Author: DVO

In today’s gospel reading, the Pharisees ask Jesus, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Many people struggling to understand God and the commandments might say, Why be good and try to keep the commandments if God loves us anyway? Simply put, we don’t try to be good so that God loves and rewards us. God loves us no matter what we do. Heaven is never a reward for a good life. Fr. Ron Rolheiser asks if these are these glib statements. He says the answer is “no” because God’s love, as Jesus assures us, is always unmerited and unconditional; nothing we do can ever make God love us, just as nothing can stop God from loving us. God loves just as God does everything else perfectly. God loves everything and everybody perfectly. Part of Christian belief is that God’s love is what keeps everything in existence. If God stopped loving anything, it would cease to be. That raises an interesting question: If God loves everything and everyone perfectly, does God then also love Satan? Indeed, does God love Satan as much as he loves Jesus’ mother, Mary? The answer can only be “yes.” God loves Satan as much as God loves Mary. The difference is not in how God loves them but in how they, each in turn, love God. God loves each of them in the same way, namely, perfectly. But obviously, Mary’s response is very different from Satan’s. In that difference, we see what creates hell: a certain attitude in the face of love. However, notice that in neither case is the love either merited or deflected. God loves us, pure and simple. God cannot be offended. God’s love cannot be driven away. God does not reward or punish us on the basis of whether we have been good or bad. God simply loves us. Then why be good? Why keep the commandments? What difference does our response make? It’s our response that makes a difference, but not in terms of giving God offense, driving God away, or making God punish or reward us. It makes a difference in how we stand and feel in the face of love.

Jesus preached the Kingdom of God, the New Age, the Final Age, the reign of justice on this earth, new life, the resurrection, and eternal life; heaven is already here, except that it’s also still coming. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes the problem was not that his hearers didn’t understand him. They understood, but almost universally, they resisted that message. Much as they yearned for God’s Kingdom to be already here, like my friend who keeps asking for another ten years to get his life in order, they preferred to push things into the future. Having God become concrete in their lives was far too threatening. Gerhard Lohfink, the renowned Biblical scholar, aptly articulates both the resistance that Jesus’ hearers had to this part of his message and the reason for that resistance: “Jesus’ hearers prefer to push everything off into the future, and the story comes to no good end. The reign of God announced by Jesus is not accepted. The ‘today’ offered by God is denied. And that, that alone, is why ‘already’ becomes ‘not yet’. It is not only in Nazareth that the ‘today’ of the Gospel was not accepted. Later also, in the course of the church’s history, it has again and again been denied or rendered toothless. The reason was the same as in Nazareth: apparently, it goes against the human grain for God to become concrete in our lives. Then, people’s desires and favorite notions are in danger, as are their ideas about time. It can’t be today because that would mean that our lives have to change today already. Therefore, it can lie, hygienically and snugly packed, at rest, inconsequential.” It’s very threatening to have God become “concrete” in our lives, as opposed to God simply being a reality that will one day become very real. Because if God is “concrete” already now that means that our worlds have to change now and we have to stop pushing things into the indefinite future. This isn’t so much a fault in faith as it is a procrastination, a stalling, wanting a little more time before we get serious. We’re like the guests in the Gospel parable today invited to the wedding banquet. We, too, want to go to the feast and intend to go to the feast, but first, we need to attend to our marriages, our businesses, and our ambitions. We can get serious later. There’s time. We fully intend to take Jesus seriously; all we want is a little more time before doing that. What’s wrong with that?

