Tag Archives: Jesus Christ

The Spirit of the Child

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For most of our novena the gospel readings at Mass are from the 11th and 12th chapters of Matthew’s gospel, which deal with the growing opposition to Jesus as he preaches and performs miracles in Galilee. It’s a rather dark section of the gospel.

Jesus is opposed by the Pharisees, who now take “counsel against him to put him to death” (Matthew 12.14) and by “this generation” of Israelites, the towns “where most of his mighty deeds had been done.”  (Matthew 11,16-19). He meets little success.

Concluding this section, Matthew adds another source of opposition to Jesus that may surprise us. His own family from Nazareth seems to oppose him.

Yet, in this bleak section of the gospel, when so many turn against him, Jesus praises his Father, Lord of heaven and earth, “for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike.”  (Matthew 11,25)

He praised those who have the spirit of the child and keep it. Certainly, St. Ann taught her daughter Mary that spirituality. On this day of the novena, we will  reflect on it.

St. Leo the Great, an early pope, said that becoming like a child– remember Jesus told his disciples to become like little children– does not mean going back to infancy physically. It means, like children, to be free from crippling anxieties, to be forgetful of injuries, to be sociable, and to wonder before this world.

The Amos Principle

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In our Sunday reading from the Old Testament (Amos 7, 12-15) the priest Amaziah tells Amos, a poor shepherd, uneducated and without training, not to speak up in the temple at Bethel. In fact, he should leave there right away. He doesn’t have the credentials.

But the Prophet Amos replies:  God calls him to speak out. That’s all the credentials he needs. Obviously, the reading is meant to support Jesus’ call of his twelve apostles in our gospel. (Matthew 6, 7-13) They’re not educated either, but God calls them.

The example of Amos can be applied to more than the twelve apostles, however. Let’s call it “The Amos Principle.” It can be applied to us all. We’ve all been called to live our faith and bring it to others.

Now Amos the prophet was a man; the apostles were all men. How about women? Let’s not  forget what part they played in Jesus’ life and the part they play in the church today.

Consider some recent statistics from Rome. There are about 460,000 priests and men in religious orders in the church worldwide today. There are over 740,000 religious women. In many unsung ways, these women represent our faith to others. Do they get  much recognition?

Though the gospels pay more attention to men, my guess is that more women than men supported Jesus in his lifetime.

Look at the gospels. Who was the closest to Jesus through his life? Wouldn’t it be Mary his mother? She was with him from the beginning, at his birth, in the years at Nazareth, as he suffered on the cross. She buried him in the tomb and saw him risen. St Luke says, “ She treasured all these things and kept them in her heart.” So much of what we know of Jesus comes to us from this woman.

The gospels tell of other women who believed in him. As an infant, Anna, the prophetess, sung his praises when he’s brought into the temple. The Samaritan woman (John 4,1-39) came to believe in him at the well and then brought her whole village to see him. The Syro-phoenician woman (Mark 7,24-30) calling him to help her daughter, the woman who touched his cloak in the crowd (Matthew 9,20-22), the woman who came looking for pardon for her sins represent the many women who believed in him.

When he came to Jerusalem for the feasts, Jesus must have stayed in nearby Bethany with his friends Martha and Mary and Lazarus. When Mary poured perfume on him in Bethany before his burial, Jesus says she will be remembered forever for her love, when that story is told.

In his parables you can see the high regard Jesus has for women. He praised the poor widow who gave her little coin in the temple, the woman who searched so earnestly for her lost money, the widow who looked for justice from the unjust judge.

St. Luke in his gospel speaks of the many women who followed Jesus from Galilee and actually supported him from their means. Luke names some of them: Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna and “many others,” (Luke 8, 2-3)

All the evangelists say that women were with Jesus during his last hours. They did not abandon him when he was taken prisoner, condemned and was crucified. His twelve disciples fled, but they didn’t. Mary Magdalen, one of his staunchest disciples, stayed with him during his passion and was the first one to go to his tomb on Easter morning. He meets her and sends her as witness and announcer of his resurrection the others. She’s called “the apostle to the apostles,” because of her faith.

The picture didn’t change in the early years of the church. True, Paul and Peter are featured in that early history, but look closely and you can see there were women with them. They were there at the beginning of the church and they have been with the church ever since.

