Seventh Sunday of Easter - Dom Peter

It sometimes surprises people to find out that in high school, my extracurricular specialty was not so much music as it was theater. In college I came to understand why in the ancient world theater had a bad reputation: pretending to be someone else is a risky task. I’ve had the idea of a short story about a man who plays Shakespeare’s Iago and ends up himself becoming duplicitous in real life. But my writing skills are even shakier that my skills at music and theater, so the story probably will never be written.

An influential, if somewhat brutal moment in my realization about the theater scene came in my second year in college. There was a certain woman who never acted in any shows, but always seemed to be on the stage crew or lighting crew, helping out with whatever needed doing. In my awkward way of trying to show appreciation one day, I asked her what moved her to volunteer for these jobs. She replied, “Oh, I guess it’s my way of having power.” The answer really shocked me. This was a time in my life when I was studying texts by the philosophers Marx and Nietzsche, men associated with the idea that any suggestions of charity or help are really about power, but this was the first time the idea really hit home.

God is love we hear this morning; this phrase is one often quoted, indeed is felicitously the name of the Holy Father’s first encyclical. Yet, as Pope Benedict points out, the phrase needs explaining, especially if we struggle to believe in agape, that self-giving love, rather than self-aggrandizement masquerading as love. How does the Church ask us to hear this phrase, as we contemplate Jesus ascended into heaven, and as we await the Holy Spirit?

As the Father sent Jesus, so now, after His Ascension into heaven, He sends us. At the same, time, He promises to be with us always. Indeed, we believe that we are baptized into His Body and this means that in some fashion we have been raised in the Ascension to God’s right hand. But how can we be at God’s right hand and still sent? The sending into the world part is easy enough for us to see, though we might wonder sometimes what our task is. What about our exaltation at God’s right hand? Can this really be true? If it is true, why don’t we experience this?

I would like to suggest that we will come to the realization of our deep union with Christ to the extent that we love truly, that God is truly the wellspring of all our actions.

Pope Benedict notes in his encyclical that in the earliest days of the Church, Christians were admired for their charity. In a world where the poor and slaves were regularly treated with contempt, the Christians offered a radically new message. Today, because Christianity has so deeply influenced our world, concern for the poor and the sick has come to be seen as normal. Therefore, this care has largely been secularized. Where friars and nuns once relieved the poor and cared for the sick, science and government programs have stepped in and not infrequently are more effective, particularly in medicine. Because many of the tasks of charity that were once done by religious have been taken over by non-religious, Christianity itself is caught in a quandary: what is it that we are about then? What, then are we sent to do?

We should recall that the mission of Jesus is connected to baptism and therefore to the Holy Spirit. Jesus did not begin His public ministry until He was anointed with the Holy Spirit. As He is leaving the world, He promises that we, too, will receive this anointing, and that the Holy Spirit will tell us all things.

And what will the Spirit empower us to do? To serve one another in love and to bring salvation to others. In another time, this often meant clothing the naked and feeding the hungry. We are not dispensed from that task today, but we should look seriously at the charge, noted by the Holy Father, that charity to the poor reinforces their helplessness and that charity is really a front to assuage our consciences.

Saint Augustine made the same observation:
“If you render service to a wretched person, perhaps you desire to extol yourself before him and wish him who is the source of your beneficence to be subject to you. He was in need; you shared. Because you rendered service, you seem greater, as it were, than he to whom the service was rendered. Wish him an equal so that you may both be under the One to whom no service can be rendered. [Tractate 8 on the First Epistle of John, 5]”

Pope Benedict’s observation, one that accords with monastic tradition, is that charity should develop in tandem with humility because it should be real service, rather than mere favors. We will achieve that true humility that pours itself out for others if we grow in union with Christ, who provided His greatest service from the Cross, the lowest place.

This is why Pope Benedict implies that prayer is the greatest form of charity by placing the monastic life first in a list of the Church’s works of charity. I don’t take him to be meaning that this is limited to the monastic state, but that real prayer is real charity because it is union with God who is charity. It is in prayer that we conform ourselves to Christ and so can imitate Him in valuing persons for their full dignity as humans in God’s image. In prayer, if we really bring ourselves to it as creature to Creator, we will discover ourselves needy and we will discover ourselves loved. Too often, we go to prayer as if it is a favor that we do for God, and then we ask Him for favors in return. Is this love or is it business? We shy away from deeper prayer because it exposes us as empty, needy and naked. But it is the crushed spirit that God will save, not the healthy and self-satisfied. Sometimes we act before God: we pretend to be righteous, we avoid looking at our neediness and we never get to prayer. Yet, if we really pray, really encounter the greatness of God, the sweetness of God, our reliance upon God, we will easily dispense with the illusion that our good deeds are our own doing, that we somehow are righteous because of them.

Here, then, is the gift we should seek from God: the gift of knowing ourselves truly: both the neediness of our present state and the blessedness of the glorified state promised but not yet realized. We seek this union with God every time we gather at the Eucharist. In the liturgy, we practice this: we act as if we are there. Unlike the unfortunate actor playing Iago, or the Pharisee acting righteous before God, this type of acting transforms us into the image of God.
This week, let us renew our devotion to prayer: real prayer! Not reading texts that affirm our opinions, not fearing to go past devotions that produce expected results, but real prayer that brings us face to face with the God who is our supreme good, who loves us and pours out His Spirit into our hearts. Then let us pray for the gift of this Spirit that as we are sent to bring Christ to others, we may truly have Christ to give them.