You disregard God’s commandment, but cling to human tradition.”
The Pharisees were clinging to “the tradition of the elders.”
The tradition dictated the careful washing of hands before eating.
It also ordered the purifying “of cups and jugs and kettles.”
It called for keeping beds clean.
It is not a bad tradition.
In fact, today we know it is necessary.
In the days of Jesus, people did not know as we do about the existence of germs, microbes, bacteria, or viruses.
Jesus did not tell the Pharisees or the crowd of ordinary people to stop washing, stop cleaning, stop sanitizing or purifying.
However, he took this occasion to challenge the Pharisees and all the people to keep God’s commandments and to work for purity inside themselves.
He said, “You disregard God’s commandment, but cling to human tradition.”
Disregard for God’s commandments keeps our hearts far from God.
Jesus sums up the breaking of God’s commandments as impurities that begin inside us and show up in our thoughts and actions.
He puts it this way today.

From within people,
from their hearts,
come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder,
adultery, greed, malice, deceit,
licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly.
All these evils come from within
and they defile.

Jesus forgave sinners.
He forgave prostitutes, robbers, adulterers and corrupt tax officials.
He forgave people whom he knew to be guilty of the evil things that he names today:

evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder,
adultery, greed, malice, deceit,
licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly.

Jesus forgave and still forgives even before we are ready to seek forgiveness.
As he said from his cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”
However, he does not want a one-way relationship.
Jesus is not satisfied to forgive us and then leave us alone where we are.
He wants us to leave sin behind and to be close to him.
He expresses his concern today:

their hearts are far from me

You disregard God’s commandment

He wants us close to him, he wants us pure, and the first step in that direction is to obey God’s commandments.
However, what if we find ourselves weak?
What if our struggle against sin is painful and full of repeated, lifelong failure?
What if we find ourselves so chained or hardened that it seems we are condemned to stay impure?
Let’s recall two lessons from Jesus that ought to give us courage.
The first lesson was about a corrupt official guilty of much public evil, and who knew it all too well and painfully.
All that he found himself able to do was visit the house of God, stand far away from the altar, look down at the floor, beat his chest, and say, “God, be merciful to me a sinner!”
Jesus said:

This man went home justified.
He who humbles himself will be exalted.

To confess honestly that we are sinners is already a lifting up of our hearts to God.
A second lesson for courage.
Two criminals were crucified together with Jesus.

One of the criminals ... mocked him, saying,
“Are you not the Anointed One?
Save yourself and us!”
But the other criminal answered him, saying,
“Do you not fear God,
since you are under the same sentence of condemnation?
You and I are justly condemned.
We are receiving what our actions deserve,
but this man has done nothing wrong.”
Then he said to Jesus,
“Remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
Jesus answered him,
“Truly, I say to you,
today you will be with me in Paradise.”

Jesus did not miraculously release that criminal from execution.
However, in answer to that man’s repentance, humility and faith, Jesus gave him Paradise that same afternoon.
He wants us to leave sin behind now.
He wants us to draw near to him.
For that we must obey God’s commandments, and we must challenge our thoughts, feelings, and choices to do battle against sin.
The death of Jesus shows that God spares himself nothing, not even the trampling of his own dignity, in offering us from out of his own sin-wounded heart the forgiveness of our sins.
Yet, in order to take hold of God’s gift, we must forgive those who sin against us, and we must ask God for what he has already offered.

Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.

Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done.

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

The merciful heart of God is handed over to us in the Eucharistic Body and Blood of Christ, “the new and everlasting covenant ... so that sins may be forgiven.”
Let us dare to offer ourselves to him, if not with purity yet, then with the honesty of committed ongoing repentance.
Repentance is the first step on the road to purity and the first step on the road to God.

