Second Monday of Lent

Readings: Daniel 9:4b-10; Ps 79:8-9.11.13; Luke 6:36-38

Could the message of today’s Gospel possibly be any clearer? As a Christian, the way you should always hear Jesus’ teachings is in the first person singular. When received in that way, you quickly realize you have enough to take care of in your relationship with the Lord that you don’t need to go on a search for even the beam in our brother’s or sister’s eye, let alone any hard-to-see splinters.

Among ourselves as Christians, it’s safe to say that on judgment day that none of us wants to receive what we deserve. Rather, you and I want God to be merciful. This brings to mind the tax collector in Luke’s Gospel, whom Jesus contrasts with the self-righteous Pharisee, the latter of whom is so proud of the meticulous manner in which he keeps all the rules.

Unable to go in or even look up while praying the precincts of the Temple, the tax collector could only beg, saying, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”¹ These words constitute the core of the ancient and venerable Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” It is of this tax collector that Jesus says, “I tell you, this man, rather than the Pharisee, went home justified.”²

Because of Jesus Christ, you can count on God being merciful but on only one condition: that you are merciful. God will forgive you but, as we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, only insofar as you are willing to forgive those who have trespassed against you. Being merciful only toward those who ask for mercy is no mercy at all.

You will not be condemned to the extent that you don’t condemn anyone else. It's interesting that the Church canonizes various women and men, declaring them saints and models of Christlikeness. The Church also teaches both the reality of hell and that hell will not be empty. But the Church has never officially, let alone infallibly, declared any individual person to be in hell.

In terms of not judging others, Saint Paul puts this very well in his First Letter to the Corinthians, no doubt referring to those who made a habit of denigrating him in the very Christian communities he founded, the so-called Judaizers or, as the apostle mockingly refers to them, “superapostles”- “I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself.”³

Examining your conscience before going to confession is how you judge yourself. Having honestly judged yourself, like the tax collector, you confess your sins and, in the Act of Contrition, ask for mercy and pledge that, by God’s grace, you will endeavor not to keep sinning. It is often the case, nonetheless, that you not only keep sinning but often continue doing so in the same ways.

To quote the title of a book by Pope Francis, The Name of God Is Mercy.⁴ Extrapolating from this just a bit: the name of mercy is Jesus Christ. In this book, the Holy Father relates the story of a priest who heard a lot of confessions. He writes that sometimes the “priest said he would go to the tabernacle and say to Jesus, ‘I'm sorry I forgive too much, but it was you who set the bad example.’” Of the course, the point of the story is that he didn’t forgive too much.

As we begin this Second Week of Lent, let’s ask “for the grace not to tire of asking forgiveness,” because the Lord never tires of forgiving us. Then, having received the mercy of God, let us, in turn, ask for the grace to never tire of forgiving those who trespass against us.

You make something of a mockery of Christ, however, if your relationship with him is only about what he can do for you. Referring back to the Act of Contrition, it's not just important but necessary that we say, "I firmly intend with your help to do penance, to sin no more and avoid whatever leads me to sin." It is crucial that you mean these words when you say them, especially in the context of the sacrament.

There is perhaps no greater temptations than to withhold forgiveness, to render judgment on a another, or to condemn someone. These are wrong because all of them are recapitulations of the first sin: seeking to make yourself God.

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1 See Luke 18:9-14.^↩
2 Luke 18:14.^↩
3 1 Corinthians 4:3.^↩
4 Pope Francis with Andrea Tornielli, The Name of God is Mercy. Trans. Oonagh Stransky. New York: Random House, 2016^↩

In Christ alone

Readings: Gen 15:5-12.17-18: Ps 27:1.7-9.13-14; Phil 3:17-4-1; Luke 9:28b-36

I'm going to approach today's readings elliptically. This approach seems fitting to me for two reasons. First, each of these three integrated passages lends themselves nicely to the practice of lectio divina. Second, I am too tired to attempt something that requires a great deal of integration.

From the reading from Genesis, this clause stood out:

"a trance fell upon Abram" (Gen 15:12):
The translation in the Lectionary is quite misleading. A better translation of this can be found in virtually any English version of the Bible. For example, the New American Bible Revised Edition (NABRE), which features an updated translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, rather than "a trance fell upon Abram," reads- "a great, dark dread descended upon him." Robert Alter, in his noteworthy translation, renders this: "and now [after he had fallen asleep] a great dark dread came falling upon him." To encounter the living God is no easy thing, even if "only" in a dream. Of course, what God promises Abram is exodus from Ur of the Chaldees to the promised land.