The Gospels tell us that God’s mercy is unlimited and unconditional, has no favorites, is equally concerned for everyone’s happiness and salvation, and does not ration his gift of the Spirit. How prone are we to think that for my religion to be true, it’s important to me that other religions are not true! For my Christian denomination to be faithful to Christ, it’s important that all the other denominations be considered less faithful. For the Eucharist in my denomination to be valid, it’s important that the Eucharist in other denominations be invalid or less valid. And, since I’m living a certain sustained fidelity in my faith and moral life, it’s important to me that everyone else who isn’t living as faithfully does not get to heaven or is assigned to a secondary place in heaven. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that we aren’t the first disciples of Jesus to think this way and to be challenged by him. That is, in fact, a large part of the lesson in Jesus’ parable regarding an over-generous landowner who paid everyone the same generous wage no matter how much or little each had worked. Jesus addresses the one making the complaint as a friend: “Why are you jealous because God is overly generous?” Why is it important to us that because we are doing things right, God should be demanding of those who aren’t? Generosity speaks of openness, hospitality, empathy, wide tolerance, and sacrificing some of ourselves for others. Orthodoxy speaks of certain non-negotiable truths, keeping proper boundaries, staying true to what you believe, and not compromising truth for the sake of being nice. These two are often pitted against each other as opposites, but they are meant to be together. Hence, you can be a Christian, convinced that Christianity is the most authentic expression of religion in the world, without judging that other religions are false. You can be a Roman Catholic, convinced that Roman Catholicism is the truest and fullest expression of Christianity, and your Eucharist is the real presence of Jesus, without making the judgment that other Christian denominations are not valid expressions of Christ and do not have a valid Eucharist. There’s no contradiction there. You can be right without that being contingent on everyone else being wrong!

In the world’s schema of things, survival of the fittest is the rule. In God’s schema, the survival of the weakest is the rule. God always stands on the side of the weak, and it is there, among the weak, that we find God. Being big-hearted is predicated on precisely rising above self-interest and being willing to sacrifice our own interests for the good of others and the good of the larger community. Fr. Rolheiser writes that we are big-minded exactly to the extent that we are sensitive to the wider picture and can integrate into our thinking the needs, wounds, and ideologies of everyone, not just those of their own kind. That’s what it means to understand rather than simply be intelligent. When we are petty, we cannot understand beyond our own needs, wounds, and ideologies. On our best days, our hearts and minds are more open, more willing to embrace widely, accept differences, and sacrifice self-interest for the good of others. On our best days, we are gracious, big-hearted, and understanding. Sadly, almost everything in our world today tempts us away from this. There can be no peace, no world community, no real brother and sisterhood, and no real church community as long as we do not define ourselves as, first, citizens of the world and only second, as members of our own tribe. Admittedly, we need to take care of our own families, countries, and selves. Justice asks that we also treat ourselves fairly. We best serve our own when we serve others. We are most fair to ourselves when we are fair to others. Only by being good citizens of the world are we good citizens in our own countries. Putting ourselves first goes against the Gospel. It’s also a poor strategy: Jesus tells us that, in the end, the first will be the last.

Today’s reflection verse brings back thoughts of how we view the Ten Commandments. Artistic representations of the Ten Commandments often depict two stone tablets with two tables of inscriptions. This portrayal follows from a classical division of the commandments in which there are two specific categories: those that order humanity’s relationship with God and those that order human relationships with one another. Bishop Barron writes that if we consider the Bible as a totality, it becomes apparent that the Scriptures prioritize the first table, those commands dealing with God. The Ten Commandments begin with an insistence that the Lord alone is God and there are to be no other gods besides him. This is not just a principle meant to order humanity’s expressions of ritualized worship but a statement about the ethos of the entire moral and spiritual order. Whatever it is that humanity worships — be it the gods of the ancients or the allures of wealth, power, pleasure, and honors — will, by necessity, give rise to our perceptions and practices concerning moral life. The God or gods in whom we place our ultimate concern will direct our lives and determine our choices. St. Paul said that the body of each Christian is “a temple of the Holy Spirit.” He means a place where the one true God is honored and worshipped. Paul provides us with an image of the Christian life as one in which a person finds happiness and integration in the measure that she becomes, personally, a place where God is first. What does this mean? How much of your life is given over to materialism, commercialism, or the accumulation of things? What rivals to the one true God have you allowed to invade the sacred space of your soul? The temple-cleansing Christ is a memorable image with enduring power. We shouldn’t relegate that image or the Lord himself to merely a statement about our impatience with the corruptions of religious institutions and miss the point that strikes closer to home: Christ comes to each of us to rid the temple of our own body of the idols to which we have foolishly given power and pride of place.

