The Fathers (of the Church), the Son, and the Holy Spirit

[A homily I gave in 2007 on the Sunday of the Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council.]

We’re in a time of watching and waiting—not like Advent, during which we wait for the coming of the Christ, but the post-Ascension period in which we wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit.  This is an important time in the liturgical year—we are coming to the end of the long Lenten-Paschal season, and we need the grace of the Holy Spirit, not only to carry us through the rest of the year, but to revive and strengthen us in our fervor and our fidelity to the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.  We still have a mission in life, and most likely it will only become more demanding with time, so we cannot afford to be indifferent to the Holy Spirit, the Source of every grace we need.

During this time of watching and waiting, we commemorate the Fathers of the first Ecumenical Council in Nicea in the year 325.  In a sense they were waiting for the Holy Spirit, too, because the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as consubstantial with the Father and the Son had not yet been formally defined, but in any case, the Fathers were gathered as the early disciples were, praying and waiting for the Promise of the Father, for they had an indispensable mission to accomplish.  The early Ecumenical Councils established and formulated the basic dogmas of the orthodox Catholic faith, which will remain in force until the Lord returns.  Some lesser teachings may be subject to change or modification, but the essential doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation are part of the permanent and unchangeable heritage of Christ, handed on to the Apostles and preserved intact—and liturgically celebrated—by the Church.

For the Gospel today we have a section from the farewell discourse of Jesus, the concluding part which is his final prayer to the Father before He is glorified in his passion, death, and resurrection.  So He is leaving the world, but sending the Holy Spirit to be with those He has entrusted with his word, his Gospel of salvation.  Jesus is referring specifically to the Apostles in this prayer, but He also prays for “those who believe in Me through their word,” which means their successors in the apostolic ministry and all the faithful as well.  It is only through the Holy Spirit that the Church is not only led into the whole truth, but that the truth of the Gospel is handed down from age to age, clarified, deepened, and expressed in ways that are understandable to every age and culture.

So we have to back up a little in the farewell discourse to see what Jesus has to say about the Holy Spirit, whom we are praying and waiting for, the One who will clothe us with power from on high, as Jesus told his disciples.  But the Holy Spirit is not only given for our individual sanctification. He is given for the upbuilding of the entire Church, because the whole of the Church’s evangelical, sacramental, contemplative, and martyric mission relies entirely on the grace of the Holy Spirit for its fruitfulness in the work of bringing souls to salvation.

One task of the Ecumenical Councils was to affirm and define the divinity of the Holy Spirit as the Third Person of the All-holy Trinity.  We find the clearest testimony to the divinity of the Holy Spirit in the Gospel of John when Jesus says that the Spirit “proceeds from the Father” (15:26). This puts the Spirit on the same level with the Son who was begotten of the Father and who is one in essence with Him. This same passage is used in the original version of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, which the Eastern Churches still use today. (It is not quite accurate to call the Creed used in the Catholic and Orthodox Churches simply the “Nicene Creed.” All the Nicene Creed said about the Holy Spirit was: “I believe in the Holy Spirit.” Everything else about the Holy Spirit was added later at the first Council of Constantinople.)

Jesus three times referred to the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Truth.  What will the Spirit of Truth do?  Precisely as Spirit of Truth, He will teach us all things and bring to our remembrance all that Jesus has said. The Spirit will guide us into all the truth, speaking what the Father tells Him to, glorifying Christ by declaring to us his word. So the Holy Spirit is the Life-breath of the living Tradition of the Church, leading her into the full truth about Christ and the Holy Trinity. The Spirit will safeguard the revelation, the heritage of Christ which He gave to his apostles, and will bring it to fresh vitality generation after generation.

That is what the Spirit does for the Church. For the world, Jesus says this of the Spirit: “He will convince [or convict] the world concerning sin and justice and condemnation.” The sin Jesus refers to is unbelief, the justice (or perhaps vindication) is his return to the Father after having completed his mission, and the condemnation is the judgment pronounced upon the devil (16:8-11). In terms of this passage the mission of the Spirit in the world is to call unbelievers to faith, to instruct them about the unique and absolute claims of Christ—based on who He is and what He has done for us—and to warn them of the condemnation that awaits those who would follow the evil one. Yet this task is difficult, for the world “neither sees Him nor knows Him.”

With the individual believer, the Spirit is more intimate. Once Jesus said that the world doesn’t know the Holy Spirit, He said to his disciples: “but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you.” That was just before Jesus said that He and his Father would come to us and make their home with us. So the Trinitarian indwelling is here completed. With us and in us—that is how God wants to be. We have to rely heavily on the Spirit of Truth in this age of widespread deception. We so need to be reminded of all that Jesus said; we need to be led fully into the profound truth about God, the Church, the world, and even about ourselves. The Spirit is entirely Self-effacing, glorifying the Father and the Son; it is through the Spirit that the Father and the Son dwell in us and act in the world today. We need to pray to better recognize the Holy Spirit, to know Him, to love Him with that flaming intensity that only He Himself can inspire.

Jesus has great love and solicitude for his Church.  At one point in his earthly ministry he likened himself to a mother hen who wanted to gather all her little ones around her, and at another as a shepherd with his flock.  We see in Jesus’ final prayer to his Father the same care and concern for his disciples.  He refers to them several times as “those whom You have given Me.”  He is concerned for them because He has to leave them so that He can return to the Father. So He prays: “I am no more in the world, but they are in the world… Holy Father, keep them in your name…that they may be one, even as we are one… keep them from the evil one… sanctify them in the truth.”

The Lord still has the same concern for his Church, his flock, his disciples.  The author of the Letter to the Hebrews says that now that Jesus has returned to Heaven, He lives to intercede for us with his Father.  Now we are the ones whom the Father has given Him, we are the ones that need to be kept safe from the evil one and to be sanctified in the truth.  This is why the Holy Spirit was sent to the Church and remains until the end of time.

But we have to receive this Spirit, be obedient to his word and inspirations, living by the grace of the sacraments and prayer, perpetuating the life of the Church in our own time and place.  The Fathers of the Church have defined and formulated the revelation given by Christ to the Apostles and have handed it down to us.  But we need to do more than hand it down to others.  We need to appropriate its meaning for ourselves and bear fruit by allowing the Spirit to live and breathe in us here and now, so that the Faith will not simply be an ancient collection of teachings, but rather a dynamic way of life that can effectively unite us to the living God, that can be an inspiring witness to others that the word of Christ is true and is the way to salvation.

Jesus said the world will hate us for preaching his word [indeed: see what reaction you get from “the world” when you speak the truth about abortion, sexual morality, “gay marriage,” etc], but at the same time we would have Jesus’ own joy within us, the joy that comes from living in the Spirit of Truth, and knowing that one day we too will go to the Father, and share in the glory Jesus has had with Him before the world began.

It all begins now, with our daily faithfulness to the word of God: those who are found worthy of the Father are those, said Jesus, who have kept his word.

Two Ascensions

[A homily on the feast of Our Lord’s Ascension 11 years ago, when the feast fell on May 9, as it does this year.  I attach absolutely no significance to this.]

As you know, we’re celebrating today the Ascension of Christ, the King of glory, into Heaven.  Which Ascension?  There are two of them; did you know that?  Well, the first one was witnessed by nobody.  The second was witnessed by the apostles.  Now the first one, which we could perhaps call his theological or spiritual Ascension, happened shortly after He rose from the dead.  If you remember when He met Mary Magdalene outside the tomb, He said to her, “Don’t touch me, because I am not yet ascended to my Father.”  Then a week later He said to Thomas, “Touch me.”  So, by then He had already ascended to his Father.  This is something that is invisible to any sensory examination, but what was happening there was really the essence of the mystery that we’re celebrating.  The Ascension of Christ right after his resurrection from the dead was the completion of his glorification.  We know from the theology of Saint John that the glorification of Christ includes his passion, his death, his resurrection and his ascension.  It’s one package of the Glorification of Christ, and it’s not finished until He ascends to Heaven, until He rises up and returns to the Father, glorified as man and, as we’ll see later, opening the gates for us to enter too, to ascend to the Father.

That was his personal triumph and fulfillment, as He said just before He left the world. He said to his Father in his “priestly” prayer: Father, I’m coming to you.  I did everything that you wanted Me to do and here I come to you.  So He completed his work on earth and He went to the Father and was glorified.  That’s how He was able to give the Holy Spirit.  Probably that Ascension happened that same day of his resurrection because Saint John says earlier in the gospel—when Jesus was saying, “I will give you the Holy Spirit, the rivers of the living water will come from Me”—that the Spirit wasn’t yet given because Jesus was not yet glorified.  Then on the night of Easter, He came to the Apostles and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” so obviously He had been glorified fully and was able to give the Spirit.  That’s the Spiritual Ascension which is really the meaning of this feast, where Christ returned to the Father to receive glory from the Father and the ultimate reward, so to speak, for becoming man for our salvation, accomplishing the Father’s will on this earth.