For Friday of the Twentieth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2009-08-21T14:21:00.001-07:00

Matthew 22:34-40

Today’s Gospel bothers to tell us “the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees.”
The Sadducees were doctrinal enemies of the Pharisees.
Hearing that Jesus had silenced the doctrine of their enemies, the Pharisees got together themselves to test the doctrine of Jesus.
It seems the Pharisees did not want only to defeat Jesus, but also to show themselves better than the Sadducees.
The Pharisee question was not hard.
“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
Jesus did not give a surprising answer.
Surprises came as he went on straightaway to give a bigger answer than the question needed, a bigger answer that left the Pharisees no room for more questions.
To love the Lord, your God, with all your being is the greatest commandment, but Jesus added the detail that it is the first commandment.
Then he added there is a second greatest commandment, that is, to love your neighbor as yourself.
These two commandments sum up the Ten Commandments.
However, Jesus went still further, and said the “WHOLE law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”
Now, he has doctrinally topped, defeated, and silenced both the Sadducees and their doctrinal enemies the Pharisees.
He has named the first and second greatest commandments.
However, he has also shown that these two commandments carry the WHOLE law of God and the WHOLE “Word of the Lord” that came through the prophets of the Lord God.
The answer of Jesus contained the WHOLE Word of the Lord.
For the Pharisees to question further would have been to call into question the WHOLE Word of the Lord.
The WHOLE Word of the Lord— the Gospel tells us the Word was God, and became flesh.
Jesus is the God the Word, but now he is also Man.
Forever without beginning or end he is the Word that is God, but now he is also the Word that is man made WHOLE.
So, the first and second greatest commandments that he names about love of God and love of neighbor are commandments that tell us about Jesus himself.
First, he loves the Lord— God his Father— with all his being.
Second, he loves us, his neighbors, as he loves himself.
Here in his Eucharistic Body and Blood, Christ hands over his whole being— heart, soul, mind, and body— to his Father.
That is the first and greatest thing that is true about the Body and Blood of Christ: they belong to the Father first of all.
Secondly, the Eucharistic Gift that belongs to the Father is shared with us, the earthly neighbors of Christ, thus bringing us into communion with the Father.
To step forward to take this Gift is to volunteer to love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself.

For Monday of the Twentieth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2009-08-17T14:19:00.000-07:00

Judges 2:11-19
Matthew 19:16-22

In the first reading, the Word of the Lord tells us the sons of Israel abandoned the Lord their God to follow foreign idols.
In his Gospel, the Lord tells one son of Israel to “come, follow me.”
The young man had asked the Lord, “Teacher, what good must I do to gain eternal life?”
The Lord unfolds for him that the required condition for gaining entry into eternal life is to keep the commandments.
However, he starts and ends by making the question and the answer about himself.

Why do you ask me about the good?
There is only One who is good.

Then come, follow me.

Folded into the start and end of the Lord’s answer is that he himself is the “only One who is good,” and that one must follow him to gain entry into eternal life.
Between the start and the end of his answer, the Lord spells out some of the commandments, but only commandments about dealing with our fellow men.
He leaves out all three of the commandments about following God.

I am the Lord your God: you shall not have strange gods before me.
You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
Remember to keep holy the Lord’s day.

He replaces the three commandments about God with one commandment about himself: “come, follow me.”
Jesus has dared to put himself in the place of God, because he is God.
In the end the things we own are as bad as idols, if what we own on earth is more important to us than treasure in heaven.

If you wish to be perfect,
go,
sell what you have
and give to the poor,
and you will have treasure in heaven.
Then come,
follow me.

To be here in this place, to start with the Lord in his Gospel, and to end with the Lord in his Body and Blood, is to own him as our Lord and God.
We must uphold this ownership in all the moments of our lives, so that nothing can be an idol.
“There is only One who is good.”
Following him in keeping the commandments in all that we do is the good we must do to gain eternal life.

