For the love of neighbor

Readings: Exodus 22:20-26; Ps 18:2-4.47.51; 1 Thessalonians 1:5c-10; Matthew 22:34-40

This week's readings only require a short-take. I will provide mine in a numerical sequence:

First, probably the reason Jesus spent so much time talking to the Pharisees is that they were the Jews who were most like him. In other words, they encouraged their fellow Jews to practice their religion. Far from being bad thing, religion is a product of faith. It isn't very likely that all Pharisees were opposed to Jesus.

Second, what is at the root of most of Jesus' disputes with the Pharisees as set forth in the Gospels, bubbles to the surface in today's Gospel. What is this root? Mistaking means for ends. The Law is but a means to the end (singular) of loving God and neighbor. While I could go all Pauline on you, I will refrain, except to say that only Jesus fulfilled the Law in both letter and spirit.

Third, among Jewish teachers before, during, and after Jesus, the teaching handed on in this pericope isn't stunningly new. After all, it is right there in the Law! What eventually emerges in Jesus' teaching as something of a departure, but not in this passage, is his answer to the question "Who is my neighbor?" But, again, when one considers today's passage from Exodus, you can see this, too, isn't such a dramatic departure.

Fourth, "neighbor" is not an abstract concept. I think the Spanish word, closely related to our English word "vicinity," gets at this better. Vecino indicates clearly someone in close physical proximity to you. This is also true of the Greek word that transliterates as plésion, from the adverb plésios, meaning "near," "close to."

Therefore, as the Beatles sang, "All You Need Is Love." Add to this something Saint Augustine preached in what we have cataloged as Sermon 110: "Love God and do whatever you please." Not too surprisingly, the back end of this sentence is usually omitted: "for the soul trained in love to God will do nothing to offend the One who is Beloved." For good measure we might throw in Chesterton's "Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair." This is probably enough to chew on.

While lovely in the abstract, this teaching is quite difficult to apply. You see, there are two big obstacles- me and other people. It's easy to love "humankind" or "humanity" (increasingly we seem to have no love for humanity, either our own or anyone else's). "Humankind" is an abstract category or, as in logic and mathematics, a set that includes all human beings.

To love everyone does not necessarily mean you love anyone in particular. To love no one in particular is the same not loving anyone. Many, far too many, who have claimed to love humanity have harmed and oppressed others out such "love."

I will end by going a bit Thomistic. Love is not a feeling. It's an act of your will. This means love is choice, not chance. Like all choices, the choice to love or not to love has consquences.

Year A Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Readings: Isa 41:1.4-6; Ps 96:1.3-5.7-10; 1 Thes 1:1-5b; Matt 22:15-21

To paraphrase Saint Paul from our first reading, the Gospel is not primarily a matter of words, but of the Holy Spirit’s power.¹ It is the Spirit’s power that convicts us, at the deepest level of our being, of the truth of the Gospel, the mystery of faith, the Paschal mystery. The Paschal mystery is the Gospel. It is the mystery of faith. What is the mystery of faith? Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

As Christians, the Paschal mystery needs to transform and convert us in every aspect of our lives. For a true disciple, faith in Christ is what integrates every aspect of our being. Faith cannot be compartmentalized. If we use the analogy of making a cup of tea, faith in Christ is not the tea bag that is plunged into the hot water, coloring it, altering both its smell and taste.

Faith is the water into which the bag is plunged. After all, you can drink water without tea, but you can’t drink tea without water. In baptism, we are plunged into the very life of God- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit- the one God, living and true, whose essence is agape, which is self-giving love.²

In addition to being the Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time, today is the Memorial of Pope Saint John Paul II. Without a doubt, John Paul II is one of the great evangelists the Church has ever produced. Papa Wojtyla always reminded us that to know Christ Jesus is everything. In the arithmetic of existence- Jesus+nothing=everything.

