This week, again, I am going to adhere to the five-minute rule. In terms of a blog post, this means no more than 500 words. Parenthetical citations don’t count.
It seems fitting that I write this reflection on this Sunday's readings on the Memorial of the Beheading of John the Baptist. Our Gospel for this Sunday is one of those about which endless words have been written and spoken (including these words of mine). I daresay a lot of those words don't amount to much more than ways to evade the cross.
By teaching the necessity of losing your life to save it, Jesus sets forth the fundamental paradox of Christianity. When properly grasped, Christianity is a religion of paradox: one in three, human and divine, virgin and mother, bread and body, success through failure, etc. The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel saw the crucifixion of Jesus Christ as an outright contradiction, thus making it the cornerstone of his dialectical philosophy.
In this passage, Jesus isn’t teaching about life's woes, those things that happen to virtually everyone at some time or another- the suffering that is an inevitable part of life. Rather, he is talking about the suffering that occurs as a result of following him, of living as if God's kingdom is already fully established, what results from loving God by loving your neighbor as you love yourself. According to Terry Eagleton, citing Fr. Herbert McCabe, OP, the "central doctrine of Christianity... is... that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you. Here, then, is your pie in the sky and opium of the people" (see "Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching").
Souffrances de Jérémie (The Suffering of Jeremiah), by Marc Chagall, 1956
This is the prophet Jeremiah's experience. It’s important not to lose the plain sense of the passage that constitutes our first reading. Jeremiah complains that he does God's will, suffers the consequences of so doing, swears he will never listen to God again, and then feels compelled to do God's will despite knowing the outcome. This, too, is what the John the Baptist, the seal of the prophets, experienced even to the point of being martyred.
In urging the Christians of ancient Rome and, by extension, Christians in all times and places, to offer their bodies as a living sacrifice to God through Christ, Paul is urging them/us to live Jesus’s teaching. Doing this requires a transformation of one’s mind. This renewal is the work of the Holy Spirit.
Blessed Christoph LeBreton, OCSO, one of the Cistercian martyrs of Algeria, wrote this as his journal entry for 20 April 1994:
We are actually afraid of what the Gospel says to us, afraid of the anguish it can lead us to, and that’s why we reduce it to a banal “religious language” that does not touch reality at all. But the Gospel is an infinitely difficult book, for the person who reads it with open eyes, who has achieved the second naïveté and become “like a child” (Born From the Gaze of God: The Tibhirine Journal of a Martyr Monk, 76)What Père Christoph describes, I believe, is the renewal of mind about which Paul wrote.
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