The sinner’s lament is answered by the saint’s plea, because the sinner is he or she who becomes a saint. This is an important issue for Catholics — despite their holiness, the saints were human and capable of failure. The grace, mercy, and forgiveness of God led to their forgiveness.

Tuesday of the Third Week of Easter
Acts 7:51—8:1a
John 6:35ab

St. Luke, who wrote the book of Acts, was likely mentored by St. Paul. The very same St. Paul that used to be Saul and audienced — with some sense of pride and certainly with his approval — the martyrdom of St. Stephen.

How do we know this? Because Luke wrote about it in the book of Acts. Paul (Saul) knew St. Stephen, and applauded his death. Luke knew Paul well and interviewed him for the Book of Acts. Imagine the conversation, after Paul’s conversion, when Luke must have whispered to Paul. “Uh, what were you thinking?”

“Well, Luke, the rumors are true,” Paul might have said to Luke. “I’m the self-same murderer of Christians that is now an apostle of the risen Christ.”

Can you see Luke holding text in his hand, and worriedly asking, “Well, I’ve written the account as you confirmed it, Paul. Are you sure you want me to publish this?” He handed it to Paul, who read it out loud.

The witnesses laid down their cloaks
at the feet of a young man named Saul.
As they were stoning Stephen, he called out,
“Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.”
Then he fell to his knees and cried out in a loud voice,
“Lord, do not hold this sin against them”;
and when he said this, he fell asleep.
Now Saul was consenting to his execution.

Paul surely paused for a bit, scratching his forehead, and might have said, “It sounds a lot worse when you write it down.”

Imagine Peter and Thomas standing nearby. They had been privy to Luke’s hankering for details. They may even have reviewed Luke's report on Stephen’s speech and death. Would Thomas have spoken up first? “Paul, John convinced me an honest portrayal of my insolence and doubt was important. Everyone else left me alone, but I think John’s got the goods on me. You should take it like a man, Paul.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard about that,” admitted Paul, “but my transgressions are a lot worse. Criminey.” Everyone certainly nodded in agreement.

“Yes, but look at the embarrassment of my cowardice,” Peter might have piped up. “For goodness sake, Paul. I’ve looked the fool, and the traitor! Matthew and that fellow Mark have been writing about me. They even bring up the fine details about me sitting by the fire. Sheesh. I don’t imagine that Luke, or John would hold back, now that everyone knows my faux pas.”

“OK, then,” Luke might have said, meekly shrugging his shoulders, “I’ve messed up, too,” though he assuredly didn’t think anything he did was akin to murder. The silence went on a bit too long. Luke broke the chill with, “Remember, though. Stephen said it best: ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’”

Enough of that.

The sinner’s lament is answered by the saint’s plea, because the sinner is he or she who becomes a saint. This is an important issue for Catholics — despite their holiness, the saints were human and capable of failure. The grace and mercy of God led to their forgiveness.

That’s not the important part, though. God’s grace and mercy are ‘necessary’ for us to become saints. Failures do not deny a person’s sanctity. They are required steps toward a growing and eventual total submission to the love of God.

St. Stephen identified the battle we undergo in that submission as a refusal to follow the leading and promptings from the Holy Spirit. “You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always oppose the Holy Spirit …” He’s harsh, but hey, they were holding stones in their hands. Stephen’s lashing out is not a condemnation. He knew their bullheaded natures could still result in an awakening. His murder would have reverberations.

How, though, are we to know what the Spirit wants? That’s not an easy question to answer, but it is a vital one to solve. We begin by focusing on God and not our own calculations. Set aside all the noise coming at us from those who are not listening to the Holy Spirit. You can tell who they are. They are handing us stones to throw at the person who is submitting to the word of God. Translate “stone” for any weapon, including insults, lies, and defamation, as well as guns and rifles.

Stephen doesn’t give us much wiggle room regarding the promptings of the Holy Spirit. He said, “You received the law as transmitted by angels, but you did not observe it.”

His introduction of angels speaks of God’s breadth of communication methods. Angels don’t seem to be an acceptable, modern method of God speaking to us. But consider all that God does to help us understand that, in our failures, he fights to offer us an eternal relationship with him, rather than the short-sighted mob mentality, deviants, and selfish options marketed as desirable options. The presence of evil spirits is actually proof that angels exist.

Angels prod us, in the same vein as they spoke to the prophets, to Mary and Joseph, to Mary Magdalene at the tomb, and so many other places in scripture. The overarching point about the angelic realm is that God created innumerable, unimaginable ways for us to know him, including through creatures beyond our cosmic boundaries. The great lengths he’ll go to, not just to get our attention, but to draw us to him. To make us his sons and daughters, his friends, and his compatriots in missions he’s designed specifically for us.

He allows the experience of pain, poor choices, and even ignoring him, so that we know the difference between true joy, glory, and forgiveness and the degenerate results of ungodly behavior. It’s a bizarre reality that ugliness sends us running into his arms, but God knows what he is doing.

In addition to his Holy Spirit dwelling inside of us, which we must willingly allow or the Spirit will not enter our hearts; and, in addition to the Father who has also put into our hearts the notion of right and wrong and the love of us that no other creature can match, which we can accept or reject; and, in addition to the friendship, kinship, and leadership provided to us by Jesus Christ, whom we can ignore for other friendships; God also provides us with angelic personages to assist us in accepting God in so many ways. Do we reject the angels, too?

What else must God orchestrate for us? Miracles? OK, he does that. Change our very DNA, our spiritual makeup, with the Eucharist? Check, he does that. Give us the Church, stewards of the truth that dates back to the results of three years of ministry and confirmed at Pentecost? Yes, he did that too. Leave a written word, compiled by authors compelled to communicate the truth for all of history. Check, check, check, and check.

There is a tragedy in our misuse of all that God does for us, and that is our more ready willingness to sin. Acts tells us that Stephen gave the speech that led to his death, “to the people, the elders, and the scribes.” No one is left out in their complicity with Stephen’s murder. It’s surely at Saul’s behest, and the anger of those he seemed to condemn, but the stones were thrown by those whom Stephen called “just like your ancestors. Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute? They put to death those who foretold the coming of the righteous one …”

In John’s gospel, he writes in chapter six, “The crowd said to Jesus: “What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you?” Jesus referenced their example of God’s manna miracle in the desert, “the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

So they said to Jesus,
“Sir, give us this bread always.”
Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life;
whoever comes to me will never hunger,
and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”

Each of us hears what we are willing to hear.

Drop the stones.

Leave a comment

The criteria for designating a 1st Century saint usually begin with martyrdom, followed by records of a personal association with Jesus and a courageous act in defense of Jesus, the Church, or the apostolic community. In a sense, Nicodemus qualified for all four.

Tuesday of the Second Week of Easter
Acts 4:32-37
John 3:7-15

It’s very likely that the first St. Nick was not St. Nicholas, the 4th-century Greek bishop and precursor to our two-century-old Santa Claus personality. Rather, the inquisitive, practical Pharisee, Nicodemus, might be called our first St. Nick.

The two saintly men, however, are similar to us in legendary status. Yet while traditions and myths surround St. Nicholas, we know little of Nicodemus beyond what is found in scripture. (That, however, means everything!)

As icons, they have been discussed and studied for centuries. Both men were from wealthy backgrounds, looked up to by their peers, and landed in the hallway of legendary Christians. We imagine them as icons, but while St. Nicholas became a patron saint of everything from toymakers to sailors (a list citing 20 different patronages), St. Nicodemus has no formal patron identification. None.

It seems an odd status for a famous saint, but not uncommon for a saint’s bench behind the big names. Instead, Nicodemus is known for his close relationship with Jesus, as proof that Jesus associated with the elite Pharisee community. The idyllic notion that Jesus only accompanied the poor and the diseased falls apart under the scriptural recognition of his affiliations with military Romans, the wealthy, and the Jewish hierarchy. Nicodemus opens theology to a broad-minded incarnated God.

Nicodemus, and likely many other Jewish leaders, were moved by Jesus’ teaching and his miracles. Nicodemus was ultimately convinced, as revealed in scripture, a man primed for sainthood.

Within the first five centuries of the Church, the practice of declaring saints shifted from popular acclamation to a more detailed process. The first saints were identified from a mix of Christ and apostolic credentials, especially when supported by scriptural records and nods from Church Fathers. The process was not formal. Historians note that the early saints were named by both God and the people (vox Dei and vox populi).

By the time of St. Nicholas, vox populi would build a “cult” around someone to be named a saint. Next, a bishop must name, decree, and then declare a person a saint. Folks from a Catholic community would request a formal decree of sainthood, then the pastor would approach the bishop. A biography and records of the person’s death were required. In most cases, remains (relics) were provided.

Martyrdom was, and still is, the common qualifier. Over time, confirming martyrdom required an appointed, dedicated body to conduct more rigorous investigations among a larger body of witnesses. By the 10th Century, a declaration went further — a papal acclamation.

The status of Nicodemus’ sainthood falls into the earliest of processes. Scripture told the story. He was also likely martyred because, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, his relics were discovered along with those of Stephen, the first saint; Gamaliel (the revered teacher of St. Paul); and Saint Abibas (a son of Gamaliel). All four were declared martyrs.

The criteria for designating a 1st Century saint usually begin with martyrdom, followed by records of a personal association with Jesus and a courageous act in defense of Jesus, the Church, or the apostolic community. In a sense, Nicodemus qualified for all four.

Besides being Jesus' debating partner during a nighttime escapade (John 3:1-21), Nicodemus defended Jesus at the Sanhedrin (John 7:50-52). Most lovely, however, was his assistance with Saint Joseph of Arimathea at the preparation of Jesus’ body in Joseph’s tomb (John 19:38-42).

Nicodemus has been honored in poetry, artwork, and tales over two millennia. He’s been portrayed in movies, Christian television series, and on the radio.

A website called Saint for a Minute describes Nicodemus’ impact. “While he does not have a specific patronage assigned to him, his life serves as an inspiration to all who seek to follow Christ faithfully and boldly. Saint Nicodemus’ story is one of courage, faith, and a willingness to stand up for what is right. His secret discipleship, nocturnal meetings with Jesus, and defense of Christ’s rights showcase his unwavering commitment to the truth. May Saint Nicodemus inspire us to be bold in our faith and unyielding in our pursuit of justice.”

Leave a comment

Why didn’t Jesus come as the King of the world among a powerful nation, and an exceptional throng of people that could influence a worldly empire, instead of riding upon a donkey? Perhaps the plan was to evolve differently, but the tribal people of God’s choosing weren’t up to that more expected, international, and glorious setting. The sorry story of a failed people and the violent death of their Messiah, though, sets up the background for what happened next. Death has been conquered.

Tuesday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time
Numbers 21:4-9
John 8:21-30

Why does scripture present us with God as Jesus, the Christ? An all-powerful and mighty God, a Father of us all, who made the universe and everything in it, isn’t enough? It’s logical, too, that the Spirit of God travels through the wind and whispers into our ears all that the Father wants us to do and accomplish. Isn’t that enough?

As odd as it is, no, that’s not enough.

It’s not so much that something is wrong with the reality of a God who created everything and lives with us all in his Spirit. God wants more than recognition. He wants to be among us in the flesh, to live and die as we do — humiliated, ravaged in age or some other horror. He wasn’t a contrived revelation or a creative addition to the universe. He is the true holy manifestation, a materialized person of the Father and the Holy Spirit who pre-existed creation itself.

The cosmic divinity of God is above my pay grade. Let’s just land on this: God decided all along (or, whatever you call “before time”) that he wanted to be one of us, among us, as shepherd, kin, king, victim, and redeemer.

“The one who sent me is with me.
He has not left me alone,
because I always do what is pleasing to him.”

God the Father and the Holy Spirit didn’t tack on a holy human trope, a puppet to delight us. This Jesus is an essential, existential character of God, tied to the sails of the Holy Spirit, and the engine of the Father, as a ship on wild waters. (Metaphors are less logical the more you review them.)

Jesus is our human and divine Lord. We must believe and follow a flesh and bones being like us, not for a season, a term, or an age, but for all eternity.

Not to skip over the fact that this reality came from the words and teaching of Jesus. It’s important to show the receipts, credentials, and provenance of this Trinitatian God. He clearly defined the person of God as Father, and the Spirit of God as Holy. No one else told us this, based on human calculations and concoctions. It sounds silly to attribute this to a notion made up by Moses or St. Paul, two fellas from over town.

In addition, the earthly manifestations of God had already been revealed in pillars of fire and cloud, a burning bush, and in incredible displays of warfare and miraculous rescues. Angels, too, announced God’s presence. They weren’t aliens from another planet, but “pre-time” (a waffly dating) creatures. God also spoke to prophets and called himself “I Am.”

From the earliest records of the Hebrew scriptures, the Messiah, the Christ, was foretold. But the shocking reality that Jesus was among the singular God, revealed in a trinity of persons, was not articulated until Christ himself claimed, “I am.” Until he said it, no one knew the assurance of Jesus’ divinity.

“When you lift up the Son of Man,
then you will realize that I AM …”

Unlike the God of fire and cloud, whose voice dropped people to their knees, spread the waters to free people, and drowned armies, Jesus healed outcasts and cured peasants. Unlike his Holy Spirit, who touched every living thing not just over the eons and around the globe, but throughout the universe, this Jesus bar Joseph led a regionally bounded and lackluster life growing up as a carpenter’s stepson. After 30 years of an ignominious existence, Jesus revealed his divinity and asserted his Lordship by spending a mere three years on a mission with a blue-collar band of unexceptional people in a place the size of a few Colorado counties.