Saint John Paul II started his first encyclical letter, Redemptor Hominis- “Redeemer of Man”- promulgated a mere five months after he became Pope at the relatively young age of fifty-eight, with these stirring words: “The Redeemer of man, Jesus Christ, is the center of the universe and of history.”³ In the first chapter of the Letter to Colossians we read:

He is the image of the invisible God,
the firstborn of all creation.
For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth,
the visible and the invisible,
whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers;
all things were created through him and for him.
He is before all things,
and in him all things hold together⁴

As indicated, everything was not only created through Christ but for him. It is Jesus Christ who holds everything together, making creation a cosmos that can be studied, understood, marveled at, even if never completely comprehended; a cosmos and not chaos.

I begin this way not only because I think it is important to remember Pope John Paul II, but because it is easy to lose sight of Jesus’ divinity, especially during this long season of Ordinary Time as we read through Saint Matthew’s Gospel in a semi-continuous way. In this season, we tend to focus rather minutely, and for good reason, on Jesus’ interactions as makes his way from Galilee to Jerusalem. It is easy to take for granted the gift of faith that enables us to believe and to profess, “Jesus is Lord.” According to the apostle Paul, any genuine confession of Jesus as Lord can only be made by the power of the Holy Spirit.⁵ Making faith one of the theological virtues, that is, a gift from God.

Our first reading, from that section of Isaiah, reckoned to be from the section of that book known as deutero or second Isaiah, written during Israel’s Babylonian exile, shows how God used a pagan emperor, Cyrus, to release his people from captivity. Thus, we see one instance of how God directs history, as in Colossians, as in Redemptor Hominis, towards his ultimate purpose: opening the way of salvation through Jesus Christ to all who believe.

While God works in the world through history, neither anyone nor anything can stop God’s purpose from being realized. In our Gospel today some Pharisees who were hostile to Jesus (not all Pharisees were) thought they had devised the perfect trap into which Jesus would fall. By asking him if Jews should pay taxes to their Roman occupiers, they thought that if Jesus said they should be paid he would be discredited in the eyes of his fellow Jews. On the other hand, if he said Jews should not pay taxes to the Romans, they could denounce him to the Roman authorities, which they ultimately did but only in Jesus’ own time.

It is important to point out that Jesus did not just split the difference, in effect, cutting the baby in two. In his response to this hypocritical question, he demonstrated the power of the Truth. In the end, what the Jews were asked to give to the Roman emperor already belonged to the Roman emperor. Considering this, the question becomes not so much what belongs to God as it is who belongs to God? As to what belongs to God, the answer is simple- everything that is.

Today’s Gospel should also remind us, as Jesus’ disciples, we are first and foremost citizens of God’s kingdom, a kingdom not of this world. In this vein, after the collapse of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, in which history shows he played a big part, Pope John Paul II consistently warned that rampant consumerism, which is not so much atheistic as idolatrous, holds as many, if not more, perils as atheistic communism.

Towards the end of Redemptor Hominis, Saint John Paul II wrote:

The Father's eternal love, which has been manifested in the history of mankind through the Son whom the Father gave, “that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life…”⁶

And so, for each of us today and every day, the question is To whom do I belong? In his wisdom and lovingkindness, having made us in his image, God leaves the answer to that question to you and to me. The true answer is revealed not so much through our words as it is through our actions and even through our inaction.

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1 1 Thessalonians 1:5.^↩
2 1 John 4:8.16.^↩
3 Pope John Paul II. Encyclical Letter Redemptor Hominis. Holy See. 4 March 1979.^↩
4 Colossians 1:15-17.^↩
5 1 Corinthians 12:3.^↩
6 Redemptor Hominis; John 3:16.^↩

Year I Monday in the Twenty-eighth in Ordinary Time

Readings: Rom 1:1-7; Ps 98:1-4; Luke 11:29-32

Our reading from the very beginning of Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans is a good short course in Christology. This is because, in this passage, the apostle establishes Jesus as being both human and divine. Some four hundred years later, at the Council of Chalcedon, this is defined as what we now as “the hypostatic union.” In Greek, hypostasis means that certain something that makes something what is and not something else.