Now, the other Ascension is the one that we’re most familiar with, and the one you can actually draw in icons because it was something witnessed by the apostles.  This was basically the termination of Christ’s appearances to the apostles after his resurrection.  It says in the Scripture that He appeared to them over the course of forty days, talking to them about the Kingdom of God.  Well, after the Ascension, this second Ascension, He didn’t appear to them anymore and talk about the Kingdom of God, because He sent the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit would, as He said, lead them to the whole truth and remind them about everything He ever said to them about the Kingdom of God.  So He didn’t have to keep coming back and forth like that to appear to them and talk to them.  He did that to shore up their faith in his resurrection and to continue his teaching and his presence among them for a short time.  He said, now the time has come that I am going to send the promise of My Father, I’m going to send the Holy Spirit, so you wait here and I’ll be back—or someone will be back. My best friend the Holy Spirit will be back.  That’s the way that Christ will be with his people, his Church, until He comes again.

So, this ascension is like something to put some closure on the apostles’ experience of having their Master with them all the time.  If He just sort of went “poof” and disappeared and then never showed up again, they’d be scratching their heads and wouldn’t realize what happened to Him.  But this way He could explain to them that He had to go the Father, and they could see Him going to the Father.  They could see Him being lifted up on a cloud.  Now Christ, in order to go the Father, didn’t really have to go “up.”  He didn’t have to go vertically to the Father, but there’s a symbolic value to that because there is—especially in ancient religions—a natural assumption that Heaven is up and Hell is down.  It’s anthropologically based on a scale of values where high values are “up” and the low values are “down.”  So Heaven is up and Hell is down.  Christ didn’t have to go up.  He just had to pass into that dimension where his Father was and where He was always in communion with his Father.  But that was for the benefit of the apostles.

There are two basic reasons why He ascended to Heaven.  Number one, to prepare a place for us and number two, to send the Holy Spirit.  So He said, “it is good for Me that I go because this is going to be better for you.”  He’s going to go prepare a place for us.  He is seated at the right hand of the Father; again, this is kind of a metaphor. Christ does not have to be “seated” anywhere, for He fills the whole universe.  God the Father doesn’t have a right hand, being pure Spirit.  But it’s a powerful symbol and it means, in all these ancient cultures and religions, to sit at the right hand of the King, was to be practically on a par with the King and to receive all the privileges and glory of the Kingdom.  It’s like Joseph when he was elevated to his position of power in Egypt.  The Pharaoh took off his signet ring and said, here this is yours.  Whatever you do is law, whatever you say is law.  He said, the only thing that is not yours is my throne.  The Father goes even beyond that: He says to Jesus, you can have my throne too, as well as all my power and authority.

Christ went to Heaven to prepare a place for us because He wants us to be with him at the right hand of the Father to share that glory, to share that reign over the universe.  Several times, in the book of Revelation, it says that the saints, the faithful who are saved, will reign with Him.  It doesn’t just say they will serve Him but it also says, they will reign with Him.  We will join Him in his reign over the universe.  So, in order to secure our place in Heaven that He’s preparing for us, He sends us the Holy Spirit but again, that was the way He wanted to be with us.  He didn’t want to leave his disciples; He wanted always to be with them.  So, by sending the Holy Spirit, that was a way for Him to be with them, to continue to teach them, to lead them, to love them, to be with them, and help them on their way back to Heaven, to the place that He had prepared for them.

Finally, this is related to his is preparing a place for us; it’s what the angels said to the apostles after He ascended into Heaven.  Angels are really no-nonsense kind of beings.  They always cut right to the point.  Here Christ ascended in glory; the disciples had never seen anything like this. He has ascended into Heaven on a cloud and they’re all standing there with their mouths hanging open, and these angels show up and say, why are you looking up at the sky?  Get busy and do what He told you!  What they said right after that was: the One that you saw go up like that is going to come back like that on a cloud.  And Christ said about Himself, to others during his earthly ministry, the Son of Man will come back on a cloud from Heaven with the angels.  So, He’s going to return.  He’s going to descend once more.  He descended, so to speak, in his Incarnation, He ascended after He rose from the dead, and then He’s going to descend again, but not a humble, hidden descent, like the Incarnation, but a descent in glory.  He’s going to come back.  He said, I’m going to prepare a place for you, then He said, I’m going to come back for you.  I’m going to come back and get you, so that, where I am you may be also.

So, let us then join the angels in glorifying Christ, for his love for us and for all that He has done for us, and for all that He is doing for us and all He’s going to do for us, all He’s preparing for us.  Then, we too, when we have this awareness of what God has done for us in Christ and all the gifts of the Holy Spirit and everything He’s holding out and offering to us, we will go away, just like the disciples did, worshipping God.  When He ascended, they worshipped Him, and then what?  They were to be, and we’re to be too, found in the temple constantly singing the praises of God.

On Spontaneity and Purity of Heart

[A homily for the Sunday of the Blind Man, from 5 years ago.]

There are several healings of blind men in the Gospels, but today’s is unique (Jn. 9:1-38).  It is much more elaborate than the others, and the whole event and the accompanying dialogues are points of departure for theological reflection.  We are offered here not simply the fact of a divine healing, but the deeper meaning of Jesus’ giving sight to the blind.

For our point of departure, let us look at the first few verses.  Jesus and his disciples came upon the blind man, and immediately the disciples began their own theological reflection: “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”  It was commonly assumed that physical infirmities were a punishment for sin, either one’s own or that of one’s ancestors.  Jesus immediately challenged that assumption by saying: “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.”  The Lord does not deny in principle that there is no relation between sin and suffering—for this relation will certainly be manifested on Judgment Day!—but that in this case, the man was afflicted not because of sin but in order that God’s glory and power would be revealed in him at the hands of Jesus.  We cannot assume that a physical infirmity has a spiritual cause, but we cannot categorically deny it, either.  We have to be in the grace of the Holy Spirit to know the difference.

The next question might be whether or not spiritual infirmities have a spiritual cause, and this must usually be answered in the affirmative.  If we are spiritually blind—and this relates more directly to us that physical blindness—then, yes, most likely it is because of our sin that we are thus afflicted.  So we ought to take a closer look, if the glory of God is to be manifested in us as well.

I read something recently that sheds some light on this issue, from the Dominican Father Simon Tugwell’s book on the Beatitudes.  The Beatitude in question is, of course, “Blessed are the pure of heart,” because to be healed of spiritual blindness is to be given the capacity to see God.  And to see God is the ultimate goal of our existence, yet we are called to discover his presence in this life as well, for if our souls are so blinded by selfishness and sin that we cannot recognize his presence in faith here and now, we will not be granted the eternal, unhindered vision of Him when all the veils are finally removed.  To acquire a pure heart is to be healed from spiritual blindness.

Tugwell says that to have a pure heart is to have an interior life that is “unmuddied” by sin, which clouds our spiritual perception.  He writes: “A very important factor here is what we may call Christian spontaneity.  It does not, perhaps, in the last analysis, matter all that much what you do with forethought; what really matters, what is really revealing, is what you do without thinking… what you do when you do not have time to work out how to respond.  It is this that will reveal what kind of person you are, and that is what is important.  After all, the kingdom of heaven comes like a thief in the night (1Thess. 5:2), with a suddenness which will not allow us to work out how we are going to react.”

This, I think, is an important point.  Our spontaneous reactions to other persons and situations reveal to us, and to others, who we really are.  If we spontaneously react to people and events with anger, fear, suspicion, hatred, defensiveness, unkindness, criticism, or merely irritation, then we are in fact angry, fearful, suspicious, hateful, defensive, unkind, critical, and irritable people. The evidence is uncontestable. This is the measure of our actual purity of heart (or rather, lack of it), even though we may be struggling to overcome these things.  It is in fact the present state of affairs, even if we are working to correct it, and we ought to honestly and humbly admit it.  This issue of Christian spontaneity is something like saying actions speak louder than words, but it is more to the point.  It’s more like saying unrehearsed actions and words speak louder that rehearsed ones.  St Thomas Aquinas says that as long as we have wrong desires (that is, if our interior is not yet pure), even if we do not give in to them, we are not yet virtuous.  We may be on the way to becoming virtuous, but we’re not there yet.  There may not be prayers in liturgical books that say, “O God, re-create my spontaneity!”—but the reality to which this points is essential for our spiritual growth and hence the healing of our blindness.

Tugwell goes on to say: “We must unmuddy the very source of our reactions, so that our spontaneity itself is transformed.  This can only come about through the Holy Spirit.  He is given to us by God to be in us a source of living water, welling up from our own hearts… But purity of heart is not just a matter of our own interiority… If we have a clean heart, it is because God has given us a clean heart… It is God dwelling in us who gives us a true interiority that is genuinely ours, but is not simply our own… Western man…does not feel secure about his identity, and feels that as a grievance.  In response to this, he generally tries to find ways of bolstering up his ‘Ego’, to reassure himself that he is something…”  We ought rather embrace the “no longer I, but Christ,” which is one of St Paul’s most profound insights.