A few days ago I took some visitors to the shrine of Elizabeth Seton on State Street in lower New York City, near the Staten Island Ferry. She is one of the founders of the Catholic Church in this country, the foundress of our system of Catholic schools and of a religious community of women, one of many, that worked tirelessly to establish the immigrant church. Not far from her shrine, Mother Cabrini cared for poor Italian immigrants who came to this country and sought their livelihood in a strange land.

We should not forget these women from our past, and we should not forget the women who belong to our church today. They have been called.

Waiting for Next Year’s Words

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Years ago, I took a theology class taught by Bernard Lonergan, SJ., and recently I’ve started reading a book by him called “The Way to Nicea: The Dialectical Development of Trinitarian Theology,”  Philadelphia, 1964. The book’s an English translation of a course he taught in Latin on the Trinity.

Theologians, like the physicists who gave us the Higgs-Boson particle some weeks ago, like to explore. What makes up matter, physicists ask? Speculative theologians, like Lonergan, ask questions about God and, like physicists, they’re not always easy to follow.

How did we get from the fulsomeness of the scriptures, writings that “penetrate the sensibility, fire the imagination, engage the affections, touch the heart, open the eyes, attract and impel the will of the readers,” to the spare words of the Nicene Creed that seem “to bypass the senses, the feelings and the will, to appeal only to the mind?” That’s a question Lonergan asks and he’s not asking simply an historical question. He quotes from Wilfred Cantwell Smith in his preface: “ All religions are new religions, every morning. For religions do not exist in the sky, somewhat elaborated, finished and static. They exist in men’s hearts.”

Our thinking about God develops; Lonergan uses the development of early Trinitarian Theology to understand how. We hold to the faith of Nicea, but we’re people of today and our religion is new every morning, so we need to express it ourselves and in our time. “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning. (T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding)

I hope the Year of Faith, which we’re beginning in October, is not just about last year’s words. We need words for today and tomorrow. Besides poets, mystics and artists, we need speculative theologians like Bernard Lonergan.

The Higgs-Boson Particle

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Scientists all over the world are celebrating the discovery last week at a research center in Switzerland of a mysterious particle called the Higgs Boson particle. It’s a particle that’s found in all matter and its existence contributes to a new understanding of the nature of our universe.

After fifty years of searching for it, physicists seem to have found it.

I certainly can’t explain what they found, but I admire the scientists for their curiosity, their imagination and their patient searching for this mysterious piece in the puzzle of our universe. They want to know and I admire their drive to know.

I also admire their humility. The scientists say they’re only beginning to see how this world of ours began and how it works. To use a religious analogy, like Moses on the mountain, they’re approaching this mysterious universe with shoes off.

Our search for God is similar to theirs. We know God step by step, little by little. We can’t look straight at the sun; neither can our minds know God completely and at once. We search, not for particles, but for signs and experiences of life that reveal God little by little.

The truth of it is that God does not hide from us. In fact, we believe God revealed himself in the extraordinary sign of Jesus Christ, God’s  Son, who came humbly into our world as God’s Word.

Today’s gospel for the 14th Sunday of the year (Mark 6,1-6 ) recalls the rejection  of Jesus by his own people in Nazareth, a town in Galilee where he was brought up. He suffered the rejection that prophets often receive; later he would suffer a cruel death on a cross, but he did not turn away. In his life, death and resurrection, we see God’s love, God’s desire that we know him.   In him, we have God’s invitation to share his life more deeply, face to face.

We have to fix our eyes on him, patiently and steadily. If we do, we will find him.

The Apostles

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Jesus Christ told his apostles to bring the Good News revealed by God in him to all people. They handed on through “their preaching, by the example they gave, by the institutions they established, what they themselves had received–whether from the lips of Christ, from his way of life and his works, or whether they had learned it at the promptings of the Holy Spirit.”  (Catechism of the Catholic Faith 76)

The apostles and others associated with them, “under the inspiration of the same Holy Spirit committed the message of salvation to writing.” (Catechism 76)

We acknowledge the apostles’ role in bringing the Good News when we read the gospels and recite the Apostles’ Creed. We remember them in our liturgy, and each month we celebrate one of the apostles in our calendar of feasts.  July 3rd, we honor the Apostle Thomas.

Thomas reminds us that the witnesses chosen by Jesus were both weak and strong. Everyone in the Upper Room the night of Jesus’ resurrection believed that he had risen. The absent Thomas doesn’t.  “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nailmarks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

Only when Jesus patiently appears to him a week later and has him touch the wounds in his hands and his side, does he believe. “My Lord and my God.”