For Thursday of the Nineteenth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2009-08-13T15:04:00.001-07:00

Matthew 18:21 to 19:1

It is another ugly page in the Gospel of the Lord.
First of all, if you are a translation snob like me, this page’s translation is very poor.
It could have easily told us the facts, but has ended up hiding them.
I’ll say more about that later.
There is also beauty in the Gospel today, but it is in an ugly setting.
Jesus likens his heavenly Father to a king who has a wicked servant tortured for his debt.
“So will my heavenly Father do to you, unless each of you forgives his brother from his heart.”
A heavenly Father who uses torture!
Where is the beauty?
The wicked servant owed his king “a huge amount.”
Those words cover up what the original language really says.
It says the wicked servant owed his king not “a huge amount,” but, “ten thousand talents,” which is the Biblical earnings for one hundred and fifty thousand years of work.
One hundred and fifty thousand years of wages!
“Since he had no way of paying it back, his master ordered him to be sold, along with his wife, his children and all his property”— so today Jesus also likens his heavenly Father to a slave trader.
Ugliness again!
This is where beauty steps in.
The servant begged for patience, and the king “let him go and forgave him the loan.”
A debt of one hundred and fifty thousand years of salary might as well be a debt of forever.
That is what we owe God for our immortal souls.
We have compounded that everlasting debt by sinning against God’s goodness to us.
The beauty is that God forgives for the asking.
However, the forgiveness is conditional: if we do not forgive, then Jesus says his heavenly Father takes away his forgiveness from us.
The servant who owed his king one hundred and fifty thousand years of wages turned to choke and jail a coworker who owed him “a much smaller amount”— as this translation has it.
The original language says “a hundred denarii,” the earnings for a hundred days of work.
The earnings of one hundred days the second man owed to the first is as nothing against the debt of one hundred and fifty thousand years of earnings the first man owed to his king.
In the eyes of Jesus, our fellow men owe us nothing compared to what we owe his heavenly Father.
If we do not forgive, Jesus says his heavenly Father will give us up for torture.
Ugly— but that’s what Jesus says.
We are preparing right now to dare to receive the gift of the flesh and blood of Christ God himself.
We are going to go into debt for it.
This gift is, as Christ said, “so that sins may be forgiven.”
In today’s Gospel, he adds words that apply also to his Body and Blood, “Should you not have had pity on your fellow servant, as I had pity on you?”
The gift of the Eucharistic Body and Blood of Christ our God gives us the obligation to do as God does.
Otherwise Jesus leaves us with ugly words about the anger of his Father.
“Then in anger his master handed him over to the torturers.... So will my heavenly Father do to you....”
There will be hell to pay.

