Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord. It is one of the those observances so ancient that both the East and the West celebrate it on the same day.

There is a passage of Scripture that is not one of the accounts found in the Gospels (Matt 17:1-9; Mark 9:2-8; Luke 9:28-26) which gives us great insight into the significance of Jesus' Transfiguration.

In a brilliant section of the first volume of his theological aesthetics, Seeing the Form, Hans Urs Von Balthasar gives an amazing summary of 1 & 2 Peter, the beginning of his summary is most germane to today's feast: "As he nears death (2 Pet 1.15), Peter is zealously concerned that those who follow should not forget his witness." His witness of Christ's glory, which he "has already seen... proleptically on Tabor, where he 'clearly heard from heaven' the voice of the Father that spoke of the Son (2 Pet 1.17f). For Peter, the earlier light of prophecy has wholly entered into this light; taken in itself, the prophetic light was a groping, as it were, (1 Pet 1.11f). But seen together with vision on Tabor, the light of prophecy becomes 'all the more reliable' both for the Apostles and for the Church (2 Pet 1.19; cf. 3.2), which receives it together with the apostolic kerygma. Here is the passage in its entirety:

Therefore, I will always remind you of these things, even though you already know them and are established in the truth you have. I think it right, as long as I am in this “tent,” to stir you up by a reminder, since I know that I will soon have to put it aside, as indeed our Lord Jesus Christ has shown me. I shall also make every effort to enable you always to remember these things after my departure. We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received honor and glory from God the Father when that unique declaration came to him from the majestic glory, “This is my Son, my beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven while we were with him on the holy mountain. Moreover, we possess the prophetic message that is altogether reliable. You will do well to be attentive to it, as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts (2 Peter 1:12-19)

Jesus' Transfiguration is also the fourth of the Lumnious Mysteries of the Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary, those mysteries on our Lord's life and ministry, established by Pope St. John Paul II, to fill the gap between the Joyful and Sorrowful Mysteries. I challenge you to pray them today.

It is a special day for our family because on 6 August 2011 that our youngest son, Evan, was baptized by the Most Reverend John Wester, Bishop of the Diocese of Salt Lake City in our beloved Cathedral of the Madeleine.

"Christ is all in all"

Our readings for this Sunday are designed to help us ask ourselves an important question: In the end, what really matters?

What really matters is not how much wealth you have accumulated and hand-on to your heirs. In fact, Qoheleth, the teacher, indicates that this is a bad thing, even an unjust thing. It is not even a matter of how much knowledge you have mastered. What matters is what will bear fruit for eternity. This means that it is not a what that matters, but a who: Jesus Christ.

My dear friend, labor not under the delusion that you will ultimately save yourself, even if you deem yourself to be a "pretty good" person. You cannot withstand the judgment of God. Any reasonably honest self-assessment in light of the demands of perfection laid down by Jesus Christ should be enough to disabuse you of that foolish notion. Realizing this, which is sometimes called "fear of the Lord," is, indeed, the beginning of wisdom.

Do as the apostle Paul urged and "seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Think of what is above, not of what is on earth" because "Christ is all in all."

My friend Artur, whose blog Cosmos the in Lost you should check out if you have not already done so, recently brought to my attention something written by the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz that, especially in light of our readings, struck me as an appropriate reflection for this late summer Sunday:

Religion, opium for the people. To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness, and serfdom, it promised a reward in an afterlife. And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium for the people is a belief in nothingness after death--the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged

Lest this come across as rank moralism of the worst variety, I ask you also to consider your own heart, what you really want, why you put the time, effort, and energy into the things that you do. Another friend reminded me of something stated by Fr. Julián Carrón, President of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation, some six years ago: "our need, our desire, which we think of as weakness, is precisely what makes us irreducible." In other words, we want to live forever, we want the life, described by St. Augustine in a letter to the wealthy Roman widow, Proba, that is truly life!

Jesus is "the way and the truth and the life" (John 14:6).

