Third Sunday of Lent: Dom Brendan

“And making a whip of cords Jesus drove them all out of the temple.”
This vivid story has captured the imagination of artists throughout the centuries. Giotto painted it on the wall of the Scrovengi Chapel in Pauda, El Greco painted it, so did Gustave Dore, Giordano liked the theme so much he painted it twice from two different perspectives; Rembrandt painted it too. Each of these paintings gives different interpretations of the event but in all of them one thing remains the same: Christ is always pictured with a whip in his hand flailing away at a terrorized throng of vendors.

But it was Rembrandt who painted the most violent version. The Lord Jesus is pictured holds the whip in his right hand. The man next to him is clutching a money bag trying desperately to grab the loose change on the counter top. One man is turned away from Christ, caught in mid flight while another glances over his right shoulder with panic and fear written on his face.

But it is the face of Christ himself that the viewer ultimately comes to focus on: there is fierce anger in his eyes and his jaw is set with grim determination. I once saw a similar look in my father’s face when he came home from work one day and found that my younger brother had shellacked the windows of the house with varnish he found in the basement.
So we should probably begin by admitting that the Gospel does not show the Lord Jesus Christ in an especially flattering light. This is not the “Jesus meek and humble of heart make my heart like unto thine” that all of us fervently hope and believe he is. This is the God you were more likely to encounter at a Redemptorist Mission in the 50’s or the Puritan God of Jonathan Edwards' famous sermon “sinners in the hands of an angry God”.

It would be tempting to ignore the cleansing of the temple except for three facts: first, every one of the Gospels records it, second it is used against Jesus at his trial as evidence leading to his conviction and execution on Good Friday, and third, it occupies center place in the Church’s liturgy for the Third Sunday of Lent. And we should probably be asking ourselves why?

The answer begins with the reading from the Book of Exodus on the Ten Commandments. In effect, the first reading is a lens that helps us focus and understand the uncharacteristic behavior of Jesus in the temple.

The Ten Commandments: if you have not read the book you’re probably familiar with the movie. You may also know that the “the ten words” as the Jews call it, are at the center of the culture wars in this country being fought in the courthouses and schools. And that is because we are talking about 10 commandments and not 10 suggestions or 10 alternate behavior choices.

The joke goes that Moses comes down the mountain and says to the people “I have good news and bad news. The good news is I got him down to ten, the bad news is that the one about adultery stays.”

Humor aside, the giving of the law to Moses on Mt. Sinai is the high point of the Book of Exodus. It is the moment when the God of Israel reveals himself to Israel. There is that beautiful line from the Prophet Baruch that we hear in the readings from the Vigil of Easter: “Blessed are we O Israel, for we know what pleases our God.” But this knowledge, which is denied the pagans, is a two edged sword because if Israel knows what pleases God they also know what displeases him. So this knowledge is not about mastering facts and manipulating information it the knowledge to do what is right and just. This is what pleases our God.
But when Moses comes down from the mountain to deliver the tablets of the law to the people what does he find? the assembly of Israel worshiping a golden calf, breaking the very commandments Moses has just received. In a fit of blazing anger Moses smashes the tablets on the ground.

Here we arrive at the point on which the Gospel turns. Moses’ righteous anger is provoked by the sin of idolatry, the Lord Jesus’ righteous anger is provoked by something equally sinister. Or to put it in the terms supplied for us by the Evangelist himself: zeal for the Temple consumes Jesus just as zeal for the Torah consumes Moses.

The temple was the holiest site in Israel, the visible sign of God’s presence. But it would be a mistake to think of it as a quiet place of personal prayer and worship. Josephus, the Jewish historian, scathingly refers to the temple as the “bazaar of Annas”. Annas was the high priest whose son-in-law Caiaphas turned Jesus over to Pilot.

Josephus’ comments refer to the fact that the High Priest controlled the monopoly on the stalls for merchants selling animals for sacrifice that were set up in the Court of the Gentiles, the huge portico on the north side of the temple. He also received rent and a portion of the profits from the money changers booths located there as well because every Jew was expected to pay a yearly tax to the temple. The amount as laid down in the Book of Exodus amounted to a half a shekel in pure silver which, in 1st Century Palestine, was the equivalent of two days wages.

But Roman coins contained the image of the emperor; it was unthinkable to use them as the temple tax, neither could they be used to purchase animals for sacrifice so they had to be exchanged for kosher Jewish coins. According to Josephus the profits in these transactions were huge because the money changers shamelessly took advantage of the pilgrims who came from the countryside and foreign countries. Annas and his family were there of course to receive a portion of these funds as well.

This means that the holiest place in Israel was probably a chaotic scene with crowds jostling, merchants haggling with pilgrims, vendors selling animals to be sacrificed, and the animals themselves bellowing and fowling the pavement. The spiritual center of Israel ends up as the biggest racket in town. And it is into this scene of chaos that Jesus bursts with a whip in his hand.

At this point we come to a homelitic crossroads. We could pursue any number of themes suggested by the liturgy but I’m assuming that one of your Lenten penances is not spending all day in Church.