For the Nineteenth Ordinary Sunday of the Church Year

2009-08-09T13:51:00.000-07:00

1 Kings 19:4-8
Ephesians 4:30 to 5:2
John 6:41-51

In the Roman Mass we have three years of readings for the Sundays.
Right now we are in the middle year that uses the Gospel of Mark.
In the middle of this middle year, the Church interrupts the Gospel of Mark, and sticks in for five Sundays in a row chapter six of the Gospel of John.
So the Church has chapter six of the Gospel of John in the center of the three years of Sunday readings.
What we have in this chapter is the foundation, the center, and the summit of our faith and worship.
Out of the five Sundays for reading this chapter, today is the middle Sunday.
The chapter is heating up.
Picking up where he left off last Sunday, Christ is now pushing supernatural and divine claims about himself.
+ A claim to be the bread of life.
+ A claim to end hunger and thirst forever for those who believe in him.
+ A claim to have come down from heaven.
+ A claim to be sent by God.
+ A claim that Christ will raise his followers from the dead at the end of time.
+ A claim to be the Son of God.
+ A claim that all who listen to God the Father go to Christ.
+ A claim to have seen God the Father.
+ A claim that those who eat Christ will live forever.
+ A claim that his flesh and blood are food and drink for the life of the world.
On the next two Sundays, he will increase and intensify all these claims with uncompromising, blunt literalism.
He is a man of flesh and blood, and he claims to be as God.
For that blasphemous claim, the law would have him stoned to death.
He has tied up his claim to godhood with his claims about his flesh and blood, so that in a nutshell this chapter gives us the full Christ.
Note well in this chapter that his claim to godhood was less objectionable to his listeners than his claims about his flesh and blood.
In the New Testament language, the realism of his words about his flesh and blood as food and drink are so graphically physical that many of his own followers decided to give up on him.
His lurid words about eating his flesh and drinking his blood were worse than claiming to be God.
Even as many of his followers turned away, Christ offered no explanation or softening of his words.
The forthright, raw language of this chapter shuts out the possibility that Christ was speaking symbolically about his flesh and blood.
So, we face three possibilities.
Christ was crazy, or he was a liar, or he was telling the truth.
We are here today because we acknowledge he was telling the truth.
We are here because of what he promises to do for us if we eat his flesh and drink his blood.
+ He will raise us from the dead at the end of time.
+ He will end all manner of our hungers and thirsts forever.
+ He will make us live forever.
Christ gives his word; and to his word he binds his whole self— body, blood, soul, and godhood.
The binding is a covenant.
Take, eat, drink, my body, my blood: the new and everlasting covenant.
He binds himself to this covenant not to save our souls alone, but also our bodies.
For our souls alone, his words would be enough.
Also for our bodies, his words would be enough.
So he is doing something more by putting his promise not only in words but also in his flesh and blood that he serves up as food and drink.
Flesh for flesh, and Blood for blood!
What great dignity we have in God’s eyes since he chose to join himself to our lives by flesh and blood and soul.
In the bodily resurrection and ascension into heaven of Christ God, our full humanity in flesh and blood sits enthroned in dignity and joy at the right hand of God the Father.
That is Good News.
Because of it, everything about the body and all we do with the body is of everlasting import.
Catholic morality sincerely cherishes, bothers with, and flows from this core truth of the Gospel.
Christ chose to offer all his claims and all his self in flesh and blood in a covenant, “The New and Everlasting Covenant.”
It is not enough, however, for us to passively receive the Body and Blood of Christ.
As he gives up his body for us and sheds his blood for us, he tells us also to the same: “Do this in memory of me.”
From a selfish point of view, these last words of Christ about his body and blood are more objectionable than anything else.
Our selfishness does not mind if Christ claims to be God in flesh and blood, and gives his life up for us.
However, our selfishness finds it objectionable that he commands us to do the same as he has done.
In the second reading today, the Word of the Lord reminds us to reciprocate his covenant by burning our lives up like incense in the fire of self-sacrifice for God; it says:

be imitators of God...
as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us
as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma.

We may step up to receive and consume the Eucharist of Christ today.
However, is the rest of our day and week going to amount to a turning away from self-sacrifice that marries our dignity to that of God the Son?
If so, then why are we here at all?

For Tuesday of the Seventeenth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2009-07-28T11:55:00.000-07:00

Matthew 13:36-43

“Whoever has ears ought to hear.”
Perhaps today’s version of the Lord’s saying would be, “Read my lips!”
Today in the Gospel, the disciples asked the Lord to explain the parable we heard him tell in last Saturday’s Gospel.
So, then, what we hear in the Gospel today is not a parable, but an unfolding of the truth.
It is wild truth, the kind we might expect from a Bible-thumping street preacher, the kind that makes us roll our eyes, or makes us laugh— laugh either in mockery or out of nervousness about a thing we wish were not true.
“Whoever has ears ought to hear,” or, “Read my lips!”
The Lord Jesus, the Son of Man truthfully says that at the end of the age he himself will send his angels to take up and throw “into the fiery furnace” “all who cause others to sin and all evildoers.”
A wild truth— wild, but still the truth!
“Whoever has ears ought to hear,” or, “Read my lips!”
It is the truth about the end of time.
It calls us to keep going with an upright, faithful will, and to forbear evildoing that the angels will not uproot until the end of time.
The Lord says his angels will throw “into the fiery furnace” not only “all evildoers,” but also “all who cause others to sin.”
“Whoever has ears ought to hear,” or, “Read my lips!”
How might we cause others to sin?
We can do so by proposing what is sinful as if it were not or as if it were good.
We can cause others to sin by saying nothing, thus allowing sin by our silence.
We must not only speak out against sin.
We must also speak out for what is good— prudent, just, temperate, courageous, virtuous.
As the Lord unfolds it today in his Gospel, we are to live as “children of the kingdom,” whom he also calls “the righteous” who “will shine like the sun in the Kingdom of their Father.”
To “shine like the sun”— is that a wild, parabolic metaphor, or is it truth?
It is a Gospel truth that the Son of the Father, the Son of Man, in spirit and body did “shine like the sun” in the company of Moses, Elijah, Peter, James, and John.
Isn’t that wild?
It is the truth.
“Whoever has ears ought to hear,” or, “Read my lips!”
We in Christ, if we choose and stay faithful to him, shall “shine like the sun”— body and spirit, all our knowing, all our freedom— wild with joy.
We own it Sunday after Sunday, here before the altar, when we stand to own what we believe: “We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.”