Another note on Hebrews, this one from Von Balthasar

Not in addition to, but precisely because he was a master of Sacred Scripture, Hans Urs Von Balthasar was, in my estimation, the premier theologian of the twentieth century. As I was reading once again, in my uneven, delayed, and inconsistent manner, the first volume of his theological aesthetics, Seeing the Form, this once again became apparent. In his discussion of the Church's experience of faith, which he asserts has Petrine, Pauline, Johannine, and Marian dimensions, in addition to masterfully and comprehensively synthesizing and summarizing 1-2 Peter, in the Pauline section he gives an amazing summary of the latter third of The Letter to the Hebrews. He does not attribute this text to St. Paul, but sees it as the "the first interpretation" of what he calls "The vertical Pauline Church."

In Balthasar's view, the Church's Petrine dimension is hierarchical, which he insisted is essentially horizontal, that is, human-to-human handing on of what was once received. The Pauline dimension, as he explained it, is vertical as a result of the dramatic nature of Paul's calling, which came crashing in unexpectedly from above as it were. Balthasar described the thought expressed in Hebrews as manifesting a kind of "Platonism." In any case, here is what he wrote:

We have come now not to Mount Sinai (cf. Gal 4.24), 'but to Mount Zion, to the Civitas Dei Viventis, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the first-born who are enrolled in heaven' (Heb 12.21f.). It is from here that God's Word now resounds, no longer as a temporal word but as definitive for all eternity, and its acceptance must, therefore, also be definitive (Heb 12.25f.). We must cling to the painful discipline of the 'Father of spirits' 'so as to come to share in his holiness'; if we do not 'withdraw' from the grace of his discipline (Heb 12.9f., 15), we will be following Jesus the High Priest 'through the curtain of his flesh' (Heb 10.20) into the truth which is beyond the 'shadowy images' (Heb 8.5) and the 'symbols of the present time' (Heb 9.9).

For the author of the Epistle, the curtain of Christ's flesh no longer conceals, as did the temple veil of the Old Testament; rather, in the place where Christ, 'by virtue of his eternal Spirit, has offered himself to God as a spotless sacrifice', there, in a Platonic-Christian contemplation, the heavenly is already seen in the events of the flesh. Even if we 'do not yet see everything in subjection to him, we do see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honour because of the suffering of death' (Heb 2.8 f.); thus, in Christ's humiliation and exaltation, we see the full dimension of the redemptive process, and ourselves taken up in it. We do indeed believe (Heb. 11.1) and in this sense we do not yet see; but, at the same time, in the temporal shadows of the Old Testament we have learned to see the definitive eschatological archetype. To be sure, this gnosis [here simply meaning knowledge, as opposed to pistis, or, faith] is a permanent ethical demand that we urgently strive after Christ as his disciples. But, at the same time, it means becoming adults in the divine doctrine; it is the need for solid food that lies beyond the milk of infants; it is progress beyond merely listening to the kerygma to its interior assimilation. As such, it is 'illumination', a 'tasting' (γεύομαι) of the heavenly gift', a partaking of the holy Pneuma', a 'perceiving of the beauty of God's Word and of the powers of the age to come' (Heb. 6.3-6). The beginner is still 'inexperienced' (ἄπειρος) in true speech, but the one who has been perfected possesses 'well-trained perceptive faculties' (αἰσθητήριο γυμνάζω) to distinguish the beautiful from the ugly (Heb 5.13f.)(355-356)

"The Church is not there for her own sake"

My friend Frank Weathers, who blogs over at Why I Am Catholic, posted something this morning that I found very refreshing. In his post he linked to a quiz published in the New York Times and posted under the heading "How Recent Popes Differ on Key Issues: Choose the pope who said each quote on seven critical issues." Needless to say, I found this very refreshing because, like everyone else, I marvel at the positive attention Pope Francis garners, but I also marvel at the seeming ignorance of most commentators, Catholic and non-Catholic, about the substance of the teaching of his two immediate predecessors, Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. In my view, anything that serves the cause of overcoming what I see as a false dichotomy is most welcome.

One of the things Pope Francis was most lauded for at the very beginning of his pontificate, indeed something he apparently said during the Conclave and has repeated on a number of occasions since, was his rightful insistence that "When the Church becomes closed up on itself it gets sick." According to many reports, including this one that appeared in the U.K.'s Catholic Herald, still-Cardinal Bergoglio told his fellow Cardinals with whom he was gathered in Conclave:

"The evils that, over time, happen in ecclesial institutions have their root in self-referentiality and a kind of theological narcissism," he wrote.