What can we take away from these readings to nourish our hearts over the coming week? Lent is the season when the Catechumens prepare more intensely for the Sacrament of Baptism and the baptized rediscover for themselves the true meaning of discipleship. The pace of modern life and with its endless demands and distractions means that we tend to forget that as baptized believers we ourselves are temples of the living God. The day that water was poured over our heads and the Trinity invoked in the ancient formula our bodies became the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit: our hearts became the holy of holies. The divine presence is a heart beat away and yet we are often unaware or numb to it. Or worse, we have pushed God aside and have enthroned ourselves at the center of our own existence. Moreover we defile this temple by the way we live, the things we allow ourselves see, the thoughts we will to think, the words we say or leave unsaid and the actions we do or leave undone.

We cannot go back and be re-baptized but we can allow Christ to cleanse us through the second baptism of repentance. The whole of our Lenten asceticism, prayer, fasting, and acts of mercy are meant to bring us to this realization. Christ comes, not with a whip in his hand but under the form of bread and wine into our hands. In his zeal for the Church he gives himself to us completely, body and blood, soul and divinity. Let us give ourselves to him.

First Sunday of Lent: Dom Peter

First Sunday of Lent, 2006
Repent and believe the Good News: Lent is here!

A friend of mine once shared with me his experience of fasting. He took it on faith that the practice had value, but in practice he found that it made him angry and difficult to live with, so he gave it up, at least for now. I have had a similar response when I have tried to give up, or even just reduce caffeine for Lent. Actually, let me admit, that I have a similar feeling every morning when we sing the office of Vigils, and as cantor I begin Psalm 94 (95): “Come, ring our joy to the Lord!” Now, I’m a morning person, but even I come up short most days having to sing at 5:00 a.m., when I’d rather be sipping a cappuccino and reading Dante. Much more to my liking is Psalm 3, which precedes Psalm 94, “How, many are my foes, O Lord…break the teeth of the wicked!” And perhaps here we have a reason why Saint Benedict put them together.

Saint Benedict wanted his monks to chant Psalm 94 each day because his own spiritual theology is closely mirrored in it. Saint Benedict wants his monks to be aware of God’s presence at all times and listening for Him: “O that today you would listen to His voice!” Conversely, at six different places in the Rule, Saint Benedict bans murmuring or complaining. And so the Psalm continues, “Harden not your hearts as…on that day at Massah in the desert when your fathers put Me to the test.”

“When you gain a friend, gain him through testing, and do not trust him hastily,” says Ben Sirach (6:7). This morning, Jesus goes out to the desert in imitation of His fathers in the flesh. Just as God had ordered Pharaoh to let Israel go into the desert and in doing so called Israel, my Son, so too, after Jesus’ baptism, where the voice from heaven identifies Him as the Son of God, He also goes into the desert. There He is tested. We follow this same pattern: claimed by God as His sons and daughters by our baptism, our lives should be something like a continual Lent, at least as viewed by those outside the Church. But, as Saint Benedict says, since few have this strength, at least in the days leading up to the celebration of Christ’s triumph at Easter, we should be true sons and daughters of God. Jesus will refer to us as friends at the Last Supper: and here is our chance to be tested by our abstinence, generosity and assiduous prayer throughout these forty days.

Like our fathers in the desert however, when we come up against obstacles, our first impulse is usually to put God to the test rather than acknowledging that this is forbidden to us, as Jesus reminds Satan in Matthew and Luke’s version of the temptation. When we are hungry or have that caffeine headache or try to be silent and find our minds buzzing away with 24/7 commentary on our busy lives, our usual first response is to blame someone else for our weakness. This is what Freud identified as the defense mechanism of projection. So we get angry at the unfortunate brother who passes by, we shake the baby or kick the cat. In some cases, perhaps by those of us slightly more sensitive, we may instead turn in on ourselves and despair. But this is not allowed either: believe the Good News! Why the long face? Why so slow of heart to believe? But what are we to believe, and why should it make us eager to repent, eager even to be tested?

“Never again will I destroy all bodily creatures,” God promises Noah in the first reading today. God promises never to send such a flood again. But the flood serves as a warning and a teaching, or as a ‘type’ as Saint Peter tells us, in this case, a foreshadowing of baptism. But this baptism does not primarily affect the body: rather it affects the soul. It offers us the chance of a clear conscience. This gift will be prized by all who recognize their consciences as muddied in some way. And this includes us all, if we have the humility and fortitude to face up to it. “No one knows himself except by be tested, or receives a crown except after victory,” says Saint Augustine. Through our testing during Lent, we will come closer to knowing the truth about ourselves. And knowing the truth about ourselves will dispose us to greet with genuine joy the announcement of the Good News. There is no Good News without repentance, as there is no crown without a victory. And the Good News the victory is this: Jesus Christ has been tested and has triumphed over all of the forces that we find too strong for ourselves: our anger, our concupiscence, our sadness, whatever demons hold us bound, their days are numbered because Christ has battled Satan and defeated once and for all. It is for us to trust in this victory, to undergo the test with Christ so that we may triumph with Him. Let us hold firm to the knowledge of His victory, after which He assumes the crown: “The Kingdom of God is at hand, and I am King!” He proclaims.

We will be tempted this Lent to give up on our good resolutions, tempted to give in to anger or sadness or boredom. We are being tested so as to know the Truth that will set us free. Will we give up, or will we repent and believe the Good News?

Ash Wednesday: Dom Brendan

Ash Wednesday
March 1, 2006
Last month on January 27th the world observed the 61st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the soviet army. In the years since that event took place there have been countless books, newspaper articles and even some movies that attempted to describe or explain the meaning of the Holocaust.