This Jesus amazed and rankled a tiny portion of one tiny planet among bazzilions (innumerable billions) of interstellar environs. Basically, a place the size of a molecule on a gnat’s whisker. Jesus Christ ruffled the religious leaders of an odd-looking, ritual-obsessed, and politically and militarily failed small community of tribal origin. He didn’t conquer Rome. He was conquered and killed by an annoying, unruly people who no longer had land of their own, and their leaders had severely restricted powers.

The Jews were the conquered remnant of a dozen nomadic tribes. An unfortunate disintegration of the wealthiest ruler in ancient history, to be fair, but a testament to Jesus’ divine arrival among a weakened people held under the thumb of two pompous overlords — the Pharisees and the Romans.

Jesus’ interactions and miraculous activities took place under an unimportant umbrella in a concealed corner of one empire. During his lifetime, his efforts intrigued only a couple of local Roman officials curious about his parochial celebrity. Without much consideration and less legal weight, the local Roman landlords acquiesced to unreasonable clerics and a protesting horde of their supporters. They crucified Jesus like a common criminal, mocked as a King of not just Jews, but also the Romans and Greeks. His murder was assumed to be another annoying and forgotten execution.

Why didn’t Jesus come as the King of the world among a powerful nation, and an exceptional throng of people that could influence a worldly empire, instead of riding upon a donkey? The plan was meant to evolve differently, but the tribal people of God’s choosing weren’t up to the task. This story of a people of history selected to be the beacon of the God of the universe tells us they were unprepared to convince anyone that Jesus was the Lord of the universe or that he sat upon a throne as the second person of the Holy Trinity. The sorry tale of a failed people and the violent death of their Messiah, though, sets up the background for what happened next.

Because he was God, assisted in both influence and indwelling by the Holy Spirit, Jesus placed himself, as we should be, under the guidance and order of the Father. He did this with a dramatic and epic reveal.

Jesus then rose from the dead. Resurrection is our future.

His prophecy and promise during his missionary life came to fulfillment. This is all that matters to a world of evidentiary truth. Show me that this man is Lord, say the interpreters of history, and ardent study with the gift of faith will do just that.

To rise from the dead as a resurrected being with capabilities and powers that astound science stamps a divine seal on the conqueror of death. The risen Jesus countermands a decaying premise of creation’s design. Jesus turned upside down, or rather upside right, the foundation of creation. He rose so that everyone, for all time, will have a marker that distinguishes Jesus from any other man by exposing a better eventuality.

The original and only logical expectation of a holy creator is that all creation will have eternal life. To deny that, in the face of Jesus’ revolutionary exclamation of life forever under his tutelage, relegates us to a doomed, deadly end, left with eternal existence, but without the feasting and beatific vision.

“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Romans 10:9

The simple truth of Jesus as Lord, shown in the dusty countryside of Jerusalem, is told today in the same parochial and insignificant fashion. We humans, in our leadership and worldview, remain a failed partner with Jesus, the Father of us all, and the Holy Spirit who yearns to live in us.

Regardless of the concentration upon the glorious Vatican compound and the remarkable cathedrals that dot every city on the globe, the truth of Jesus as Lord, as the risen Son of God, is primarily told on the streets, in the neighborhoods, on automobile bumpers, and in the common gathering places of the world. The vast majority of Christian testimony takes place beneath and outside the pantheons of government councils, executive boardrooms, and mansions of the wealthy.

And still, the testimony powerfully transforms the population.

We bless our meals in the name of the God who lives, offering up our thanks to “Christ our Lord, Amen.” We discuss our families and mention the ones that are sick, upset, lost, anxious, and maybe dying. We casually and sincerely add all these people to our prayers, mouthing “We pray to the Lord” and “Lord hear our prayer,” while we drink coffee and tea and enjoy each other’s company.

We are witnesses, testifying among each other, and in public. “No one who believes in him will be put to shame.” In almost all such cases of shared faith, restaurant managers and serving staff, others around us on the beach, and those who hear us on the subway, all bow their hearts, encouraging us to be faithful.

Our thinking and attention must be formed and focused toward a singular relationship to one man, scripture tells us. We gather in faith, hold hands in prayer, and object to Jesus' insults by changing the reception on our radios, the channels on our televisions, and the images on our phones. The airwaves and digital spaces offer plenty of faithful options and opportunities. We have even chosen to teach our children at home when no other choices exist. The effect of eternal life is unstoppable.

So, many of us wear crosses to remind us, some attached to rosaries, and others hanging from our rear-view mirrors. Our churches display the cross of the man, and we enter in packs and droves to make our statement with our feet. Our churches are everywhere, whether common in their space or glorious in their steeples.

While many of us may struggle to grasp that an all-powerful and loving God exists, the seemingly complicated story of an obscure birth, life, and death has morphed into a perfectly good notion of the almighty that has crashed through the barrier of the invisible. We shake each other’s hands at our services and claim the Spirit’s urging. “Christ be with you.”

When someone curses, “Jesus Christ,” we murmur the added words and finish their sentence with, “is Lord.” When we see old friends, and they exclaim their shock at seeing us, “Jesus Christ, it’s you!” We answer, “No. It’s just me, John. But thanks for seeing him in me.”

God insists that the basis for everything we should believe rests on this single, central, recurring statement: Jesus is Lord. He’s the Lord of me, he’s the Lord of all. Lordy, Lordy, Lordy.

We are told that at the core of our being, in our heart, our acceptance must be resolute and confident enough to confess that belief out loud, and the simplest expressions are the ones that course through society where two or three are gathered.

We do this because “Their voice has gone forth to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.”

(Oh, and Jesus is returning, likely in the international and glorious visage that we think is more appropriate. However, the “how” will be just as unexpected.)

[A rewrite of my OMG reflection from 11-30-16]

Leave a comment

We each have one sin that tortures us, insisting upon constant repentance. Most of us have more than one, doomed under a Gatlin gun of sorrows. We cower and hide, paranoid, unable to request, yet again, a worn-out “forgive me.” How do you put up with us, God? It must be the combined power of a trinity. “I want to smote him,” says one. “I’ve got this,” says another. “Good,” says the third person. “I tried everything in my power, and I’m moving on.”

Tuesday of the Third Week of Lent
Daniel 3:25, 34-43
Matthew 18:21-35

Forgiveness begins with sin. Without sin, forgiveness is moot. But not to worry. Sin is rampant, so forgiveness need always be handy. We should keep a storeroom full of forgiveness for others. They’ll need shelves of it for us.

Sin and forgiveness do not get wiped away, except in the eyes of God. Transgressions vibrate longer than the ring of one bell. Sins are not moments that pass. We call upon forgiveness for each sin over and over again because one sin can be decades-long, flashing in an unending stream of reruns. Sin after sin plays on all our channels at once, ad nauseam, in unrelenting, obnoxious cycles.

Confession works. It washes. But our memories grieve us.

We each have one sin that tortures us, insisting upon constant repentance. Most of us have more than one, doomed under a Gatlin gun of sorrows. We cower and hide, paranoid, unable to request, yet again, a worn-out “forgive me.” Forgiveness from those we love has a limit. We can see it in their eyes. 70 times 7 passed by long ago. God’s admonition to forgive seems absurd for them to do, but absolutely necessary for us to hope for. What must our family members think of us? I cannot forget. How can they? How pathetic we all are. How does God do it?

Thankfully and unfortunately, we are not alone. For every snowball of sin we throw, we get seven back in retaliatory clusters. After we brush ourselves off, we yell “I forgive you” to a host of people whom we don’t even know, while the one we hit lies comatose. We whisper to God and cry for mercy.

The daily infractions we encounter and cause can number in the dozens, dating back to when we were just teenagers. Sure, we’ve forgotten most of our sins. That’s frightening enough, considering the volumes of sins we can’t forget. Several times a day, many of us shudder and weep.

We all know the knucklehead who repeatedly offends. It is often us. Seventy times seven forgivenesses come to 490 for each repeated sinful act, per person. They struggle to embrace us at some point. We know more than one knucklehead like ourselves. We seldom remember to forgive them, an act required thousands of times a year. And that’s just for the crap that happens to us. How about the indecencies and calumnies we caused, that we pray have been forgiven?

Dear Lord, what a mess.

Science estimates that we blink 30,000 times a day. The older we get, the more forgiving acts (from us and to us) must reach saturation. Our blinking will come awfully close to the times we are forgiving folks and being forgiven. Cussing will surely be involved. The sinning-and-forgiving continuum, where sparks are flying, could fuel entire planets.

We also breathe nearly 30,000 times a day. Those are similarly daunting numbers. The sinful cadence of our lives catches our breath more often than physical exertion. Literally. If we’re not careful, we’ll stop breathing.

Sins are a tricky thing to compile because we humans have a propensity to find a sinful adventure in just about everything we do. Different sins seem to require different provisions of forgiveness. Some are easier to forgive than others.

Proverbs tells us about the incalculable breadth of sinful stuff we can accomplish, but in one stretch of verses, the author highlights the worst of the worst. In true biblical form, God specifically hates seven things. I’ve thought other things were worse, since I’ve practiced most of these for 70 years. We are doomed.

“These six things the Lord hates, yes, seven are an abomination to Him:
A proud look,
a lying tongue,
hands that shed innocent blood,
A heart that devises wicked plans,
feet that are swift in running to evil,
A false witness who speaks lies,
and one who sows discord among brethren.”
(Proverbs 6:16-19)

How do you put up with us, God? It must be the combined power of a trinity. “I want to smote him,” says one. “I’ve got this,” says another. “Good,” says the third person. “I tried everything in my power, and I’m moving on.”

God’s forgiveness through Jesus’ life hints at how we should forgive. We would be wise to consider his example. The sins that God hates require immense forgiveness. Judas pulled off almost all of these sins against Jesus by himself. Though forgiveness was within his reach, it apparently never reached his closed heart. When he took his last breath, eviscerated and hanged at his own hand, he refused God’s power to restore him. Our refusal to face the music, choosing self-harm instead, sadly mirrors Judas’s stubborn rejection. “Alas, Judas. I know him well.”

We know the great lengths to which God went to establish permanent forgiveness for our egregious sins. His vocal command would be enough, we think, but he chose dying on the cross, took a dreaded gurney ride into hell, and then rose from the dead to a shocked, unbelieving retinue of the very folks who needed his forgiving self.

Pope Gregory I, who served the church at the beginning of the 7th century, catalogued seven “deadly” sins, or infractions that can block the redemptive forgiveness of Jesus altogether. As with Judas’ self-destruction, the list matches the Proverb list. The deadly sins of pride, greed, lust, wrath, gluttony, envy, and sloth fall away under God’s forgiveness. Who among us wouldn’t provide the necessary participatory remorse? Forgiveness expects a plea for mercy. We plead 70 times 7.

It all sounds quite complicated. We’re tied up like pretzels in the cycle of these things. We return to the washing machine like dirty clothes, get cleaned up, only to be immediately dirtied again. And just like our dirty hair, we have to wash, rinse, and repeat this exhausting theatre for the rest of our lives!

Gregory offers some help for all awful and dreadful sins. To delay our normally quick return to the laundry room, Gregory implemented countermeasures. These are activities of the heart that help us to stall our activities of the flesh — faith, hope, charity, justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude — the seven virtues. They counteract the deadly sins. The virtues appear at first to be acts of forgiveness but are better defined as acts of love. The proper grasp of forgiveness is to understand that to forgive means to love.

We bow to God’s mercy. We accept God’s grace, get washed again in the confessional, and in our socially available acts of repentance. And then, we love.

We most likely express our love as faith, hope, charity, justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude, but we practice love in waves of blinking and breathing. These are the autonomic parts of our lives. Although they occur automatically, we can exercise them manually. We can manually inhale/exhale and stare/blink, an exercise that trains us to refrain when we can, and repent when we can’t.

Blinking and breathing 30,000 times a day constitute the proper amount and actions of our love for each other. They fulfill the countermeasure to 30,000 acts of sin, forgive everyone we encounter, and meet our necessary pleas for mercy.

Consider that closing our eyelids expresses our remorse. The opening of our eyes extends our plea for mercy. In the breaths we take, we inhale our forgiveness, and our exhales mete out God’s mercy for all to share.

Set aside the compilations, calculations, considerations, and conundrums of chaotic causality. It’s an unnecessary exercise of probable futility.

All we have to do is blink and breathe. Just blink and breathe.

[A rewrite of my OMG reflection from 8-11-16]

Leave a comment

Further study will help us go deeper into the Our Father prayer, a pure, rich, and divine treasure for Christians. Catholic theologians organize the Our Father into seven petitions, following the opening phrase — Our Father — which recognizes us in the presence of God as the Father of all. That’s the proper position to take in all prayer. “Our Father.” He is our protector and our intimate guide.

Tuesday of the First Week of Lent
Isaiah 55:10-11
Matthew 6:7-15

A huge part of the Our Father prayer is the protection of our souls from evil. Our bodies will be crushed and ultimately destroyed. But our souls, our spiritual natures, will remain forever.1 Jesus structures this prayer of petitions for our salvation. But this prayer is not for us alone, as if we were singular planets in the universe. No. We are members, relational beings, tied to a world of both animate and inanimate beings. And God wants to protect us.

We find our membership in the Body of Christ, gathered by the Holy Spirit into the Holy Catholic Church, and bound up — if we are willing — into the Communion of Saints at the behest of the Father. We call upon the Father in this Our Father prayer, but it is given to us by the Son, and prayed at the prodding of the indwelling Holy Spirit. The entire purpose and urgency for creation is embodied in this one, short prayer.

There are two general controversies in the wording of the prayer, both at its finishing phrases. First, there is a historical translation debate (well, not really a debate) over “temptation” and “final test.” Second, is a doxology added on — “For yours is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever, Amen.”

