On God's mountain

I am on a self-imposed preaching hiatus. As a result, it was a bit of conundrum whether to compose a reflection on this week's Sunday readings. I decided to wait and see how I felt today. And I feel like doing one. Good thing reading blog posts is a voluntary activity! At times, I focus on the second reading, sometimes called "the epistle reading." Today, I am taking our first reading from Isaiah as my text.

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Isaiah 26:6-10a

"On this mountain," our reading from Isaiah tells us, God will establish his kingdom. From this prophetic description, God's kingdom sounds like a glorious place. Like Terry Jones longed for Finland, God's mountain is where I long to be.

One feature of God's mountain is that there is enough, more than enough for everyone. This bounty, provided by God, is not earned. It is given freely. Our Gospel serves as something of a photographic negative to Isaiah's broad and even breathtaking vision.

Each time we gather for worship, we say together the Lord's Prayer. This is the prayer Jesus taught, which differs from the vain murmurings to which he opposes these petitions. It is the prayer the Lord has placed on lips of his Church. But he did not teach us this prayer for it to remain on our lips. It needs to sink down into our hearts.

During my visit to New Mexico last month, I had the wonderful privilege of once again hearing my former bishop, now-Archbishop John Wester, preach. He preached on forgiveness. He said that in a lot of instances it really makes no sense to forgive, at least not from a logical point of view. He then stated perhaps the longest distance imaginable was from our heads to our hearts. In our Gospel reading from several weeks ago, in which the inspired author of Saint Matthew's Gospel sets forth the Lord's teaching on forgiveness, Jesus says clearly that you must forgive "from your heart" (Matthew 18:21-35).

Try as some might to alter this, Christanity is always more of a matter of the heart than it is of the head. This is true as long we keep Jesus' teaching at the center. I was reading last night about one of Frederich Nietzsche's best friends, the theologian Franz Overbeck. Overbeck was the one who went to Nietzsche after the latter's breakdown in Turin. There can be little doubt that Overbeck's theology influenced, at least to a small degree, Nietzsche's philosopy.

Published in 1873, Overbeck's most influential work was Über die Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie (How Christian is Our Present-Day Theology?). His conclusion was theology in his day was not very Christian. I doubt his assessment of Christian theology over the ensuing one hundred fifty years would change his view. But then, Overbeck's main assertion was that constructing a Christian theology, by which I take him to mean a systematic one, is impossible, at least if we take the Gospels and early Church seriously.

In the second (of seven) petition of the Lord's Prayer, we ask for God's kingdom to come. In the following petition, we ask that God's will be done on earth as it is heaven. It's glaringly obvious that these two petitions are related. What else and where else is God's kingdom except the time and place where God's will is done? When God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven, doesn't the kingdom become a present reality? Who, if not the followers of Jesus, are to do God's will on earth?

Letting the Lord's Prayer move from our lips to our hearts is the only way to answer the Marxist critique of Christianity. What is that critique? In a nutshell, the critique is that oppression and injustice are to be endured in this life without complaint and certainly without revolt to earn one's eternal reward. Christian charity then aids unjust social conditions by treating symptoms while ignoring causes. This is why Marx called religion "the opium of the people."

We have the witness of holy women and men who have let the Lord's Prayer move from their lips to their hearts. There is the oft-quoted observation made by Dom Hélder Câmara, who, as Archbishop of Olinde and Recife in Brazil, along with Saint Oscar Romero, was an episcopal champion of the Gospel: "When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When ask why they're hungry, they call me a communist." This is the only way to refute the Marxist critique of Christianity, a critique with a great deal of merit. In section twenty-six of his first encylical, which remains a document well worth reading, Deus caritas est, Pope Benedict takes on this critique.

In an essay entitled, "The Kingdom of God and Theological Dimension of the Poor," theologian Jon Sobrino observed: “Forgetting the poor has gone hand in hand with forgetting the Kingdom of God.” Then, since the essay was written for a conference on Christology, in reference to the Church’s early conciliar history (like that of Chalcedon), which age marked the time the Church began to be entwined with the empire, Sobrino asserted: “By the time of the fourth-century conciliar debates it is clear that the Kingdom of God plays no role whatsoever in Christology." Maybe seeking to recover the central role of the Kingdom of God might be a way to challenge Overbeck's thesis.

God's kingdom is present now only in the form of a mustard seed, that is, in small, often very discreet, even hidden ways. But it is made truly present whenever and wherever God's will is done. Because it derives from the same source, namely the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, we can be sure that the pathway from our lips to our hearts is paved by the Beatitudes.