One of those camps, Auschwitz was in fact two death camps. An earlier one where thousands of poles, jews and gypsies were put to death. Among them St. Maximillian Kolbe starved to death in the basement of the punishment block 11. To get there you have to walk down a long corridor lined with the prison photographs of polish intellectuals and students, some of them just boys. All of them perished in the camp. At this point the guides tell you that the average life expectancy of a prisoner in Auschwitz was 6 months.

Auschwitz II was the larger camp just 2 kilometers away. Nothing can really prepare you for the size of the place: the double row of electrified barbed wire fences, the watch towers, and the long rows of barracks.

In the center of the camp are two rail lines with a wide gravel walkway on either side for disembarkement. It was here that the train journeys for Jewish deportees and other minorities finally ended. In the summer of 1944 hundreds of trains arrived with their cargo of 250,000 Hungarian Jews who, within a few hours after their arrival, had been herded into the gas chambers and from there into the crematoria. Death organized on a factory scale.

All but one of the gas chambers and all the crematoria were blown up the Nazi’s in the days before the liberation. They lie at the back of the camp near a grove of poplars: huge piles of rubble left undisturbed as a silent witness. Just to the right of them is a pond filled with murky water. It was here that the ashes of the dead were dumped.

Looking into that pond you see not merely the ashes of the Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians and others. You see also the ashes of what might have been, the shattered hopes and dreams of modern civilization.

The Nazi death camps of World War II, like the camps of the Soviet Gulags, and the re-indoctrination camps of Mao’s China and Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam are all a testimony to the fact that something has gone fundamentally wrong with the human project. Something that is far more than mere badness, far more than mere selfishness, something that is in fact evil. Were it simply a matter of ignorance or human stupidity we could say that what the human race needed was higher education, a masters in compassion or a PhD in human kindness. But it fact no amount of education, no amount of reading and study can change the fact that you and I sin even willingly and eagerly.

The journey that led to Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Bergen Belsen and a hundred other camps all began with a single human will to do wrong. And there is not a single person here tonight who does not know what that feels like if we allow ourselves to get beyond the usual excuses and the pop-psychology jargon we use to justify ourselves to ourselves.

I just said that something has gone fundamentally wrong with the human project. But this is not how we started out. On Holy Saturday Night at the Great Vigil of Easter we will hear how God created us good in the beginning, and how he as worked all through human history to call us back to our original innocence. Ashes to ashes is what we will become but God has greater plans in store for you and I. What he asks is our cooperation. And the first step in that cooperation is the grace of repentance, the desire to turn from sin and to seek forgiveness and renewal.
The ashes of Auschwitz are a sober reminder of what happens to a world without God, a world without love and without repentance. The ashes that we bless and distribute here tonight are not a sign of hopelessness and despair but the joyful acceptance of God’s offer of salvation.

Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time: Dom Brendan

8 Sunday Ordinary Time B
February 24, 2006

At the beginning of Lent each monk in the community is expected to give the Prior the name of the book he will read for Lent. This comes out of St. Benedict’s regulations for Lent in Chapter 48.

I’ve decided to read the Song of Songs. I chose it because of a discussion we had a month or so back in our Catholic Readers Society. Someone mentioned that this book would have been better left out of the bible because it is essentially a collection of poems, often frankly erotic, on the theme of human love: Hebrew opera from the 10th century b.c.

The criticism sounds a bit like my novice master of 30 years ago who gently suggested that novices might want to avoid reading the Song of Songs so as not to stir up youthful passions. Of course, as soon as we had a moment free we went right to our rooms and read it. It was everything he feared and all we hoped it would be.

As it happens, when the canon of the Hebrew bible was decided upon by the rabbi’s at Jamnia following the fall of Jerusalem, the opulent poetry of the Song of Songs caused much debate. Was it Sacred Scripture or not? It was Rabbi Akiva, a fierce conservative but for all of that no prude either, who argued forcefully for its inclusion. “God forbid,” he said, “that any Jew deny that the Song of Songs is a holy text; for all the ages are not worth a single day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel. All scripture is holy but the Song of Songs is the holiest of all”.

He was not only defending the emotion of the Song of Songs, but also the extraordinary symbolic image of Israel as the bride of God. And his argument carried the day.

You might be wondering where I’m going with this and how long it’s going to take to get me there because obviously the Song of Songs does not figure anywhere in this Sunday’s readings. What does figure into the readings is the reality behind the Song of Songs i.e. the covenant relationship between Israel and God described as a marriage in which Israel demonstrates her faithfulness to her husband by forsaking idols and observing the torah.
I had an aunt who used to say that marriage was like a hot bath, once you got into it, it didn’t seem so hot any more. This may not be everyone’s experience of married life but it was hers. It also seems to have been the experience of the Prophet Hosea in the first reading. He is a husband who has been made a fool of time after time by an unfaithful wife, but who loves her so passionately that he works to win her back. He even plans a second honeymoon. The prophet’s unhappy experience in love and marriage is an image of Israel’s now hot, now cold relationship with her husband YHWH, but more importantly, it is the also the image of the passion with which God loves Israel.

