Easter Vigil 2006 - Dom Peter

“Who will roll back the stone for us?”
We have spent the past forty days working at prayer, fasting and almsgiving. These practices are recommended by the Church to combat the usual blockages in our spiritual lives posed by the flesh, the world and the Devil. For many of us, this is a frustrating experience. Our plans for more prayer get blocked by emergencies or the intrusions of angry thoughts that return to us from other experiences during the day. Our efforts at fasting are undermined by forgetfulness, by excuses and by simple weakness of will. Our efforts at kindness to others are met by indifference from our families and friends and certainly by the world. Our efforts to forgive others are stifled when those persons commit the same old sins against us over and over.

In other words, were Lent meant to be a time of concentrated self-improvement, many of us would have to admit that we fell a bit short. If we feel that we have succeeded, perhaps by August we will be back to wherever we had been last August.

While the problems I mentioned above seem to stem from others’ intrusions on our spiritual lives, in fact the reality is different. The angry thoughts we have at prayer are not caused by our neighbors, however irritating or belligerent they might be. In reality, these persons demonstrate that we are not yet rid of our anger, or our self-concern or so on. This should hit us when at the end of Lent, Jesus Christ, a man unjustly persecuted if ever there were one, serenely takes up His cross and marches off to his death.

Here is a tremendous paradox: when we set out to choose life, we hope that it will bring us liberation and happiness. What we don’t always reckon on is that before we make this decision to choose life, we have been silently choosing death all along. When we make an effort to turn around and follow Christ more closely, our past choices spring to life and hold us back. The experience may feel like one of God’s abandonment, that we are alive but He is nowhere to be found. We desire to find Him, but we fear finding only a corpse and, what’s more, a huge stone stands before us. Who will roll it away? It does not occur to the women that Jesus Himself is alive and quite capable of a small task like moving a huge stone.

What the women, and we, also don’t count on is the fact that the things we tend to associate with life in our world today: excitement, interesting stories and disputes in politics and ideals, just wars, the latest plot of The Sopranos, the most interesting blogs and websites, even the good feelings of being with those whom we like, if I dare say so (and I might bring forth Abraham to testify to my interpretation); these things are part of a world that is passing away and clinging to them is more like choosing death than being alive. God created the world good, of course: we heard this in the first reading. The reading we don’t hear tonight is of the sin of Adam and Eve. We become what we love, and Adam and Eve, by turning from God, heard the just sentence: to dust you shall return. When we prefer the world, we may feel momentarily alive, but we are on the road to dust. When we come to our physical deaths, this may appear to us as a sudden event, but in fact, it is the consequence of the choices we make for spiritual death. This will be its reality, at least until we are reclaimed by the One who brought life by His own death.

The ancient pagans were puzzled to see the ancient Christians approach death in rather a different way. The Christians, according to St. Ambrose, carried their dead high and sang “Alleluia!” Why? Because as life and the good creation had been changed into death by the sin of Adam, death and suffering have been changed into life and victory by Jesus Christ. As the eternal logos, He consented with His Father’s plan to come down from heaven, but He never lost sight of heaven, was not allured by the pomps of the Devil, as we heard six weeks ago. We become what we love: if we are in Jesus Christ, then death does not mean a final reversion to dust, but a transfiguration into the Divine Life. If we love with Christ’s love, then we will become like God Himself.

Have I changed my tune here? Didn’t I begin by saying that our efforts to better ourselves, to follow Christ more faithfully turn out often to be failure? Indeed, and I stand by that assertion, and I stand by the fact that it is Good News. This is because only Christ can roll the stone away, and a recognition of that fact is the key to salvation. We can only be saved, we can only desire a Savior, where we find ourselves perishing, where we recognize the places where we have chosen death. In these places within ourselves, where we are dead spiritually, let us place the Body of Christ, that on this night, He may triumphantly rise and put life in those places. During Lent, we have been searching out not our virtues, not our strengths, but the sepulchers within us. When we find these, we should rejoice: Christ desires to go there before us, and to have us hear there the Good News: He is risen indeed! Like the ancient Christians carrying their dead and singing Alleluia, we should come upon the dead parts of ourselves and sing Alleluia, for these are places where we can have a new life, and one we probably didn’t expect.

Can it be this easy? Am I making this up? If this were not the case, why do we sing, O felix culpa, O happy fault? God’s power makes even our faults, especially our faults, into a reason for rejoicing. What other news can compare with this? Listen to the invitation our Lord makes: all who are thirsty, you who have no money, come to the water and receive without paying! It’s on me! Christ has paid the ransom!

