Resisting temptation

Readings: Gen 2:7-9.3:1-7; Ps 51:3-6.12-14.17; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11

Ah, the First Sunday of Lent! Ash Wednesday through the following Saturday is really just a Lenten warm-up. Each year on Lent's premiere Sunday we hear about Jesus' temptations in the desert. At least in the Synoptic Gospels, of which Matthew is one, it was to the desert he went after his baptism by John in the River Jordan.

For Matthew, the Lord's forty-day and forty-night sojourn in the wilderness is meant to be something of a recapitulation of Israel's forty years in the desert. For the first time in many years, I have decided this year to read through the Bible in a year. I don't do these things by podcast. I just pick up the "good" book and read. As of today, I have read Genesis, Job, Exodus, and the first seventeen chapters of Leviticus- I didn't start exactly on New Year's Day.

I have read the first five books of the Bible I don't know how many times. It seems to me that this narrative, which did not take the form it now has until about BC 1000, is mainly about Israel's formation as a people and their grappling with how to be a people set apart. We should be much more impressed than we are by the ethical monotheism that slowly emerges in ancient Israel. It is their worship of the God of heaven and earth that sets them apart, making them unique among the nations.

Our first reading from Genesis is remarkable, even now, for its depth of meaning. Created in the divine image and, at least initially, in the divine likeness, humanity's temptation remains the same: to rid ourselves of God and to put ourselves in God's place. This is what constitutes sin, original or unoriginal.

This temptation is often subtle. The serpent tells the woman that God doesn't want her to eat the fruit because if she does, she will be like God. Well, the truth is, she is already like God, fruit or no fruit. But likeness is not identity. Hence, to be like God is not to be God. I think, too, this temptation is about denial of reality.

Denial of reality is denial of God. At the fundamental or atomic level, there is right and wrong. Hence, you can't determine these for yourself. Attempts to do so don't so much result in divine punishment in the here and now as to merely reaping what you sow either now or later.

We are constrained by creaturely limits within the boundaries of what is real. Nonetheless, it is perhaps the most human of tendencies to push against these seeking to expand our limits. This is certainly a theological point made by the story of the Tower of Babel. The takeaway of that story is that it is possible to transgress these limits but that one does so at her/his own peril. In our day, one does not need to be religious or even to believe in God to see some of the dangers inherent in bio-technologies and the easy talk about a transhumanistic future. Most of us have seen Bladerunner.

Jesus came, as Saint Paul writes about in such detail in our second reading, to restore our likeness to God, which is lost whenever we fall for the same subtle stratagems as the first human beings in our first reading. The story of "the fall" is by no means a historical account of an actual event. To read it as such, in a flat, two-dimensional way, is to drain it of virtually all revelatory meaning.

Temptations remain the same as those outlined in Genesis and to which the Lord is subjected in our Gospel: the flesh, the world, and the devil.

Turn the stones into bread to soothe your hunger.

Throw yourself down to create a grand spectacle of angels catching you mid-fall, saving you from certain death while demonstrating God's awesome power.

Worship the devil to gain power. In reality, it isn't about worshipping Satan to achieve power, like the guitarist who meets the devil at the railroad junction outside town and sells his soul to be an axe master. Rather, seeking power for its own sake is probably the most devilish thing of all! God doesn't coerce by using divine power. Thunderbolts belong to Zeus, not to the God of Israel. Turning back to Israel as a people, I think this insight goes some distance toward explaining why God hardened Pharoah's heart even in the face of many divine manifestations.

One who is truly alive does not live by bread alone, but by the words of God.

One who truly trusts God does not tempt God. She knows how God works. It isn't divine power on demand.

One who trusts God does not use the means of coercive power to accomplish divine ends. God's kingdom will not be established by the coercive power of the state.

"So submit yourselves to God. Resist the devil and he will flee" (James 4:7). Prayer, fasting, and almsgiving are how, like Jesus, you can resist these perennial temptations.

Ash Wednesday

Readings: Joel 2:12-18; Ps 51:3-6.12-14.17; 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:2; Matthew 6:1-6.16-18

Lent, repent! It’s a great mnemonic. “Lent” is derived from an old English word meaning “Springtime.” Spring is the time when, shaking off the dead cold of winter, nature returns to life. What Lent, then, should be about is shaking off what leads to death and taking up what leads to life.