From Paul's Letter to the Philippians:

"He will change our lowly body" (Phil 3:21):
Transfiguration isn't only a way for Jesus to give his closest disciples of preview of his resurrected glory. The point and purpose of the Christian life, the point and purpose of Lent, which calls us back to the path of following Jesus, is to allow Christ, by the power of his Holy Spirit, to conform our lowly bodies to his glorified body. More specifically, our participation in the Eucharist is aimed at making us his true body, his verum corpus, conformed to his glorified body. You are then sent forth to glorify him by your life. If our lives are not transformed/transfigured by our partaking of Christ's body and blood, there hardly seems any point or purpose in it. It becomes a largely unconvincing magic trick, ex opere operato notwithstanding.

Jesus Alone Engraving by Unknown, 1907

From our Gospel reading, which is Luke's account of Jesus' Transfiguration, there are several things that stood out to me.

"spoke of his exodus" (Luke 9:31):
Jesus' "exodus" didn't have Jerusalem, the holy city, as its destination but as its point of departure. The exodus of his passion, death, and resurrection began in Jerusalem and moved out from there not only to the whole world but to the entire cosmos. "Dying you destroyed our death; rising you restored our life. Lord Jesus, come in glory!" This is the true exodus, the one prefigured by Abram's call out of Ur and also the one to which the exodus of Israel out of Egypt points.

"Peter and his companions had been overcome by sleep" (Luke 9:32):
Like Abram, Peter, John, and James fell asleep. Unlike Abram, their sleep was not revelatory. It was only upon awakening that the saw and heard Jesus speaking with Moses and Elijah. It was only after they were fully awake that they heard the voice of the Father confirming Jesus' divine Sonship. For the most part, in Christian terms, certainly in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) to be asleep is to be blind to what God is doing right in front of your face. In light of this, how often do you "sleepwalk" through your days, utterly oblivious to what God is doing?

"he did not know what he was saying" (Luke 9:33):
Baffled by what he has just seen and heard, Peter makes a feeble proposal to "memorialize" the event of Jesus' Transfiguration. But this event does not require a memorial. It demands transformation on the part of the one who has seen or heard. As noted in my commentary on the clause from our reading Genesis, encountering the living God is terrific/terrible awful/awesome thing.

"This is my chosen Son; listen to him" (Luke 9:35):
Like Abram, their father in faith, the three disciples were frightened when they found themselves in the immediate presence of "God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth."
In John 2:5, which occurs during the Wedding Feast at Cana and, for John, marks the beginning of Jesus' public ministry, Mary, Jesus' mother, after requesting her Son do something about the fact that the party had run out of wine, speaking to the servants who are in the room with the sixth large water jars, tells them "Do whatever he tells you." In short, "listen to him." This episode is the second Luminous mystery of Our Lady's Rosary. The Transfiguration is the fourth Luminous mystery. There is a parallel between the two: Jesus' mother exhorting us to listen to her Son and Jesus' Father also directing us to listen to His Son. The fruit of the second Luminous mystery is To Jesus through Mary. While the fruit of the fourth is Desire for holiness (i.e., desire for transfiguration/transformation/conversion). My point in bringing the Rosary in this is that, far from being some pious little prayer for beginners or for those who don't really want to pray, the Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary provides us a most useful means for contemplating the Paschal Mystery.

"Jesus was found alone" (Luke 9:36):
Seeing him conversing with Moses and Elijah, the latter of whom is considered the greatest Hebrew prophet and who, rather than dying, ascended above in a chariot of fire, about the "exodus he was going to accomplish in Jerusalem," shows that Jesus "alone" is the fulfillment, the full realization, of the Law and the Prophets. After being momentarily "transfigured," at least in the eyes of Peter, John, and James (for a fleeting moment the scales fell from their eyes, as it were, and they saw Jesus as he really is/was/and always has been) and conversing with Israel's two major figures, they hear the voice of the Father indicating that Jesus is his Son and, therefore, they should listen to and heed him.

When it was all said and done, when Moses and Elijah had disappeared and the frightening cloud of God's all-enveloping presence lifted, "Jesus was found alone."

I can't keep from sharing the lovely song "Christ Alone."

Suffering and the means of our salvation

In his commentary on the ninth chapter of Job, Robert Alter, writing specifically on the second independent clause of the second verse- "how can [a] man be right before God?"- notes that these words refer to "being vindicated in a court of law." The essence of Job's complaint at the beginning of this chapter is that because God and human beings are equal, "he bitterly recognizes that he will never have his day in court." Even so, Job could never win. My whole point in fleshing this out is to get to a wonderful comparison Alter makes: "One detects a fundamental idea that will lead to Kafka's The Trial."