“If we can unmuddy the source of life in us, if we can allow God to re-create us from deep within, so that there is a pure life in us, Christ’s life as well as our own, then this must inevitably affect the way that we are and the way that we see.  There is an interaction between seeing and being.  The kind of person you are affects the kind of world that you see… And conversely what you see affects what you are.  If you see the world as a rather grim affair, you will become a grim person.  If you see the world as a place where there are butterflies, you will probably be a rather more light-hearted kind of person.  If our life is rooted in God, so that the wellspring of life in us is God, then we shall see as God sees… If we have a pure heart, a source of life welling up from the eternity of God, then what we shall see is God.”

This is a very important teaching.  Attaining purity of heart is the healing of our spiritual blindness.  Purity is not merely a matter of trying to avoid impure thoughts or actions.  It is a much more thoroughgoing inner transformation.  It determines how we see the world and other people, and hence how we will spontaneously react to them.  And if the life of Christ through the grace of the Holy Spirit really is the source and driving power of our whole inner life, then we will see as God sees, and our unrehearsed words and acts will reveal that we are in fact Christ-like people, both inside and out, and we will bear the fruit of the Holy Spirit in all our actions and relationships.

When Jesus healed the blind man, the first thing the man saw was the face of God, that is, the face of God incarnate in Christ.  This is symbolic of the movement from darkness to light, from inner blindness to sight, from a muddy interior to purity of heart.  The Gospel makes it clear, however, that it was not only a physical healing of blindness.  For when the man saw Jesus the second time, he fell down and worshiped Him, recognizing, with his new-found spiritual vision, the presence of God in Jesus.

We must begin with the humble admission that we are still spiritually blind, still not pure of heart.  Even a quick examination of our spontaneous reactions (whether external or internal) will give us plenty of evidence for that.  The greatest error that could be made here is to claim that we can see when in fact we are still blind.  Jesus made that clear to the Pharisees, who resented the fact that He implied they were still blind, when He said to them: “Now that you say, ‘we see,’ your guilt remains.”

Let us also realize that, unlike the blind man in the Gospel, it is our sin that is the cause of our spiritual blindness, because only sin can destroy purity of heart.  If we do not yet see everything as God sees it, if we do not yet recognize the presence of God everywhere, if we spontaneously react in unkind or self-centered ways, then we are still suffering from a sin-induced spiritual blindness, a lack of purity of heart.

So let us pray fervently—and not mechanically as we may do every day as we pray psalm 50(51)—“Create in me a pure heart, O God!”  Let this be our constant entreaty to the Holy Spirit as we prepare for his coming at Pentecost.  This matter is too important to be tossed in the mental dustbin with hundreds of other long-forgotten Sunday homilies.  We need the grace of the Holy Spirit to effect a radical change in our inner lives—we can’t afford to remain how we are!  It is crucial for our own salvation and our beneficial influence upon others that our inner life is free from all the darkness that is all too often revealed in our spontaneous reactions.  The Lord can heal us, can enlighten us, but we must want it with all our hearts, and diligently strive to co-operate with his grace.  For our goal is nothing less than complete purity of heart—nothing less than to see God.

On Spiritual Thirst and Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches

[Here is a homily for the Sunday of the Samaritan Woman from ten years ago.  I’m glad I saved all these!]

Christ is risen!  Today’s gospel (Jn. 4:5-42) is a gospel for the thirsty.  If you are not thirsty, if you’re self-satisfied and complacent, and think that everything in your life is just as it should be—especially in your spiritual life—well, you can go home now.  The rest of you can stay and listen, because this is a gospel for the thirsty.

Now we meet in this gospel a thirsty woman.  She didn’t, perhaps, know how thirsty she really was, or didn’t really know in what her thirst consisted, although Jesus knew that.  So He led her into a little encounter by saying that He was thirsty, to put her at ease, though to start with it didn’t.  We can see by her whole dialogue that she was very unhappy.  She was a complainer.  Kind of like the paralytic from last week, although he was more of a whiner; this woman is a little more arrogant, but she was still an unhappy complainer about her life.

Jesus was coming to her to make things better for her, but first He had to help her recognize what her thirst was all about.  Perhaps it was a thirst for love, for security, for fulfillment, but she was looking in the wrong places.  She tried to satisfy her thirst with men, and she went through quite a few of them.  Obviously, that didn’t work, because she was still thirsty, and her life only got more and more unhappy: not only personally, but socially, too, because most likely she was ostracized from the whole community for her behavior. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be going to get water in the heat of the day; she would’ve gone with everybody else in the early morning, when they usually get water.  But she was probably a persona non grata with the whole community, so she had to sneak off at a different time, by herself.  So she was very unhappy and lonely.

But Jesus, before He could just “fix” everything for her, had to make her realize a couple of things. One of the things was that her unhappiness was her own darn fault.  Oftentimes we point the finger at something else for our unhappiness.  No matter what happens in life, we find ways to be unhappy.  If we don’t get what we want, we’re unhappy.  Or if we do get what we don’t want, we’re unhappy.  Even if we do get what we do want, we’re still unhappy, because we’re afraid we’re going to lose it, or that it’s not going to last forever, or whatever.  We can always manage somehow to be unhappy.  But we have to realize, then, that our unhappiness is fundamentally of our own making.

I just read this story recently; it’s more of a parable, I guess, about a man who was a construction worker, and he would come to work every day, just like the other guys on the job, and they would all bring their lunch to work.  He looks in his lunch bag, and says, “Yuck; peanut butter and jelly again.  I hate peanut butter and jelly!”   And he would complain like that.  And every day, the same thing:  “Peanut butter and jelly again!  I hate peanut butter and jelly!”  So finally, the other guys who were eating lunch with him said, “Well look, if you don’t like peanut butter and jelly, just tell your wife to make you something else!”  And he says, “What do you mean, my wife?  I’m not married—I make my own sandwiches!”

This is the problem that we have, and that the Samaritan woman had.  She was “making her own sandwiches.”  And we “make our own sandwiches”—and then complain about them!   Because we don’t like it, and it’s the same old stuff every day.  Well, Jesus is trying to tell us that we don’t have to do that!  Things can change, with his help, with his presence in our lives.

But we also have to realize that once we know wherein our happiness lies, we do have to make some changes.  The Lord didn’t just wave his hands over the Samaritan woman and say, “Now there: everything’s perfect for you!”  She had to make some changes in her own life: she had to stop the behavior that she was engaged in, and she also had to change her attitude about life.

It’s time that we start learning from our life experiences, instead of complaining about them.  That doesn’t get us anywhere; we just walk around with a “woe is me” attitude all the time. We’re just going to be stuck in the same rut that we’ve dug for ourselves and never get out.  We have to recognize first in us the desire for something more than our own “peanut butter and jelly sandwiches”: something that is going to change our life, that can change our life.

Jesus comes and says, “If you only knew what’s possible for you!  If you only knew what is the gift of God, and who it is that’s offering this gift to you, offering something that’s not merely going to make you feel good for a little while, like all the other things that you’re searching for in your unhappiness, but something that’s going to be a life-giving spring inside you that never runs dry, that always supplies you with what you really need to be happy!”

But, as often happens when the Lord (or somebody else at the Lord’s bidding) touches a sensitive nerve in our life, we immediately become evasive and change the subject, which is exactly what this woman did.  She finally got it, though; that’s when the enlightenment came.  She left behind her water jar—symbol of her former life—and ran to the town, telling everyone: “I have found the One!  Come and see!”   And so she, at that moment, received her enlightenment.  Tradition says that she later on became a saint, and they call her St Photina, which means “the enlightened one.”

We have to finally “get it,” too.  The Lord is going to be speaking to our hearts, speaking to our thirst, if we’re ready to come to Him and to listen, to recognize the need that we have, and be willing to make the necessary changes in our life that are going to dispose us toward enlightenment.

Enlightenment does not fall out of the sky.  Enlightenment is something that comes at the end of a long process of purification, of learning, of struggling, of growing, of opening your heart.  It’s been waiting there all the time, but we just can’t receive it—we have too many obstacles inside ourselves to accept it, to experience it and to live in it.  So we have to go through this whole process.

First of all, we have to start by recognizing our thirst—that our thirst is for something beyond the cheap little satisfactions that we’re trying to squeeze out of this life.  There’s something more than that.  We have to recognize where our thirst really is: Jesus spoke of a hunger for the Bread that endures unto eternal life.  Our hunger, our thirst and our desire have to be for that which transcends the things that just pass, and we can’t be satisfied with something less than God wants to give us.