It bears noting that Lent is not a six-week self-improvement course. It is a time when the Church, in all her members, seeks to become more profoundly what we already are: the Body of Christ fully alive and, in the power of the Spirit, extending this life to the world. One way to do this is by recommitting ourselves to practicing those life-giving spiritual disciplines set forth by the Lord in our Gospel today: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.

There seems to me a correlation between these disciplines, which fundamentally constitute Christian spirituality, and those great gifts of God, known formally as “the theological virtues”- faith, hope, and love.

Prayer is essential for a Christian. It is your response in faith to God’s call. God calls you to share his divine life, the life of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Grace is nothing other than God’s sharing divine life with us. This life is a communion of persons fused together by love. This is why the Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life.

Prayer, too, whether corporate or personal, liturgical or spontaneous, is communication with God. “Without prayer,” observed Romano Guardini, “faith becomes weak and the religious life atrophies.”¹ Over time, he noted, it’s difficult to “remain a Christian without praying.”² What relationship can thrive or even survive without communication?

Prayer is the catalyst of faith. Prayer is to fasting what faith is to hope. Just as hope without faith is mere optimism, fasting without prayer is dieting. Almsgiving without prayer and fasting is humanitarianism. Humanitarianism is good as far as it goes. But it falls short of what Jesus teaches his disciples.

As love- agape in Greek and caritas in Latin- is the fruit of faith and hope, almsgiving, which is perhaps best described as self-giving service to those in need, is the realization of prayer and fasting. Caritas- self-giving love- is the essence of Trinitarian life. As the scripture reveals: Deus caritas est (“God is love”).³ To jump ahead to the beginning of the Triduum, that most lovely of Latin hymns begins- Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est (“Where charity and love are, God is there”). But we have all of Lent to arrive at that point.

Caritas, or charity, is concern for the whole person, including her transcendent dimension. As Pope Benedict noted, besides material assistance, which charity bids us to give, what genuinely Christian service offers those in need is “refreshment and care for their souls, something which is often even more necessary than material support.”⁴

Since Lent is the time each year during which we prepare for the renewal of our baptismal promises at Easter, it bears noting that when you were baptized, by grace, you were plunged into the divine life of God. Recommitting to practicing the fundamental disciplines of Christian life during Lent is how your renewal does not amount to so many words that signify, that is, point to, nothing real.

Something similar can be said about receiving ashes on your forehead. Especially in light of our Gospel, it takes some audacity to be marked in this way. To be thus marked is not just to be reminded of your mortality. No fact is more mundane, more existential, more universal than death. To receive ashes is to identify as a penitent, one who seeks to be transformed by grace into the image of Christ. Ashes are a sign of hope.

So, as we begin Lent, a season dedicated to repentance, we must disabuse ourselves of the very un-Catholic and un-Christian notion that grace and effort are mutually exclusive. Of course, we need God’s grace to make our efforts fruitful. It is God who both begins and brings to completion his good work in and through you.⁵

It is true that the practice of spiritual discipline will not, in and of itself, bring you closer to Christ. To believe otherwise is to mistake means for ends. Only Christ can draw you closer to himself. What even your best efforts do is open you to God’s grace, clearing space for and attuning yourself to the Spirit.

As Christians, we live and learn by seeking to put into practice the teachings of Jesus. Experience is the best teacher. How else can you really verify the truth of what the Lord teaches? As the religion of the Incarnation, Christianity cannot remain a set of abstract ideas and ideals.

May your practice of these disciplines foster growth in virtues theological: faith, hope, and love. The end to which the Law is but the means, as Jesus demonstrated repeatedly in word and deed, is to love God with your entire being and to love your neighbor as you love yourself. Or given the often-convoluted way we relate to ourselves, to love your neighbor as Christ loves you.

The Greek word, metanoia, usually translated as “repent,” means to have a change of mind, a change of heart. In other words, to repent is to change, and to be changed is to be converted. For a Christian, this means being increasingly conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. Lent, repent!