Josef K., the main character in Kafka's work, is arrested but, despite the cloud of suspicion hanging over him, he is never brought to trial. The salient moment, the one to which I believe Alter refers, is a story told to Josef by a priest in the cathedral of the city in which he lives and to which he has accompanied an Italian client. The story is Before the Law.

In Before the Law, a man from a rural area tries to gain access to "the law." He wants to gain entry through an open door. The doorkeeper informs the man he cannot go through the door now. So the man waits, not just a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, or even a few weeks. He waits for years to be admitted. Over that time, the man uses everything he has to bribe the doorkeeper to let him through. While the doorkeeper takes all the man's bribes so that the man can be assured has not "left anything undone." Just before he dies, the man asks the doorkeeper why, in all the years he has waited, has no one else sought access to the law. The doorkeeper replies by saying, "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it."

There are reasons that authors like Kafka and Samuel Beckett were fascinated by the Book of Job. Believers should be as well. Job demonstrates that, even for those of us who believe in the God of the Bible, there is no "good" or acceptable answer to the problem of evil. This is even true for Christians in light of Christ's death.

In Waiting for Godot, Beckett has Vladimir worrying about why Jesus assuring the "good thief," whom Tradition has named "Saint" Dismas, is only found in Saint Luke's Gospel, despite the fact that one of two being saved seems to him "a reasonable percentage." It was Saint Augustine who asserted that just because Jesus only assured Dismas one should not assume that the other, less convinced thief was damned.

Redemption, justification, salvation are serious. I think, at least to some extent, Lent is a time to take these things with more seriousness. We tend to think and speak of these things, if we think or speak of them at all, lightly and live our lives until the moment of suffering sets in. Suffering, in case you haven't noticed, is, to use a common business phrase, "baked into" human existence. This captured well in Preface III of the Sundays in Ordinary Time when we pray:

For we know that it belongs to your boundless glory,
that you came to the aid of mortal beings with your divinity
and even fashioned for us a remedy out of mortality itself,
that the cause of our downfall
might become the means of our salvation...

Our traditio for this First Friday of Lent is Tom Jones singing a Gospel classic, which is a track on his Praise & Blame album, "Did Trouble Me."

First Monday of Lent

Readings: Lev 19:1-2.11-18; Ps 19:8-10.15; Matt 25:31-46

Being holy as God is holy is not easy. As the late Rich Mullins sang: "It's hard to be like Jesus." Our long first reading, taken from the “Holiness Code” found in the Book of Leviticus, is something of a commentary on the Ten Commandments. The first three of the Ten Commandments are about loving God, which is distinct from, though inextricably tied to, the final six commandments about loving your neighbor.

What about the fourth commandment, you might ask? Well, the fourth commandment, about honoring your parents, is unique, just like the space parents or, you as a parent, occupy is unique- between God and other people. But that is a homily for another day.

Our reading from Leviticus ends with the exhortation to love your neighbor as you love yourself.¹ Hence, our Gospel, taken from Matthew, the most Hebraic of the Gospels, reads like an extension of our first reading.

Taken together, today’s readings are about what it means to be holy: doing right, being good, being kind, compassionate, and caring. Being holy, in a word, is to love. Being holy means loving perfectly. Loving perfectly is to love like Jesus loves: without measure and without counting the cost.

Love, in a Christian sense, is not in the first or the last instance about affectivity, about how you feel either about what you do (you don’t do good so you can feel good about yourself- the amount of good you’re capable of doing is dwarfed by one person’s needs, let alone those of the whole world) or who you do it for. After all, if you’re a Christian, you love and do good even to your enemies. Honestly, how do you feel about them?

Christians strive to be neighbors to everyone they meet, even as they recognize that, concretely, their neighbor is the person they encounter who needs their help. Thomas Merton stated this clearly: “Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.”²

In our Gospel for this First Monday of Lent, one all of us have heard many times before, Jesus identifies himself with the hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, and imprisoned. To serve them is to recognize Jesus Christ in what Saint Teresa of Kolkata frequently referred to as “his most distressing disguise.”