“A bride”, as the saying goes, “is a woman with a fine prospect for happiness behind her”. Salvation history has a far more optimistic assessment for the bride Israel. The book of Hosea was written around the middle of the 8th century b.c. It would take another 750 years before the marriage relationship between God and Israel would take a dramatic and unexpected turn when God would renew the covenant in a way that no one could have guessed or imagined.
In the person of Christ God came to Israel in human flesh and renewed the covenant, no longer by the mark of circumcision in the flesh of each Jewish male: henceforth it is God Himself who bears the mark of the covenant cut into his flesh with nails and a lance. And out of his wounded side, as from the open side of Adam, is born the New Eve, the Church, the Bride of Christ.
It is out of this background that we should hear this Sunday’s passage from the Gospel of Mark. It is framed in the context of a theological dispute about the proper observance of the laws on fasting. But this story is not about the outward observance and legalism of the Pharisees verses the spiritual freedom of Jesus and his disciples. Fasting in Jesus’ day was not simply an act of piety or the mindless accommodation to someone else’s rules about food. Fasting had to do with Israel’s present situation over run and occupied as she was by pagans. More specifically it had to do with the commemoration of the destruction of the Temple. The prophets promised that one day God would come to restore the fortunes of Israel and fasts would be turned into feasts.
So Jesus raises the theological ante by asking “How can the guests at a wedding fast when the bridegroom is still with them”. In other words the bridegroom is at hand. Fasting is a sign of sorrow and repentance. Weddings are occasions of joy where the order of the day is feasting not fasting. Jesus’ presence means that the party is in full swing, and no one wants a glum face at a wedding.

But there are also darker things hinted at in this passage: there will come a time when the bridegroom will be taken away and put to a violent death. Mark, who also knows the outcome, immediately presents two images that hint at what that outcome will be: new cloth and new wine which tear and burst the old that went before them: images of the resurrection: the tearing away of the hold of death and the bursting forth of Christ from death and the tomb.

With Ash Wednesday just a few days away the liturgy is carefully preparing us for the coming of Lent. Obviously we cannot derive the whole theology of Lent from a few verses of Mark’s gospel. But using this Sunday’s texts we can begin to see what the goal of our Lenten fasts and observances are and what they are not. Certainly, Lent is not about eating carrot sticks and cottage cheese in order to win God’s favor and approval. We already have it. It is rather a time for God to
“ lead us into the desert and speak to our hearts
so that we may respond there as in the days of our youth.”
A time to put our own relationship with God aright by remembering the passion with which our God loves his bride, his Church and the length to which he has gone to prove it.

6th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Dom Peter

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
If I were to write a book about Mark rather than preach a homily I would entitle it, “God in Human Flesh: the Good News of Jesus Christ.” This title is purposely provocative. Most commentators would disagree that Mark presents Jesus as God. Indeed, it is in Mark’s Gospel that Jesus responds most clearly to the rich young man, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” Most commentators assume that Jesus is saying that He is not God. But He doesn’t say that at all. Rather, He is challenging the rich young man to put two and two together. As we know, the young man lacks the faith to go all the way, shown most plainly by his unwillingness to give up his wealth to the poor. This is because he is unable to recognize that God has come to earth, and as a result of this everything has changed. Mark throws each of us this same challenge: repent and believe in the Good News: God has come in human flesh. Will we recognize this and therefore change our lives? Or will we stick to safe formulas such as one I found yesterday in an otherwise excellent book on Mark: “Jesus is neither God nor a divine being, but a human.”[i] This of course is not the Church’s teaching, and so this kind of thinking perpetuates the suspicion that the Church and Scripture say different things.

I say that everything has changed, but this is not exactly true. Indeed, one of the reasons that we recognize that Jesus is God is that He acts like God has always acted. More on that in a moment; for now, let us dwell a bit more on the fact that people don’t recognize God when He comes. This happens because He also acts in ways that they don’t expect of God, in ways that seem to compromise God’s holiness and purity.

We live in an antiseptic culture. Touching one another has become risky. When the monks prepare breakfast for our guests each morning, we are required to wear latex gloves. So not only touching one another is risky, but touching what other people touch is risky. For this reason, many of us are reluctant to share the Cup at Mass. Throughout the Old Testament, there is a similar concern for God’s holiness. God teaches in the Torah that His Chosen People must distinguish between what is holy and profane, what is clean and unclean. Things that are unclean are not so, however, because they contain germs. Rather, because God has come to dwell on earth within the temple, things that are unworthy of His presence are endangered. Contact between God’s presence and uncleanness causes the improperly cleansed person to be consumed in God’s wrath. In fact, in two Old Testament stories, leprosy is precisely the result of presumption, once by Miriam claiming to be a prophetess on the same level as Moses, and once by King Uzziah presuming to take the priests’ role in burning incense.

When God’s wrath breaks out against impurity, the imagery used is often that of an angry horse. Animals have very sensitive noses, and if you hold something near them that stinks, they snort, shake their heads and stamp their feet. They may even charge at the offending object and destroy it. This is an image of God common in the Old Testament. The very word for anger in Hebrew is related to the word for ‘nose’. In a corresponding way, one may appease God’s anger by burning incense or holocausts. These raise a pleasing odor and cover over the stink of impurity.

This, of course, is hardly a complete or sufficient image. God also purifies His People, forgives sin, heals the sick and teaches wisdom.

Still, it is hard to prepare oneself for the shock of Jesus, even if He were a mere prophet and not God, reaching out and laying hands on a leper. The touch of a leper defiles and nullifies one’s privilege of appearing in God’s presence.