Is Thomas unique in his weakness of faith? Were the others chosen by Jesus as foundations of his church unlike him? From the slight information the gospels provide, all the other apostles are both weak and strong–Peter, their leader, is a prime example.

Did the Holy Spirit change the apostles completely at Pentecost? We may think they were, but I don’t think they were so completely transformed as we like to believe. The story in St. Luke’s gospel of the two disciples on the way to Emmaus may better describe the post-resurrection church and its leaders.

Hardly a triumphalist church and hardly perfect leaders. Their strength and their guide was the patient Jesus. The Risen Jesus was with them then and he is with us now.

Irenaeus and the Gnostics

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Many years ago I took a course on Gnosticism in Rome under Fr. Antonio Orbe, SJ, an expert on the subject. Gnosticism, an early heresy that threatened Christianity in the 2nd century eventually waned as a movement and its writings were destroyed. Until a large cache of gnostic writings was discovered recently in the sands of Egypt, most of what was known about the the gnostics came from the writings of St. Irenaeus, the bishop we honor today in our liturgy.

When I studied under Fr. Orbe, he was just back from Egypt and was busy deciphering a trove of gnostic writings. I remember an observation he made about St. Irenaeus.  He said he was struck by how accurately and fairly  Irenaeus reported  what the gnostics taught in his writings,  not distorting what they said or omitting their ideas. He was fair and respectful to friend and foe alike. He was a peace-maker.

Not a bad example for today when hot words and smear attacks, distortions and lies dominate our communications. Irenaeus was a peace-maker. Peace makers don’t destroy, they heal and unite. Blessed are they!

Ireneaus also respected the created world. wrote against the gnostic teachers of his day who claimed their wisdom was wiser than the gospels. He compared their teaching to the faith of “the great church,” the church all over the world. The widely-traveled Christian bishop knew that church; originally he came from Asia Minor, became bishop of Lyons in Gaul, visited Rome. He knew what Christians over the Roman world believed.He also knew what the new gnostics taught, and he wrote down their teachings in great detail in a book called:

The Sign of the Cross

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When Jesus prayed, he used the words and signs of his own  Jewish tradition, which he learned in his family and from others. Our Christian tradition, which guides us in prayer, grew from the Jewish  tradition of prayer that nourished Jesus himself.

Christian prayer has a wisdom all its own, with many different forms and expressions. One basic prayer has  a special place–  The Sign of the Cross.

In the Catholic church and other Christian churches,  the Sign of the Cross is an important part of personal and public prayer. Originating in the earliest days of Christianity, it’s centuries old. It’s the first sign made on us at Baptism and the last sign made as we pass to our future life. It’s a vital part of liturgical prayer and the sacraments. With the Sign of the Cross we begin and end our prayers.

A Blessing of the Triune God

We call it a blessing. We say we “bless ourselves.” Tracing with our hand the figure of the cross on our forehead, our breast, our shoulders, we bless ourselves: Spacer

In the name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.

The Sign of the Cross proclaims a blessing. It symbolizes God blessing us, God embracing us with blessings. And this same sign expresses our belief that God is the One from whom all  blessings flow. In the Sign of the Cross we embrace our good God with mind and heart and all of our strength, and God embraces us.

God blesses. The Jewish scriptures describe God, above all,  as the One who blesses. God blessed Noah and saved the world from the flood. God blessed Abraham and Sara with blessings more than the stars in the sky. God blessed the Jewish people, redeeming them from the slavery of Egypt. Life itself and all creation are God’s blessed gifts.

The Jewish tradition of prayer always approaches God as One who blesses. “I will bless the Lord at all times,” the psalmist prays. Because we are blessed by God,  we bless the Lord in return.

The Christian tradition of prayer follows this same pattern, but in addition it praises the One who blesses for another incomparable blessing: the blessing of Jesus Christ. “Blessed be God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has bestowed on us in Christ every spiritual blessing.” ( Eph 1,3 ) He is “the Word who made the universe, the Savior sent to redeem us.”

In Jesus Christ God appears as our Friend and Brother. With the Father he sends the Holy Spirit upon us “to complete his work on earth and bring us the fullness of grace.” In Jesus, God has reveals the source of all blessings.