The “sort of” debate addresses the traditional, “and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” with which we are all familiar. However, this prayer in Matthew ends in many translations with, “and do not subject us to the final test, but deliver us from the evil one.” Hear that one more time: “and do not subject us to the final test, but deliver us from the evil one.” That is an entirely authentic ending to the Our Father, by the way. It’s not a mistake in scripture translation nor a confusion about what Jesus taught.

In essence, there are two endings.

This is an apologist’s delight. God allows such things to happen, cementing the details to reveal slight differences in his intent. He does this to further study, but also to draw us into the contrasts of what seems like a multi-headed truth, but is really two (or many more) perspectives on the same theme. Roll these over in your head. “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” plus “and do not subject us to the final test, but deliver us from the evil one.”

The two phrases sound at first blush like the same thing, but “final test” is a rather disconcerting phraseology from “into temptation.” Also, “evil one,” or Satan, is quite specific from the fiery, general category of “evil.”

“Final test” in Jesus’ day could refer to the end times, and may just as well refer to saving us from our slow descent into partnership with evil.

I like the scholars’ and apologists' teaching on Matthew’s Chapter [6:13] “final test” wording, especially the folks who worked on the New American Bible Revised Edition (NABRE). These heady folks refer us to John Chapter 17:15, and 2 Thessalonians 3:3. The gist of these two scriptural references balances two dictums about God. “The Lord is faithful; he will strengthen you and guard you from the evil one.” His faithfulness is where we must place our trust. God’s faithfulness follows us through the broken world, strengthening and guarding us. Which means, we remain in a broken world.

In John 17:15-17, the apostle John captures a dialogue, a prayer from Jesus to the Father. “I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world. Consecrate them in the truth. Your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world.”

The more traditional words of the ending Our Father petition — “and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” — might miss the more pointed trajectory of Jesus’ emphasis on living with temptation by relying upon God’s protection of our souls. That is, we may interpret God as leading us into temptation, and we plead with him to change his mind. Rather, God allows us to be tempted, certainly, but his warnings, if we are in synch with the Holy Spirit, Jesus’ teachings, and the Father’s love, will win out.

One theologian describes the understanding of temptation that the Our Father intends. Peter, following Jesus as he was carried off by the Roman soldiers, is an example of our intimate relationship with God as we encounter evil. Rather than stand outside with the rest of the disciples, away from prying eyes, Peter entered the gate, sat with the guards, and put himself in danger. He went to “see.” Jesus had already warned the disciples, specifically after Judas had betrayed him. “Do you think that I cannot call upon my Father and he will not provide me at this moment with more than twelve legions of angels?”

Peter was confronted by the guards’ friends and succumbed to fear, denying Jesus three times. He had no business being there, but did not listen. Still, Peter was restored.

You might be familiar with the phrase, “fools rush in.” That was Peter. (That is us.) The full proverb, “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” is from Alexander Pope’s 1711 work An Essay on Criticism. We do not need to go where God warns us not to go. Of course, when we are “taken” where we do not want to go, he will give us the courage and words. Peter was warned that he would betray Jesus, that he would fall prey to a temptation, a hubris of his rank and power, and that he would misunderstand what Jesus was doing.

“As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world.” There is an important distinction between our curiosity and impulses, and being sent into the world by Jesus. Peter acted on his impulses. Temptation is often seen too simply, as a clear choice between good and bad. Au contraire.

Further study will help us go deeper into the Our Father prayer, a pure, rich, and divine treasure for Christians. Catholic theologians organize the Our Father into seven petitions, following the opening phrase — Our Father — which recognizes us in the presence of God as the Father of all. That’s the proper position to take in all prayer. “Our Father.”

The Catholic Catechism aligns the prayer and the seven petitions into two major sections. “The first series of petitions carries us toward him, for his own sake: thy name, thy kingdom, thy will!” See the repeated pronouns — thy, thy, and thy. The second set of 4 petitions focuses on us, us, us, and us. “In none of the three petitions do we mention ourselves …” (Part 4, Article 3). In the last four, we are the focus.

The first three:

1. Hallowed be Thy name — We give God praise to strengthen our faith.

2. Thy kingdom come — We have hope, shown in our desire for God’s reign in the world.

3. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven — We accept God’s divine will over our will.

   The second series of petitions (4-7) offers up our expectations with four intercessory verbs: “give us … forgive us … lead us not … deliver us …”

4. Give us this day our daily bread

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

6. Lead us not into temptation

7. Deliver us from evil.

The catechism tells us, “the fourth and fifth petitions concern our life as such — to be fed and to be healed of sin; the last two concern our battle for the victory of life — that battle of prayer.”

The Catechism then summarizes all the petitions, saying, “By the three first petitions, we are strengthened in faith, filled with hope, and set aflame by charity.” Our pleas admit we are creatures and sinners. In the last four, Jesus instructs to petition for “us.” We are not alone, but as the Catechism submits, “bound by the world and history, which we offer to the boundless love of God.”

To see these petitions, and their deep wells of meaning and supplication, the repetitive nature of prayer makes sense. We instill not just the words into our minds and hearts, but we also ingest them. God works them into our spiritual marrow, tying us to him like cars on a train or creatures no longer needing a leash.

One last issue left to the Our Father is the doxology “For yours is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever, Amen.” These words are not in the original text of Matthew. Several non-Catholic translations tack the words at the end, but most identify them as “amplified” and “extended” phraseology. Their reasons are sound.

For centuries, and even millennia, doxologies, or exalting the glory of God, have been used at the conclusion of prayers. It was very common in Jesus’ time. The Didache, likely the first catechism, dating to the 1st Century, hinted at this very doxology. In the 5th and 6th Centuries, St. Jerome and Gregory the Great both included a doxology at the end of the Our Father.

The English version, our current doxology, dates to 1525, when King Henry VIII of England was still a Catholic. It’s falsely framed as a compromise between Catholics and Protestants, though a part of that politically was surely in the minds of both religious expressions. You’ll find the addition of the doxology improperly used for two reasons: as a cudgel and a peace pipe.

Instead, the added doxology reveals the Church's prerogative and should not be a political or misguided liturgical tool. We pray as a Church, rightly incorporating the ancient Jewish faith and adopting the wisdom of the saints into our spiritual language.

In a lovely way, the doxology used by the Protestant and Evangelical communities reflects the broad nature of the larger Church and the savvy willingness of our Catholic scholars and stewards of the faith to recognize the Holy Spirit's influence.

Leave a comment

The call for his apostles to be fishers of men was Jesus’ central metaphor, rather than riffing on accountants, lawyers, carpenters, or well diggers. He could have come up with a great analogy for a baker of bread (nothing great comes to mind), but he chose men of boats instead. Jesus used boats and sandals like anyone else, and he morphed into God from within the same reality as us. It confirms to us that his promise to return and resurrect us is assured.

Tuesday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time
James 1:12-18
Mark 8:14-21

I had to rewrite my reflection this week after reading Ron Bruni and Steve Hall’s articles. Good on them. They’ve chewed on two of the most difficult top-of-mind theological conundrums in our Catholic faith — why does God allow trials, and what does God really have in mind for us in the next life? Heady, personal, and well-explained studies on their part. Bread and trials are covered. I ash-canned my less worthy work.

Instead, I went aquatic and dredged up a seemingly inconsequential but curious issue— why does Jesus wade through so many encounters with the apostles on boats?

He preached to his initial circle of disciples for the first time from a boat just off the shore. Next, he performed his famous “that’s too many fish!” miracle off the side of Peter, James, and John’s fishing boat. A year or two later, he wandered about, walking on the sea — apparently as Jesus is wont to do — and climbed into the apostles’ boat when they panicked in a storm. He rescued Peter, who attempted to defy physics, and helped him get back into a boat. On, it seems, a separate occassion he slept in a boat while they panicked again, and Jesus yawned and calmed the seas. He ran from the crowds at one side of the Sea of Galilee to the other, specifically not on the boat that they all took, and they wondered how he did it. In Tuesday’s gospel in Mark, Jesus used their lack of food supplies as a reminder of who he was — yes, on a boat.

One might argue, citing Jesus’ various opportunities to teach, that boats are yesteryear’s buses, airliners, space ships, trains, and minivans. That’s too easy. It’s likely true, but not the stuff of a potentially heady review of what God is up to.

Of course, there is Noah’s Ark bobbling about on the drenched earth. Jonah got tossed out of a boat before the giant fish swallowed him up. Paul’s journeys on two boat rides ended in crumpled wood and some apparent deaths. All are exciting venues of dramatic turns in the challenging events of human travel. Great adventures that keep us cleverly attentive to historic biblical tales.

Is it just that boats were a primary mode of travel from pre-Jesus through post-Jesus? Yes. That’s probably as deep and watery as it gets. He mostly walked everywhere else and may have only ridden a donkey that one time.

Granted, the call for his apostles to be fishers of men was Jesus’ central metaphor, rather than riffing on accountants, lawyers, carpenters, or well diggers. He could have come up with a great analogy for a baker of bread (nothing great comes to mind), but he chose men of boats instead.

Think about the natural/supernaturalness of it all, though. He had the capability to walk on water. We could say that’s no big deal, because he was God. He performed unbelievable and wholly impossible miracles, too. He wafted through an angry crowd set on tossing him off a cliff by divining invisibility or some other superhero trait. Was his unseen escape a precursor to the Flash, maybe?

No matter his methods, the amazing feats are a big deal. Jesus used boats and sandals like anyone else, and he morphed into God from within the same reality as us. He spoke like us, but his words exhibit wisdom, knowledge, and insights beyond the reach of any human. Can there be any question about who he was? How many mechanical and philosophical magic show explanations must we manufacture to hide the fact that Jesus was God in every way a human is not? All that, while being every bit a human being, just like us?

Even Jesus’ resurrection took place by exiting our broken human reality into the supernatural realm, rescuing millions from Hades, opening the gates of Heaven for them, and returning here, waving to his forlorn apostles (they were on a boat) and cooking up some fish. Now that’s some irreducible boldness of God being a fully hungry human while orchestrating cosmic Godly events.

Jesus firmly and intentionally awakened us to his divine capabilities because he wants us to know that the spiritual realm not only exists but pokes, lives, and thrives in our existence. He was tortured, killed, and buried. Then, ta da! His restored/raptured/illuminated rescue from death performs as no more unreal than walking on water and unwrapping a 4-day-old dead Lazarus. OK, it’s a lot more unreal, but Jesus used our same realm to reveal all three divine endeavors.

When Jesus returns in his glory, there will be trains, airplanes, rocket ships, wi-fi, and likely the common use of nuclear fusion. That is, if he waits another decade or so.

Jesus didn’t dismiss boats. He used them. He used plates and cups. Forks and thermoses came later, but I’m sure he’ll be scarfing up a meal in the future on a boat with both of them. What else would he do?

It’s an exciting, paranormal expectation we’re sure to see. Even we, in our transformed, resurrected, and immortal bodies, will be part of a whole new normal.

I think Jesus used boats just like he used clothing, carpentry tools, and language. It’s all practical proof, physical evidence that he was here, and it confirms for us that his promise to come back and resurrect us is assured. He’ll be waving at us, cooking up something that we’re familiar with — maybe on a cooking surface we’re most familiar with.

Are we hungry?

Leave a comment

Frank and Ralph are the most fascinating angels in all of creation. They have no shame, which you would expect, but since they’re bumping up against the rest of the angels, you’d think they would crumble from the disdain. I suspect that when you meet them, you’ll want to write a story about them, too.

Excerpt from Chapter One of Frank & Ralph: The retired Guardian Angels of Jesus

I was not short when I lived on earth in my Olmec tribe 500 years before Christ. At 5’2”, however, much of Heaven towers over me—especially the angels. They stand not as tall as they are and stare for long periods at invisible spiritual landscapes. I still have little idea what they are pondering.

Frank and Ralph, as angels do, pick a physical size for their human form but adjust their bodily presentation every few hundred years. Today, Ralph stands 6’3” and bends his back and shoulders forward, with his knees slightly bent and his left foot forward. No other angel that I know of does this. Akin to a boxer’s pre-fight stance, he carries his two overly hairy appendages at the ready, which he necessarily covers in long-sleeve shirts.

Since he began wearing cuffed, creased slacks in the 19th Century, Ralph has favored mahogany colors to match untucked red plaid shirts. He is not a trendsetter, but he likes it. He often grips his left pant’s pocket with his thumb, a stylistic bad-boy stance not far off the mark.

Ralph recently added staccato movements with his right hand as he talks. He emphasizes words with a tap of his right thumb, pinched with the pointer finger, making hard thrusts in midair. He has difficulty mastering affectations like this, annoying Frank in his persistent attempts to match human quirks with his cranky, angelic demeanor.

He believes his look is timeless, but said the same about the rough woolen red scarf he wore in the 15th Century, which clashed with his 5th Century sage gray robe and linen white outfit, both of which angels wore in the days after the Ascension. Timeless means anywhere from 500 to 1000 years.

“I blend well.”

“Of course you do,” said Frank. “Blending is your moniker.”

“That’s an intent, not a moniker,” I correct Frank. I am a linguist of average ability, and I often remark on their word choices. To humans, I am annoying. To Ralph and Frank, I’m helpful.

In truth, blending in is more of a hope than a reality for Ralph.

“Yes, of course, dear Ipomoea,” Frank told me. “Thank you for the clarification. Ralph intends, indubitably, to blend and wants dearly to do it well.”

“Oh, cut it out,” Ralph said, chopping his pinched fingers too late. I don’t think he’ll ever get the hang of it.

Frank’s clothing contrasts with Ralph’s, but not by much. Fashion sense escapes them both. Frank’s tastes accent a stretched height of 6’5”—sleek, regal, and distinguished. Just accents, to be precise. They’re not accomplishments.