In in the one person of Jesus Christ, two hypostases- divine and human- are joined in the words of the Council of Chalcedon

without mixture, change, division, or separation; the difference of natures not being removed by their union, but rather the propriety of each nature being preserved and concurring in one person… so that he is not divided or separated into two persons, but the only Son, God, the Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, and one and the same person¹

Paul is very clear about his vocation, his calling. He was called to “bring about the obedience of faith” among the Gentiles, that is, among non-Jews. Of course, being a Jewish person as well as a Roman citizen who likely spoke Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew, and probably passable Latin while also being multi-cultural, made Paul ideal for carrying out the evangelization of Roman Empire.

What is the surest sign of Jesus’ divinity, according to the apostle in this passage? Being resurrected from the dead. This, in Paul’s view is what “established him in power.”² Of course, to be resurrected, he not only had to have a body, to be incarnated, but to die.

Jesus, too, in our Gospel, points to his own, then future resurrection as the surest sign of his divinity. He does this response to people coming to see him perform signs and miracles, to witness the magical mystery tour of the itinerant carpenter from Nazareth.

Especially in the Synoptic Gospels (i.e., Matthew, Mark, and Luke), Jesus is quite ambivalent about the miracles he performs. In this passage from Saint Luke’s Gospel, the Lord minces no words- despite the signs and wonders he performs, his own people, his fellow Jews refuse to believe. This dovetails nicely with our Gospel from Matthew yesterday.

The Queen of Sheba, from the Medieval manuscript Bellifortis by Conrad Kyeser and dates to c. 1405.

The parable of the Wedding Feast is a thinly disguised allegory. The king is the Father. The king’s son is Jesus. The servants sent out call the invited guests to the wedding banquet are the prophets and the invited guests the Israelites, the Jews, God’s chosen people. What about those from the highways and byways? That’s us, the gentiles. The idea that we somehow secretly belong to one of the ten lost tribes, besides being historically laughable, defeats the Gospel.

As for the man lacking the proper clothing, he’s that one that believed, who accepted the invitation and came but was not really convinced or converted. Perhaps his fault is that he lives a life of presumption. Presumption holds that, in the end, God’s mercy wins out. Therefore, how I live doesn’t really matter. This is the one who is convinced that being a “pretty good” person will suffice in the end. And so, one needn’t bother too much about adhering to Church teaching handed on in Scripture and Tradition.

Worldly wisdom, after all, is often easier, more practical, perhaps more common sensical whereas adherence to Christian teaching requires something of you. As Chesterton sagely noted: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”³

Getting back today’s Gospel, a similar dynamic is in play. Jesus tells his fellow Jews that they will be judged by gentiles who believed, the Queen of Sheba and the Ninehvite, who heeded those who we less than Jesus on much less evidence. In context, these are shocking words. They are meant to provoke repentance and belief in the Son of God.

We’re very much in the same situation as those Jesus addresses in today’s Gospel. During this year of Eucharistic Revival, we can either reduce Christ’s Real Presence to only that in consecrated bread and wine, thus limiting our understanding of the words and gestures of consecration, like those seeking a sign, as some kind of magic. Or we can seek arrive at an ever deeper understanding that in giving himself to us body, blood, soul, and divinity, Jesus asks nothing less from us than the pledge of our body, blood, soul, and humanity.

The Communion Rite is the Catholic altar call. Our “amen” to the words “the body of Christ, the blood of Christ” is not just a profession of belief that we’re receiving him- though it is that- it is also pledging ourselves to him, a renewal of baptismal promises, the firm intention, with the help he gives us in and through this sacrament, “to sin no more and avoid whatever leads me to sin.”⁴

The high point of Mass is the not consecration of the bread and wine, which, by the Holy Spirit’s power become for us the body and blood of Christ. The high point of the Mass, the point to which it all builds, is the Communion Rite. This is when, together, we receive the One who makes us what we are- the Body of Christ, the Church, those whom not only in but through Christ is made present. Having received him, we are then sent forth, dismissed, to “Go and announce the Gospel of the Lord,” to spread the Good News of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, the message of Alleluia to those who live in darkness and the shadow of death.⁵