Leprosy is displeasing to God, however, not simply because it is unworthy of His holiness, but precisely because is an affront to human dignity. God loves His People and is grieved to be separated from any of us. This separation is the consequence of our sin, symbolized by the bodily impurity of leprosy. God is so eager to rescue us and restore friendship with us that He enters the world as a man. He demonstrates His love not writing a prescription for the leper, but by the loving gesture of a touch. How many years had it been since this man with leprosy was touched? Ten? Twenty? Thirty? Can you imagine being without human touch for that long and what it would mean to have Jesus touch you? To have God touch you?

It is noteworthy that Jesus, by working this cure, can Himself no longer enter into the towns but must travel in desert places. By touching this leper, He has taken upon Himself the consequences of leprosy which we heard about in the first reading. He and the leper have changed places: the leper can now return to the city and Jesus cannot. Thus has He taken upon us our sins and alienation, to bring them to the cross where they will be destroyed.

Why then does Jesus suddenly speak sternly to the man? The language of the cure in today’s Gospel echoes in many ways the exorcisms that we have seen so far. Jesus does not merely heal the leprosy; He drives it out. In fact, the language goes a bit further. Jesus is not merely warning the man; the Greek term used here is embrimēsamenos, which normally means ‘to snort with rage’: that is, like a horse in the presence of a foul smell. John the Evangelist uses the same term when Jesus arrives at the tomb of Lazarus to confront the evil stench of death. This depiction is part of Mark’s signal that this is no mere man. This is our God, locked in the primeval battle with the foulness of darkness and death. Our God is a jealous God and countenances no rivals. God is angry battling leprosy and evil. The miracle here is not simply the trick of wiping away leprosy, it is the freeing of man from sin, sickness and death, restoring him not simply to a fulfilling life, but to a loving friendship with God, for Whom we were made. God’s anger blazes against whatever would come between Him and His beloved creation.

I began by proposing that Mark writes so as to provoke the hearer to repentance. We are in no way different from those characters in the story we hear today. Indeed, Jesus Christ, our God, is coming into our midst. He will come forth from heaven and touch of lovingly as we stretch out our hands and tongues to receive him. If this is so, we must leave off and renounce whatever impurity that we cling to so that as Jesus consumes it, we are not lost along with it. We must separate ourselves from our sin and give it to Jesus to be destroyed, whatever that sin is: anger, gluttony, envy, gossip, flattery, self-will, vainglory.

But more than that: we must recognize that God is coming to touch not only me, but my brother and my sister here with me today. If this is so, we cannot imagine these persons unworthy of God’s love. If that is so, we must also leave off considering others outside the pale of God’s redemption. We must not be scandalized that Jesus touches a leper and we must not be scandalized that God loves the sinner, among whom I number myself. Let us rededicate ourselves to purifying our hearts to God and toward others and so make a fitting dwelling place for Him Who comes to take up His dwelling there, our Lord Jesus Christ, to whom be power and glory forever. Amen.

[i] Rhoads, David, Joanna Dewey, Donald Michie. Mark as Story: An Introduction to the narrative of a Gospel, Second Edition, Fortress 1999, 104.

5th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Dom Brendan

Fifth Sunday Ordinary Time
February 5, 2006
Cycle B

I want to begin this reflection with a brief calendar item. I think that February is the most dismal month of the year followed closely by January and March in that order. Some of you may share my feelings on this matter. But even if you do not, I take a certain amount of comfort in the knowledge that the ancient Romans, where were in large part responsible for our calendar, considered February to be an unlucky month which is why it is also the shortest month.

Originally, the Roman calendar had only 10 months beginning in March and ending in December. The period between December and March was simply disregarded as of little importance because nothing happened in those cold, dark, slumbering 60 days which we have come to call January and February. This is why January and February were the last months to be added to the calendar.

Given the reputation of this month it is somewhat appropriate that the Book of Job ushers in February with one of its rare appearances. It suggests to me that the members of the Pontifical Liturgical Commission (who chose the readings for the three year cycle) may actually have picked this reading out of something that approximates a sense of humor.
“Is not man’s life on earth a drudgery?
Months of misery and troubled nights have been allotted to
me.”
So says Job. In speaking of months of misery does he have January and February in mind? Probably. Though he is also speaking out of a larger context in which the experience of this month only plays a small part: that is the mystery of human suffering, and to be more precise, the mystery of undeserved human suffering. Of this, of Job is surely the prime example.

Throughout the Old Testament there is a sense that if you serve God faithfully and keep all his commands things will go well with you: corn, wine and oil, long life and plenty will be yours: whereas disease, suffering, poverty and a violent death are the lot of the sinner.
By the time of Christ this idea of blessings for faithfulness and curses for sinfulness was firmly fixed in Jewish mind. You can see an example of it in John’s Gospel when the apostles, noticing a blind man sitting outside the temple, ask Jesus if it was his sin or his parents that caused him to be born blind. The blind, the lame, the leprous and diseased are all being deservedly punished for things done or left undone.

I said that this idea was a common one in the Old Testament. But the Book of Job proves to be the exception to the rule. Job is a righteous man: his sufferings are completely unmerited and undeserved. His misfortune is actually due to a wager between God and Satan to see if Job, who up until now has enjoyed God’s favor and protection will, when faced with the loss of everything he holds dear, curse God to his face.