Frank wears grays and beige common-man suits, nothing too posh, vaguely appropriate to every era’s standards. He prefers to fold his arms when he stands and sits, slowly crossing his legs one way and then the other. He favors a cupped pipe, a cigarette, a cigar … anything that produces long wisps of soft white smoke. He never inhales, which anyone can tell. He twirls his fingers when he’s not toying with some tobacco implement.

Their movements are wooden, self-conscious, stiff parodies of human sways and turns. However, in the extremes—delicate or brutal engagements—they’re remarkably adept.

Both have sported facial hair from their days with Jesus—Fu Manchu for Ralph and a European professor’s full beard for Frank. Depending on the company they keep or the country they inhabit, they can look like any race. I’ve advised them to be more consistent in their choice of nationality following a roiled exchange four hundred years ago. They entered a 17th-century German coffee shop dressed as Asians. A confusing outcry charged with curses of bigotry rushed them into the only empty seats smack dab in the middle of the establishment. Amid the noise, they decided to morph into something they thought would fit better, confusing everyone. Two rather tall, Mongolian-accented Asians in button-down shirts instantly became long-robed Nigerians. The crowd was silenced, frozen in shock. My dark-skinned bush-dressed friends stood up, dropped some coins on their chairs, and loped out of the shop muttering wasted apologies in the long-lost staccato of the African tongue (literally clicking of tongues) called Centúúm.

“I think the barman fainted,” Ralph told me. We’ve never been back there, for obvious reasons.

Ralph talks in common pithy phrases and loves the dialectical addle of the day. He held on to “Gimme a break” for over 70 years. Today, he says, “Oh, cut it out.” His timing is always clumsy.

Frank uses long words like “penultimate,” “absolutely,” and “exasperated.” “Indubitably” is new. Since they don’t fit into the angelic host network like everyday angels, my dear pals lack much of the smoothness of Spirit-filled beings. Their communication with other angels crackles, like that of humans when first facing God (except for St. Jerome, who exudes unrivaled confidence). Their memory banks are rather unorganized. Again, like us. It’s probably why the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit spend so much time with them—redirecting, prodding, and keeping them busy with duties the angelic hierarchy either ignores or purposely wants to avoid.

When walking in plazas, malls, or on any street, the three of us look like weirdly dressed actors taking an intermission break from a questionable Broadway play to catch a smoke and a coffee.

Frank and Ralph’s deployment as retired angels—an unprecedented full-time angelic assignment on earth—placed me with them. Since their deployment to earth soon after Jesus’ Ascension, and my subsequent recruitment of their help, I’ve spent as much time with them on earth as I do in the realm of Heaven.

More bulbous physically than they are, I habitually walk to their right holding a satchel of scribblings. Baseball caps, tennis shoes, and jeans have only recently replaced my preference for robes. Robes of all sorts have been found fashionable as masquerades for centuries. Because of our Spirit natures, if we’re too much of a distraction, we go invisible. We lose the smells, the beating of rain and sun, and the sharper colors, of course. So we don’t do that unless we simply must.

If you didn’t know, saints and angels share a similar state of invisibility on earth. We humans, when allowed through Heaven’s portal to the confines of creation, are what we are, but angels can portray any visage that suits their fancy.

Frank and Ralph are the most fascinating angels in all of creation. They have no shame, which you would expect, but since they’re bumping up against the rest of the angels, you’d think they would crumble from the disdain. I suspect that when you meet them, you’ll want to write a story about them, too.

Leave a comment

We tease the Pharisees about their poor grasp of Jesus’ divinity. How did they not see it? Consider, however, that the divine natures evident in Jesus rattled them to the core. A man cannot be God. This was their understanding, a foundational definition of who God must be, and who we are not.

Tuesday of the First Week in Ordinary Time
1 Samuel 1:9-20
Mark 1:21-28

When a point is made in scripture, especially when it is repeated, we Christians should pay attention. We should never allow ourselves to be “ho-hum” about emphatic teachings. One such statement shows up more than a dozen times — several times in every gospel and at least three times in other New Testament books.

“The people were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes” (Mark 1:22).

It’s almost too obvious to hear. Of course, if Jesus is God, then he’d be amazing. Ho-hum. Yet, the writers of the post-resurrection scriptures, over and over again, identify the shock at Jesus’ demonstration of the Spirit’s power, wisdom that could only come from God, and his divine miracles, healings, and raising folks from the dead.

Astounded folks are quoted so many times that we accept Jesus’ remarkable presence today on faith, a faith that translates into a common-sense-like ho-hum. But hear the surprise behind the words of those who encountered Jesus. Astonished Jews and Gentiles ask, “Where did this man get such wisdom and miraculous powers?” They are apoplectic, gobsmacked, and find everything about Jesus beyond understanding.

The many aspects of divinity we attribute to Jesus aren’t found in any other human beings. Of course, we say. Duh. However, consider the cumulative effect of his divinity and what that means.

Only a few knowledgeable scribes know the scriptures and ordinances of the law with uncommon skill. A holy prophet receives visions and insights that few can duplicate. The wisdom of a just and merciful king comes to a population with rarity. The channeling of God’s power in healings and raising people from the dead is even more rare. Miracles that manipulate the order of the universe emanate from God through the words of humans even less often.

Each of those categories, as awesome as they are, registers only a limited view of divine powers exhibited by Jesus, the Christ. They are icing on the cake, and do not cover the full range of Jesus’ capabilities, touching on only a few of the astonishing elements of divinity. “Where did this man get such wisdom and miraculous powers?” (Matthew 13:54).

We tease the Pharisees about their poor grasp of Jesus’ divinity. How did they not see it? Consider, however, that the divine natures evident in Jesus rattled them to the core. A man cannot be God. This was their understanding, a foundational definition of who God must be, and who we are not. Then Jesus tells them that “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth” (Matthew 28:18).

The religious leaders and legal minds of Israel knew the power of God. They had studied the testaments and learned the precepts handed to them, stewards of teachings from God. They sat in Moses’ seat. According to their calculations, the holiness of God was beyond human grasp.

Astonishment is the correct reaction. The Word was alive on scrolls they studied, yet Jesus claimed to be the Word made flesh. Their land, gifted to them, a chosen people, would disintegrate in order to convert the world, Jesus told them. The Temple would be torn down, demolished in 40 years, and the presence of God’s Spirit would instead live in Christ-followers. Leaders of a Gentile Church would form communities in lands they did not even know existed.

More importantly, further to astonish us, is what is coming next. Most likely, none of us will see the restoration of creation from our places here on earth. Even if our progeny should travel to other planets, they may not be here for the return of Jesus either. If they do, they will see the Son of God, partnered with the saints and angels, fly by them while the hosts repair the universe.

We will see all this, though, if we are willing to surrender to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ — from the mezzanine in Heaven when our life here has ended. Perhaps we’ll be among the restorative crew of saints?

At no point in our existence should “ho, hum” be appropriate. Our faith is one of constant astonishment, beyond the most amazing of imaginations.

Leave a comment

The young have new passions and are excited when the Spirit fills them. Their primary task is conquering the misdirections of the Evil One. This is the time to win this battle. It’s much harder if youth are poorly formed as adolescents and struggle to become God-fearing and holy men and women later in life.

The Sixth Day in the Octave of Christmas
1 John 2:12-17
Luke 2:36-40

John tells us we need to separate the love of the world, or the things of the world, from the love of God. It’s not a startling claim, but it does need some details, which John provides.

He separates the love of the world from the love of the Father, saying that if we love the world, the love of the Father is not in us. Let’s think about what it means — to love the world.

John is precise. He cites sensual lust, enticement for the eyes, and a pretentious life. These things are not from the Father. While these are obviously distractions from God and drive us toward immortality, the point John makes centers on their temporary nature. The things of the world — what he calls enticements — are passing away.

Focus on the world, and you get endorphin jolts, caffeine kicks, and a host of fading pleasure highs. Yet, whoever does the will of God remains forever. The world can’t offer anything but temporary pleasures.

The definition of pretentious is very telling, an excellent word used by the English translators of the NAB. Newer versions translate the Greek to “pride.” That’s a good word, too, but pretentious has more meat on it.

Pretentious means claiming, or behaving as if one is important or deserving of merit when such is not the case. Pretentious, by the way, is an adjective, and it’s not even a strong enough word to merit being called a noun. The noun is pretend, unfounded, or false. That’s so much deeper than mere pride, which focuses upon riches, honors, or pleasures.

To claim a greater excellence or importance than the truth warrants is to be pretentious, lifting our chins with faked distinction. To lay claim to more than is one’s own. That’s a fairly horrendous thought, something we laugh about when a child says it. “That’s mine,” a child would say. “You can’t have that.” “You don’t own me.”

John begins by saying, “I am writing to you children, because your sins have been forgiven for his name’s sake.” He then writes to the fathers, because they’ve known God from the beginning. And he spoke, then, to the young men, “because ye have conquered the Evil One.”

He repeats a message, then, to all three. So interesting. The children, because they know the Father. To the fathers, again, since they’ve known him since the beginning. And to the young men, encouraging them because they are strong and the word of God remains in them. They have conquered that Evil dude.

Commentators say that John recognizes the strength of youth as distinct from that of children and their fathers. Young men are envigorated, energized. We see that in sports. The young are the champions. John ties their youthful strength to the Holy Spirit. We see that in the youth movements, too. The young have new passions and are excited when the Spirit fills them. Their primary task is conquering the misdirections of the Evil One. I like how John places this essential growth path upon the young. This is the time to win this battle. It’s much harder if youth are poorly formed as adolescents and struggle to become God-fearing and holy men and women later in life.

Children are challenged in everything. They have to deal with making mistakes. They’re fragile if their fathers and mothers berate them for not knowing the right way to go. God forgives them, even if their parents do not. He tells them they can know the Father.

We know this because John says the fathers have known God from the beginning. It begins as a child, grows in the young, and remains in the adult. If they don’t follow this path, a pretentious life may fill that void.

So how does this fit into the gospel, which is about the prophetess, Anna? Luke slides by that word rather quickly — the prophetess Anna. I think of the women in our church. How many of them are prophetesses? How many of them are fortelling, whether they’re talking to an individual or to a group? We can identify true prophecy, I think, by the lack of pretentious behavior.

Anna was advanced in years. She was 84. She was a member of the rather unfamous tribe of Asher, the eighth son of Jacob, so one of the ten tribes. Asher appears to have been, throughout its history, fairly disconnected from the other tribes of Israel. Together with Reuben and Gad, Asher is one of the only tribes of which no person has ever been identified by name after the conquest, when the Hebrew nation was taken to Babylon. Asher and Gad are the only tribes not mentioned in the list of heads of tribes. This Asher connection harkens to God’s continual use of the lesser people, the poor, and those set aside.

John‘s letter speaks specifically to men. It’s interesting how the lectionary authors match this gospel about a woman. Anna was married and widowed after only seven years. She lived in the temple, fasting and praying. She basically lived there. A mix of legend and partially approved apparitions positions Anna as Mary's teacher, who also lived at the Temple. She already knew both Mary and Joseph when they visited the Temple.

Anna's entire life was a setup to announce the child Jesus when he was brought to the temple. She correctly grasped that purpose, giving thanks to God and speaking about the child, telling everyone who had been awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem, that here he is.

The parents, Mary and Joseph, had fulfilled all the prescriptions of the law of the Lord. They sacrificed doves, what they could afford, and they brought their child to the temple for the circumcision. All this to proclaim their love of God. When they had done that, they returned to Galilee to their home town of Nazareth, and the child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom, and the favor of God was upon him.

They had come into the city of Jerusalem, and they weren’t going back to Bethlehem, where the children were killed in Jesus‘s name. Instead, they went to the town of Nazareth, where he grew up. Jesus became strong, filled with wisdom in the Father's favor. The Holy Spirit was upon him. This is a summary of John’s messaging in his letter. A non-pretentious upbringing, exhibiting “whoever does the will of God remains forever.”

We’re not sure about the timeline of Bethlem, Egypt, and Nazareth from this scripture reading. But the connection between the first letter of John, speaking about growing in knowledge of the Father, does have a special meaning. We have known the Father since childhood. The devil challenges us in the extreme during our adolescence. And in our adulthood, we have a history of relationships with the one who made us, the one who lives in our hearts, and the one who joined us as human beings.

Leave a comment

Suddenly, the Lord whom we seek will come to dwell in us. The Holy Spirit is the messenger of the covenant we desire. We yearn for a community of faith, a gathering of faulty people accepting the friendship of God and the forgiveness of our sins. None of us is deserving, but all of us are sought after by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Advent
Malachi 3:1-4, 23-24
Luke 1:57-66

Thus says the Lord GOD:
Lo, I am sending my messenger
to prepare the way before me;
And suddenly there will come to the temple
the LORD whom you seek,
And the messenger of the covenant whom you desire. (Malachi 3:1)

This messenger prophesied by Malachi turned out to be John the Baptist. Malachi — which means “messenger” — is likely a nom de plume, a pseudonym for another author, perhaps Ezra, or a couple of scribes. Let’s stick with Malachi, since the biblical tradition does too.

The storyline of Malachi is well outlined by the USCC (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) in their introduction to the book of Malachi. The following explains a pattern we’ve seen many times in the Bible—an expected reply from God to societies gone awry.