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1 Romano Guardini, The Art of Praying: The Principles and Methods of Christian Prayer (Manchester: Sophia Institute), 5.^↩
2 The Art of Praying, 5-6.^↩
3 Epistula Ioannes I 4:8.16.^↩
4 Pope Benedict XVI. Encyclical Letter, God is Love [Deus Caritas Est], sec. 28b.^↩
5 Philippians 1:6.^↩

Year I Seventh Monday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Sirach 1:1-10; Ps 93:1-2.5; Mark 9:14-29

“To whom has wisdom been revealed?” This is a rhetorical question posed in our first reading from the Book of Sirach. In its original context, the answer to this question was “No one.”

Jesus Christ is the full revelation of God’s wisdom. Not only that, but through the working of the Holy Spirit, we can grasp God’s wisdom ever more fully but never completely. In and through Christ Jesus, God has lavished wisdom on us.

Just as one can study philosophy and not be a lover of wisdom, one can have access to God’s wisdom revealed in and through Jesus and not be truly wise or even any the wiser. There is a big difference between knowing all about someone and actually knowing the person. Knowing about Jesus rather than knowing him is what happens when one takes a merely academic approach to the scriptures.

This is in no way to denigrate the tremendous benefits that arise from studying God’s word methodologically. We certainly must resist the temptation, ever present in American Christianity, to become anti-intellectual regarding our faith.

Anyone acquainted with the scriptures knows that God’s wisdom is not the wisdom of the world. In fact, divine wisdom often contradicts worldly wisdom. For example, we like to imagine that material abundance is the result of God’s blessing and a sign of God’s pleasure with the one who lives an easy and comfortable life.

Jesus, who is the wisdom of God personified, makes it clear, especially in the synoptic Gospels, of which the Gospel of Mark is one, that such wealth cannot save you and, in many instances, it presents the biggest obstacle to salvation. To give just one example, consider the response of the rich young man to Jesus’ call to renounce everything and follow him. This man “went away sad, for he had many possessions.”¹ Seeing him turn away, Jesus remarked: “How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!”²

In the arithmetic of God’s kingdom Jesus+Nothing=Everything. To grasp this, to experience this, is to possess true wisdom.

Our Gospel this evening also shows us the audacious and often unbelievable nature of God’s wisdom. Divine wisdom is revealed in Christ as compassion and concern. Coming down from Mount Tabor with Peter, James, and John, where, after being transfigured and appearing alongside Moses and Elijah, he was again reaffirmed as the Father’s “beloved son,” and his three companions were told- “Listen to him,” Jesus walked into a dispute.³

This dispute was over the inability of Jesus’ disciples to heal the young man who seemed hellbent on self-destruction. Responding with what seems to be a bit of impatience, the Lord has the boy brought to him. Jesus then witnesses for himself the disturbing symptoms of boy's affliction.

After telling Jesus, in response to his question, that this has been a lifelong malady, the young man’s panicked padre says- “But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” It seems at that moment, Jesus shifts from impatience to annoyance. (One of the most salient features of Mark’s Gospel, which is the earliest written Gospel, is how the inspired author brings the Lord’s humanity into full view). Jesus’s first words spoken in response to the father’s plea indicate this: “If you can!” What he means by this is revealed in what he says next: “Everything is possible to the one who has faith.”

Jesus, it seems, is saying something like “Of course, I can do something! It’s clear you don’t know who you are asking. Do you believe I can help your son?” I can only imagine how the Lord’s slight annoyance melted into compassion upon hearing the honest and sincere reply of this worry-wearied and desperate dad: “I do believe, help my unbelief!”

It wasn’t only the seemingly possessed young man who needed Jesus’ help. His father did, along with all who were there disputing, including Jesus’ ineffective disciples. Of course, this extends to you and me. We need the Lord’s help to believe in him, to trust that he is the Father’s beloved Son to whom we should listen, who we should follow and obey.

In the end, Jesus exhorts those present to pray. Through prayer, your faith will not remain infantile or pagan; a pseudo-faith that believes when things are going great the Lord is pleased, and when things aren't going so well believing he is displeased or, worse yet, that he isn’t who he says he is and, therefore, unable or unwilling to do something. Prayer, the foundation of spiritual life, is the catalyst of faith.

It is through prayer that you come to know Jesus Christ and not just about him. Prayer, because it is “communion with God,” observed Romano Guardini, “is the most fundamental expression of faith.”⁴ Praying is an act of faith through which we seek help for our unbelief.