The brief passage from today’s liturgy comes from the seventh chapter where Job is visited by his three troublesome friends who have ostensibly come to comfort him. Since suffering is a punishment for sin they feel certain that Job must have done something wrong to merit all this misfortune. Job can only protest his innocence and the apparent futility of the human condition in the face of suffering and death. But since God is just it must somehow add up to something.

Most people are quite happy to suffer in silence, if they’re sure everybody knows about. The Book of Job, capitalizing on this bit of truth, seems to be saying that there is at least someone who needs to know what suffering is all about and that someone is God. This is why you get the sense that Job, while patiently enduring all that is dished out to him, is really pointing a finger at God and saying: you don’t know what it means to suffer, to feel pain, and to die. What is more, Job is right. God by definition is beyond sickness, suffering and death.
One of my theology teachers liked to say that Job provokes God into coming up with an answer to the charge that he is a stranger to all that is human and weak. And the answer is the Incarnation of Christ. And this in fact how we are meant to understand the passage from today’s Gospel. Jesus is God’s personal response to the human condition and all that it entails.
Mark shows this in a dramatic way. He has Jesus work his miracles on a Sabbath which in effect says that this is the beginning of a new age, a new Creation. Jesus also rejects any taboo that might inhibit his ability to help those in need. He reaches out and touches Simon’s mother-in-law. A respected rabbi of Jesus day would not have taken a woman by the hand, and certainly not on a Sabbath day. Christ’s approach to this woman, and all who are sick or possessed, is Mark’s way of signaling God’s compassion.

This may not strike you as a big deal. After all, every religion has, in some way, an answer to the problem of suffering and evil. Some faiths, like Christian Science, deny the reality of the physical universe and pretend that disease and death are an illusion. Some faiths comfort the suffering by asserting that God is tormenting them for their own good, to make them better persons. And others maintain that God has nothing to do with suffering because he stands above it.

It is true that God does not want human misery. But that does not mean that he has nothing to do with it. In fact, if we take today’s Gospel as our guide, we see that God has in effect rolled up his sleeves and entered into it, is not afraid to get his hands dirty doing something about the human condition.

But as everyone knows its one thing to visit a hospital and another to be a patient: this explains why the Lord Jesus will go on to identify with suffering humanity in a far more dramatic and ultimately shocking way. On the Cross he will taste death itself and descend into the abyss of hell the ultimate place of human alienation and torment. There will be nothing held back from him in this, the ultimate lesson in what it means to be a human being.

Whenever we gather for Eucharist to eat and drink his flesh and blood we celebrate a wondrous exchange: we enter into the mystery of his passion and death and he enters into our own personal experience of suffering and death. But he brings with him more than empathy, he brings the power of his holy and life giving resurrection.

This is not the theological equivalent of an extra strength Tylenol. He does not take our suffering away, and we will all one day have to die. But his passion and death gives meaning to our own. And this is good news to keep in mind in these long, dark slumbering days of February.

3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time: Dom Peter

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time B
The world in its present form is passing away. What is the present form of the world? And will there be a new one? How will it appear and what will it look like?

For much of modernity, talk of ‘the world’ was normally taken to refer to a physical place, earth or possibly the universe as a whole. Anthropology has a different sort of answer to the question, ‘What is the world?’ The world as most of us experience it is not so much a physical place as a series of interlocking relationships. These relationships, in turn, are governed by various rules. We speak, for example, of the world of politics, and we mean the sort of monkey-business of professional lobbyists, trading favors behind closed doors and so on. From time to time, we hear talk of a revolution in American politics, where the bums are thrown out and new, honest men and women replace them. But the new and honest usually turn out to be bums themselves: the political world, its rules and pressures are too strong for mere human beings to change them significantly.

Perhaps Wordsworth best captured the difference between the world as a place, which is good and beautiful, and the form of the world that we experience as a kind of trap, in which the rules of relationships and apparent necessity snare us and cause to do things we don’t mean to do.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This snare or net woven of the rules of this world is exactly what is passing away. This is why Paul counsels us to live as if those rules no longer held. It is why most of the Fathers of the Church, commenting on this morning’s Gospel, point to the fact that the first Apostles leave behind their buying and selling, their wives, indeed their very worlds in order to follow Jesus Christ as He passes by.

It is worth noting that Jesus is passing by the sea. Mark uses the same word paragon, as Paul does to describe what the form of the world is doing, passing by or passing on. Saint Matthew says rather that He was walking by and Saint Luke omits the episode altogether. I would suggest that this is because Jesus is on a rescue mission, not unlike Jonah. There are two forms of the world in conflict, and they are about to separate definitively from one another. Jesus is coming to rescue those caught in this world, those toiling away at their work and its demands, not sure what the point is. “Leave your nets!” Jesus says, “come after me, and as I have pulled you out of the water, you too will save others by pulling them out of the water.”

That there are two worlds passing by each other also suggests that Jesus is not rescuing us to set us free from commitment or relationships. Far from it. Rather, He is inviting us to be freed from the nets of this form of the world so that the world can be recreated with proper relationships. What will these look like? These will be relationships based first and foremost on discipleship to Jesus Christ Himself. In other words, the new world that is coming into being is the Church, a new set of relationships and rules for acting as human beings freed from the dead-end of sin and death.