God loves Israel (1:2–5), but the people return that love poorly. Taking advantage of the negligent attitude of the priests, they withhold tithes and sacrificial contributions (3:6–11) and cheat God by providing defective goods for sacrifice (1:6–14). People divorce their spouses and marry worshipers of other gods (2:10–16). Sorcerers, adulterers, perjurers, and people who take advantage of workers and the needy abound (3:5). Priests, who could strengthen discipline by their instruction, connive with the people, telling them what they want to hear (2:1–9). Underlying all this is a weary attitude, a cynical notion that nothing is to be gained by doing what God wants and that wrongdoers prosper (2:17; 3:14–15). God condemns the wrongdoing and the underlying attitude, issuing a challenge to immediate reform (3:10–12), but also announcing a general reckoning at a future moment (3:16–21).

“Sure,” you may be thinking. That also describes our times. We fit the faulted folks of Malachi’s period under the Persian overlords, 500 years before Christ. We don’t tithe, allow (and even celebrate) divorce, take advantage of workers and immigrants, abuse the needy for political or economic purposes, are counselled by sorcerers, and hail leaders who tell people what they want to hear. To be blunt, it’s a repeated refrain. We could similarly accuse the populations of every decade over the last 2,000 years.

Look closely, however, at that last phrase regarding God’s condemnation in the message given for Malachi to preach — but also announcing a general reckoning at a future moment (3:16–21).

Our minds go first to the good news, which is appropriate for dealing with God’s reckoning.

And suddenly there will come to the temple
the LORD whom you seek,
And the messenger of the covenant whom you desire.

Lots of marvelous stuff packed into that verse. The temple. The temple used to be the dwelling place, pinpointing the Lord’s presence in our realm. That changed at the splitting of the veil at Jesus’ crucifixion. Even before that, the temple of the Hebrew nation was destroyed forty years later, and the temple housing of the Lord became the Christ's followers.

The message is still valid. Suddenly, the Lord whom we seek will come to dwell in us. The Holy Spirit is the messenger of the covenant we desire. We yearn for a community of faith, a gathering of faulty people accepting the friendship of God and the forgiveness of our sins. None of us is deserving, but all of us are sought after by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

And now to the reckoning, the consequences of not accepting God’s friendship and dismissing the need for forgiveness.

We huddle together for that very reason. Someone among us calls out a reminder, repeating the message of God’s friendship and shared desire that we need him in every moment. “Do not be afraid,” we tell each other. “Let’s pray,” the courageous ones say.

The Temple drew people to God after he formed them in the desert to enter the promised land and fixed that holy place in Jerusalem. Now, God gathers the holy temple people in homes and churches worldwide. We await the reckoning with pleas for mercy for our nations. Some of us will go as martyrs, but all of us want our loved ones to join us.

Leave a comment

The sins of Christians look just like any other sin. We don’t necessarily appear to be retaliating against a holy relationship within the Body of Christ. When Christians sin, though, we join with the world. In a very real sense — a frightening recognition of our participation in evil — we too often prioritize our worldly relationships over our relationship with God.

Memorial of Saint Martin of Tours, Bishop
Wisdom 2:23-3:9
Luke 17:7-10

Christians recognize temptations for what they are, because we are sinners. Some of us have decades of experience. We realize, eventually, when we have fallen for that which we know is sin.

We are sons and daughters of God, brothers and sisters of Jesus, and temples of the Holy Spirit; we belong to God amid a throng of fellowship. A community that sins and then calls out for repentance. We need to repent because we’re sinners. Rotten fruit can look good to eat until you examine it.

Aligning with God’s wisdom comes with greater discipline than aligning with other wisdoms. We know we are “made” perfect. Except for a few rare individuals, we are not made perfect here. God’s will and direction for us provides great delight and spiritual comfort. Still, we sin.

God formed man to be imperishable;
the image of his own nature he made them.
But by the envy of the Devil, death entered the world,
and they who are in his possession experience it.

Other people operate from a different foundation of faith. Our citizenry to God is not the same as our citizenry to country, to religion, and/or to some other global entity. Christians step into a holy relationship, extremely personal to God and attached to the fellowship of believers. Our religion is the gathering of us, not some behaviour modification. Ours also is not just a legal contract, a ritualistic process, or a philosophy. Christians are deeply and eternally bound to God.

As gold in the furnace, he proved them, and as sacrificial offerings he took them to himself.

The sins of Christians look just like any other sin. We don’t necessarily appear to be retaliating against a holy relationship within the Body of Christ. When Christians sin, though, we join with the world. In a very real sense — a frightening recognition of our participation in evil — we too often prioritize our worldly relationships over our relationship with God.

Bondage to Christ means to turn our lives over to Him. We bind up our will to his will. It’s quite a complicated thing, in reality, but the gist of the decision means that we believe God’s will is the better thing. We turn back to him more immediately as we grow in faith. We choose to follow God’s leading, and not our own.

The “more immediately” notion is telling. We hope to progress in our faith as God molds us. That means we’re likely not aware of much of the sinfulness that needs attention until it rises to the top of our minds. We work on ourselves with a steady sense of frustration, constantly relieved that God loves us anyway.

A lot is involved there, obviously, like hearing God’s voice, agreeing to belong to a loving community of faith that isn’t always so loving (mainly because its members are like us), and trusting that God will repair and restore everything.

We can argue, and we do, that some of the sinful behaviors condemned by our faith are “not black and white.” For instance, one argument says that compassion is more important than a strict rule, which is a poor framing of the exercise of compassion. Compassion applies comfort to the consequences of evil’s damage. It does not condone evil. It addresses the victim’s circumstance with love.

Some call condoning a minor infraction a slippery slope, when it’s simply a poor application of attending to someone’s pain.

Several believers waffle on the sin of divorce or plead that we allow active homosexual partnerships. Even more believe that abortion is a valid option for pregnant mothers. The proper assignment of categorizing a faulty marriage (annulment) aside, repentance calls for reparation when possible. When impossible, the sin lives, but the sinner is cleansed. The sin of sexual relationships outside of marriage is not solved by pasting a marriage certificate on a sinful union, or sticking a new certificate on top of one we already signed up to live. And to complete the notion of misplaced compassion, aborting a human being is never logical, even if one thinks that mercy allows it.

The issues of sin aren’t addressed by changing the parameters of sin, but by restoring the sinner. In fact, the more egregious our sin, the closer to God we become when we condemn the sin and live a new life in Jesus.

That’s because the closer one sits at Jesus’ feet and listens to the Holy Spirit, the more one tends to agree with the Church’s identification of holiness and sin. Life seems complicated no matter which way you go, but after you take a bite out of unexamined rotten fruit, the yoke of Jesus is the lighter burden.

Whoever loves me will keep my word,
and my Father will love him,
and we will come to him.

Leave a comment

Yes, the loss of Jocelyn remains raw. I see much of life through a different lens since she shuffled off this mortal coil. Death will do that to the living. I hear the daily readings with a mind’s eye upon memories of her life. I am told this is how grief works its way. Memories of my lost friends and other family members appear in scripture constantly. It’s both lovely and painful.

Memorial of Saint Charles Borromeo, Bishop
Romans 12:5-16ab
Luke 14:15-24

I’m not sure anyone in the family has made, or even imagined, the connection between our late daughter Jocelyn and St. Charles Borromeo. I didn’t see it until today.

Jocelyn died on June 23, 2024. She was born on November 4, 1977. Nov. 4, today, is the feast day for Charles. Charles died on November 3, 1584, at the age of 46. The Church selected November 4 as his feast day. Jocelyn was 46 when she died.

Feast day for Charles and now our Jocelyn, both dead at 46.

It’s a coincidental connection, at best, I suppose. Jocelyn, though, likely checked on this fella, looking up the saint’s feast on her birthday. She was fascinated with these kinds of details. Borromeo and Jocelyn were the older ones in families with six children. Besides being a theology nerd, like Charles, the comparisons with Jocelyn probably stop there.

However, the two share an uncommon character trait. Borromeo was a severe man and an eventual heavy-handed archbishop. It doesn’t sound good, but the biographical details reveal the necessary courage and stability that come with the leadership gene. The priest-cum-bishop was an uncompromising leader, which at the time was of great benefit to the Catholic Church. Without his determination, the Church would have been overrun.

Jocelyn possessed this uncompromising character trait as well, although her heavy hand dealt less with Borromeo’s worrisome wars and terrorism and more with the fundamentals of right and wrong—a welcome check and balance feature in a family.

Fueled by Charles’s similar stance on ethical issues, Jocelyn held the unapologetic reins of authority over her five younger siblings. Both of these heaven-sent souls were loved for that kind of leadership. She was frustrated at times with those outside of her control, but respectfully appreciative (though dismissive of those who should know better). God gave her a remarkable conviction. In her inner circle, her children and husband were protected fiercely.

Charles fell ill with “intermittent fever and ague,” and died from an unidentified disease, according to his biography in Lives of the Saints. Jocelyn was taken out by cancer, recorded only in family epitaphs.

The laundry list of seven gifts in Romans 5, which Paul then associates each with their subsequent responsibilities, reminds me of Jocelyn. She possessed the gifts of hospitality, ministry, zeal, sincerity, and hope, and had a deep affinity for the lowly. She graced many family and friends with them. However, the gift of “teacher” eluded her. Teaching took more patience than she was given. “That I cannot do,” she once said with emphasis. “Six out of seven isn’t bad,” she might have commented. (Or, maybe that’s just me.)

I am also reminded of Jocelyn in watching Jesus’ orchestration at the meal with the elite from Jewish high society, as told in today’s Gospel from Luke. The way Jesus handled their stuffiness and arrogance fit our daughter and sister, Jocelyn, to a “T.”

“But they were unable to answer his question,” wrote Luke about Jesus’ responses to the haughty Jews who foolishly tested him. Our Jocelyn had the same knack for rhetoric. Parables would not have been a tool for her, but the blunt truth she could deliver.

Yes, the loss of Jocelyn remains raw. I see much of life through a different lens since she shuffled off this mortal coil. Death will do that to the living. I hear the daily readings with a mind’s eye upon memories of her life. I am told this is how grief works its way. Memories of my lost friends and other family members appear in scripture constantly. It’s both lovely and painful.

I like to think of this communion with the dead as akin to the Father’s love and mercy. It’s essential to strive for what we yearn for — reuniting with those we've lost by praying for them and honoring their memory. We barely meet the basic requirements of love here, and so depend mightily upon his mercy. That’s why Jesus took every broken trust, angry word, and heinous intention upon himself. He brought the ancient dead to Heaven by claiming them as righteous, for goodness’ sake.

Paul knew from our failures what we must do:

Let love be sincere;
hate what is evil,
hold on to what is good;
love one another with mutual affection;
anticipate one another in showing honor.

Jocelyn mirrored well God’s purpose for graced gifts, though like many of us, she didn’t realize that fully, until now, gazing upon the source of all good, the model of mutual affection, and the epitome of honor. Her view of the beatific vision of God at this moment is one we can hardly imagine.

In the meantime, until we join our loved ones in that gaze, we want to do the right thing. Let us, “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.”

Leave a comment

Imagine that the Paradise God carved out of the universe, as it was blockaded from all of creation, now unhinged and out of order, as a kind of cornerstone in the restoration of the heavens and earth coming in the next age. Our imaginations are a playground for God, if we accept his boundaries, that is.

Tuesday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time
Romans 5:12, 15, 17-19, 20-21
Luke 12:35-38

For just as through the disobedience of one man
the many were made sinners,
so, through the obedience of the one
the many will be made righteous. (Romans 5:19)

Angst over an original Adam and Eve, bouncing between myth and reality, metaphor and literal truth, distracts us from the relationship between man and God so essential in the theology of Paul’s verse above. Not that our angst is unfounded. In fact, consternation and confusion are the very marks of our existence. The angst is our veil. We see through a glass darkly, as Paul put it in 1 Corinthians 13:12.

The issue for Paul is God and us, not the pain of the murky window through which we attempt to peer into Heaven.

Paul had already set the stage earlier in this chapter for a different frame for us than our confusion. “But death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who did not sin after the pattern of the trespass of Adam, who is the type of the one who was to come.” (Romans 5:13)

Granted, Paul can sound more confusing than the truth he struggles to explain.

Let’s fit a placeholder right up front. The word “Adam” in Hebrew is both singular and plural, allowing the word to mean “mankind.” We have a similar use in the word “man.” So, for those who consider Adam purely mythical, go with mankind. For those who insist upon a literal Adam as the first in creation, you and I and Paul will get along just fine.

The framework for Paul’s theology of Jesus rests on Adam’s entrance into sin. That sin was disobedience in his relationship to God. It wasn’t a traffic infraction or a social blunder. Adam’s was a sin of high command.

“The LORD God gave the man this order: You are free to eat from any of the trees of the garden except the tree of knowledge of good and evil. From that tree you shall not eat; when you eat from it, you shall die.” (Genesis 2:16-17)

Since we’re a procreative bunch, the progeny of Adam and Eve were subject to this disastrous sin. “The many were made sinners.”

How to fix this? Frankly, there is no fixing it. We can, however, be repaired. “… so, through the obedience of the one, the many will be made righteous.”

The relationship of God with Adam and Eve was personal and likely a physical reality. They abode, lived together in Paradise. That wasn’t heaven. It was, and likely still is, a created segment of the universe, with God already there with them. “When they heard the sound of the LORD God walking about in the garden at the breezy time of the day, the man and his wife hid themselves from the LORD God among the trees of the garden.”

Imagine that the Paradise God carved out of the universe, as it was blockaded from all of creation, now unhinged and out of order, as a kind of cornerstone in the restoration of the heavens and earth coming in the next age. Our imaginations are a playground for God, if we accept his boundaries, that is.

In that horrific breaking of the goodness of Paradise where both man and God lived, Adam and Eve, in their sinfulness, could no longer be physically with God. They hid from him. The repair to this detachment, Paul insists, was for God to enter the world as one of us and reattach, as it were, creation to him. We needed to be made righteous by a righteous man’s sacrifice and conquering of death—a new Adam.

