Your Time Is Gonna Come

These readings are taking us to the “end times”: in one sense, the end of a liturgical year, but especially the end of all time when Christ comes again. The prophet Daniel foretells Archangel Michael’s great harvest of just and unjust. In Mark, Jesus seems to bypass angelic involvement in favor of His own surprise soul-sifting. Either way, to quote Led Zeppelin, “your time is gonna come.”

But that sifting time doesn’t completely and convincingly materialize this side of heaven. Meanwhile we have the perennial “problem of evil,” or as the Church’s Catechism calls it, the “mystery of evil.” Why and how does evil occur in the world—more precisely, why and how are people allowed to commit evil—sometimes seemingly without consequences, and without divine intervention?

While it remains a great scandal that God allows us to do evil, it is that very gift of freedom based on understanding and virtue that enables us to do good. Take away the possibility of evil from us, and you thereby take away the possibility of good. How incredibly powerful and complex has God made us! The fire that can, in one moment, drive people along the warpath of rage, also can drive people in the commitment of marriage, holy orders, and consecrated life. It depends on where we allow our hearts to roost.

I began to put my thoughts together before all this stuff in France happened! In case you haven’t heard it: on Friday militant Islamists killed over 120 people in Paris. The day before, it was Beirut. Not long before, a Russian airliner. Pope Francis aptly referred to these terrorist actions as a kind of drawn-out Third World War.

At the same time, wars happen, to our minds, outside of us. We are tempted to distance ourselves from them and objectify them. Beyond the initial fear and outrage, we must remember—and we do remember—that there’s the solidarity of grief and prayer; but also there is the renewed battle call to personal holiness and mission.

We might say, “Let’s hear it for children and for saints,” as they seem so enviably single-hearted in their pursuit of happiness, goodness, and faith. But a sappy love of children, or even saints, will not make us childlike or saintlike. Suddenly, having become adults, we renew our maturity again and again by harnessing of our passions for beauty, our understanding for truth, and our freedom for goodness; in so doing we pay the best homage to childhood and sanctity.

All of this is rooted in Jesus the Christ, who, Hebrews reminds us, “offered one sacrifice for sins, and took His seat forever at the right hand of God.” “Now,” the letter continues, “He waits until His enemies are made His footstool.” Are the men and women of ISIS “His enemies?” Is God’s inspired Word accomplished in their elimination? Or is the one sacrifice of Christ the means to accomplish even their salvation and consecration...even ours?

A Mirror of our Sinfulness, A Window to our Salvation

            Once again, a special feast trumps a Sunday in Ordinary Time—this one honoring the Holy Cross. This is not a celebration of planks of wood. It has been said, with no small amount of snark, that if someone assembled all the existing relics of the “True Cross," they could form a giant redwood. True or not, that statement betrays the great devotion Catholics have shown throughout the centuries to the Cross.

On every liturgical day the Church is celebrating our Incarnate Savior. In his letter to the Philippians Saint Paul reminds us that, by becoming man, God the Son set aside the glory of divinity (though not divinity itself). That “emptying of self” is what enabled Jesus to live a full human life, with the full array of joys and sorrows—in particular rejection and scorn, and above all the pains of His passion and death.

And yet God also experienced much of this from us prior to the Incarnation. Take, for example, the Israelites’ rejection of God at various points along their trek in the wilderness. Time and again Israel set aside the true God by worshipping foreign gods and treating people unjustly. Israel understood her chronic tragedies as God’s response to their sins, while in reality those tragedies were the consequences of participating sinfully in a sinful world.

While it is not accurate to portray God as fickle and sensitive as we human beings often are, this much is true: God is not pleased with sin, and He wants it out. In the account from Numbers, God instructs Moses to mount a bronze serpent on a pole so that the afflicted can look upon that serpent and be healed. What is really happening in this transaction? God is holding a mirror up to the people’s faces, so that they can see what their sin has done to them, how it has disfigured God’s image in them to the point of nearly becoming unrecognizable. Only then can they acknowledge their sins and turn to Him who would restore them by His mercy to a greater beauty than before.

There is the wonder of the Cross: it is the instrument of our salvation because on it our Savior was lifted up in mingled shame and glory, thereby allowing us to perceive the double truth of our alienation from God in sin and God’s drawing us to Himself in love. With joy and gratitude we draw near to the Cross, and to its Occupant, for by that Holy Cross He has redeemed the world.

More Like An IV Than A Torrent

Readings for 16^th OT A 2014

            We heard last week how, like a seed planted in the ground, God’s Word has a purpose and accomplishes it, despite the various hindrances we encounter. According to Saint Paul, “all creation groans” in expectation of the full revelation of God’s power: that is to say, man’s personal struggles with knowing and choosing what is good are matched by a sense of incompleteness and even treachery on a global scale.

            My daily ministry has me encountering people in their worst moments of physical pain and spiritual discouragement. The beds of Schuylkill Medical Center, the beds of our nursing homes and many people's homes as well, are fields in which wheat and weeds are found together: human beings, good creations of a good God, are afflicted with various ailments. In their understandable impatience they wish He’d rip out every trace of the ailment, but He doesn’t tend to work that way with that or much else.