This is why we gather every week around the altar and table of the Lord: we are rehearsing, as it were, a new way of being. Our participation in the Eucharist is a decision on our parts to leave behind the old form of the world and work with Christ to co-create the new world. Is this goal too lofty? Are we out of our depth here? After all, we often don’t act like the Church even when gathered here, to say nothing of what we are like once we return to the old world outside of those doors.

John the Baptist preached that there was one coming after him who was more powerful than he. This verb ‘to come after’ signifies someone who will come and take up John’s work when his time is through. And indeed, it is precisely when John was arrested, as we hear this morning, that Jesus begins to preach a message very similar to John’s: the time is fulfilled, repent and believe the good news!

When Jesus sees Simon and Andrew, what does He ask them? Most people would respond, I believe, that He said “Follow Me.” In fact, He says, come after Me. Take up My work! He invites to pick up where He left off to be fishers of men and women, to bring about the conversion of the world to Christ.

Do the Apostles do this? Do they come after Jesus? Eventually, yes, once the Holy Spirit has been given. But today, the best they can do is to follow Him. Not a bad start, mind you, and probably about where most of us are. We recognize the need to change, to repent, but we feel overwhelmed by the possibility and demands of real sanctity. It seems, well, dangerous. To claim that the world is passing is to invite opposition from those who are powerful in the world, after all.

Nevertheless, Jesus really does invite me and you to live as if this world were passing away, and by lives of holiness to proclaim clearly to others that there is a better way than the present form of the world offers. That way is love and self-sacrifice, of the renewal of our minds that they and the world may be transformed, that is, given a new form unlike the one passing away.

Today’s first reading illustrates the dynamics of our efforts on behalf of God’s kingdom and what we can expect when we come after Christ. Oddly enough, when Jonah preached to Nineveh, they were all too ready to listen. In a sense, the old Nineveh really did pass away: the Nineveh of idolatry and sin changes course and becomes a nation that fears God and lives virtuously. The one person who remains unchanged is Jonah himself. It is this sort of stubbornness that often confronts us as we make the effort to be transformed in Christ. We set out to change other people and wind up having our own worldliness shown to us in all its ugliness. This is a good place to be! Conversion and transformation in Christ is not magical. He asks our consent at every step of the way and even forgives when our conformity to the world causes us to hedge. It is only much later in the story that Peter will discover the price of coming after Jesus, as well as the glory of the new world of the Church under the headship of the resurrected Christ.

My brothers and sisters in Christ, let us begin again today to the Church. So many people want the Church to conform to the world and so only view the Church politically, economically, sociologically and so on. What if we as Church could really proclaim the transformation of the world? Let us begin again the adventure of coming after Christ, of discipleship, that we may begin this transformation by the renewal of our own hearts: seeking out the various nets we have laid for ourselves within, our stubbornness, our pride, our vanity, our fear and need of comfort, and let us leave them behind to pass away. Let us rather look to the Lord, present in our midst this morning and be recreated in the Eucharist to be persons of praise, thanksgiving, hope and love in Jesus Christ, to whom be glory and honor forever. Amen.

Mary, Mother of God, 2006

Mary, Mother of God, 2006
Each year on this date, Saint Cyril of Alexandria must somewhere be smiling and cringing. Smiling because this celebration of Mary, the Mother of God is a vindication of his life-long struggle for orthodox Christology. Cringing because in the Post-Communion prayer, we slip in the title, “Mother of Christ,” which was precisely the formula he fought so long to get rid of! It is a bit like toasting the memory of Ronald Reagan by quoting Leonid Brezhnev.

Cyril spent the better portion of his adult life in a relentless battle against Bishop Nestorius of Constantinople. Nestorius’ claim to infamy is that when his flock was referring to Mary as the Mother of God, he felt that their Christology was too extreme and asked instead that they call her Mother of Christ. After all, how can God, without beginning or end, have a mother?

But Cyril insisted, and indeed carried the day. Yet in a fit of theological amnesia, our English translators decided that the Latin phrase Filii tui Genetricem et Ecclesiae Matrem, literally “Mother of Your Son and Mother of the Church” should be rendered “Mother of Christ and Mother of the Church!” And of course, this wasn’t merely a problem with our translators: it had to get by a bunch of bishops and was approved by the Vatican. This morning, for your edification and my sanctification, I will pray the prayer as written. And why not start the New Year making lemonade with this one?

“Isn’t this just the sort of arcane nonsense that only scholars can care about? How much difference can it make? Isn’t Jesus the Christ and Mary the Mother of Jesus?” Yes and yes.
The problem is not what Nestorius allowed, but the fact that he insisted on calling Mary the mother of Christ and forbad her to be called Mother of God. Just as fatherhood is revealed to us by Jesus’ relationship to god the Father, so too, motherhood is revealed to us by Jesus’ relationship to Mary His Mother. To understand fatherhood, we must understand God’s fatherhood; to understand motherhood, we must understand Mary’s motherhood. No small praise for the Virgin of Nazareth in Galilee.

God is eternal and without origin, but God’s body is not. It is Mary who gives God a body. But the question is this: is God therefore a body? Can we in some way say that in fact, Mary is somehow at God’s origin, at least as we know Him now? It sounds risky to say so, but our salvation and the redemption of God’s good creation is at stake, if we refuse to acknowledge this.
For Nestorius, the body of Jesus the Christ was simply a tool. His real nature, the divine nature inhabited this body for a time, but threw it off, once He accomplished what needed to be done. Therefore, since his divine nature didn’t need a mother, he merely went along with the Incarnation as a kind of charade, or to be more kind, as a condescension to our lowly human nature for the purpose of instructing us. He put on a body to allow us to see something of God, but not God. Following this reasoning, we too must someday throw off our bodily eyes and perhaps even our bodies in order to see God.