The story, true inasmuch as we can place the intention of the scriptures, places God back into creation and us back into God’s presence. It’s a relationship bundle, not a court-ordered visitation. We’re physically re-aligned with God if we both desire it and are willing to accept it.

Even in that exercise of our will, though, God assists us. Paul explains. “Where sin increased, grace overflowed all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through justification for eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

We still die, but we are not dead. We will shuffle off this mortal coil, as Shakespeare coined it in Hamlet, clearly identifying a life eternal afterward. Our exit shuffle, which I envision more as a dance than a doggerel march, includes several elements of the grace Paul points out. We are filled with the Holy Spirit, fed by the body and blood of Christ, and formed in the Word placed upon our hearts by the Father.

The glass darkly and the shuffling off this mortal coil aptly reveal to us the path we’re on. We, in exquisite transformation, have a truly good news ending, or rather, beginning. “In conclusion, just as through one transgression condemnation came upon all, so, through one righteous act, acquittal and life came to all.”

Leave a comment

Some of us find Jesus’ use of the Jonah story as a prophetic connection a strong clue to its veracity. Why would Jesus wrap such an essential reference to three days in a whale by Jonah to his upcoming three days in the “heart of the earth?” Would he use a critical piece of scripture that is fulfilled from a made-up story?

Memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary
Jonah 3:1-10
Luke 10:38-42

Today’s reading from Jonah skips over the anger of a reluctant prophet, his obstinacy in the face of a God he knew to be immovable, and the frightening reframing of Jonah’s need to go to Ninevah through an experience of a giant fish that spewed him out of its gullet after three days onto a beach.

Instead, we get the happy conclusion, a successful command from Jonah that the Ninevites would be killed if they didn’t repent. Actually, it doesn’t appear from the text that Jonah offered repentance. Quite the opposite. He was a mouthpiece describing Nineveh’s upcoming demise and was angry with God when the people were spared.

It’s the king who fostered the behavior of a repentant people. “Who knows, God may relent and forgive, and withhold his blazing wrath, so that we shall not perish,” said the King, imploring God to save them.

The unholy people then did what the king asked — rather, commanded. “Man and beast shall be covered with sackcloth and call loudly to God; every man shall turn from his evil way and from the violence he has in hand.”

This remarkable tale ends like a fairy tale, with God relenting his hand, stopping “the evil that he had threatened to do to them; he did not carry it out.”

I say fairy tale, because theologians have argued over the origin of this scripture. Like the story of Job and many other Old Testament documents, the stories present fanciful, legendary fireside drama.

Yet, some of us find Jesus’ use of the story as a prophetic connection a strong clue to its veracity. Why would Jesus wrap such an essential reference to three days in a whale by Jonah to his upcoming three days in the “heart of the earth?” Would he use a critical piece of scripture that is fulfilled from a made-up story?

Then some of the scribes and Pharisees said to him, “Teacher,* we wish to see a sign from you.” He said to them in reply, “An evil and unfaithful* generation seeks a sign, but no sign will be given it except the sign of Jonah the prophet. Just as Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights,* so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights. At the judgment, the men of Nineveh will arise with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and there is something greater than Jonah here. (Matthew 12:38-41)

In fact, Jesus identifies the men of Nineveh as present on the judgment day. Of course, if we take Jesus seriously, and we layer the power of God upon the miracles and preposterous-sounding healings during Jesus’ earthly life, Jonah’s story assuredly is true.

The symbolism of the story isn’t in the details of events. The symbolism refers to the very nature of kingship, which is connected to God through both inherited and appointed authority. Jonah’s attentive king was perhaps the King of Assyria, or simply a local, provincial ruler, say the scholars. In any case, his leadership was that of a servant who finally hears and takes the proclamation of God to heart.

We more often place ourselves in the shoes of Jonah, for good reason. Obstinacy and avoidance better reflect our natures. Our roles as authorities present more opportunities for sin, but we may not recognize that. God, in most cases, must force our hand to obey him. The King of Nineveh, however, has performed worse evils than Jonah, allowing and surely participating in the sins of Nineveh. We, too, have authority roles very similar to those of this man who wisely, and just in time, garnered God’s favor.

I’m reasonably sure that we’ve all, at one awful time or another, called for punishment by God for another person. Indeed, we’ve played this card on entire nations.

God’s response to Jonah reminds us of our place within and in collaboration with God’s divinity. These are the last words in the short 4-chapter book of Jonah.

“And should I not be concerned over the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who cannot know their right hand from their left, not to mention all the animals?” (Jonah 4:11)

God didn’t say to Jonah that the people were innocent, but they were certainly ignorant. Likely brainwashed and coerced into sins slowly and methodically. Most fascinating is God’s back-handed mention of the dumbest elements of creation, the animals, as examples of the people’s sinfulness.

Jonah had no right to be angry. The king had no right to be subordinate to evil. We don’t know if or when Jonah realigned his attitude toward God, but we like to think he woke up to God’s correction. We do know that the king’s response is a treasure for all of us in authority, which is likely everyone of us in some fashion.

Leave a comment

Jesus sent us each the Holy Spirit, where our bodies serve as living temples. The sacrifice has been made, and it will not be repeated. Now churches gather us to a treasured meal of Jesus’ body and blood in the consecration of bread and wine. We confess our sins to one another and repent, absolved from our sins by the ordained representatives of Jesus.

Memorial of Saint Jerome, Priest and Doctor of the Church
Zechariah 8:20-23
Luke 9:51-56

We have in our histories both literal and figurative homes. Our literal homes are the places where we were born, grew up, got married, raised a family, and, of course, will be our final resting place. For most of us, those may all be different locales.

I was born in Boise, Idaho, and raised in Idaho and Colorado for a few years before becoming an adult in California. For the past 50 years, following a short stint with Joanne after we were married in California, I’ve lived in Colorado.

My hometowns have been Boise, Coeur d’Alene, and Shoshone, Idaho; Los Alamitos, Westchester, and Inglewood, California; Colorado Springs, Manitou Springs, and Woodland Park, Colorado. There are other places, too.

The Church provides us with several connecting points in today’s readings, and they all point to a home we think of as Jewish — Jerusalem. It is, however, an iconic locus, a religious center for most of the world's major religions — Jewish, Muslim, and Christian peoples, the three primal Abrahamic faiths.

Today is also the memorial of St. Jerome, the 4th- and 5th-century scholar and theologian who translated the scriptures into Latin. He took the Old Testament collection of Jewish texts in the original Hebrew, forgoing the Greek translation done around 280 B.C.by 72 Jewish scholars. That Greek translation was necessary because few Jews spoke Hebrew after the building of the Second Temple. They knew Greek and Aramaic, instead. Jerome sought after the texts that the 72 used as sources.

Today’s reading from Zechariah was noted by St. Jerome in his second collection of commentaries on the biblical prophets. He traveled to Jerusalem and lived on the outskirts, landing in Jesus’ birthplace, Bethlehem, for 38 years of his scholarly life. His fascination with the historical center of Jerusalem led him from his home in Rome and his studies in Antioch.

Jerome said some controversial things (according to his day’s notions) about Jerusalem. “We must live not in Jerusalem which is now, but in the Jerusalem which is above.” — (Letter 14). He said, about pilgrimages to Jerusalem, that they are “Valuable but not necessary for salvation; spiritual life is more important.”

Jerusalem has long been a magnet for the Catholic and Christian world, drawing folks for two millennia. Zecharia’s words echo in the pilgrim’s ear: “Many peoples and strong nations shall come to seek the LORD of hosts in Jerusalem and to implore the favor of the LORD.”

Zechariah’s prophecy is one for the ages, telegraphing the Pentecostal feast in the Temple of Jerusalem after Jesus’ Ascension: Thus says the LORD of hosts: In those days ten men of every nationality, speaking different tongues, shall take hold, yes, take hold of every Jew by the edge of his garment and say, “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.”

To Americans, Jerusalem holds both that literal attraction, the region that birthed our Lord and crucified him, and its figurative grip on the bulk of the world’s religions. It’s the place where our Lord cleansed the Temple in preparation for his death, and predicted its violent demise 40 years later.

The figurative hold of Jerusalem also has a strong negative influence. The Samaritans, broken from the rule of Judah’s claim to Jerusalem during the split of the North and South in 900 BC, named Samaria their capital and built a replacement temple in the Northern Kingdom. Called Israel when the Assyrians conquered the North, the non-Jewish overlords adopted the Torah. They grasped its import but rejected Jerusalem’s centrality.

The Samaritans — which loosely compares to the split of Protestants from Catholicism — considered Jerusalem a fraudulent and disreputable center, a place conquered like themselves. Samaria adopted many aspects of Jewish culture and traditions, but merged them with their own polytheistic beliefs and practices. That’s why a thousand years later, we hear in Luke the disdain from Samaria’s people. “On the way, they entered a Samaritan village to prepare for his reception there, but they would not welcome him because the destination of his journey was Jerusalem.”

Catholics are taught that the Temple of Jerusalem, no longer a center of ancient animal sacrifices and contested by a litany of wars and shared ownership, has been upgraded (in a genuine, revelatory sense) to our bodies as temples of the Holy Spirit. In the Old Testament, the temple in Jerusalem was the heart of worship for the Israelites. This sacred space was where Jews encountered God. They offered sacrifices there and sought forgiveness.

Jesus sent us each the Holy Spirit, where our bodies serve as living temples. The sacrifice has been made, and it will not be repeated. Now churches gather us to a treasured meal of Jesus’ body and blood in the consecration of bread and wine. We confess our sins to one another and repent, absolved from our sins by the ordained representatives of Jesus. Jerusalem has morphed into a living body of priests, prophets, and kings, the Body of Christ.

The figurative importance of Jerusalem, however, remains tied to its physical location. St. Jerome is credited with promoting the notion of Jerusalem’s historical importance.

“Tradition has it that in this city, nay, more, on this very spot, Adam lived and died. The place where our Lord was crucified is called Calvary, because the skull of the primitive man was buried there. So it came to pass that the second Adam, that is the blood of Christ, as it dropped from the cross, washed away the sins of the buried protoplast, the first Adam.”

Jerome explained the place of Jerusalem in our Catholic teaching. “Everyone is judged unto the righteousness of God, not by which land he dwells in, but by the merits of his faith. True worshipers do not worship God in Jerusalem, nor on Mount Gerizim; “God is spirit,” Christ said, “and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth.” … Look, my brother, because you have not seen Jerusalem, and yet faith is lacking in nothing for you; because, living anywhere, you are with us. Be assured that whether you live here or elsewhere, the reward is equal for good works with the Lord.”

Each of our stories of birth, life, and ultimately where we die has an importance to our physical trajectory. As temple people, the residences of the Holy Spirit, we witness and testify to God’s presence in creation and His promise for the coming Kingdom. We cover the globe, authentic Jerusalems on parade.

As Psalms said today, “They shall note, when the peoples are enrolled: “This man was born there.” And all shall sing, in their festive dance: “My home is within you.”

Leave a comment

The fox would never be the same again. Fear and cunning would return, but the comfort of his mother, the joy of his brother and sister, and the order and care of his father would lie beneath everything from now on. He now knew that other voice—the voice of the kind man, who spoke in the radiant light.

Acts: 9:1-9

Chilled air rolled over the Palestinian landscape, whipping the thickening fog that hung in the brush. Resting clouds lay in the crevices, hiding everything from sight, including the rare tree. Few noises pierce thick, low-hanging clouds trapped in the bushy hillsides, so travelers and creatures step wary, afraid of hungry predators waiting in the fog. Fear makes no noise, either, except for the resulting and bewildering pounding of its inhabitant’s heartbeat.

The cold breeze increased, dragging the blinding whisps through the branches, still eerie and silent. The blurry air dulled even the sound of a brown fox’s steady breath as he listened for a prey’s beating heart.

Foggy white air masked both ground and growth. Hazed brightness from a rising sun felt worse than darkness. At least the dark star-bright blindness allowed the tiniest of footstep sounds, the necessary announcements of prey or predator. The dark places faded, though, stealing the fox’s hunting advantage. The fox feared little at night, amped instead with artful cunning. He hid in the day and skulked in the night.

Fog lit by a faraway morning sun revealed nothing new, no noises or flickers of fur or feet. It concealed them. The fox couldn’t smell or see in any direction. The deadly muttering of fear, more common to his daytime demeanor, returned, overtaking his nighttime strength. Hunting had not been successful.

He’d been up all night. Two nights in a row, and now a third wasted day of treacherous worry was about to begin. Weary and starved, his waiting patience had reached its limit. He could wander no more, and so he had to lie down where he stood. To rest, even as the dangerous day of light would begin.

Familiarity, he noticed, as he pawed the spot where he lay, but it was not good news. His paws touched an orderly patch of earth. He had stopped at the edge of a human path, wandered from the secure environs of bushland hills.

Packed and flattened rocks, filled with sand and spent salt, marked where humans traveled. The cold breeze lifted the fog inches off the earth. He sniffed, worried, rightly that he’d landed exhausted where he should not be. Alarmed, but still, the fox could see the feet of people, appearing as the fog rose. Their movements were no longer silent, no longer muffled in the thickness of wet air. People were everywhere along the path, bustling with foreign sounds. He froze, melting into the dried grass at the edge of the path, spent from wasted hunting, unable to sprint or even scoot away, frightened that he’d be discovered.

A whirl of wind and light came from the sky and erased the fog. The fox now saw everyone there. In horror, they stopped walking. He gripped the stones beneath his paws, pushing his head into them. Incredibly, they had not stopped for him. They stared at an oncoming spear of brightness, above everyone. They did not yet see him.