Far from being contrary to faith, doubt is an essential ingredient. It is a grave error to reduce faith to mere belief. When your belief flags, it is wise, like the desperate dad, to keep asking Jesus. Prayer is an act of faith in the One who is eager to have compassion on you and to help you in your need.

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1 See Mark 10:17-31.^↩
2 Mark 10:23.^↩
3 See Mark 9:28.^↩
4 Romano Guardini, The Art of Praying: The Principles and Methods of Christian Prayer (Manchester: Sophia Institute), 7.^↩

Year A Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Lev 19:1-2.17-18; Ps 103:1-4.8.10.12-13; 1 Cor 3:16-23; Matt 5:38-48

On this Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, which this year is the last Sunday before the beginning of Lent, we are still in the fifth chapter of Saint Matthew’s Gospel. This is the fourth week our Gospel reading is taken from this chapter, which constitutes the core of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount. Today's reading picks up at the very next verse from where last week’s ended. Hence, we’re still in the part of the Sermon on the Mount known as the “Theses and Antitheses.”

Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? Rest easy, it isn’t. Jesus’ theses begin with words like, “You have heard it said…” His antitheses begin with, “But I say to you…” His theses are taken directly from the Law. For example, in Exodus we read:

But if injury ensues, you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe¹

In the Law as set forth in our first reading, taken from the so-called “Holiness Code” of the Book of Leviticus, it is clear that one’s neighbor is a member of “your own people.”² In his Parable of the Good Samaritan, which is unique to Luke’s Gospel, Jesus gives an astounding antithesis, expanding the definition of one’s neighbor even to include the despised Samaritans!³ But his antithesis in today’s Gospel constitutes an even more radical call to discipleship.

Saint Paul, in our reading from his First Letter to the Corinthians, writes very straightforwardly that God’s wisdom seems like foolishness to those possessed of worldly wisdom. After all, what could be more foolish than loving your enemies or refusing to return a push for every shove, to give as good as you get? These are some of the Lord’s most difficult teachings.

Hating those who hate you and being intent on seeking revenge are what might be called “natural” responses to being hated and wronged. But Jesus, who is God's kindness and mercy personified, calls his followers to a manner of living that is difficult and counterintuitive. The hardest part of living in this new and strange way is not merely refraining from violent, vengeful responses but the interior work required to actually love those who do you wrong and seek the good of those who wish you ill. According to Jesus, forgiveness is only the beginning.

In our Gospel readings over this past month, Jesus’ teaching is meant to provoke us. The word “provocation” is a compound word meaning for (=pro) your calling (=vocation). Seeking to adhere even to these hard teachings of our Lord is our calling, the calling you received in baptism when you died and rose with Christ to new life. This is what new life in Christ looks like! “As we see,” wrote Victor Hugo about Monseigneur Myriel, the benevolent bishop in Les Miserables, “he had a strange and peculiar way of judging things. I suspect that he acquired it from the Gospel.”

On this final Sunday of Ordinary Time before the start of Lent, we celebrate the Rite of Sending. Who is sent? First, we send our Catechumens. Second, we send our Candidates. Where are they sent? We send them to the Cathedral for the Rite of Election and the Call to Continuing Conversion? Finally, to whom are they sent? They are sent to Bishop Solis. It is the bishop who “elects” the Catechumens to the sacraments of Christian Initiation: baptism, confirmation, and Eucharist. He also calls those already baptized but not yet in full communion with the Church to continue their conversion as they seek full communion with the Catholic Church.

[To the Elect and Candidate at the Mass during which the Rite is celebrated: So, Tatiana, Don, George, and John, let the teachings of Jesus you’ve heard today and on the several Sundays preceding serve as a provocation, a call from the Lord. These hard teachings are points of discernment as you approach the Easter sacraments. In short, you must be ready to live like Christians as that life is taught and exemplified by our Lord himself.]

The scriptures we’ve heard today call us to repentance. The Greek word, metanoia, usually translated as “repent,” means to have a change of mind, a change of heart. In other words, to repent is to change, and to be changed is to be converted. For a Christian, this means being more and more conformed to the image of Jesus Christ, the One, who, as he was nailed to the cross, demonstrated what it means to love your enemies and pray for those who ill-treat you.