"In Revelation, Jesus says that he is at the door and knocks. Obviously, the text refers to his knocking from the outside in order to enter, but I think about the times in which Jesus knocks from within so that we will let him come out. The self-referential church keeps Jesus Christ within herself and does not let him out."

"Put simply, there are two images of the Church: a Church which evangelizes and comes out of herself" by hearing the word of God with reverence and proclaiming it with faith; and "the worldly Church, living within herself, of herself, for herself," he said, adding that, "this should shed light on the possible changes and reforms which must be done for the salvation of souls."

Then-Cardinal Bergoglio told the College of Cardinals that the next Pope "must be a man who, from the contemplation and adoration of Jesus Christ, helps the church to go out to the existential peripheries, that helps her to be the fruitful mother, who gains life from 'the sweet and comforting joy of evangelising'"

While this is certainly true and something important for the Pope to say, it is hardly a novel insight. Of far more importance than persistently diagnosing the problem, is his proposal to overcome these unhealthy tendencies. As I indicated in a post earlier in the week, I believe his proposal to overcome this is taking CELAM's 2007 Aparecida document global in the service of the so-called "New Evangelization," which is nothing other than fulfilling the Great Commission given to the Church by Christ Himself (Matt. 28:16-20). The name that he has given to this program, this impetus, this evangelical thrust, is "missionary discipleship."

In his book Will Many Be Saved?: What Vatican II Actually Teaches and Its Implications for the New Evangelization (right now available through Amazon for Kindle for $1.99), Dr. Ralph Martin cites a lengthy passage from a book of what were then his recent essays, selected by his former students in honor of his seventy-fifth birthday and published as Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith: The Church as Communion, in an essay entitled "On the Ecumenical Situation," by then-Cardinal Ratzinger:

For the Church it is never merely a matter of maintaining her membership or even of increasing or broadening her own membership. The Church is not there for her own sake. She cannot be like an association that in difficult circumstances, is simply trying to keep its head above water. She has a task to perform for the world, for mankind. The only reason she has to survive is because her disappearance would drag humanity into the whirlpool of the eclipse of God and, thus, into the eclipse, indeed the destruction, of all that is human. We are not fighting for our own survival; we know that we have been entrusted with a mission that lays upon us a responsibility for everyone. That is why the Church has to measure herself, be measured by others, by the extent to which the presence of God, the knowledge of him, and the acceptance of his will are alive within her. A Church that was merely an organization pursuing its own ends would be a caricature of a Church. To the extent to which she is revolving around herself and looks only to the aims necessary for maintaining herself, she is rendering herself redundant and is in decline, even if she disposes of considerable means and skillful management. She can live and be fruitful only if the primacy of God is alive within her

In thinking a lot about this matter, perhaps the major source of freshness Pope Francis brings flows from the fact that for years prior to becoming pope he was a residential bishop in a major city. He brings the same kind of energy that Pope St. John Paul II brought when he arrived in Rome from Krakow, an energy that can only come from fully engaged pastoral ministry. While several people whom I have asked about this poo-pooed the thought, I believe the fact that Pope Francis was not ordained a priest until after the conclusion of Vatican II and so has exercised his entire priestly, episcopal, and now papal ministry in the post-conciliar era is highly significant as well.

Reza Aslan, Pagels, Crossan, et al.: Jesus is not Lord

I am going to say up-front that I HAVE NOT READ REZA ASLAN"S BOOK Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. So you can base your decision as to whether or not to continue reading this post on that disclaimer. I'll go one better: I will not read this book.

My reason for not reading it is twofold. First, with all of my commitments, the amount of time I have available to read is quite limited. This forces me to prioritize what I read. Second, from watching Aslan's now famous Fox news interview, in which the interviewer embarrassingly asked him how a Muslim could write a book on Jesus (a stupid question to be sure- his overly defensive answer was almost as embarrassing), to reading several short reviews of his book, like one from The Economist, to which I turned after the flames sparked by the interview, it seems to me that Aslan's book, while no doubt well-written (he is a professor of creative writing at University of California, Riverside), contains nothing new. In fact, all of this reminds me of so many of Elaine Pagels' books, several of which, such as Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, I read and then regretted spending the time. I am particularly put in mind of John Dominic Crossan's 2009 book Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, a revised and popularized version of his earlier book The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant.