When we bless ourselves with the Sign of the Cross we remember the triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who blesses us with life here on earth and the promise of life beyond this.

It is part of our prayers and is a prayer in itself.

The Patience of Job

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I think the greatest of popes was Gregory the Great, who held the church together during Rome’s free fall into poverty in the 6th century. He kept his balance by reflecting on the scriptures, and one of his favorite books to reflect on was the Book of Job.  Here he is drawing on Job’s wisdom:

“Paul saw the riches of wisdom within himself though he himself was outwardly a corruptible body, which is why he says ‘We have this treasure in earthen vessels’. In Job, then, the earthenware vessel felt  gaping sores externally; while an interior treasure remained unchanged. The gaping outward wounds did not stop the treasure of wisdom within from welling up and uttering these holy and instructive words: ‘If we have received good at the hand of the Lord, shall we not receive evil?’ By the good he means the good things given by God, both temporal and eternal; by evil he means the blows he is suffering from in the present.”

Gregory quotes from Isaiah:

“‘I am the Lord, unrivalled,

I form the light and create the dark.

I make good fortune and create calamity,

it is I, the Lord, who do all this.’

“I form the light, and create the dark, because when the darkness of pain is created by blows from without, the light of the mind is kindled by instruction within.

‘I make good fortune and create calamity…’ Notice Job’s skill as he meets the arguments of his wife. ‘If we have received good at the hand of the Lord, shall we not receive evil?’

 “It’s consoling, when we suffer afflictions, to remember our Maker’s gifts to us. Painful things will not depress us if we quickly remember also the gifts that we have been given. As Scripture says, ‘In the day of prosperity do not forget affliction, and in the day of affliction, do not forget prosperity.’”

Love Remains

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The First Letter of John, which we read this Sunday, says simply: “No one has ever seen God.” It’s true. God is  beyond what our eyes can see and our minds take in. God, the creator of heaven and earth, is everywhere. “In him we live and move and have our being.” But our eyes are too weak to see him; our minds too small to know him. We only know God in our limited way.

But we can know God, John reminds us. We know God by love, particularly by loving one another.

“If we love one another, God remains in us,

and his love is brought to perfection in us…

God is love, and whoever remains in love

remains in God and God in him.” (1 John 4, 11-16)

God is love and his love remains in us. The first place God’s love is seen is the world we live in. God’s love is in the air we breathe, the lives we enjoy, the friends, the families, the wives, the husbands, the children, the good things of the earth we’ve been given.

God is love, his love remains; it continues, and we thank God for a love so wonderfully faithful.

The greatest gift of God, the crowning sign of his love, is Jesus Christ, his Son and our Lord. As the Word of God, he’s also beyond what our eyes can see and our minds know. But the Word was made flesh and entered our world and became like us. Conceived in the womb of Mary, his mother, he was born and grew in wisdom and grace, at a certain time and place, like us. We have seen him.

He took the path we humans take, from birth to death. In a unique way, he knew our sorrows, our sufferings, our weakness and our pains. He knows our sinfulness.

His love remains. We can hear his faithful love expressed in today’s gospel. As Jesus raises his eyes to heaven, he prays for us; he guards us, he promises to lead us to where he is. Weak as we are, unsteady as our love is, sinful as those whom he ate with the night before he died, he remains with us.

The Fear of Death

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Great mysteries are expressed and deep truths revealed in these days between Easter and the Ascension, St. Leo the Great says in a sermon:

“In those days the fear of death was removed with all its terrors, and the immortality not only of the soul but also of the flesh was established.”

To remove the fear of death, keep your eyes on the two disciples on the way to Emmaus whom Jesus accompanied “to sweep away all the clouds of our uncertainty.”

“He reproached them for the slowness of their timid and trembling hearts. Their enlightened hearts catch the flame of faith, and lukewarm as they have been, they are made to burn while the Lord unfolds the Scriptures. In the breaking of bread also their eyes are opened as they eat with him. How much more blessed is that opening of their eyes, to the glorification of their nature, than the time when our first parents’ eyes were opened to the disastrous consequences of their transgression.”

Keep your eyes on all the disciples at this time, the saint says: “the most blessed Apostles and all the disciples, who had been both bewildered at his death on the cross and backward in believing his Resurrection, were so strengthened by the clearness of the truth that when the Lord entered the heights of heaven, not only were they affected with no sadness, but were even filled with great joy.”