“Show us the Father!” the Apostle Philip pleads at the Last Supper. Jesus’ response to Philip is important. He chides him: “Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me? He who has seen me has seen the Father.” Jesus does not say, “He who has seen me has some idea of what the Father is like.” Indeed, we can come to an idea of God’s character by inspecting many of the signs He has put in creatio. Jesus also does not say, “He who sees me with spiritual eyes sees the Father.” No, He simply says, “He who sees Me sees the Father.”

This is true because Jesus is God and Jesus, since He is also man is a body. Some of us don’t like to admit it, but our nature as human beings means that we are bodies. Not merely bodies, mind you, but bodies nonetheless. It is false to say that we are spirits inhabiting bodies, though many of us today would prefer to think that. Many are ashamed to be bodies. Often this is because we think that only perfect bodies are worthy of respect, to the great profit of the plastic surgeon. Or we are embarrassed by the weakness of the body, that it becomes ill or has desires that we have difficulty controlling. So we blame the body and long to be rid of it, perhaps not consciously, but I do believe this is true. And I do believe that this is why we have so little respect for mothers today, including the Mother of God. For it is to our mothers that we owe our bodies, and therefore it is to our mothers that we owe ourselves. For we are bodies.
So we return to the importance of today’s Solemnity. God takes for Himself a mother and so becomes a body. If Jesus is not a body then His Resurrection is not bodily, then His presence in the Eucharist is merely symbolic. Indeed, there is much at stake in calling Mary the Mother of God. If God is pleased to be a body, surely our bodies can’t be bad: indeed, they are gifts from God: they are ourselves! When we leave this earthly life, we won’t be ourselves again until the Resurrection when we will receive our bodies back (at age 33, according to Thomas Aquinas—but I digress). Remember that: we won’t be able to hug our departed loved ones again until the Resurrection, but that will happen; therefore we have this hope for the world, that everything about it that is good will be perfected by God in the end, our bodies included. For if God cherishes humanity enough to become human, surely He will not begrudge us humans becoming God with Him.

Ash Wednesday homily: Dom Brendan

Ash Wednesday
March 1, 2006

Last month on January 27th the world observed the 61st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the soviet army. In the years since that event took place there have been countless books, newspaper articles and even some movies that attempted to describe or explain the meaning of the Holocaust.

One of those camps, Auschwitz was in fact two death camps. An earlier one where thousands of poles, jews and gypsies were put to death. Among them St. Maximillian Kolbe starved to death in the basement of the punishment block 11. To get there you have to walk down a long corridor lined with the prison photographs of polish intellectuals and students, some of them just boys. All of them perished in the camp. At this point the guides tell you that the average life expectancy of a prisoner in Auschwitz was 6 months.

Auschwitz II was the larger camp just 2 kilometers away. Nothing can really prepare you for the size of the place: the double row of electrified barbed wire fences, the watch towers, and the long rows of barracks.

In the center of the camp are two rail lines with a wide gravel walkway on either side for disembarkement. It was here that the train journeys for Jewish deportees and other minorities finally ended. In the summer of 1944 hundreds of trains arrived with their cargo of 250,000 Hungarian Jews who, within a few hours after their arrival, had been herded into the gas chambers and from there into the crematoria. Death organized on a factory scale.

All but one of the gas chambers and all the crematoria were blown up the Nazi’s in the days before the liberation. They lie at the back of the camp near a grove of poplars: huge piles of rubble left undisturbed as a silent witness. Just to the right of them is a pond filled with murky water. It was here that the ashes of the dead were dumped. Looking into that pond you see not merely the ashes of the Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians and others. You see also the ashes of what might have been, the shattered hopes and dreams of modern civilization.

The Nazi death camps of World War II, like the camps of the Soviet Gulags, and the re-indoctrination camps of Mao’s China and Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam are all a testimony to the fact that something has gone fundamentally wrong with the human project. Something that is far more than mere badness, far more than mere selfishness, something that is in fact evil. Were it simply a matter of ignorance or human stupidity we could say that what the human race needed was higher education, a masters in compassion or a PhD in human kindness. But it fact no amount of education, no amount of reading and study can change the fact that you and I sin even willingly and eagerly.

The journey that led to Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Bergen Belsen and a hundred other camps all began with a single human will to do wrong. And there is not a single person here tonight who does not know what that feels like if we allow ourselves to get beyond the usual excuses and the pop-psychology jargon we use to justify ourselves to ourselves.

I just said that something has gone fundamentally wrong with the human project. But this is not how we started out. On Holy Saturday Night at the Great Vigil of Easter we will hear how God created us good in the beginning, and how he as worked all through human history to call us back to our original innocence. Ashes to ashes is what we will become but God has greater plans in store for you and me. What he asks is our cooperation. And the first step in that cooperation is the grace of repentance, the desire to turn from sin and to seek forgiveness and renewal. The ashes of Auschwitz are a sober reminder of what happens to a world without God, a world without love and without repentance. The ashes that we bless and distribute here tonight are not a sign of hopelessness and despair but the joyful acceptance of God’s offer of salvation.