If our efforts at Lent don’t actually improve us, is there not then a better way to arrive at Christ? No, our efforts bear much fruit if they bring us to a realization of our need for Christ, and if we surrender ourselves into His merciful and loving hands. If we consent to our death: this we will do in a few moments when we renew our baptismal vows. As Saint Paul has reminded us, we who have been baptized into Christ have been baptized into His death. So our promises at baptism are a consent to die the death that Christ died: the death to self, the death to this world, the death to death, as it were.

We will, after all, promise once again to reject sin. In a sense, we will promise to renew the fight that we took up at the beginning of Lent, but we will do so now with the renewed faith that comes of the realization that where we find death, Christ bursts forth with life from the Father. Where we have gathered in the darkness this night, the light of Christ has burst forth with an unconquerable joy. What we will have learned is that this victory, impossible for us, is already won by the Strong Man, Jesus Christ. By our efforts to break free of sin, Christ will find a welcome home in us this night.

So let us review a bit where we have been this Lent: what were our greatest disappointments? What were the self-revelations that we most disturbing to our self-image? What are the stones that we need rolled away? Having seen these, let us raise our eyes again and see that One who has already broken out of the tomb. Let us sweetly forget ourselves and let our failings be blotted out by the All-powerful, by the One into whose hands the Father has given all things. Christ is Risen. He is truly risen, alleluia!

Good Friday 2006 - Dom Brendan

The comedian and filmmaker Woody Allen once said that he didn’t mind dying, he just didn’t want to be there when it happened. Few of us do. Ultimately we will have no choice in the matter. Death is part of the sad and inexorable logic of human existence that demands that every child born of every human mother will, one day, die. The trajectory between our births and deaths is a straight line called time that pushes relentlessly into tomorrow. Each day of a life lived means one less day to live because there is a finite number of heart beats in every human life.

This is a fact that even the Lord Jesus Christ himself could not escape. The moment he was conceived in the womb of his mother he was bound by the universal law of death. This is the great scandal of the Incarnation that we seldom pay adequate attention to: the God who takes on human flesh in Jesus Christ becomes the God who dies. A scandal so great that debunking Calvary is a multi-million dollar industry: from the so called “Gospel of Judas” to the Passover Plot, Holy Blood, Holy Grail and a potboiler about Leonardo Da Vinci which you will find in the fiction section at Borders.

Of course Jesus Christ could have died quietly in his own bed of complications brought on by old age and infirmity. But he did not. He died at the prime of life, in one of the most brutal, degrading and painful forms of capital punishment. To crucify was not merely to execute, it was to psychology destroy the victim with torture, isolation, ridicule and humiliation through a protracted and agonizing death. The nails were driven through the hollows of the wrist striking the median nerve causing immediate, overwhelming and prolonged agony. Bypassing the major arteries, these wounds were not meant to be immediately fatal, but so that the maximum suffering could be sustained for the longest possible time. So that in the end the crucified was left begging for death as a relief.

Doesn’t it make you wonder why God chose the cross as the instrument of our salvation? Yet, it is here, before the scandal and failure of the cross that the Liturgy of Good Friday asks us to stand. The Gospel does not attempt to explain the divine logic of the cross, but only to proclaim it. God has become completely one with sin and death and has not stopped being God there. And this is not what we expected, that God would come and show his power and glory by a shameful death: that he would give blessing through one cursed, freedom through a slave, righteousness through one made sin, wealth through one made poor, wisdom through foolishness, strength through weakness, and life through one man’s death.

But then, that’s why they call it Good Friday isn’t it?

Holy Thursday - Dom Peter

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ! We gather tonight to begin our annual observance of the Triduum: the three holy days. This period of three days has for us a mystical signification. I won’t quote you all the places in the bible where three days are mentioned, merely point out the obvious one.

Jesus has told the Pharisees and us that just as Jonah spent three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so must the Son of Man spend three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. However, if we go strictly by the chronology of the gospels, Jesus dies on a Friday afternoon and rises during the night on Saturday, staying one full night in the grave.
I was delighted to discover that St. Gregory of Nyssa pondered this same problem. His solution is ingenious, in that quirky Patristic way that not everyone finds convincing. He makes two interesting leaps. The second is to say that, since God calls the darkness ‘night’, then the darkness that overshadows the earth as Jesus hangs on the cross introduces an extra night into the sequence of events.

Even if you take this as proven, you might be asking, ‘but wasn’t Jesus still alive at this time? And doesn’t that still make only two nights?' Your questions would be answered by Gregory’s first leap of logic: this darkness over the earth on Good Friday was only the second night during which the Son of Man was in the heart of the earth. That is because, even though Jesus’ physical death takes place on the cross, the spiritual significance of that death is illuminated, indeed, is enacted on Holy Thursday at the Last Supper. Let us understand that we are in the presence of mystery here, where time and space cease to work in their customary manner. As of Thursday night, when Jesus says, “This is my body which is for you,” He has already offered Himself and taken away our sins. The Crucifixion will demonstrate the radical price of this self-offering and of our salvation, but the Jesus’ death was inevitable, indeed was already initiated, this night.