For Thursday of the Sixteenth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2009-07-23T09:52:00.000-07:00

Exodus 19:1-2,9-11,16-20b
Matthew 13:10-17

The Living God wanted the children of Israel to have faith in himself, but he also wanted them to have faith in Moses.
In the first reading he told Moses:

I am coming to you in a dense cloud,
so that when the people hear me speaking with you,
they may always have faith in YOU also.

As God and Moses spoke to each other, the people saw lightning, cloud, smoke and fire atop Mount Sinai; they heard thunder and trumpet blast.
The people trembled before the mystery.
To borrow the words of the Gospel, “they look but do not see ... hear but do not ... understand.”
Only Moses understood what God was saying; and Moses told the people.
To the end of his life, Moses was a zealous, faithful, consistent witness to the Word of God for his people.
In a similar way in the Gospel, Jesus gave open “knowledge of the mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven” to his disciples.
However, he gave the crowd only the parables that were mysterious, like the lightning, cloud, smoke, fire, thunder, and trumpet blast from atop Mount Sinai.
Crowds saw and heard the sights and sounds of Sinai and of Jesus; but only Moses and the disciples of Jesus received understanding of the mysteries.
God wanted the people to have faith in Moses, and to receive understanding through Moses.
Jesus wants people to have faith in the testimony of his disciples, and to receive understanding of Jesus from the testimony of his disciples.
Jesus wants us to testify as Moses testified to the end of his life.
Are we zealous, faithful, consistent, believable, respectable witnesses of Jesus or not?
Here at the Mount of the Mysteries, the Altar of the Eucharist, the Living God comes down.
Together with us, the eyes of the world see only a parabolic bit of bread and wine.
For us disciples who believe, these are really the Body and Blood of Christ, granting us “knowledge of the mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven.”
God gives them to us with his expectation that we will serve as his witnesses before the world.
“Do this in memory of me.”
Can the world recognize a memory of Jesus in the lives we choose to live?
As disciples of Jesus, do we have integrity?
He warns us today:

To anyone who has,
more will be given
and he will grow rich;
from anyone who has not,
even what he has will be taken away.

For Tuesday of the Sixteenth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2009-07-21T13:37:00.000-07:00

Exodus 14:21 to 15:1
Matthew 12:46-50

The first reading answered the question, “On whose side was the Lord?”
The Gospel then answered another question, “Who is on the Lord’s side?”
Consider the first question.
On whose side was the Lord?
He went to war for his chosen people to free them from slavery in Egypt.
However, the Lord has not yet ended all slavery among his chosen people.
Satan still tempts us to enslave ourselves by sin.
At times, the demonic takes possession.
However, we also freely enslave our fellow human beings in many ways.
There are also forms of slavery inside us.
We are still bound by physical and emotional weaknesses, sicknesses, and wounds.
We are still shackled by limitations in our reasoning, understanding and knowledge.
Then, even though we may know what is good and true, our wills are weak.
We can struggle for freedom, but it is never perfect or absolute in the present world.
So, at the end of all things, the Lord will make war one last time to put an everlasting stop to all the enslavements of his chosen people.
Who are his chosen people?
The Gospel recasts that question.
Who is on the Lord’s side?

“Who is my mother?
Who are my brothers?”
And stretching out his hand toward his disciples,
he said,
“Here are my mother and my brothers.
For whoever does the will of my heavenly Father
is my brother, and sister, and mother.”