Far from being a downer, Lent, which comes from the old English word for spring, is the time each year during which we prepare for our celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. An important part of celebrating Christ's rising from the dead, which occurs at the Great Easter Vigil, is the baptism of the Elect and the renewal of your baptismal promises.

Therefore, as we stand on the threshold of Lent, a season dedicated to repentance, we must disabuse ourselves of the very un-Catholic and un-Christian notion that grace and effort are mutually exclusive. Of course, we need God’s grace to make our efforts fruitful. It is God who both begins and brings to completion his good work in and through you.⁴

It is true that the practice of spiritual discipline will not, in and of itself, bring you closer to Christ. To believe otherwise is to make the same mistake made by the scribes and Pharisees with whom Jesus disputed. It is to mistake means for ends. Only Christ can draw you closer to himself. What even your best efforts do is open you to God’s grace, clearing space for and attuning yourself to the Spirit.

As Christians, we live and learn by seeking to put into practice the teachings of Jesus. Experience is the best teacher. How else can you really verify the truth of what these scriptures set forth? As the religion of the Incarnation, Christianity cannot remain a set of abstract ideas and ideals. As Lent approaches, let us recommit ourselves to practicing the core spiritual disciplines taught to us by Jesus: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.

Let your practice of these disciplines foster growth in theological virtues: faith, hope, and love. Hope is the flower of faith and selfless, self-sacrificing love is their fruit. The end to which the Law is but the means, as Jesus demonstrates repeatedly in word and deed, is to love God with your entire being and to love your neighbor as you love yourself. Or given the often-convoluted way we relate to ourselves, to love your neighbor as Christ loves you.

Therefore, let our prayer be that of today’s Collect, or opening prayer, for today’s Mass: “Grant, almighty God that… [we] may carry out in both word and deed that which is pleasing to you.” And “may we experience” through this Eucharist, as our Prayer After Communion pleads, “the effects of the salvation which is pledged to us by these mysteries.”

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1 Exodus 21:23-35.^↩
2 Leviticus 19:18.^↩
3 See Luke 10:25-37.^↩
4 Philippians 1:6.^↩

Led by the Spirit means living antithetically

Readings: Sirach 15:15-20; Ps 119:1-2.4-5.17-18.33-34; 1 Corinthians 2:6-10; Matthew 5:17-37

Since this week is my once-a-month "light week," when I only serve at one Mass (usually the Saturday Vigil) instead of all three, I flirted with the idea of not posting a reflection on these readings. In ruminating on them today, I decided to post a very brief reflection. In our Gospel today, we hear Jesus teach thesis and antithesis- "You have heard that it was said... But I say you..."

Jesus' teaching sets forth exactly what Saint Paul writes about in our reading from his First Letter to the Corinthians, namely that the Christian is Spirit-led, not rule-driven. In other words, like the Pharisees, who, it is really important to point out, took righteousness very seriously, you can keep a thousand rules, even 613 rules deemed to be made by God either directly or indirectly by inference, and still not be righteous, not be holy as God is holy.

Now, it is important not to dismiss the Law or the rules legitimately derived from it. Jesus never does, as the beginning of today's Gospel clearly indicates: "Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law." Jesus never denigrates the Law. On the contrary, he reveres it.

Mistaking ends for means, it seems to me, is the fundamental problem. The end to which the Law was given to be the means is loving God and neighbor. Love is a matter of the heart. Hence, what it means to be righteous, rather than adherence to a set of rules externally imposed, while not foreswearing all rules, is a matter of your heart.

In the homily I heard last night, this Gospel reading was nicely described as "a psychology of human action." Living by rules, at least in my own experience and that of many other people to whom I've ministered over the years, psychologically speaking, often has the effect of making matters worse with regard to the things the Decalogue and Jesus, in upping the ante, prohibit. For example, food is rarely more tempting that when I've committed to fasting, even when I've only been fasting for an hour or two. It's easy to urge others to forgive those who have wronged them, but when wronged, how easy it is to start expounding on how karma is a b-i-t-c-h. I think we're all familiar with these psychodynamics.