Whether you buy Gregory’s reasoning, his underlying theological insight is of utmost significance. The meal in which we partake this night is the sacrificial banquet of the one true lamb whose blood removes our sins. We cannot share His Body and Blood if it is not broken and poured out upon the Cross. Conversely, Jesus’ death on the Cross is meaningless if it is not His self-offering in sacrifice for our sins. The Cross spreads a banqueting table for us, and the table is revealed as the altar of the Cross. Both of these realities, of course, depend further upon the Resurrection, but that is to anticipate.

Jesus sheds further meaning on His impending death and the offering He makes to the Father in the demeaning action of the washing of feet.

We often take Peter’s aversion to Christ’s offer to wash his feet as a protest on behalf of Christ’s dignity. This it may be, but I would like to close with a suggestion or two about how each of us is like Peter, that we don’t really want our feet washed, and that each of us would rather not follow Jesus’ example of service when it is presented this way. I say that we don’t really want these things, but this is an exaggeration: at the deepest level of our being, we do desire salvation and communion with God and one another, so I will tell you some of the ways we forget that this is the truth about ourselves.

Around the closing of the Second Vatican Council, Romano Guardini wrote the following about the liturgy, the high point of which we celebrate in these three days:
“[It] is a steady light, constantly burning; a gentle flame, continually warming; a force silently at work, moulding and purifying. As such it needs the peace and freedom to develop, unhampered by aims and motives.”

“Unhampered by aims and motives…” I can’t say that we approach liturgy that way so often today. Is this because we don’t approach much in life that way?

Peter and the others surely had their aims and motives, what we might today call an ‘agenda’. It included Jesus ushering in the Kingdom of God with spectacular signs and wonders, fire raining down upon the Gentiles and (not to be forgotten!) themselves sitting at His left and right. Peter is repeatedly scandalized by Jesus’ predictions of His passion, of which this sign is paramount. In a sense, Peter’s refusal is John’s version of Peter’s attempt to persuade Jesus that the Son of Man need not die.

However, Peter is who he is because he is able to sign on again when he needs to. Unlike Judas, he does not despair, but just as quickly asks for cleansing of the head as well.

But how often do we insist that God’s plans for us go according to our aims and motives, to our agenda? Do we really want to admit that we need Jesus to cleanse us and that to be cleansed we must witness His abasement? Surely there must be an easier, more antiseptic manner to the goal of redemption, and surely it need not suppress our own ideas, especially the ones that seem especially good to us. You will never wash my feet, Lord! Not if it means giving up…[fill in the blank here].

It gets worse when Jesus commands us to go and do the same, to wash one another’s feet. Simply serving others is a task many of us will sign on for. But Jesus is asking something more profound. If Gregory of Nyssa is right to say that this night represents Jesus’ passion and death, and that His version of ‘service’ means suffering for the forgiveness of others, we might balk. If so, this exposes in us an unwillingness to recognize Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf, as well as an inability to recognize in ourselves a desire for control, which service can often mean. This is another reason that we refuse others’ service of us: we don’t want their help. I can do it just fine, thank you. And as far as serving others: I will accept as long as it doesn’t hurt too much, that I get good feelings out of helping someone. If it means suffering at their hands, well…

If you recognize a part of yourself in this, as I do in myself, we must ask, what can we do? Here is where the liturgy returns to help us out, as does Fr. Guardini’s analysis of the liturgy. Let me offer a similar quote from a wildly different context as a possibility. In a poem called “En sourdine” Paul Verlaine writes:
“de ton Coeur endormi
Chasse à jamais tout dessein,
Laissons-nous persuader

From your weary heart, drive away forever every plan. Let us rather surrender.

Prescinding from the irony in Verlaine’s poetry, let us recognize that this is a love poem. Love, at least ‘falling in love’ tends to distort time, to dismantle our reserve, to reorient our preferences and relativize our concerns. Can we separate ourselves from our mundane concerns, our individuating preferences, our defense mechanisms and our drive for accomplishment for three short days and allow ourselves to be courted by God? If we can, think of how our faith and our very lives will be different.

Let us then surrender to Christ in the liturgy once again this year, and allow ourselves to be swept up in the embrace of one who loved us enough to suffer ultimately to win our eternal friendship in heaven, let us mourn with tears the death of one so just and so good; let us rejoice with abandon at the astounding triumph of the Lamb of God and His unhoped for offer of a share in God’s own life. “Master, then not only my feet, but my hands and head as well!” May you be praised, Lord Jesus Christ our Savior!