The sunlight struck him as odd. A missile of the glowing sun in the midst of them had dropped from the sky. The light landed just in front of him. Still, no one saw the fox. A dozen or more people practically surrounded him. They stood at the edges of the path, to his right and left. The fox held back the oncoming shiver of fear which would give him away, just as he had been taught, but no bush hid him. He scrunched into a mound of fur, bumped by a heel or draped by a cloth, but unrecognized.

Not one spied him. The harsh light turned all heads away from him and into the sky. Thinking that now he could scoot away, a man fell to the ground. A hand splayed inches from the fox, shocking him into a frozen state. The fox stopped blinking, squinting to hide any eyeball reflections that he was there. The man then partially lifted himself into a sitting position with that one hand behind him, just in front of the fox. The animal remained camouflaged in the grays of the stone path and its mottled edge of dirt and dried grass. The fallen man and everyone else continued to stare into the sky.

The voice of fear inside his head harshly warned the fox to scamper away, but he could not move. Any motion would reveal his presence.

In the man’s fall, a bag had fallen from his shoulder. It splashed open. Water flowed out, running smoothly over the rocks and directly to the snout of the fox. The fox smelled goat, the skin of the bag. Uncontrollable in a weakened state, the fox drank, slowly moving his tongue over the cool fluid. The water tasted pure, with just a hint of oil from the goatskin. While the light from above held everyone’s attention, the much-needed moisture revived him. The water was fortunate, surprising, and welcome even while he was frightened beyond measure.

Then a pouch made from fur flipped open. It had also fallen with the man, attached to his hip. From it rolled a train of dried grapes and berries, also aimed directly toward the snout of the fox. He dared not run now. Seldom had berries in the wild ever had time to dry. Birds, insects, and small animals ate everything that lay on the ground or clung to a branch. The rare chance to taste the compact flavor of a dried berry returned from his memories. He heartily chewed on them. The water still flowed, carrying more berries to his tongue. The flavors dizzied him.

Another smell. Beneath the wafts of human odors and animal skin, he traced the aroma from the fur bag. It was fox fur. The fox was transported back in time to his mother’s body, his snout pushed under her when he was a pup. He fed on her, as he fed from this fox’s fur now. Lost in his dreamy memory, he saw that his tongue now reached and licked the salty fingers of the man. Shocked that the man did not move, the fox looked up and saw the man staring through the fingers of his other hand, attempting to shade the light coming from the sky. It had brightened even more. Nothing could distract him or the others around him.

Ready now to run, nourished, surprisingly calmed by the distraction of the people who stared into the sky, the fox yet again was held fast. This time by a voice. His ears turned into the sound, and he knew that voice. All went quiet as the voice spoke. No humans moved. Neither did the fox.

The fallen man then spoke. The familiar voice came again from the light. Yes, the fox was sure. The voice from the light matched that of the man whom the fox followed in the desert for all those weeks. That wandering man would whistle and speak to him in soothing calls. He would leave him morsels to eat, and pour out puddles of water for the fox to drink. The odd-acting fellow sang and spoke to the sky, but never seemed to eat. Then he met up with another man, and the fox ran away. That other man smelled and sounded of fear, dread, and terror.

The water, the berries, the smell of fox fur, and the light’s voice overwhelmed the fox. That voice reminded him of the safety of his mother, cuddling him, cooing into his ear, blowing into his eyes. Wrapped up in her, he would suck on her body, along with his brother and sister. He had not felt that comfort since he was a pup — that shared hugging and rolling around in the grass with his siblings. He remembered his father’s eyes watching him, too, nudging him to move along, licking at his head. Security, safety, being held close to each other, attentive eyes, and nurturing his every need.

The voice from the sky was full of that long-gone warmth and caress and care. The fox pondered all that was taking place on the edge of this human path where he ate and drank, and against all logic, felt safe. Since leaving his young world, he lived only with the voices of fear and cunning. Fear in the light, hiding from sight. Cunning in the night, hunting and stalking for food.

Now, calmed by the light, amidst the worst of his enemies, he heard soft sounds and watched humans in awe.

The fox sat up, just as the man stood, with the help of others. The fox turned away and walked into the brush without a holler or ruckus from anyone about his presence. Foxes don’t know about magic, or love, or divine revelation. This experience, however, brought him as close as a fox could ever be to all of them.

The voice of comfort stayed with him, present still with each pad of his paws on the grass, dust, and gravel as he wandered back into the wild. The chilled wind flew by again at a rise on a hill not far from the human path. The voice of fear came with it. The fox lowered its head, keeping it below the height of the bush, and naturally hid again.

And yet, he’d heard the other voice. Enough to trust it more. He hoped it would come back. He sucked on the berry flavors still fresh in his teeth. He would never be the same again. Fear and cunning would return, but the comfort of his mother, the joy of his brother and sister, and the order and care of his father would lie beneath everything from now on. He now knew that other voice—the voice of the kind man, who spoke in the radiant light.

Leave a comment

For those of us fraught with authority issues, we must back off when it comes to Jesus. We may have had problems with our parents, librarians, and traffic cops, but there’s no appeals court or argument with the head of every principality and power. We can’t get any higher authority than God. His power and love need no court.

Memorial of Saint Peter Claver, Priest
Colossians 2:6-15
Luke 6:12-19

It’s not often that we hear about the power of Jesus from the perspective of raw masculinity. We’ve got the cleansing of the Temple, where Jesus wielded a whip. But that’s about it. There are no fistfights, other weaponry, gym memberships, or gridiron escapades with some form of a ball or stick.

Our references to Jesus, according to almost all popular notions, focus not on manliness, but on his restorative powers as a healer, teacher, and his sacrificial persona — the Lamb.

These things — healing, teaching, and sacrifice — are not necessarily exclusive feminine attributes, but we must admit that the strength of women lies in nurturing and giving of self. A mother can be fiercely protective, but not in a lethal way, as men might exhibit the protection of their family, friends, and citizens. Many of us men envision courage and strength as keystones of our nature.

Both sexes in holy moments, channeling God’s intimate involvement in our lives, will reach the same commitment to protect and nurture the innocent, injured, and troubled. They will lay down their lives for another.

Today’s gospel presents the proper, non-gender-limited* image of Jesus’ powerful capabilities. Or, to put it more accurately, the appropriate human image for both sexes. He related to men and women in equal measure, a quality uncommon before him and since. He gave of himself.

Strictly speaking, Jesus’ character is entirely foreign to anything purely masculine or feminine. Look at this description. “Everyone in the crowd sought to touch him because power came forth from him and healed them all.” (Luke 6:19)

That power of Jesus, a strength uncommon in any other human, is explained further in our reading today from Colossians: “For in him dwells the whole fullness of the deity bodily, and you share in this fullness in him, who is the head of every principality and power.” (Colossians 2:9-10)

That’s a mouthful. There are, though, three data points for us — fullness of the deity in a body, our sharing of that fullness, and Jesus as the ultimate GOAT (the greatest of all time).

What is the fullness of the deity, bodily? That would be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, wouldn’t it? According to Paul, the author of Colossians, we share in this fullness. Harken back to our description as made in the image of God. Make no mistake, our sharing in God’s power is complementary, not substitutional. We complement him, mirror him. We don’t take his place. Jesus remains the head of “every” principality and power. We operate as his collaborators, not minions. The role of supreme authority rests in one place.

For those of us fraught with authority issues, we must back off when it comes to Jesus. We may have had problems with our parents, librarians, and traffic cops, but there’s no appeals court or argument with the head of every principality and power. Can’t get any higher authority than God. His power and love needs no court.

The concept of ‘fullness’ is introduced earlier by Paul in Colossians, Chapter 1: “For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell.”

Everything that is God is within Jesus. The persons of God reside together, as one. It’s not easy to grasp, of course. I like the example of our likeness to God, in God’s image, as one of personalities and roles. For instance, we men are fathers, and women are mothers, not just to our own, but to the young around us. We reach out to care for others, as if we are charged and assigned to do so. That makes us like God the Father.

We are also spiritual beings, sometimes out of body. We transcend this existence. In heaven, awaiting the restoration of creation, we will be like the angels — spirit beings. And, of course, we are men and women of physical natures, and Jesus promised that we would be returned to body and spirit. We say Jesus took upon a human state, but in better terms, Jesus exhibits what a human is supposed to be — like him.

The universe was built for and by Jesus to live with us, we are told. Well, no, that’s not quite right. We are to live with him.

Jesus came first, then us. It’s a complex concept to grasp, but remember that in Paradise, as depicted in scripture, God walked with Adam and Eve in the Garden. I envision that was the second person of the Holy Trinity.

That fullness of Jesus’ power, as translated in earlier verses of Colossians, extends to us formally. When creation fell, God promised the redeemer, the one we know as Jesus, would rescue us. He did so, as Colossians explains.

Jesus is “the head of the body, the church.” More specifically, “He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead (in other words, he rose from the dead first), that in all things he himself might be preeminent.”

To be preeminent means to exist as the one in the highest position, that existed before all others, and whenever he walks into the room, we bow down.

Jesus, upon his death, took all the righteous who had died since the beginning of time with him into Heaven. Moses or Abraham couldn’t do that. Only the preeminent power. And then, he returned to creation as the risen Christ, body and spirit.

In one of Paul’s longest sentences on record, verses 15-19 of Ephesians, he explains the fullness of the Holy Trinity in Jesus as shared with us in great detail.

For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that he may grant you in accord with the riches of his glory to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner self, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the holy ones what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

To summarize: in all things, bowing before the Father, we are to have faith, rooted in love, and like our brother and Lord Jesus, we are strengthened by God who dwells in us.

Jesus may not have had a gym membership. Still, through his tasks of carpentry and, by extension, mastery of all construction materials, including stone and metals, he likely was fit and physically capable. He exercised both mind and spirit.

We can look forward, even in this age, to channeling the gifted powers of God. Not to tamp down our lethal natures when called upon, but to call more readily upon God’s fullness in us. Be strong in body and spirit. Be holy in both.

Powers that God will only wield through us, when we are in total union with him, can be known as from God. That’s possible here, Paul tells us. But it’s indeed based upon knowing the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, surpasses feats of strength, and overcomes evil by laying down our lives.

*Gender is no small subject for Christians. I recommend HANS URS VON BALTHASAR AND CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST THEOLOGY, by Michelle A. Gonzalez. “Feminist theologians find an unlikely partner in Hans Urs von Balthasar, a theologian who also takes the category of gender as essential to his understanding of theology, the human, and divine action.” Gonzalez wrote, “Balthasar’s model of humanity is based on an understanding of the female as primarily receptive and the male as active.”

Leave a comment

God’s power relationship to us, decisively so, is modeled by our parents. A “love God or hate God” premise isn’t a power struggle, but a decision. Our parents are supposed to “image” God in our lives. Varying percentages of success by our parents’ collaboration and cooperation with God form our attitudes about the goodness of God. Those attitudes may be adopted by us, but we make our own way. We adapt them to fit how we choose to deal with God.

Memorial of Saints Martha, Mary, and Lazarus
Exodus 33:7-11; 34:5b-9, 28
John 11:19-27

Psalm 103 tells us things about God that need to be kept at the front of our minds.

Not according to our sins does he deal with us, nor does he requite us according to our crimes. For as the heavens are high above the earth, so surpassing is his kindness toward those who fear him. (Psalm 103: 10-11)

The entirety of Psalm 103 could be all that we need to know in this life. It forms our basis for loving God. The ugly truth, assured, and ultimately lovely, “is his kindness toward those who fear him.” God understands, knowing we naturally operate from fear of power, which only he can translate into love. We surrender to holiness to be like him, or plow down hard-hearted roads, abandon God, dismiss his power over us, and imagine our plans make more sense.

Our fear of the power that made us strangely means we are allowed to be free to choose — to embrace the creator and true power of the universe and our lives in it, or reject him. Yes, fear is a clue to the powerful presence of God. Rejection is a fool’s path. We cannot steal power from God. We cannot limit it. We certainly cannot destroy God’s power. Fear should stop us from doing so. To do otherwise is to initiate our doom, tying our destiny to the consequence of this short existence and sabotaging his plans for us.

As for man, his days are like the grass; he blossoms like a flower in the field. A wind sweeps over it and it is gone; its place knows it no more. (Psalm 103: 15-16)

Recognition of our finality establishes our sanity. We should fear the consequences of rejecting God’s place in our existence because any future after this life depends upon a divinity that chooses us. We didn’t create ourselves. Can God love us enough to keep us forever?

Who redeems your life from the pit, and crowns you with mercy and compassion. Who fills your days with good things, so your youth is renewed like the eagle’s? (Psalm 103: 4-5)

Sabotage God, and we condemn ourselves. There is no other outcome. To think differently is akin to insanity. Those who insist there is no God to catch us and take us to an afterlife do not understand fear. Fear draws us to God.

This is the same power relationship, decisively so, which exists between parents and their children. The “love God or hate God” premise isn’t a power struggle, but a decision. The power already exists in God. He hands it to us to unite back to him.

Our parents are supposed to “image” God in our lives. They see our sins and dismiss them. They feed us, hold us, and sacrifice even as we flail about and cause ruin. Varying percentages of success by our parents’ collaboration and cooperation with God form our attitudes about the goodness of God.

A healthy upbringing means that our parents or caretakers raised us in a cycle of love and hate heavily weighted towards love. But it’s not a scale. It’s a pattern.

Parents should raise children by displaying the same sense of fearing God and returning to him, bowed and repentant. Their transgressions must end in God’s mercy, or how can parents expect obedience and repentance from us? That is, parenting models that weep at their sins and express joy in God’s acceptance of their return to him establish the holy pattern of who’s really in charge and how good that power is.