We can’t just be self-satisfied, complacent, and unwilling to make that difficult inner journey to discover our thirst, and to see what it is, inside us, that’s gnawing away at us, perhaps, and to realize that there’s something that has to be done, something that has to change, in order to let Christ fulfill that thirst.

We may be like that Samaritan woman, and have all kinds of reasons to complain why our life is not happy—whatever it is: something happened to us in our childhood, or something happened to us yesterday, or whatever—and many things that happen to us do hurt or affect us, and we have no control over them. But we have control over how we’re going to respond to them, what we’re going to do about it. Nothing can force us to be miserable.  Nothing can force us to be depressed, to be angry: those are the products of our own thoughts and emotions that we choose to apply in any given situation or event.  It’s up to us.

We can choose: we’re free beings, we can decide how we’re going to respond to something, if we learn to live in a way that is not pure reaction—instant, emotional reaction to everything that happens.  We can think, we can pray, we can decide how we’re going to react to situations, and we don’t have to be miserable all the time, making peanut butter sandwiches and then complaining about them.  There is something that we can do for our life so that we don’t have to just carry this “cross” of our own making and be grumbling and resentful at life because it didn’t give us a better treatment.  We have no excuse for complaints.  This is the message that Jesus is giving to us.

Then, once we recognize our thirst, and the place we have to go to slake it, then we have to look at our other attitudes that have to be healed.  Then, when we find a healing of our attitudes, and we realize that the presence of the Spirit in us empowers us to make the necessary changes in our life, to recognize our true thirst and to fulfill it, we’ll realize that we need much less than we think we need to be happy.  And the happiness that we do find in God, will be a lasting, rich, rewarding, true happiness—and that will really satisfy our thirst.

Then we will come to that deeper enlightenment about what’s really true in the gospel, and our relationship with God comes alive for us, personally.  Then, we can tell others what we have found.  But we have to be what we’re preaching, first.  That’s a real hard thing; preachers are always afraid to preach, because we know we don’t practice what we preach, but we have to, and we have to at least try to embody the message, or else we will not be credible.

There’s a story about Gandhi, that this woman came to Gandhi with her son and said, “My son is eating sugar, and it’s not good for him!  Tell him not to eat sugar!”  And Gandhi said to her, “Come back in two weeks.”  She said, “OK.”  And so, two weeks later, she comes back, with her son, and Gandhi says to him, “Don’t eat sugar.”  And she said, “That’s all?  Why did it take you two weeks, just so you could say, ‘Don’t eat sugar’?”  And he said, “Because, two weeks ago, I was eating sugar.”

You have to embody what you preach.  You have to be doing it yourself before you can tell somebody else to do it.   That’s why we have to go through the process of personal purification, conversion, enlightenment—and then we can say, I can show you the way now.  I can point to you the way, the truth, and the life.

If we only knew the gift and who it is that offers it, and what He can do for us, how he can heal and enlighten and fulfill us, we would open our hearts wide to receive that gift, we would leave behind the leaky water jar of our attachments, narrow-minded attitudes, and all that closes us off from true life and joy.  Then we would begin to worship in spirit and in truth, and walk the path of the enlightened followers of our Lord Jesus Christ.

On Wanting to Be Healed and Getting Up and Walking

[Here is a homily for the third Sunday after Easter, from 2004.]

Christ is risen!

We’ve just heard the account of the healing of the paralytic [Jn. 5:1-15].  Recently I had the opportunity to spend some time with a paralytic.  She’s not exactly a paralytic, but for all intents and purposes she might as well have been.  She was in the hospital with a very serious and life-threatening illness and basically couldn’t move from her bed.  I was reflecting upon that in light of today’s Gospel: what it means to be a paralytic and what it means to be healed.

A paralytic—or Laura, in this case—couldn’t do the most simple things for herself because she was in so much pain.  The pain itself was paralyzing; it wasn’t that she couldn’t walk.  She was in so much pain that she couldn’t do anything, so every little thing had to be done for her by either someone visiting her or by the nurses who came in to take care of her.

To be a paralytic is to be in a state of helplessness and infirmity and utter dependence upon someone else—upon everyone else—and that is where we find ourselves, often enough, or where we ought to find ourselves, in the sense that this is what the human condition is like.  We don’t want to accept or acknowledge that fundamentally we are weak and infirm and unable to do much of anything by ourselves, and are utterly dependent upon others and things outside of ourselves. In our society we try to create an opposite illusion—that we are strong, and independent, and self-sufficient, and invulnerable—but eventually life catches up with you and teaches you the truth.

When I was at the hospital there in Seattle, in the waiting room of the surgery wing, I was surprised: it was a huge waiting room.  It was full of people, waiting because one of their loved ones was being operated on at that moment—and it was like that the whole day!  As soon as one operation was done, another one was beginning; more people came in, and another one was done: dozens of them, in one day—and that was just an ordinary day, in the activities of one hospital, in one city.   Multiply that by all the cities and all the hospitals all over the world, and millions of people are in this condition of serious infirmity. So when I’m talking about someone I know, it’s not just an isolated case.  It’s an icon of humanity, of the human condition, in its state of existential weakness and need.  One of the first things that we have to do is to accept and acknowledge that, and not try to create the opposite illusion.

By contrast, I remember noticing in church one Sunday a young girl, maybe sixteen or so, all dressed up, all painted, polished and bejeweled, and that was an image of that illusion of self-sufficiency, independence, strength and the rest.  I remember thinking to myself, “Which of those two is really the icon of humanity: the painted girl, or the woman in the hospital bed?”  I came to the conclusion that it was the woman in the hospital bed, because that’s closer to the reality of where we stand—especially when we’re without recourse to God.

The situation of the paralytic is sometimes so difficult, as Laura told me, that the pain is so bad that you can’t even pray.  It just takes up all the energy of your body and your mind, and you can think of nothing: all you can do is hang on for life—literally.  At that point, you need somebody to help you, to bring you to God.  That’s why, in other stories in the Gospel, the paralytic was brought by somebody to Jesus—because he couldn’t bring himself.

So we also need to support each other, to rely on others to bring us in our infirmity and need to God—to the place where healing comes from.  This is the next step; it’s not that we have to say, “OK, we’re weak, sick, and helpless,” and then just wallow in that without any hope.  That’s only the first part of the picture; we have to respond to it a way that opens us to the grace of God.

I also found it interesting that one of the nurses who was helping Laura was an older, Ukrainian lady.  She was of the “old school” but she really knew her stuff, because in the old country she was a hospital administrator, but she could only be a nurse here, because in the U.S. they would never accept her credentials.  She would come in and say, “Laura!  You still lying in bed?  Get up and walk!  Is this what you do at home?  Come on!  Walk, walk, walk!”   She was encouraging her to walk, because even when you’re sick like that, your body has to have a little bit of movement and activity, in order for things to start functioning well.  When you’re under anesthesia for eight or ten hours, everything in your body goes to sleep—your head may wake up, but all your guts are still “sleeping” and it might take days for them to start functioning again.  So you need some encouragement like that.

On the other hand, there’s something that we have to do ourselves—something that only we can do.  We have to make the choice to turn to God who can heal us, who alone can heal us.  We can’t heal ourselves—you have to be aware of that—and we can’t just try to make an illusion for ourselves of self-sufficiency and think that this will carry us through, because healing doesn’t come from ourselves; it has to come from God.

In the gospel, this paralytic shows us what not to do.  He was certainly aware of his situation—he’d been sick for many years—but he seems to have sort of resigned himself to be a suffering grouch for the rest of his life, because even when the Healer came to him and said, “Do you want to be healed?” the first thing he started doing was complaining!  “Oh, I don’t have anybody to take me into the water, and then if I try to crawl in there somebody gets in before me so I’m just stuck here; I’ll never get healed.”   But the Lord didn’t ask him any of that stuff!  When the Lord said, “Do you want to be healed?” He was not just asking a rhetorical question, as if “In your dream of the Good Life, would you like to have perfect health?”  No.  He was in a very practical situation, intervening in that man’s life at that moment:  “Do you, with this particular sickness that you have had for the last 38 years, do you want to be healed—now?”   And the man could not “get” it.  But the Lord had mercy on him and healed him anyway.

There’s a kind of condition to that, because when we receive a healing from God, God is also asking us to take responsibility for our healing—to take responsibility for our life.  When things change like that, we have to change our lives, and it’s clear in the gospel that Jesus meant that because, when He saw him a little while later, He said, “Look, now you are healed.  Sin no more, lest something worse overtake you”—which, first of all, means that there is something worse than being sick with a physical illness. The Lord was warning him: “If you don’t take responsibility and respond personally in a good way to what I’ve done for you, then it’s going to be worse than it was before.”  And the thing that is worse than physical illness is the hardening of the heart.  Do you know why?  Because that is something that God, without our cooperation, cannot heal!  He cannot heal a hard heart in this sense, if our will is against Him—if we do not will Him, invite Him, choose to be healed.  The one place that we can make off-limits to God—if we want to—is our own heart, our own soul and spirit, because God will not violate our freedom.