Somewhere along the way, despite the influence of such works as The Imitation of Christ, Christians lost sight of Jesus' maxim, found at the end of today's reading- "Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No’ mean ‘No.’ Anything more is from the evil one." Especially in this age of social media, how often do we Christians lose sight of such inspired exhortations like the one found in 2 Timothy: "Avoid foolish and ignorant debates, for you know that they breed quarrels"? This brings to my mind that much-used but often misattributed observation made by Mary Wollstonecraft: "Convince a man against his will, He's of the same opinion still."

Grace builds on nature. Given this, there is no way around the fact that most of us have some work to do. I know I do. While it is work I must begin and persist in doing, I will not complete it. As Saint Paul wrote: "I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus" (Phil 1:6). Until that day, we move forward in hope.

Memorial of St. Paul Miki & Companions, Martyrs

Readings: Gal 2:19-20; Ps 126:1-6; Matt 28:16-20

Today we remember Saint Paul Miki and Companions. Along with twenty-five of his sisters and brothers, Paul Miki, a Japanese Catholic who became a Jesuit priest, underwent martyrdom for the sake of the Gospel.

Born into a wealthy family, Paul lived in the sixteenth century, when the Jesuits were bringing the Gospel to Japan. The Jesuits educated him. He then decided to join the still relatively new apostolic society founded by Ignatius of Loyola. In time, Paul became a successful and well-known preacher. His ministry resulted in many of his fellow Japanese converting to Christianity.

Suspicious of the Jesuits as outsiders and seeking to eliminate any foreign influence in his domain, the Japanese emperor, Toyotomi Hideyosh, began persecuting Christians. This meant the Jesuits who were the main perpetrators of Christianity. The martyrdom of these Japanese Christians occurred about forty years before similar events depicted by the Japanese-Catholic writer Endō Shūsaku in his novel Silence. In 2016, Martin Scorsese made this beautiful work of Catholic literature into a movie of the same name.

Along with twenty-five fellow Catholics, laity and clergy, after being arrested, Miki was made to walk about 600 miles from Kyoto to Nagasaki. As they walked, these faithful children of Mother Church sang the Te Deum. This great hymn of praise, still sung today, begins:

We praise you, O God:
we acknowledge you as Lord.
Everlasting Father,
All the world bows down before you.

All the angels sing your praise,
the hosts of heaven and all the angelic powers,
all the cherubim and seraphim
call out to you in unending song:

Holy, Holy, Holy,
is the Lord God of angel hosts!
The heavens and the earth are filled
with your majesty and glory.
The glorious band of apostles,
the noble company of prophets, the white-robed army who shed their blood for Christ,
all sing your praise¹

Once in Nagasaki, on 5 February 1597, Paul Miki was tied to a cross and had his chest pierced, which wound killed him. All the remaining twenty-five were put to death in rapid succession. These Japanese martyrs were canonized in 1862 by Pope Pius IX.

Saint Paul Miki and Companions

The second reading from the Office of Readings for today’s memorial is a contemporary account of this martyrdom. It recounts that as he hung on the cross, Paul Miki preached his final homily. Echoing the First Apology of the great Church Father Saint Justin Martyr, in his dying words, Paul proclaimed that there was no contradiction between being Japanese and being Catholic. After thanking God for the “blessing” of martyrdom, he ended with these words:

As I come to this supreme moment of my life, I am sure none of you would suppose I want to deceive you. And so I tell you plainly: there is no way to be saved except the Christian way. My religion teaches me to pardon my enemies and all who have offended me. I do gladly pardon the Emperor and all who have sought my death. I beg them to seek baptism and be Christians themselves²

This is a deep lesson in what it means to live and to die as a Christian. Yet, how slow we often are to forgive far lesser offenses, how ill-disposed we are to bear wrongs patiently, preferring instead to carry a grudge or, worse yet, get even. Your karma may have run over my dogma but I’ll take grace over karma every time! While Saint Paul, the apostle, the author of our first reading, was beheaded in Rome, Paul Miki was literally crucified with Christ in Nagasaki.