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1 From the Chacedonian Creed.^↩
2 Romans 1:4.^↩
3 G.K. Chesterton. What’s Wrong with the World, Part I Chapter 5- “The Unfinished Temple.”.^↩
4 From The Act of Contrition.^↩
5 Roman Missal, Concluding Rites; Luke 1:79.^↩

Memorial of the Guardian Angels

Readings: Zech 8:1-8; Ps 102:16-21.29.22-23; Matt 18:1-5

In today’s Gospel, Jesus refers to the “angels in heaven” of the “little ones” about whom he is speaking. The Lord speak of “their angels.” The existence of angels is a truth of the faith, a matter of revelation. Angels are wholly spiritual, that is, non-corporeal beings. The Catechism neatly summarizes the Church’s teaching concerning guardian angels:

from infancy to death human life is surrounded by their [angels'] watchful care and intercession. Beside each believer stands an angel as protector and shepherd leading him to life. Already here on earth the Christian life shares by faith in the blessed company of angels and men united in God¹

One of the first prayers most Catholic children learn is the prayer to one’s Guardian Angel:

Angel of God,
my guardian dear,
to whom God’s love commits me here,
ever this day be at my side
to light to guard, to rule, and guide

It is a time-honored practice to recite this prayer twice a day. Once in the morning and once in the evening.

These teachings can seem childish. But, taking a cue from our Gospel, it is a teaching that requires child-like faith to believe and to practice that belief. It is also important to locate the Church’s teaching on angels within the beautiful tapestry of Church doctrine. Besides, there something very natural about positing an order of beings between human beings and God.

In the Creed we profess belief in “God the Father almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.” As spiritual beings, angels belong to the invisible order of creation. Nonetheless, the relationship of angels to the world is both material and spiritual. Angels, while personal beings, are “principalities and powers” of the cosmos by virtue of their spiritual nature.

Angels do not intervene in the world by arbitrary decision or in a way contrary to their real nature. Angels remain under the authority of God almighty. There is a vast difference between angels as written about in Scripture and explained by Catholic doctrine and angels as conceived of by those who adhere “New Age metaphysical” teachings. Though the two are often mixed

A guardian angel is a spiritual being who protects you. As today's liturgical memorial attests, liturgy being prima theologia (i.e., first theology), it is safe to say that belief guardian angels is part of the Church’s doctrinal patrimony. While belief in angels is dogmatic, belief in guardian angels is not

In terms of angels at work in the world bringing about God's purpose, consider how instrumental the Archangel Gabriel was in the Incarnation of God’s only Son. Looking at both the Infancy Narratives of Saint Matthew and Saint Luke, Gabriel appears to both Mary and Joseph. Consider too how, in the wonderful deutero-canonical Book of Tobit, Tobias hires a companion to accompany him on his journey to retrieve some money of his father’s from a relative. Unaware, Tobias hires the archangel Raphael, who, while an archangel, very much acts as Tobias' guardian. In the end, Raphael brings both spiritual and physical healing, enabling Tobias not only to return safely to his father and mother, but gain him a wife and restore his father Tobit’s eyesight.

In a Catechesis for a Wednesday General Audience way back in 1986, Pope Saint John Paul II, who wrote about his devotion to his guardian angel, taught:

the angels, as pure spirits, not only participate in the holiness of God himself, in the manner proper to them, but in the key moments they surround Christ and accompany him in the fulfillment of his salvific mission in regard to mankind²

To end, let us pray together in faith:

Angel of God,
my guardian dear,
to whom God’s love commits me here,
ever this day be at my side
to light to guard, to rule, to guide

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1 Catechism of the Catholic Church, sec. 336.^↩
2 Pope John Paul II. General Audience. 30 July 1986.^↩

Year Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Ezk 18:25-28; Ps 25:4-9; Phil 2:1-11; Matt 21:28-32

Currently, repentance is a word little used and little understood. To repent does not mean to be sorry for your sins. Contrition is our theological word for that. This is why in the Sacrament of Penance, before imparting absolution, the priest asks the penitent to make an act of contrition. This vocal prayer is meant to be an outward sign of the penitent’s inner sorrow for his sins.