That’s something that we have to be aware of when we are seeking healing for our life.  You have to start with that awareness, and accept that fact, that we are in a state of infirmity, dependence and need.  But we shouldn’t rebel against that and try to be like that painted girl that I mentioned earlier, because health, success, wealth, prestige and all those kinds of things tend to breed arrogance, pride, a sense of false invulnerability, and superiority over others—whereas the experience of infirmity and need can create in a person the nobility that comes from the struggle, and the humility that comes from having to reach out to someone to help you, and also the confidence, courage and peace that come from faith and hope in God, who is the only One who can truly heal.

So we come to God when He asks us that question, and we should listen in our prayer for that question: “Do you want to be healed?”  Don’t just “blow it off,” either: “Of course I want to be healed, I’m in pain!”   Well, no; think about it: do you want to be healed?  Do you want, really, to take responsibility for living as a healed person, as a new person?   We also have to be aware that we’re never going to be totally free from all pain and suffering; we may be healed of one thing, but life will bring its own stuff with it.  If you haven’t already suffered from some serious illness or injury, chances are that you probably will sometime later in your life, because that’s the human condition—that’s how life works down here.

The Lord told us that there would be suffering in this life.  But He said, “Take courage, because I have overcome the world.”  He has the power not only to heal bodies but to make us new inside—if we choose that, if we allow Him to do that.  He has to work with our free will; we have to hand over our will and say, “Yes, I want to be healed; I want to go on living in a new way, a transformed way”—on a more profound level of existence.

Some people seem to be on a permanent search for healing.  They never quite attain it, for in fact they secretly don’t want it.  They would rather simply attend endless healing conferences, at which they can endlessly make their woes known.  What would happen if they actually were healed?  There would be no more need for healing conferences!  They would actually have to get on with the business of living life, and there would be no further opportunity to seek sympathy from others.  How unhappy they would be if they were thus healed!  Well, in that case I suppose they would go to a healing conference to deal with their heartbreak over not needing to be healed anymore.

St. Paul tells us that the meaning of the Resurrection is to walk in newness of life, and this is what the Lord wants to give to us.  He comes to us and asks not only “Do you want to be healed of this illness” but “Do you want newness of life?”  Do you want to be transformed?  Do you want to see things in a new way?  Do you want to be raised up to a level of living in the grace of the Holy Spirit in a way that transcends the pettiness and the superficiality and shallowness of the world around us?  We have to walk in the newness of life that comes only from Christ.  We must embrace Him.

As you come to Holy Communion today, listen for the voice of Christ who says, “Do you want to be healed?” And then answer with your whole heart, turn over your will, your life, your resolution to be new, to be different, and say: “Yes, Lord, I want to be healed.  You alone can heal me.  Give me this newness of life.”  And then we will hear in our own hearts what He said to the paralytic: “Rise, and walk!”

Seeking the Risen Jesus

[This is a homily I gave on the Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing Women in 2005.  I edited it down from 3200 words to about 1900 so your eyes won’t burn out from being stuck to the screen so long.  I sure was long-winded in those days!]

Christ is Risen!

We’re continuing today our celebration of the resurrection of Christ, celebrating today in a special way the holy myrrh-bearers.  Now these women came out to anoint Jesus who had died and was buried.  The Gospel says they went to the tomb when the sun had risen. They didn’t realize, however, that the Son of God had risen and He wasn’t even in the tomb.  But they were seeking Jesus.  I remember reading not long ago in the letter to the Hebrews where it gives the bottom line of what we have to do for salvation: “To please God you must have faith.”  It says that means you have to believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him.

I had seen several things from Scripture here and there about seeking God, but it really doesn’t talk much about finding God.  You know we’re told to seek Him, but we don’t have to find Him.  Before you think that’s too weird, let me explain.

We have to seek God with the hope of really meeting Him, but it’s God who finds us.  We don’t find God.  And if we don’t happen to find God in all our seeking, we shouldn’t be discouraged either, because it’s not our job to find God.  Our job is to seek God, and God’s job is to reveal Himself to us, to manifest Himself to us.  This is what happened in the Gospel.

The women went to seek Jesus, and when they got to the tomb they found this angel who said, “You seek Jesus of Nazareth.”  Correct.  Well, He is not here.  They didn’t find Him.  So now what?  The angel explained what happened, and whether or not they really got it I don’t know, because they were still petrified with fear and ran away.  This Gospel that we read today [Mark 16:1-8] as an abrupt ending.  But, if you attach Matthew’s Gospel onto this one, it picks up where that left off.  Here it leaves off with them running away.  In Matthew’s Gospel, as they’re running away, Jesus appears to them and they do find Him, or rather He finds them.  They went looking for Him, didn’t find Him, got scared, took off, and He appeared to them, manifested Himself to them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then they recognized Him and worshipped Him and heard his word to go and tell the others, and the rest is salvation history.

One thing we have to realize is that our part is to seek God with all our hearts, but God’s part is to manifest Himself to us.  The Lord says that in the Gospel of John.  He says, “If you believe in me and you keep my word, I will manifest myself to you and my Father and I will come to you and make our home with you.”  That’s what He wants to do.  But it doesn’t mean that we’re let off the hook by saying, well, it’s his job to manifest Himself.  The seeking of Him is a very serious work, and it’s something that demands a lot of effort and sacrifice on our part.

One of the things we see in the myrrh-bearing women, when they went to do this labor of love for Jesus—it’s only love that can propel you to do the impossible—is that what they were hoping to do was impossible.  They were going to this tomb that had a huge stone stuck in front of it, and a detachment of soldiers stuck in front of that, to make sure that nobody would move the stone even if they could.

The women are coming to this tomb saying, who’s going to roll the stone away for us?  Well, if anybody tried to roll the stone away they’d get a lance through the chest and that would have been it.  So they were trying to do something that was really impossible but, they could not not do it, because they loved Jesus so much and nothing was going to stop them from at least going there and putting up a good fight.  You know how the old babas are good at getting their way.  If they brought their umbrellas or rolling pins they could at least try to smack the guards over the head.

In any case, they were ready to get to Jesus to perform this labor of love.  We have to realize too, that in our seeking of Jesus, there are going to be obstacles.  And maybe there are going to be situations that make it look like it’s impossible to find Jesus, to meet Him, to enter into communion with Him, and even to live in the way that He asks us to live.  But we have to focus not on the impossible, not on the obstacle, the stone that’s in the way, but to focus on the One whom we seek, and just go out of love, trusting that, as they say, love will find a way.  Love for Jesus will find a way to do his will in this world.

We have to realize that Jesus may not be where we’re looking.  Don’t be complacent about what you think or where you know you’re going to find Jesus, because these women had good reason to be absolutely sure that Jesus was right where they thought He was.  He was dead after all, and they laid Him in a tomb and placed a stone over it.  So that’s where He was, and they were absolutely sure that’s where He was.  Guess what, He wasn’t there!

God is sovereign, He is the Lord.  He is not bound by our ideas and conceptions and fantasies and even hopes and dreams.  He is the Lord, and He will manifest Himself as He sees fit.  As I said in the beginning, our job is to seek Him but not to have any preconceived plan of just how to seek Him or just where we’re going to find Him. We have to be pilgrims.  We’re always on the move.  We have to always be open, always be ready for God to do something new.  Ready for God to speak the word to us and for us to get up and do it, whatever it is, even if it doesn’t fit our preconceived notion of how our life ought to be.  God is going to manifest himself to us in his way.  We may seek Jesus in our own way and find out He is not here.  Let’s be open to see where He really is.

I just read a book recently about seeking God in the wrong places.  This was a testimony of a woman who was born Catholic but who went off into this New Age and occult stuff.  She was really deep into it and was a master practitioner of various New Age things, and she would even do séances and such, trying to call up the dead.  At a certain moment—and this is how her conversion happened—she was performing this séance with all these people and they put their hands on the table and all these things started flying around the room and the demons were posing as dead relatives who manifest themselves.  Well, suddenly she was unable to put her hands on the table.  They seemed to be bound to her side.  She couldn’t move, and she didn’t know what was happening, but she heard this beautiful voice say, “I am the Queen of Peace.”  She thought, wow, what is that?  Then she realized it was the Blessed Mother who was calling her out of there.  And the first thing that she said was—because she knew something of God was happening—“I will never do this again.”  So she didn’t, although it took her a while to pull away from all of the other stuff that she was involved in, but that was the turning point of her conversion.

A lot of these people, unless they just crass mercenaries or actual satanists, are just deluded, deceived people who are trying to find God or some sense of the spiritual world, but are doing it in the wrong way—so what she was doing was looking for God in the wrong place.  Therefore Our Lady had to say to her, like the angel at the tomb, He is not here!  You have to look for him where He is.  So Mary came and brought this woman out of the darkness of the tomb.  In binding her arms she was freeing her soul.  Really, the woman was seeking the living among the dead.  This séance business is necromancy.  Mary could have said also with the angel, why seek the living among the dead?  This is something that we have to remember in our spiritual life, to seek Jesus with an honest and open heart, and trust that He is going to manifest Himself to us, and to follow the leads that we receive.