As it pertains to our Gospel reading- let us not forget that martyr simply means witness. We evangelize far more by witness than by words and arguments. In his exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi, Pope Saint Paul VI described very well the life and witness of Paul Miki and his companions:

Above all the Gospel must be proclaimed by witness. Take a Christian or a handful of Christians who, in the midst of their own community, show their capacity for understanding and acceptance, their sharing of life and destiny with other people, their solidarity with the efforts of all for whatever is noble and good. Let us suppose that, in addition, they radiate in an altogether simple and unaffected way their faith in values that go beyond current values, and their hope in something that is not seen and that one would not dare to imagine. Through this wordless witness these Christians stir up irresistible questions in the hearts of those who see how they live: Why are they like this? Why do they live in this way? What or who is it that inspires them? Why are they in our midst?³

You cannot make disciples unless you are first a disciple. In a sense, the phrase “missionary disciple” is what Kantian philosophy would dub an analytic phrase. It is analytic because to be a disciple of Jesus Christ is to be a missionary and to truly be a missionary, you must be a disciple. But the reason we need the phrase is because too often we separate the two. It is the witness of so many saints, like the Japanese martyrs, that show us the truth of what our scriptures tonight teach us.

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1 Liturgy of the Hours. The Ordinary. Office of Readings. Hymn: Te Deum.^↩
2 The Liturgy of the Hours. Office of Readings. 6 February. Saint Paul Miki and Companions: Memorial.^↩
3 Pope Paul VI. Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Nuntiandi, sec. 21.^↩

On being salt and light

Readings: Isa 58:7-10; Ps 112:4-9; 1 Cor 2:1-5; Matt 5:13-16

Today's Gospel reading is one of those that doesn't really require a lot of gloss, explanation, or interpretation. But there are a few features of this teaching, which immediately follows Jesus' teaching of the Beatitudes, that bear reflecting on. One observation prior to delving into this pericope more deeply is that, given its location in Saint Matthew's Gospel, it is safe to say that living the Beatitudes, living beatitudinally, is how followers of Jesus are salt and light. When reading the scriptures, context matters!

Getting to the heart of what I think requires some explanation, it is all too easy to understand these four Matthean verses in a Pelagian way. I hesitate to invoke "Pelgian" like this, if this is Pelagianism, Pelagius was not a Pelagian. What I call "Pelagian" is the strawman Augustine posited and then pilloried. So, in this sense, "Pelgian" means something like doing good works to earn salvation and benefits from God. So, Jesus is not saying that, as his follower, you become salt and light by doing good works for those reasons. How can I assert that so confidently?

I can be confident in my assertion because Jesus, according to the inspired author of Matthew, speaking to his disciples, tells them "You are the salt of the earth" and "You are the light of the world." Following the latter statement, he tells his followers their light must shine before others. You have it, he's saying, so don't hide it. It stands to reason that you can't become what you already are. This gets to things like the grace communicated through the sacraments.

What is it that we have as Christians? Saint Paul, in our reading from 1 Corinthians, provides us with the answer to that question. We have "the mystery of God" that has been proclaimed to us. What is the mystery of God? It is the Paschal Mystery: the death and resurrection of Jesus, God's only begotten Son. The "Spirit" and "power" about which Paul writes are nothing other than the cruciform nature of genuninely Christian existence.

Living beatitudinally means living in a cruciform way. What does it mean to live in a cruciform way? It means living in a sacrificially selfless way. The Beatitudes, because they are Jesus' self-portrait, sketch out what it means to live as Christians. Demonstrating the Spirit's power is not calling down Zeus' lightning bolt and other such things. Christians are not pagans.

Demonstrations of the Spirit's power are harvesting the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (See Galatians 5:22). I find it interesting that there are nine Beatitudes and nine fruits of the Spirit. While there may not be a one-to-one correspondence between them, they certainly resonate.

Always bear in mind that Jesus did not come to lay heavy burdens on you. Later on in Matthew, he chastises the Pharisees and the teachers of the Law for doing just this (see Matthew 23:1-4). Jesus came to lift your burden, to make you truly free. Living beatitudinally is what happens when someone realizes her freedom.

For a Christian, true freedom, according to the Beatitudes, is not freedom from (mourning, marginalization, persecution, conflict, poverty, etc.). Rather, true freedom, as Jesus shows us by his birth, life, passion, and death, is the freedom to love God and your neighbor. This love is the demonstration of power that Paul no doubt refers to when writing to the Church in ancient Corinth.