Genuine holiness doesn’t seek or even desire credit for righteous deeds. For the holy person, her righteous deeds are merely an extension of the love of God she herself has received and experienced. By performing righteous deeds, a holy person recognizes that he remains an “unprofitable” servant because he has only done what he was “obliged to do.”³

Starting this first full week of Lent, seek out opportunities to help someone in need. Prudentially assist that person. Let your only criterion be that they need some help. And then follow Jesus’ advice from our Ash Wednesday Gospel: “do not let your left hand know what your right is doing.”⁴

In a verse of his song “Distressing Disguise,” which title he took from Mother Teresa’s description of Jesus, Christian singer/songwriter Michael Card gets it quite right:

Every time a faithful servant serves
A brother that's in need
What happens at that moment is a miracle indeed
As they look to one another in an instant it is clear
Only Jesus is visible for they've both disappeared ⁵

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1 Leviticus 19:18.^↩
2 Thomas Merton, Disputed Questions, 143. New York: Macmillan, 1976.^↩
3 Luke 17:10.^↩
4 Matthew 6:3.^↩
5 Michael Card, "Distressing Disguise."^↩

"the joy of the Lord must be your strength"

As we do each year on the First Sunday of Lent, today we hear about Jesus' three temptations during his time of fasting and prayer in the desert. It's significant that in the Synoptics (i.e., Matthew, Mark, and Luke) this happens immediately after his baptism:

1) Turn stones into bread- make it all about you, become self-focused

2) Worshipping power- forcibly make others do your bidding instead of selflessly serving them

3) Testing God- instead of trusting God; undermining trust in God is the work of the evil one

12th Century Mosaic, Saint Mark's Cathedral, Venice

These temptations are perennial and common to all human beings in every age. That Jesus was tempted like this is a sure sign of his actual humanity. He was tempted in every way that we are tempted, but, unlike us, he did not yield to temptation (Hebrews 4:15). I don't know about you, but I can resist anything but temptation. This is what makes our Responsorial today to so very meaningful: Be with me, Lord, when I am in trouble. When am I not in trouble?

In terms of Jesus not giving in to temptation, there is always the "What if,..." In this regard, never loose sight of the fact that God is a risk-taker. If creating was a risk, then why wouldn't redemption be a risk as well?

In rides Saint Paul with an important reminder, especially during Lent, that you are not saved by your own good works, by your ability to resist temptation, by your determination not to live by bread alone. Rather, you are saved by believing in your heart (even if, maybe particularly if, your head finds this incredible) that Jesus is Lord because he rose from the dead and by confessing this with your mouth. Each Sunday, in the context of Mass, you confess with your mouth that on "On the third day he rose again from the dead." It is obvious that there is an irresolvable tension between resisting temptation (avoiding evil and doing good) and not being able to save yourself. Like all such tensions inherent to Christian faith, it is imprudent to try definitively resolving it.

Even during Lent, Sundays are always a celebration of Christ's resurrection. So, today we can heed the words from the Book of Nehemiah that constitute the Church's reading for Morning Prayer on this First Sunday of Lent:

Today is holy to the Lord your God. Do not be sad, and do not weep;
for today is holy to our Lord. Do not be saddened this day, for rejoicing in the Lord must be your strength! (Neh 8:9-10)

"I hid my face from the saints and the angels..."

So, have your Lenten disciplines survived contact with your day-to-day life? I hope so. If not, don't be discouraged. Maybe it would help you to know that Ash Wednesday to the Saturday after is kind of like Lenten prep. time. Maybe you took on too much? Maybe you didn't take on enough. Perhaps you need to make a little adjustment. I did just that this morning. I jettisoned something good but something that would've constituted too much for me.

I am on day three of reading the Book of Job. Job is one of the most fascinating books in the Hebrew Scriptures. As Robert Alter, whose translation and commentary I am using, repeatedly points out, Job is not an Israelite. Alter, by contrast, is Jewish.

Job is most certainly not and has never been considered a historical book. Catholic scholars group it among the Wisdom books. For Jews, it is grouped among the Ketuvim, "The Writings." Chapters 1-2, along with chapter 42, serve as the framing story in the canonical text. Many, not all, especially not the interpolations of Elihu, which are likely interpolations (i.e., later additions to the text), which make up six chapters, are very impressive poetically.

The Book of Job is about the age-old problem of evil, or, using the fancy philosophical/theological term- theodicy. What's refreshing is that it offers no real answer to the problem of evil-induced suffering. Why? Because it's honest about the fact that there is no satisfactory answer. The first two chapters are about God allowing the satan (i.e., Adversary) to afflict Job in such a way that he curses God. Indeed, the third chapter begins after all Job's children are killed and after all his wealth is taken away and after he is afflicted with a pernicious skin disease from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. Alter calls the third chapter of the book "Job's harrowing death-wish poem." It is a breathtaking piece of ancient poetry.