You know, we can’t pre-plan our whole life, our spiritual life.  It doesn’t work that way.  We’re in a relationship with someone, with God, and relationships are dynamic and they change and they grow and they adapt to new circumstances.  We can’t think of God as merely a person like us.  But we can’t treat Him as if He were less than that.  He’s more than that.  We have to be open, listening, seeking Him with love, and that’s the testimony of the myrrh-bearing women.

Mary Magdalene especially is mentioned here.  She is one who is like an icon of love in the Scriptures and through the whole Church tradition.  She’s a forgiven sinner who loved much, as Jesus said in Luke, and who loved Him with her whole heart and followed Him to the Cross, and went to do the impossible at the sealed tomb—and became, as we say, an apostle to the apostles, received that message to go and tell the others that Jesus is risen.

The Lord rewards those who seek Him, as it says in Hebrews, one way or another.  He may not just appear to us and allow us to embrace his feet and worship Him as the women did, but He will reward those who seek Him sincerely, consistently, faithfully, lovingly, being willing to bear the cross, realizing that we are seeking the crucified as well as the risen Lord.

So let us follow the example of the myrrh-bearing women, and we will then hear that same message of the angel: “You seek Jesus…”  Wouldn’t it be a great thing for someone to acknowledge that, for Heaven to acknowledge that.  “Oh yes, we know you, you’re one that seeks Jesus.”  That in itself, what a great honor it must have been just to hear those words from the heavenly angel!  You seek Jesus, this is the good news.  So let us hear the good news, and go out to others as the women did, saying: Christ is risen!

20,000

We interrupt our regularly-scheduled programming for this earth-shaking announcement: today, April 11, 2013, marks the 20,000th day since the birth of Fr Joseph, your favorite blogger!

20, 000 (count ‘em!).  I never thought I would make it this far, and I feel every one of them!  I seem to be “full of days,” to use a biblical expression for old age, though I’m afraid I may have miles to go before I sleep.  But I take some consolation in this: today is also the feast day of my dear St Gemma, another sign of the mysterious Providence governing my life, in a special way in the past three years or so.

Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if you are fuller of days than I am, though every day there are more people in this world younger than I (the number of people older than I am seems always to decrease).  20,000 is a good round number, though it’s only good for a day.  There’s a lot behind me and God knows how much ahead of me.

There doesn’t seem to be any point in pointing out this bit of chronological trivia, except to call attention to myself.  So now you can pray for my repentance and salvation, and it will all work out for the best!

No Conditions

[A homily for the Sunday of St Thomas, from way back in 2002.]

Christ is risen!

How do you know?  Did you ever see Him?  Did you touch Him?  How do you know Christ is risen?

This was the dilemma of St. Thomas that we heard in the Gospel, and I think it’s fortunate for us that Thomas went through this little crisis of faith, because it helps us in our own struggles.

On the positive side, Thomas represents something that is very deep within each one of us, and that is the desire to see God:  the desire to come into some sort of personal, tangible contact with God—in this case, especially with Christ, who was risen from the dead, or who Thomas was told was risen from the dead.  But that desire is an important thing, and that’s something that God has put into all of us, into all of our hearts and souls.  For some people it’s buried very deeply—some say they don’t want to see God, they don’t want to meet God; and other people, they go about, searching for God in many different ways.  But all of us somehow have this deep desire, somewhere inside us, to see God, to enter into communion with something greater than ourselves, with the great Mystery of the universe.

Thomas manifested this desire.  He wasn’t there when Christ first showed up, and so his desire was like a pain in his heart.  In a sense, what he said was “sour grapes,” because he wanted to see Christ so badly.  The others said, “We saw Him!” and he said, in effect:  “No, you didn’t!” because he felt so bad that he didn’t.

Anyway, Thomas started out first with this desire to see God, which is good.  The problem was that he then went on to say, “But I will not believe unless I put my finger into his nail wounds, and put my hand into his side.”   So, there’s where the problem is: the need for some sort of empirical verification of our faith.  He had to “test it out scientifically,” so to speak.   He had to touch; he had to probe; he was not going to believe otherwise.   And he was also—and this was another problem in his situation—he was also not going to accept the testimony of eyewitnesses.  That was another thing that stood in the way of his faith.

So he’s “one for three” in this thing:  he had the deep desire to see God; that’s a good thing.  But then he insisted that he would not believe until he could prove it by his own investigation and experimentation; and, finally, he would not accept the testimony of witnesses.

When the moment came, and Thomas was with them and Christ appeared again, He immediately, of course, knew what was going on, and addressed Himself directly to Thomas and said, “OK, here I am!  You want to touch my wounds?  Here I am.”   Now, at this point, Thomas abandoned his need for “scientific investigation” and personal probing of the mystery, because Christ’s appearance already did away with the need for that.   It seems to me it would’ve been an insult to Christ if He appeared to Thomas in His glorified body and said, “Here I am!” and Thomas said, “Well, I still want to touch; I still want to check it out!”  He didn’t; his response was not going up and investigating Him—much religious art notwithstanding—but rather it was: “My Lord and my God!”

Probably his jaw dropped and then he came up with that expression of faith in the divinity of Christ, unlike anything else that’s anywhere in the Scriptures.   No place in the Scriptures do we find such clear expression of Christ’s divinity—except in John’s prologue, where he was writing as a kind of theological reflection—nowhere do we have a story of any personal encounter with Christ, no one anywhere except here says to Jesus, “You are my God!” without qualifications, without any room for ambiguity.  So Thomas went from that place of doubt, of demanding proof, of refusing to accept the testimony of witnesses, to the point of telling the whole world that Christ is God. He certainly redeemed himself in that, for that testimony has been extremely important for the whole Christian faith down through the ages.

At that moment, Christ gave us a beatitude—but first, he gently reproached Thomas, saying “You believe because you saw.”   Well, OK; practically anybody can believe what they see.  “But,” He said, “blessed are those who have not seen, but who still believe.”  That is also a very important passage in Scripture, which is very necessary for the whole life of the Church, since then up until now, and until the end of time, because they were the only ones—the apostles, and the other disciples of that time—who were privileged to have this eye-witness relationship with Christ,  the kind of relationship which St. John talks about in his first letter where he says, “What we have seen, what we have touched, what we have personally experienced.” That’s something that was reserved to a select few.  But the grace was not reserved to a select few; the blessedness was not reserved to a select few; that is for everybody.

This word is important, and has been written down and preserved for us because all ages of Christianity have to hear that word:  “Blessed are you, if you believe, not having seen”—not having performed your scientific investigations, and touching, and probing; not getting tangible, empirical proof of the things you wish to believe in.   We find ourselves in that blessedness if we believe, and outside it if we don’t.

So we should look at those same three points that characterize Thomas’ situation, and see where we stand in our own lives. First of all, that desire for God:  that’s a good desire, the desire to see God, the desire to be in communion with Him, to be in contact with Him, to know Him, personally and powerfully.  That is a good desire to have, and that is something that we should cultivate because that’s what keeps us going.  If we lose our desire to see God and to experience God, then we’re going to stop showing up for services, we’re going to stop doing anything about the whole spiritual enterprise.  The whole journey of spiritual life is just going to be shot if we do not have the desire to see God and to enter into communion with God.  So we need that desire.

But we cannot go to that point and put conditions on our desire to see God, and say, “Well I’m not going to believe, until these conditions are met,” whatever they might be.   We might not be saying, “I want to touch his wounds,” but oftentimes we may have other conditions, and say, “Well I’m not going to believe unless God does this or that for me,” or “…answers this prayer,” or whatever.   So, we shouldn’t put conditions on our faith.   Christ did not say, “Blessed are you who believe when you get what you ask for.”  He said, “Blessed are you who believe when you don’t see”—when you’re in the dark and still believe.  So we have to have the faith that’s sufficient to take us through the darkness, even when the conditions that we’d like to put on God before we would believe are not met.  We abandon that, we say, “I’m not going to put any conditions on God; I’m just going to believe anyway!”  And why am I going to believe?  Well, one of the reasons is the next point: because we have the testimony of witnesses.

The whole of Christianity is based on the testimony of witnesses.  That’s how the Church started; that’s how the Church spread; that’s how the Scriptures were written; that’s the foundation of Christianity!   Christianity is not a religion of private revelation—“I believe because God appeared to me and spoke to me.”  And then you believe because God appeared to you and spoke to you, so you believe.  That’s not how Christianity works; Christianity is based on the testimony of the original witnesses of God, and what they said, and what they did, and what they wrote down, and what they handed down to succeeding generations.