            The other day a professed atheist shooed me away, wanting nothing to do with “hocus-pocus” (which, by the way, is a corruption of the words of consecration in Latin, “Hoc est enim Corpus Meum,” “For this is My Body”). He challenged me for any sort of proof beyond this material realm, but at that point I didn’t have the presence of mind or the patience to dialogue with him. It wasn’t the time or place, anyhow.

            While most of my audience shares with me a lifelong identification with Christ and the Church, I want to see where this man is coming from. God seems slow and distant at times; the dispensation of His love resembles an IV more than a torrent. We might consider that slowness and silence to be a grand disappointment. Although our all-powerful God enlists the help of human beings in carrying out His wise, loving plan, many things lie outside of our control—especially the behavior of other human beings who, like us, do not always operate in a wise and loving manner. And then there are the calamities that arise from weather, creatures, and so forth. When it comes to sickness and aging, however, the uncontrollable factor is the deterioration of our mortal frame, and even there with an honest appraisal we find that we may bear some responsibility.

            There is no quick answer to the mystery of evil, whether it’s physical decay or moral injustice. Our Catechism points out that the entirety of the Christian faith is the response to that mystery. Insofar as God has created it, a person or a thing is good. The old saying goes, “God doesn’t make junk.” He created the human person with the ability to appreciate beauty, know truth, and choose good—abilities which are divine in origin. We sin when we fail to exercise those abilities, but God patiently has moved in the redemptive direction by establishing covenants with us, chastising and consoling us by turns. The sending and sacrifice of the Son in human flesh, the bestowal of the Holy Spirit, and the establishment of the Church as the reliable vehicle for salvation: finally these divine gifts demonstrate unending, unconditional love that God commissions us to “go and do likewise” (Lk 10:37), to “pay it forward” as we might say today.

             In the myriad, mystical ways of His Providence, the Lord brings good out of evil, even if we may not perceive it this side of heaven. In faith, hope, and love, with courage, justice, temperance, and fortitude, we persevere.

Memorial, Sacrifice, and Banquet: An Easter Homily

Last night at our Easter Vigil we initiated seven persons into the Catholic Church: two through Baptism and Holy Eucharist, five through a Profession of Faith, Confirmation, and Holy Eucharist. While Baptism is always the first Sacrament a person receives, Eucharist is the highest. In this Sacrament, Jesus Himself abides with us as our pledge of heaven. In the Holy Mass He comes to us as memorial, sacrifice, and banquet. These themes fit into the Easter Triduum:

Memorial: When you “remember” someone, biblically speaking, you act on his behalf. God “remembered” childless wives like Hannah and Elizabeth with children who would do great things for Him. The Psalmist boasted of how God, in His mercy, “remembered” Israel in her distress, countlessly saving her from distresses both self-inflicted (sin) and enemy-inflicted (oppression). 

On Holy Thursday, the night before His death, Jesus "remembered" His apostles: He washed their feet. He gave them His own Body and Blood in the Eucharist. He entrusted them with the power to make that Body and Blood present on our altars; in other moments He entrusted the power to forgive sins, to anoint the sick, and to bestow the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Sacrifice: Sacrifice is the heart of religion. The Jews, in particular, sacrificed their best animals and produce in order to demonstrate to God and to themselves that God deserved the best of their love. To purely materialist minds, it seems like the biggest waste; in a sense they’d be right. By spending our time and attention on divine things, somehow our perspective on earthly things changes. They become at once more important and less important: more, because now we want to use those things well, and less, because we know they're not all there is to this life. 

On Good Friday, Jesus followed through on the promise of Holy Thursday by offering His fully divine and fully human life. Everything He endured, from the lies that people levied against Him to the physical and mental torture to the crucifixion itself, He endured for our salvation. At every step, love was His motivation; no other reason would do.

Banquet: People need to eat. The act of eating often provides as much emotional satisfaction as physical. Food finds its way into most gestures of hospitality, welcoming, congratulating, and mourning—in a word, every human interaction. With good intentions we flash it around whenever we want to impress people. Among all cultures the Italians come to mind with that word, abbondanza, which to my mind includes food, but encompasses all wealth and every expression of value. 

On Holy Saturday, death’s scarcity becomes life’s abbondanza when Jesus treats the souls of the blessed to His eternal wedding feast, when He forever unites Himself to His Church in a total bond of fidelity, permanence, and fruitfulness.

The quiet Upper Room meal, the Silence of the Lamb that was slain, the darkness of the grave: these three days together form one great, mysterious day of joy and hope. We know too well how our sorrows and sins can get the better of us, but the Lord Jesus declares to us once and for all--and as often as necessary--that sin, suffering, and death do not have the final say on our lives, as long as we steep ourselves in the meaning and power of this most sacred day.

Christ our Life is risen from the dead, glorious and immortal. By our faithful participation in His Word, His Bread, and His Charity, it shall be so!