Re-reading Job's death wish poem reminded me of something I noted in a doctoral term paper I wrote on Samuel Beckett:

It seems that as he grew older, Beckett grew increasingly fond of Job 3:3: “Let the day perish in which I was born and the night in which it was said, there is a man child conceived.” In addition to four Bibles, each one in a different language (English, French, the Old Testament in Italian, and Luther’s German Bible), and a concordance, he kept a copy of the Book of Common Prayer in his working library

What really struck me today was the penultimate verss of the death wish poem:

For I feared a thing- it befell me,
   what I dreaded came upon me (Job 3:25)

For day three in his book Pauses for Lent, writing about the ancient Israelites in the desert (one of the guiding images of Lent, along with Jesus' forty days of fasting and praying in the desert), Trevor Hudson writes:

While they are not in control of what happens to them, they do have control of how they will respond to the events of their lives

This is true, no doubt. But there's suffering and then there's suffering the likes of which Job was subjected, likes of which the people of Ukraine and Yemen are being subjected (the former far longer than the latter at the hands of Saudi Arabia, aided and abetted by...).

So, I might get a little hangry while fasting. How I deal with that is part of my purpose for fasting in the first place. But the other part of fasting, which is to be in solidarity with those who suffer involuntarily and to pray for their deliverance and give alms for their relief, is just as important. While praying and giving alms are necessary, the suffering is so great that fasting and other penitential actions take on more the shade what is found in the final verse of Job's death wish poem:

I was not quiet, I was not still,
   I had no repose, and trouble came

Kyrie eleison/Christi eleison/Kyrie eleison.

Our Friday traditio for this First Friday of Lent is Jennifer Knapp's "A Little More." It's been our traditio before, but not for a long time. I listened to this song several times over on Ash Wednesday. It spoke deeply to me. In light of the suffering from which I am spared and quite different, it turns out to be infinitely more than I can give, especially as I realize nobody deserves to suffer in those ways.

Ash Wednesday: Lent begins

I have no desire to expound on today's Mass readings, except to urge anyone reading this to quietly consider how you might engage in the practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Even if you're not a believer, spend some quiet time, go without in solidarity with those who do so involuntarily, and serve others in helpful and kind ways.

I was struck today by three things in the Church's liturgy. The first two arose from Morning Prayer. One of the Intercessions cuts to the heart of what Lent is all about:

Teach us to be loving not only in great and exceptional moments,
- but above all in the ordinary events of daily life

The second also gets to the heart of the reason for this sanctifying season. It is from the Prayer that concluded this morning's office:

As we begin the discipline of Lent, make this day holy by our self-denial

What struck me about this is something that I "knew." But this prayer helped it penetrate my too often hardened heart.

What I did realize (again)? That I will never become holy simply by performing acts of self-denial. Only God can, by his grace, make me holy, or even make this day holy to me.

There is also the sense that not only is every day holy but that I am holy. Like the golden ring that gets dropped on the ground and covered with dirt, my holiness, buried beneath detritus of all my striving and distractions, needs to be "unearthed." I think the spiritual disciplines help in this regard. There's a line in the chorus of Jennifer Knapp's beautiful song "A Little More" that articulates this in such a heartfelt way: "Unearth this holiness I can't earn."

As to this seemingly audacious idea that I am already, in some sense, at some level, holy (and so are you!), Pater Tom (Merton), in his still amazing and eclectic book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, noted:

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us

As to how practicing spiritual disciplines is an aid, and only an aid- means, not an end, I invoke something James Kushiner wrote more than a decade ago on the old Touchstone blog, "Mere Comments," continues to resonate with me, which is why I probably overuse it:

A discipline won’t bring you closer to God. Only God can bring you closer to Himself. What the discipline is meant to do is to help you get yourself, your ego, out of the way so you are open to His grace

Thirdly, I was struck by the Collect for Mass referring to Lent as "this campaign of Christian service."

Of course, these three things are connected, even if inversely to the order in which I presented them. Laying it way too cleanly: the purpose of Lent to better love God and neighbor - and the way we do this is through a more intentional and perhaps more intensive practice of the fundamental spiritual disciplines - almsgiving, which constitutes "this campaign of Christian service," is the fruit of prayer and fasting.

Blessings and peace. May you be ready to celebrate the Glory of Christ's Resurrection at Easter and renew your baptismal promises from your heart.