St. Paul even gives us the same thing.  He says, “I pass on to you what I myself received from others: that Christ died and was buried and rose from the dead,” and the rest, in First Corinthians.  So he’s doing that himself.  But he was a kind of extraordinary witness, because Christ did appear to him.  He was in the first generation and a lot of extraordinary things were happening then, because Christianity had to get a “jump-start,” it had to get moving.  If it hadn’t been for St. Paul, who knows how small a portion of the world would have ever been evangelized?  Paul evangelized most of the known world at the time, and really got Christianity off to a great start.  And then, from his testimony and the testimony of the other apostles, it spread and was preserved by the Church in writing and oral tradition, and has come to us today.  So that’s the “bottom line” we base our faith on, is the testimony of these witnesses.

Now, this faith can be enhanced and supported and confirmed by personal experiences of God.  God does not withhold that either, because God has been present to practically everyone who’s sought Him, throughout the ages.  I mean, some ways are more extraordinary than others, but if you talk to almost anybody who’s really living a spiritual life, they will tell you, “Yes, I know the presence of God; I have experience of God.  He has been in my life and there are evidences of it.” The faith is based primarily on the witnesses but is supported, confirmed, strengthened, and grows through personal experience of God.

Let us, then, put all these together in our lives: the desire for God, the putting no conditions on believing in God, and then accepting the testimony of witnesses who have given us the Christian faith.   And that will make us able to receive God.  As the fathers often say, we don’t see God mostly because we don’t have a pure heart.  We aren’t purified, our spiritual senses do not have the capacity to see God, to experience God, so that even if He stood right before us and said, “Here I am,” we wouldn’t even see Him!  We wouldn’t recognize Him because we’re too dull of spirit; we’re too loaded down with our passions and selfishness and all the other stuff that puts blinders on us, that makes it impossible to see God.

So it’s not a matter of us coming to God and putting a condition on it, saying, “I won’t believe unless you do this.”  God is the One who says, “Well, you’re not going to see anything unless you do this!   You’re not going to see Me unless you change your life, unless you get rid of the obstacles that make it impossible for you to see Me, to receive Me, to experience Me.”   God is the One who puts conditions—not us.  So we have to come to God and say, “Your will be done.  Do unto me whatever You need to clear out the junk, to take the scales off my eyes, so that I can see and feel and experience and know You, like your disciples knew you.”

Let us come to God that way, and let us believe without seeing, and experience the blessedness that is given to those who believe without seeing, and then, little by little, as we go through our lives in faith, we will come to know God.  We will know for certain the presence of God, we will know when He is near, we will live from his life, and we will spontaneously say with Thomas, “My Lord and my God!”

Rise and Live Forever!

[This is a homily I gave on Easter 2004.  This year I’m preaching to a select crowd of about three here at COSJ, and I won’t be writing it down.]

Christ is risen!  I was thinking that after we sing, “Christ is Risen” so many times, maybe that’s all there is to say.  I don’t even need to give the homily now, because “Christ is Risen” says it all—it is the answer to all of our deepest needs and longings and hopes. I remember reading, some years ago, an article in a magazine that said that when the devil attacks you or tempts you or harasses you there’s only one thing that you have to do.  Say this: “Christ is risen! Christ is risen! Christ is risen!”  And then he’s got to go!  Because that is the defeat of the devil.  All he’s got to do is be reminded of that, and reminded that we believe in that and embrace that, and he’s got to be out of there, because he cannot stand it.  That’s the thing that has destroyed him and robbed him of his power.  The devil is the Prince of Death; the devil feeds on death.  Death, as St. Paul says, is the last enemy, and in the Letter to the Hebrews it says that Christ came to undo the works of the devil—the devil who kept everyone in bondage to fear of death their whole life long.  Well, Christ is risen, and death is overthrown and is transformed, and the devil has to get out of the way.

So today we’re celebrating this great mystery, this power of the Resurrection that is something new in the whole universe: when He rose from the dead, something new happened that had never happened before, which has transformed the universe and the future of the whole universe forever, because what happened in Christ is not just someone dying and coming back to life; it’s not just an organism functioning, then ceasing to function, and then starting to function again.  It’s a completely new life, a life that is taken up into a new level of being.  The humanity of Christ was taken up into the glory of the Father to be eternally glorified in the same glory that He shared with the Father for all eternity as God, as the Son of God.  But now this new power is at work in the universe; his power to elevate humanity up into the level of divine life and divine glory.  This is the gift and the power of the Resurrection.  What underlies this great, divine power to change everything and to transform everything into a shining image of God?  Well, of course it is love: it’s the divine love which makes all things new.  The love that Scripture says is stronger than death; God’s love alone is stronger than death.  We struggle here on earth with our mortality, and we do love, but of ourselves we can’t love in the same way that God loves, in this effective way that overcomes death.

I was reading in one book, which said that when we say “I love you,” to someone, on a very fundamental level we’re saying, “I want you to live forever.”  But the thing is that in our human condition we cannot make that happen.  We cannot make our loved ones live forever.  It’s a wish, a desire, but it’s one that we cannot accomplish of our own power.  We want to say, “I love you, I want you to live forever,” yet our loved ones die.  But it’s different with God.  See, God can say, “I want you to live forever, because I love you,” and He makes it happen: we see that first in the life of Christ, in the death and resurrection of Christ, as we sing the psalm, “You will not let your Beloved know decay.”  So, the Father says to Christ, “I love You, and therefore You are going to live forever,” and so in his humanity, as I said, He raises Him up into that glory, as Jesus prayed before He died:  “Take Me back into that glory that I knew with You before the world began.”  That is, “take Me back, as man.”

So now Christ has that same power to love us unto life: his love for us is stronger than death, and He can tell us that same thing—that He loves us, and wants us to live forever.  This is something that He’s already begun to do in the first-fruits of redeemed and resurrected humanity, the Mother of God.  Jesus said to her, in effect (I don’t know if He used these same words, but it’s the same thing)—when He raised her up body and soul into Heaven, He was saying to her, “I love you, and I want you to live forever!  Now, rise from the dead!”  And she did!  This is the love that is stronger than death, the love that we celebrate in the Resurrection of Christ that transforms the whole universe.

Now there’s another side to the coin here, of love being stronger than death, because if love is going to be stronger than death, it first has to be stronger than life.  Now, what does that mean?  This is something that we can actually share in ourselves.  For love to be stronger than life, it has to be willing to die.

Jesus’ love was first stronger than life because He was willing to sacrifice his life for those whom He loved—He was willing to give it up.  He gave us that message in the Gospel:  “Whoever would save his life, will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.”  That’s something that Jesus has shown us first, and gives us the example.  Do not love life more than God, and do not hold on to this passing life in such a way that would make you lose the life that’s true life in God.

Let’s see also the testimony of the martyrs; it’s the same thing.  We read that in the Book of Revelation where it says, “Love for life did not deter them from death”; so they were willing to make that sacrifice of their life.  Their love for God was stronger than their desire to live this earthly life, so they were willing to make this sacrifice, even the ultimate sacrifice of giving up their life.

Jesus did this for us.  First of all, his love was stronger than life: He was willing to give up, to lay down, his life for his beloved.  But then, being the divine Son of God, and having the power to lay down his life and take it up again, He proved that his love is stronger than death, and He rose from the dead, and entered into that new, divine, glorified life that He promises to all of those who believe in Him and who love Him.  And we’re the ones who can benefit from that promise and that power of his love that gives us life, and gives us life eternal.

Now, one of the ways, and one of the most beautiful ways that this power of Christ’s presence—his love stronger than death, his divine life—is with us, is in the Holy Eucharist. This is the presence in our midst of Christ, slain and risen, and when we receive the Holy Eucharist, we take into ourselves the love that is stronger than death, the love that promises eternal life, because He said, “He who eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood abides in Me, and I in him….”   And what else?  “…and I will raise him up on the Last Day!”  Why?  Because the love that He puts in us through the Holy Eucharist is stronger than death and is going to make us rise from the dead on the Last Day, when He comes for us, his beloved.

There’s something that I read recently which I found to be a very beautiful insight into the mystery of the Eucharist and the Resurrection.  This is from a book by François Varillon.  He says, “When Marc Oraison was a surgeon in Bordeaux, every day he would see people die, people cease to exist.  He decided to become a priest so that he could celebrate the Eucharist in the midst of a universe bound to death and so that, through the Eucharist, he would make the Resurrection present at the very heart of this universe in which everything is mortal.  The Resurrection is the life beyond all deaths; it is the breach without which we would be forever enclosed in the circle of universal mortality.”