We are the chosen of the Lord if we choose to be his disciples and to do the will of his heavenly Father.
The relative freedoms we might win in the present world— such as physical and emotional freedoms— all such freedoms will come to an everlasting end, if in the end we have not remained faithful to our greatest freedom and source of freedom: God.
Jesus said [Jn. 8:31-36]:

... If you continue in my word,
you are truly my disciples,
and you will know the truth,
and the truth will make you free....
Every one who commits sin is a slave to sin.
The slave does not continue in the house for ever;
the son continues for ever.
So if the Son makes you free,
you will be free indeed.

If we want freedom, let us eat and drink the truth that God freely breaks open and pours out for us in his Body and Blood so that sins may be forgiven.
However, it shall all be useless, unless we put the power of the Lord’s victorious covenant to use by our own warfare against sin in our own lives.

For Friday of the Fifteenth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2009-07-17T14:47:00.001-07:00

Matthew 12:1-8
Exodus 11:10-12,14

In the old law of God, anyone who did work on the Sabbath, such as collect firewood, or harvest food, was worthy of stoning to death.
Today in the Gospel is the Sabbath, but the followers of Jesus are so hungry they pull off heads of grain, and eat them raw straight from the stalk right there in the field.
Jesus pushes the protesting Pharisees for mercy, since his followers are hungry.
However, that is not all he does.
He uses what is happening to throw light on himself.

I say to you, something greater than the temple is here.

For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.

The only thing greater than the temple is God himself; and the Lord of the Sabbath is God himself.
Jesus, the Son of Man, is here as God who is greater than the temple, and as God who is Lord of the Sabbath.
By upholding that, Jesus commits blasphemy, and now he too is worthy of stoning to death.
It is as if to say to the Pharisees: “You think my followers are bad, but I am much worse, and here’s how, and in your faces.”
He is not putting on a macho strut.
Rather, he is shielding his hungry followers, taking the punishment for sin upon himself, and upholding the truth that he is God.
He is the unblemished, male Passover Lamb, whose blood marks the temples of God’s mercy, kills the enslavement of sin, and gives freedom to the sinner.
The Body and Blood of Christ the Passover Lamb opens the way and strengthens us for our escape from the enslavement of sin.
In the Body and Blood of Christ, we eat and drink his freedom, but then either we use it, or we lose it.
We need to follow him— even forty years in the desert— on a road that obeys the New and Everlasting Covenant he made with us in his own Blood.
Our obedience to his Covenant is a road to his Promised Land and his Temple in the Heavenly Jerusalem.
There we shall celebrate with him an everlasting Sabbath of joy and life.

For Wednesday of the Fifteenth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

2009-07-15T12:56:00.000-07:00

Matthew 11:25-27

Today we see Christ give thanks that childlike spirits have received knowledge of the Father and of the Son whom the Father has sent.
The childlike of the Gospel are open and keen for what God gives.
God chooses to let them know him, and he shapes them into living signs of himself.
The Son of God became a man of flesh and blood, and has the deepest and truest knowledge of the Father, and is the deepest and truest living sign of the Father.
Jesus is fully open to the Father, and he truly shows the Father.
From Jesus we can receive all the depth, reality and knowledge of God.
He says it in his Gospel today: ALL THINGS HAVE BEEN HANDED OVER TO ME BY MY FATHER.
Jesus, the Son of God, is open all the way to everything his Father gives him.
You and I, because we are sinners, are not yet fully open to the Father.
Jesus the Son of God, Jesus a man of flesh and blood, Jesus the sinless one, is the only man who has all knowledge of the Father, and is all knowledge of the Father.
God gives all of himself to us by way of his Son even in his Body and Blood.
In the Body and Blood of Christ, God gives himself to us, and opens himself to us.
Through the Body and Blood of Christ, God the Spirit pours upon us, cleansing, saving, completing, hallowing, glorifying, and restoring us as images and likenesses of God.
God does and gives his all, but we need to answer with our all.
To let in what can fulfill us more than anything else, we need to turn our backs on sin, turn our faces to God, open ourselves and offer ourselves to the Lord with lowliness, courage, and truth.