Jesus Cleansing the Temple, by El Greco, ca. 1570

While I don't want to push this fact too hard, I think it is somewhat revealing that, like Pagels' and Crossan's works, Aslan's book was not published by an academic publisher, but by Random House, a popular publisher. One does not need to delve deeply into Aslan's book to grasp his thesis, which is given away in the title: Jesus was a zealot. This prompts the question, "In the context of Jesus' time, who were these Zealots?" The Zealots were something like "the Jewish nationalist revolutionary party." They strongly opposed Roman rule and tried many times to incite the Jewish people to armed revolt. They believed that God would restore the Davidic Kingdom by the sword, by an armed uprising against the Romans. The Gospels only mention the friction between the Jews and Romans in passing, even in accounts of Jesus' passion, prompting a lot of scholarly commentary on the person of Barabbas, who was released by Pilate in Jesus' stead (Matt. 27-15-26; Mark 15:6-15; Luke 23:13-25; John 18:38ff). However, we know there was one zealot, or former zealot, among Jesus' followers: Simon (Luke 6:15; Acts 1:13- Luke and Acts were composed by the same author and are companion works).

In the most historically reliable documents pertaining to Jesus' life, which are found in the New Testament and called "Gospels," Jesus repeatedly opposed violent rebellion, saying things like "Put your sword back into its sheath, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword" (Matt. 26:52). Even in Acts we read that when He gathered with the apostles at the place from whence He would ascend into heaven, "they asked him, 'Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?' He answered them, 'It is not for you to know the times or seasons that the Father has established by his own authority. But you will receive power when the holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth'" (Acts 1:6-8). Zealot, indeed.

The answer to the question about how a Muslim can write a book on Jesus is that Muslims believe Jesus was not just a prophet, but a great prophet. However, they do not believe He was the divine Son of God, who died on the Cross as propitiation for the sins of the world, was buried, and rose again on the third day, let alone the one who sent the Holy Spirit after he ascended into heaven. As I will show, Muslims do believe that Jesus, Iesa, was taken to heaven by God and they also believe that He will play a unique role at the consummation of the world.

It seems pretty clear that Aslan's Jesus sort of straddles the gap between an Islamic Jesus, at least a Jesus that does not offend Muslim sensibilities, retaining the patina of a prophet (i.e., opposing oppressive and unjust Roman domination and rule of His people) and the Jesus of the now wholly insignificant and nearly forgotten Jesus Seminar, of which Crossan was a driving force. Aslan and his defenders are adamant in their insistence that his book does not present an Islamic Jesus, but yet another real, 'historical' Jesus, of which there have been so many (the angry political revolutionary Jesus is hardly Aslan's creation). One thing that is cited by some is that Aslan takes Jesus' crucifixion for granted, that is, he accepts that it happened. This is contrasted by some who ignorantly assert that Muslims do not believe Jesus was crucified.

The Islamic account of the crucifixion of "Iesa, son of Maryam" is what Christians would describe as "docetic," but with a twist. Docetism (from the Greek word dokein, meaning "to seem" and dókēsis, which refers an "apparition" or "phantom") is perhaps the most ancient of Christian heresies. Docetists, whose errors are argued against throughout the Johannine corpus (i.e., The Gospel of John, along with the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Letter of John), believed that Jesus only appeared to be a physical, embodied human being, but really was a phantom, a ghost, a spirit, one who only "seemed" to die on the Cross. Here is what the Qu'ran teaches about Jesus' crucifixion:

The Crucifixion, El Greco, ca. 1596-1600

And [for] their saying, "Indeed, we have killed the Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary, the messenger of Allah." And they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him; but [another] was made to resemble him to them. And indeed, those who differ over it are in doubt about it. They have no knowledge of it except the following of assumption. And they did not kill him, for certain. (Sura 4:157)

Verse 158 of Sura 4 of the Qu'ran goes on to insist that, rather than dying on the Cross (he only seemed to because God made someone else who looked like Jesus die on the Cross), God raised Iesa to Himself. Verse 158 goes on to say, "And there is none from the People of the Scripture but that he will surely believe in Jesus before his death. And on the Day of Resurrection he will be against them a witness." The "twist" comes with the old switcharoo God pulls, replacing Jesus with someone else who looked like him (do I detect echoes of the capricious God referred to and denounced by Benedict XVI in his still stellar Regensburg Address?).