But the LORD’s mercy is from age to age, toward those who fear him. His salvation is for the children’s children of those who keep his covenant, and remember to carry out his precepts. (Psalm 103: 17-18)

We may adopt attitudes formed in our upbringing, but we make our way forward. We adapt our parental notions of power to fit how we choose to deal with God. God helps us with that journey through revelatory interventions. The Church, gathered believers, built upon witness and testimony, assists us, embraces us, and loves us. Godless affiliations cannot explain suffering and fear, and do not collaborate with God. By design, they sabotage God’s mercy and cut off the path of rightful fears. They can try mightily, even with deep compassion. Yet, what do they deliver after death?

At the front of our minds, we model and witness to the world. As with God, it is never too late to witness healthy and holy parenting through our constant return to God. Then, we can be like him and hear the power of God tell us, “Do not be afraid.” It is God who disperses our fears.

Merciful and gracious is the LORD, slow to anger, abounding in mercy. (Psalm 103: 10-11)

Leave a comment

When more skeptical folk inhabit the world than believers, a miraculous interventionary loving God doesn’t have to operate with ferocious, even outrageous responses. The accumulation of miraculous reminders will overwhelm the deniers. Skeptics arrive at a strict, blindered-view from many paths. That our creation was intentional, and being related to the divine in a parental/child manner, takes courageous surrender. Miracles aid us in taking every step — some will be big, but most will be small, steady, and unwavering.

Feast of Saint Mary Magdalene
Song of Songs 3:1-4b
John 20:1-2, 11-18

It's appropriate in our physical world that a successful salve to skepticism is an actual miracle. Any other interventionary activity will only temporarily pause our hopelessness.

How’s that for an opening paragraph?

For explanation, my use of a barrel filled with scrunched-nose disdain, throwing all kinds of doubts into the generic category of “skepticism,” names the attitude that many of us take against believing in miracles over coincidence. More simply, I believe wariness and caution rightly guard our steps, but miracles assure us that we’re on the right track and correct our misdirections.

“Other interventionary activity” refers to transcendent events outside God’s activity within creation. It’s also a broad category (like skepticism), binding together aliens, demonic beings, extrasensory forces, and artificial intelligence. These invisible realities can lead us astray from God. People cycle through similar lists of optional forces. It’s natural to consider and even try them out. Inevitably, we should discard the truly bizarre things, proven to be foolish, malevolent, or hazardous. Sometimes it takes years. Some of us only set them aside, pretending a further review, as we ponder their credibility.

“Salve,” of course, is the ointment, balm, or comfort that would apply to a skeptic’s mindset. We need such medicinal treatments because we’re built for hope, not chaos. The skeptical ilk of protesting takes a lot of energy.

“Hopelessness” plays out in the end for skepticism left unattended. Worse for us is to decide that doubt is the confirmed state of all things.

I now introduce a new term. “Purist logicians.” Those guys and gals who remain ardent skeptics, insisting on the fenced-in boundaries of what scientific analysis and non-spiritual philosophy can describe. When more skeptical folk inhabit the world than believers, a miraculous interventionary loving God doesn’t have to operate with ferocious, even outrageous responses. He has done so, though, with Jesus, saints, and historical accounts that rocked the world.

The accumulation of many “minor” miraculous reminders (how crass is that to call some miracles minor) is more common. They, too, can overwhelm the deniers.

Skeptics arrive at a strict, blindered-view from many paths. Some experience, or some other person, convinced them to wear blinders. They tune out the miracles. Consequently, believing our creation was intentional and that we’re related to the divine in a parental/child manner takes courageous surrender. Miracles aid us in taking every step — some will be big, but most will be small, steady, and unwavering.

Who am I to question the skeptic’s journey? The decision to adopt what dictionaries call “secular humanism”* challenges just about everyone these days. It’s understandable for so many of us to quit our search for meaning and settle on a mindset and worldview that rejects the frightful reality that a loving God built our world and allowed it to be stunk up by creatures like ourselves. When the majority of the population we inhabit rejects spiritual indwelling and miraculous witness and testimony, we’re swimming upstream.

Yes, I did say frightful reality. The idea that a loving God exists is only a temporary, emotionally charged happiness. Not that surrender to God is only frightful. A loving God is good news, and solves just about every problem we might have about our afterlife. Yet, life now remains fraught with suffering as a constant, even as we believe in a glowing, growing, flow of lovely purpose in our connection to a God present to us.

The freedom we, hopefully, choose to allow — religious expressions that inspire and gather us — requires that we surrender to a supernatural, largely invisible entity. Without miracles, that surrender can be impossible. They make God visible, aligning our vision outside the blinders.

As said earlier, “purist logicians” quake at the concept of a transcendence that knows no bounds. They know what a divinity outside of time and space truly means. Firstly, that our creation was intentional, and secondly, we’re related to the divine in a parental/child manner.

Many religious expressions refuse to surrender fully to God, cauterizing the breadth of God in some form or fashion. They might conclude that God is an accumulation of human beings joined into an eternal wisdom. That position denies the pre-existence of a creator. It’s a partial surrender. Again, that’s likely part of our journey. Just as the religions that attribute many gods to managing the universe (with some gods being good and some being bad), our progress toward accepting a fully engaged divinity explains why we approach God gingerly.

That takes us back to the initial statement: It's appropriate in our physical world that a successful salve to skepticism is an actual miracle. Any other interventionary activity will only temporarily pause our hopelessness.

You see it, I think — we yearn for an actual miracle because God knows we need it. Over and over again, I might add.

We can dither about on the skepticism track for only so long. It’s pretty exhausting to keep from full-blown depression. The number of celebrities and prominent intellectuals who have made recent public conversions suggests a shift toward seeking the true God. Each one has testified to some miraculous thing that brought about the shift. Miracles are evidence that God exists. All of Jesus’ life, the whole gospel message, presents an evidentiary litany of miracles. They complete an Old Testament run of prophecies, and plant the future blossoming of a Church aligned to the Holy Spirit’s leading.

Mary Magdalene is a prime example of personal spiritual growth. She experienced every miraculous type of God’s intervention in her life through the Son, the Holy Spirit, and the Father. She knew the persons of God intimately, convinced of interventionary spirits beginning with Jesus’ exorcising her demonic possessions. She knew the incarnated God of Jesus, mourned Jesus’ death, witnessed and proclaimed his resurrection, and was present at the Ascension. She was the first human to acknowledge many of God’s miracles, likely living out the rest of her days in total contemplative harmony with the Father. A life lived in the fullness of the Trinity.

That life of interventionary miracles typifies our own. We, too, can identify the same progression of skepticism at all the levels she experienced. Wariness, answered by God’s interventions, did not happen only to her. It’s a witness to our journeys.

While we can rightly be doubtful of ably copying the trusting, never wary life of Mary the Mother of God, replete with welcomed sorrows amid the ultimate honor of grace-filled existence, we can more readily follow the progress of Mary Magdalene. From worry to hope, her ultimate embrace in a love relationship with the divine is precisely what God hopes for us.

* Secular humanism is a philosophy that emphasizes human reason, ethics, and scientific inquiry while rejecting religious beliefs and supernaturalism. It focuses on improving human welfare and promoting values such as compassion, justice, and individual fulfillment in this life. (Wikipedia)

Leave a comment

Only one prophet would be sent out in the earlier days of Israel. Jesus sent out twelve men, not just one. Then, he sent seventy. God’s miracles confirm his constant presence. Our repentance confirms our sinful nature. Be wary, but know the mercy and loveliness of Jesus. His ultimate response is for those of us who know that repentance is necessary.

Memorial of Saint Bonaventure, Bishop and Doctor of the Church
Exodus 2:1-15a
Matthew 11:20-24

Deep in the heart of Jesus' teachings lie miracles that support him. Are miracles necessary? The prophets prophesied and performed miracles and signs, all of which pointed to God. So, in the cities where his apostles go to preach, Jesus gives them the same powers. Miraculous evidence confirms God’s desire to recapture and restore creation.

Jesus, adding his followers to the Spirit-filled list of ancient and current prophetic witnesses, built an unending future generation of prophets.

We’re in the section of Matthew, Chapter 11. Jesus had already sent out the apostles to announce the coming Kingdom, and they had come back. A few verses earlier than today’s reading, Jesus instilled in their minds and hearts that while the healing and exorcising power of His Spirit would astound entire communities, the call for repentance would not be automatic.

Only one prophet would be sent out in the earlier days of Israel. Everyone from Moses to John the Baptist pleaded with God’s people to repent and follow the law. A new ruling kingdom would take over the earth. These prophets often referred to prophecies of a coming Messiah to take charge of the kingdom.

The pleading largely remained the same after Jesus’ incarnation, but Jesus taught that the future Kingdom was at hand. Repentance remained the foreboding principle, but the landscape was changing. John the Baptist is referred to as the last prophet. What does Jesus do after the days of the prophets are over?

“Then he summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits to drive them out and to cure every disease and every illness” (Matthew 10:1). The message of the coming Kingdom was urgent. Jesus sent out twelve men, not just one.

It also pointed to a future of many more prophetic witnesses for the world to meet.

The evidence of credibility for the early prophets was a series of miracles and signs, fasting, and hearing the voice of God. Jesus also fasted, but he drank wine, and he gathered his followers in meals; periodically, they were abundantly fed. More telling, the voice of God, as heard by the prophets, now spoke to Jesus, calling him “Son” loudly for many to hear.

Credibility wasn’t entirely successful for the Old Testament prophets. Many were run out of town, and even killed. Jesus explained to his disciples that they would also encounter cognitive dissonance, an inability for hearers to reconcile their beliefs with their experiences, a necessity in converting hearts.

John the Baptist, the last prophet and the one who announced the Messiah’s coming, was not accepted, like previous prophets, and neither would they accept Jesus. “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they said, ‘He is possessed by a demon. The Son of Man came eating and drinking and they said, ‘Look, he is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners’” (Matthew 11:8-9).

Many in power failed to connect the premise of a holy life, backed by evidence from miracles and signs, to substantiate God's involvement in the lives of either John the Baptist or Jesus. Jesus reminded his followers that “wisdom is vindicated by her works” (Matthew 11:8-9). It’s an oft-repeated axiom: We will be known by our fruits.

Later in his ministry, as revealed in Luke’s Gospel but not recorded by Matthew, Jesus sent out dozens more disciples to preach and perform miracles. The apostles ventured only to Hebrew towns. Seventy disciples would visit the towns of the Gentiles. The system of coming prophets grew exponentially in a few short years.

The miraculous pattern of preaching, driving out evil spirits, and healing stood as evidence of God’s power, God’s active involvement, and orchestration of events in creation. Jesus explodes the tradition of one prophet, extending it to his anointed ones and those filled with His Spirit. It’s without a doubt the most significant marketing achievement in human history.

God’s intervention in miracles has a dark side, too, for those who refuse and reject him. We remember the warnings that Jesus gave to the households and various towns that did not accept his disciples.

“Whoever will not receive you or listen to your words—go outside that house or town and shake the dust from your feet.” (Matthew 10:14)

Jesus is blunt. “Amen, I say to you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town.” (Matthew 10:14) Well, we know what happened to them. Human wickedness receives God’s retribution.

This is not a new warning. Similar warnings were given to the towns visited by the Old Testament prophets—everybody from Jonah shouting to Ninevah and Lot living in Sodom.

Jesus visits the towns where his apostles and disciples lived, where they had announced, “The kingdom of God is near.” This is a call to faith because Jesus would soon visit each village where the apostles and the disciples had preached. Not all went well.

“Jesus began to reproach the towns where most of his mighty deeds had been done, since they had not repented” (Matthew 11:20). There must have been a shaking of dust for several towns for the awful categorization of “no repented.”

“Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida,” Jesus said. This isn’t some distant, unfamiliar city. Bethsaida was the hometown of Philip, Andrew, and Peter. Also, Capernaum, not Jerusalem, was the biblical center of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee. “And as for you, Capernaum: Will you be exalted to heaven? You will go down to the netherworld.”

We know how badly the Sodomites had acted, perversions we are all too familiar with today. Jesus said that the inhabitants of Sodom would have repented if they had seen what Jesus’ apostles and disciples had done in His name. They would have been saved by the overwhelming evidence of Jesus’ miracles.

“For if the mighty deeds done in your midst had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day.” (Matthew 11:23)

Two sides of God’s evidence are clear. Healings and casting out of demons show God’s mercy. Destruction and being wiped off the map are the consequences of God’s wrath. We seldom focus on the unexpected, long-term consequences of sin. Mercy is only necessary because of sin, and we rely on that. Yet, the effects of sin still take place.

Jesus’ miracles should have served as signs inspiring the Hebrews. They were pretty familiar with the prophecies. For several chapters, Matthew fills out the theme of rejection by those who should know better. Matthew has been highlighting the dangers right up to today’s Chapter 11.

Chapter 9:4-6: Jesus knew what they were thinking, and said, “Why do you harbor evil thoughts? Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise and walk’? But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he then said to the paralytic, “Rise, pick up your stretcher, and go home.”

In Chapter 7, “Stop judging, that you may not be judged. For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.”

The warnings continue through chapters 12–13.

Indeed, Jesus is merciful because mercy is necessary due to the prevalence of so many evils. “If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him.” Matthew 7:11

The miracles are important to us. “Rise, pick up your stretcher, and go home.” “Be made clean.” “Your heavenly Father gives good things to those who ask him.”

God’s miracles confirm his constant presence. Our repentance confirms our sinful nature. Be wary, but know the mercy and loveliness of Jesus. His ultimate response is for those of us who know that repentance is necessary. It’s no small thing that Matthew ends Chapter 11 with the following:

“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.” (Matthew 11:28)

Leave a comment