Repentance means to change your behavior. In a Christian context, it means to have a change of mind, a conversion, which causes you to turn from sin and start acting rightly. Indeed, repentance is the fruit of genuine contrition. It is addressed in the formal Act of Contrition, when we say to God- “I firmly intend, with Your help, to do penance, to sin no more, and to avoid whatever leads me to sin.”

Note, too, that penance, while related, is also distinct from repentance. Penance consists of those good and pious acts we undertake to help reverse the effects of our bad and impious actions. As the doctrine of indulgences teaches, it is something like the Christian way of balancing karma. Hence, a truly Christian life is a repentant life, that is, a life filled with the good fruits grown and nurtured in the life of the Christian by the grace of God. The main source of this grace is the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist.

Far from a dismal gray existence, living in a repentant manner does not mean playing life so as not to lose, sitting on the sidelines, or endeavoring to stay out of “the world.” A repentant life is a vibrant, happy, joyful life. It is a life played to win; a life prepared to take risks for God’s kingdom. It is a life of gratitude lived in response to God’s love given us in Christ; a Spirit-filled life. Repentance is the theme of our readings today from Ezekiel and Matthew.

Our reading from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Philippians consists of what is often called the “Kenotic Hymn.” “Kenotic” is an English adjective of the Greek verb kenosis. Kenosis, in Greek, even in modern Greek, simply means “to empty,” as in Paul’s phrase translated as “he emptied himself.”¹

The passage that comprises our second reading consists of the first eleven verses of the second chapter of the apostle’s letter to the Church in ancient Philippi. New Testament scholars insist that verses seven through eleven were not originally composed by Paul. Rather, he used the words of an ancient Christian hymn sung in the Church and known to his correspondents to make his point about what it means for Christians to be Christ-like.

This hymn gets to the very nature of God and is vital for us to grasp: It is the very nature of the tri-personal God to be self-emptying for the Other. This is the only way to understand the revelation “God is love.”² It has been noted that the Incarnation of the Son of God is an event “so earth-shattering that it enacts something akin to the psychoanalytic concept of trauma” on the world.³ The Incarnation is the most profound instance of God-being-God. During the Creed, we bow as we profess our belief that “by the Holy Spirit [He] was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.”

It is because “he was in the form of God” that Jesus “did not regard” his divinity “as something to be grasped,” or, more literally to be made use of in a debased manner, or even to steal. Getting to the point, the Son’s self-emptying was not despite his divinity but precisely because of it. Too often when dealing with this critical New Testament passage, it is understood and communicated in such a way that it is made to seem as if Christ’s self-emptying is somehow at odds with his divinity rather than the surest sign that he is “true God from true God.”

It has been noted that “Jesus’ disclosure shows that in his very nature God is self-effacing.” This observation stands in direct contrast to what is often taken for traditional Christian orthodoxy, which “has thought of [God] as the opposite; majestic, glorious and triumphal,” or even as angry, easily offended, and vengeful.⁴ Thinking of God as anything other than self-emptying/self-effacing is a remnant of the paganism that seems inherent to fallen humanity.

A kenotic, or self-emptying, life is a repentant life. It is repentant because it requires you, according to the apostle, not to look out first and foremost for yourself but to “humbly regard others as more important than yourselves.”⁵

Not only is a repentant life the only life worth living, in the end, it proves to be life itself. Elsewhere in Saint Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus clearly teaches- “whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”⁶ This paradox is the beating heart of Christian faith.

In his song “Paper and Fire,” John Mellencamp captured this powerfully:

He wanted love with no involvement
So he chased the wind, that's all his silly life required
And the days of vanity went on forever
And he saw his days burn up like paper in fire⁷

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1 Philippians 2:7.^↩
2 1 John 4:8.16.^↩
3 John Milbank, Slavoj Žižek, Creston Davis, Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology, 7.^↩
4 Hugh Montefiore, “Jesus and the Revelation of God,” 111.^↩
5 Philippians 2:3-4.^↩
6 Matthew 16:25.^↩
7 John Mellencamp, “Paper and Fire.”^↩