As set forth in The Economist review, Aslan insists that "Far from being a pacifist, Jesus... was the leader of a nationalist revolt against Rome who was punished for sedition, not blasphemy." Again, an insistence of Jesus being executed by the Romans for being a revolutionary is hardly ground-breaking. Aslan's thesis comes complete with the tired trope that the canonical Gospels are not reliable sources for Jesus' life, a claim that can be and has been not just rebutted, but refuted. The take away is that, while He may have been seen by many as the Jewish Messiah (which belief was obliterated by His death at the hands of the Romans), and by others as a prophet, or prophetic figure, Jesus is not Lord, which is hardly a scholarly conclusion borne out by the historical evidence.

As the apostle Paul insisted, "nobody speaking by the spirit of God says, 'Jesus be accursed.' And no one can say, 'Jesus is Lord,' except by the holy Spirit" (1 Cor. 12:3).

If someone can treat the best historical sources on the life of Jesus in such a cavalier manner, I feel somewhat justified in taking any "history" that person might seek to convey with a grain of salt. Besides, I don't have to waste 8 bucks and 149 minutes in a movie theater to be convinced that the latest remake of The Lone Ranger is a bad movie.

Pope Francis: Messenger of Divine Mercy

I don't want to become too carried away with Pope-a-palooza, but today is not only Friday, it's a First Friday, which means a day when many Catholics, though not nearly enough, examine their consciences, go to confession, then attend Mass. The point of this is not to seek God's mercy, but to experience it fresh again. It also a day when, typically during the 3 o'clock hour, many Catholics, again, not nearly enough, pray the Chaplet of Divine Mercy. Hence, I want to reference one more time something the Holy Father said during his in-flight press conference on the return trip to Rome from Brazil.

When asked a predictably provocative question by a reporter from Italy's Corriere della Sera newspaper concerning the plight of those Catholics who are divorced and remarried and who have not had their previous marriage(s) nullified by the Church, which situation prevents them from licitly receiving the sacraments, Pope Francis spoke of mercy, Divine Mercy, saying, "I believe that this is a kairos, this time is a kairos of mercy. But this intuition came first from John Paul II, when he started with Faustina Kowalska, Divine Mercy ... he had something, he realized that it was a necessity of this time."

The Greek word καιρός, or, transliterated, kairos, in the general sense means something like "the right moment," "the opportune time." In Christian usage, it means more particularly something like "God's appointed time," or "the time for God's purpose to be fulfilled." The word καιρός is placed on the lips of Jesus at the beginning of St. Mark's Gospel, in verse 15 of the first chapter (a breathtaking verse, which, in the context of Mark, are the first words spoken by the Lord as He emerged from his sojourn in the desert to begin His ministry): "This is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel." The word "time" in the original Greek is καιρός.

I have no idea what the Holy Father has planned in this regard. He seemed to indicate that this particular issue will be something he will discuss with his chosen panel of eight cardinals when they meet at the beginning of October. It was certainly among the issues discussed during the Synod of Bishops dedicated to the Eucharist back in 2005. Anyone engaged in pastoral ministry at the parish level can tell you that this is a question that urgently needs to be addressed, even as we recognize the dire need to give witness to the sanctity of marriage, for us married Christians to live out this sacrament in a way that our marriages are visible and tangible signs of Christ's love for and fidelity to His Bride, the Church, to be, in effect, Ephesians 5 Christians.

So, as St. Faustina, who was taught by the Lord, urged us to pray: "Eternal Father, I offer you the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Your Dearly Beloved Son, Our Lord, Jesus Christ, in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world."

"Hang on to your hopes, my friend"

Late summer is a listless time for many people, myself included. So, our traditio for today, the first Friday of August, is the Australian band Bodyjar performing a cover of Simon & Garfunkel's 1966 classic 'A Hazy Shade of Winter.'

That's an easy thing to say, but if your hope should pass away /It's simply pretend/That you can build them again/Look around, the grass is high/The fields are ripe, it's the springtime of my life