So this is what we’re doing here when we celebrate the Eucharist, and especially today, on the Feast of Christ’s Resurrection: we are making the Resurrection present at the very heart of this universe in which everything is mortal. But Jesus says: not everything is going to be mortal, because I am going to raise you—as we heard from Saturday’s Matins reading of Ezekiel’s prophecy of the dry bones—“I am going to raise you, my people; I’m going to raise you from your graves.  Don’t say, ‘We’re lying here dead and our bones are dried up, and God has abandoned us.’  I am going to put my Spirit in you, and I’m going to raise you from your graves.”  This is read as a prophecy of the general resurrection at the Last Day.

Let us resolve to love God more than life, more than we love life itself, so that we are willing to make whatever sacrifice we need to be faithful to God—even the ultimate sacrifice—so that our love will be stronger than life, and then, when we finally pass from this life, we will hear that voice of Christ, as in chapter five of John He says: “An hour is coming when the dead in their graves are going to hear the voice of the Son of God.”  What is He going to be saying?  What are you going to hear, when you’re lying in your grave at the Last Day?  You’re going to hear Christ say, “I love you!  I want you to live forever! My love is stronger than death.  Now rise, and live forever!”

Yes to Incarnation, Yes to Passion

[I gave this homily on the feast in 2009.  It is slightly edited because of the time of the liturgical year in which this feast is being celebrated.]

The Feast of the Annunciation is one of the greatest feasts of the liturgical year, since it gives us the opportunity to celebrate an incomprehensible and marvelous mystery that is at the heart of our salvation: the Incarnation of the Son of God, our Savior. Yet there’s also a kind of bittersweet dimension to it, since it almost always occurs during Lent or Holy Week.  So the liturgical structure does not reflect quite the same exuberance as do other major feasts, for we celebrate the Liturgy in conjunction with Vespers, and there are even some Lenten texts prescribed in some of the services of the day.  Perhaps this adds to the poignancy of Mary’s “let it be done to me,” because her surrender to the will of God falls under the shadow of the Cross.

Let us try to understand something of the mystery of this feast, and what the Church is trying to communicate to us by means of it.  First of all, we see in the Gospel text (Lk 1:24-38) that the evangelist takes pains to insist that Mary was a virgin, and therefore that Christ was conceived in her directly from God, without any human mediation.  Ordinarily, when female characters are introduced in stories, even biblical ones, the delicate issue of virginity is not the very first one mentioned.  But in today’s Gospel it is.  We learn about that even before we learn her name!  “The angel Gabriel was sent by God… to a virgin.” And when we do learn her name, her virginity is mentioned again: “the virgin’s name was Mary.”  Once the angel explains what God is planning to do in her, she herself states that she is a virgin—and perhaps implies that she had intended to remain one.  If she had fully intended to have a normal marriage, she wouldn’t have thought twice about the angel’s words, “you will conceive in your womb and bear a son.”  If she was about to get married, of course she would very likely conceive and bear children as countless other women have done.  But she asked the angel how this was supposed to happen, since she did not know man.  This would have been a nonsensical question if she had fully expected to know man on her wedding night!

But whatever Mary’s plans for her own life may have been up to that point, what most concerns the evangelist, and us, is what the angel next said: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.”  This is the astounding news of the Incarnation of God.  There have been great annunciations in the Old Testament concerning the births of prophets or kings.  These all prepared the way for the coming of the Messiah, but Jesus is greater still than the common understanding of the Messiah, for even if people could expect that the Messiah’s conception would have happened by some intervention of God, like that of the conception of Isaac or John the Baptizer, no one ever thought that a husband would have been totally excluded from the equation!  The Incarnation is more than a providential intervention in human affairs.  God Himself was about to enter into human life and history in a wholly unprecedented, undreamed-of manner.  He wasn’t merely going to pour his blessings upon the favored child, be it king or prophet.  He Himself would become that Child and thereby save his people from their sins.

This is what the Gospel has established by repeatedly making it clear that she was a virgin and that she was in fact to be impregnated solely by the power of God.  There have been heroes and saviors of the people of God down through the ages, but they all had their human failings, and they all died, never to be heard from again.  Their wisdom and their deeds were remembered, but their power to deliver the people of God from their afflictions died with them.  With the arrival of the Angel Gabriel, the fullness of time had come, but another merely human hero would not be adequate to the task at hand, which was not a temporal liberation, but a radical, permanent overthrowing of the power of sin and death—something only God could accomplish.  And so God came, through the human body and the personal consent of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The Epistle for this feast (Heb. 2:11-18) tells us something about why the Son of God became man.  He partook of human nature, it says, “that through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage.”  So Jesus was born as a man so that He could die—because as the eternal Word of God, Pure Spirit, He could not die—and in dying he would rob death and the devil of their power and free all those held in their grip.  For ever since Adam and Eve were cut off from the Tree of Life, mankind has lived in the shadow of death—and death, for uncounted millennia, had been considered as the end of all things for the one who died.  Death was the bitter curse, the last enemy, the ultimate devourer of all the experience and meaning of life.

But this state of affairs was not acceptable to the Lover of Mankind.  Even though death was a just punishment for sin, God wished to redeem his creatures made in his image.  He could have simply said, “All is forgiven,” but that would not have been a sufficiently profound expression of his everlasting love.  He could have said, “I hereby abolish death,” and it would have been done, but He would have remained on his throne and the unbridgeable chasm between God and man would still have remained.  God wouldn’t be satisfied until He personally crossed that chasm and made a way for us to cross over to Him.  So rather than destroying the power of death with only a command, He actually experienced the agony of suffering and death, personally absorbing all its ancient terrors and its insatiable lust for the destruction of all that lives.  According to the Epistle, this was a priestly service by which He made expiation for our sins.  For, as St Paul says, death came into the world through sin.  So if Christ was to deliver us from the power of death, He would have to make expiation for our sins.  He did both by his death on the Cross and his Resurrection.

Now we have a way back to God; now we can cross the bridge that leads to Heaven.  It would have been utterly impossible to do with without the Incarnation, which made possible the sacrificial death of Christ.  These two mysteries are expressed a little later in Hebrews, when the author writes: “we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way which He opened for us… through his flesh…” (10:19-20).  The incarnate Son of God is Himself, in the reality of the human nature He assumed, the “new and living way”—new, because the way back to God didn’t exist before the Incarnation, and living, because after his Resurrection, Jesus shall die no more but lives forever to save those who put their faith and trust in Him.

All of this wonderful work of God on our behalf—without which death would have devoured us forever—began when a teenage Jewish girl said, “Let it be done to me according to your word.”  So we return to the mystery of the Annunciation and why it is so important—and also why the Immaculate Virgin Mary is venerated so highly by the Church.  She was the means by which our salvation came to pass, or shall we say, she provided that which was necessary for our Savior to save us, his human nature.

It is impossible to separate the mysteries of the Incarnation and the Cross, and so it is perhaps fitting that this feast does usually occur during Lent.  The third Sunday of Lent is the Sunday of the Holy Cross, and very soon we will be entering the profound mystery of the Passion of Christ.  Between these two shines a pure and gentle light from the Heart of the Mother, an opening to the joy that is the ultimate plan of God and that secretly underlies even the agony of the Cross, for we know how the story ends, or rather, that the story never ends—for death shall be swallowed up by Life in the Resurrection of Christ.  Then the angel’s prophecy will be fulfilled: “Of his Kingdom there will be no end.”  We affirm our faith in this every time we pray the Nicene Creed.

For now, we live in faith and in hope.  The joy of the Age to Come has not yet been manifested, only promised.  We have miles to go before we sleep, that is, before this earthly journey comes to an end and we enter into eternal rest from the labors and sufferings of this life.  In the time that still remains we must align our hearts and thoughts with those of Our Lady, who said yes to the will of God in all things.  It was not only at the Annunciation that her consent was required to fulfill the will of God.  Her whole life had to be a surrender, a selfless embrace of the mystery of God in her life, in both joy and sorrow.  Her yes was perhaps hardest to pronounce as she stood at the foot of the Cross.  It’s one thing to say yes when hearing that you are miraculously going to be the Mother of the Messiah, who will reign forever, and quite another to see this Messiah condemned, tortured and executed with common criminals.

There are liturgical texts in which Mary recalls the mystery of the Annunciation as she stands before the Cross, wondering what had become of the angel’s prophecies of joy and glory, now that her whole world, her love, her hope, was pierced by nails and torn by scourges.  But she wouldn’t leave Him, wouldn’t despair, and thus she said yes to God to the bitter end, and so was rewarded with the revelation of his Resurrection, with the Gift of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, and with eternal joy in Heaven.  She is the Queen Mother glorified at the side of the King, her Son, as the mothers of the sons of David, the kings of Israel, were honored in their time (see, for example, 1Kgs. 2:19).  But this Queen Mother and her Son are unlike any that went before them and any that came since.  For she alone had conceived in her womb and bore a divine Son, whom she called Jesus.  The Holy Spirit had come upon her and the Power of the Most High overshadowed her.  The Child that was born was called the Son of God.  He was great, for He was the Son of the Most High; and He reigns forever, for his Kingdom will have no end.