Bishop Robert Barron, writing in his book, “This Is My Body,” notes that the very earliest theology of the Eucharist is found in St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, penned probably in the early fifties of the first century, and it clearly brings forth this organic, participative quality. Paul speaks of the intense identification that is effected between Jesus and his Church precisely through the Eucharist: “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?” (1 Cor. 10:16). The evocative Greek term behind “sharing” is koinonia, meaning communion or mystical participation. Is this a hard doctrine? At the conclusion of the Eucharistic discourse, delivered at the synagogue in Capernaum, Jesus practically lost his entire Church: “When many of his disciples heard it, they said, ‘This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?’” (John 6:60). Again, if he were speaking only at the symbolic level, why would this theology be hard to accept? No one left him when he observed that he was the vine or the good shepherd or the light of the world, for those were clearly only metaphorical remarks and posed, accordingly, no great intellectual challenge. The very resistance of his disciples to the bread of life discourse implies that they understood Jesus only too well and grasped that he was making a qualitatively different kind of assertion. Unable to take in the Eucharistic teaching, “many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him” (John 6:66). Jesus then turned to his inner circle, the Twelve, and asked, bluntly enough: “Do you also wish to go away?” (John 6:67). There is something terrible and telling in that question, as though Jesus were posing it not only to the little band gathered around him at Capernaum, but to all of his prospective disciples up and down the ages. One senses that we are poised here on a fulcrum, that a standing or falling point has been reached, that somehow being a disciple of Jesus is intimately tied up with how one stands in regard to the Eucharist. In response to Jesus’ question, Peter, as is often the case in the Gospels, spoke for the group: “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God” (John 6:68–69). As in the synoptic Gospels, so here in John, it is a Petrine confession that grounds and guarantees the survival of the Church. In the Johannine context, this explicit confession of Jesus as the Holy One of God is bound up with the implicit confession of faith in the Eucharist as truly the Body and Blood of the Lord. When the two declarations are made in tandem, John is telling us, the Church perdures. In light of this scene, it is indeed fascinating to remark how often the Church has divided precisely over this question of the Real Presence.

There is a story of a young child who had to deal with wetting their bed. Their childhood friends would tease them with a rhyme that connected to the word “pee.” This poor child was helpless to protect themself. They were exposed and ashamed. You could also see that they were angry, not so much at the other kids and their teasing as at themselves, at their weakness and inability not to do that for which they were being taunted. Sometimes, kids are powerless to stop wetting their beds long after they’ve matured enough to experience great shame in doing it. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that children such as these belong to the kingdom of God. Jesus had just such a child in mind when he made that statement. But generally, we need to understand why the kingdom belongs to children. We tend to idealize the innocence of children, and childlike innocence is a beautiful quality. However, that is not what Jesus idealizes in a child. The quality that makes children so apt to receive the kingdom is not so much their innocence as their helplessness, their powerlessness to not wet their beds, among other things. Very young children cannot feed themselves, let alone provide for themselves. And certainly, they cannot protect themselves, especially against their own weaknesses. There is a congenital ineptness inside us, and try as we might, we cannot always or often protect ourselves against our weaknesses. That’s basic biblical anthropology. But there is something even more important theologically here. Physically, our life’s bloom is short-lived, and long before we are ready for it, our bodies begin again to betray us. Wrinkles, fat, and the humiliating sags of mid-life appear in ways that cannot be hidden. Our friends don’t tease and taunt us about these weaknesses, as very young kids do. They don’t need to; we are painfully aware of our inadequacies. That is true for us emotionally and morally, too. But this is the point: in the face of our inadequacies, we must begin to see ourselves as God sees us, a child who cannot yet be fully responsible for their life. Then, our shame can give way to tender compassion. We are all bed-wetters and live in that humiliation. But, as Jesus assures us, to such as these belongs the kingdom of heaven.

Sometimes in our fear of being tainted in our orthodoxy we forget that many of the great theologians in Christian tradition were unafraid to pick up pagan thinkers, mine their insights for truth, and then blend these with their faith. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that St. Augustine did this with Platonism. Thomas Aquinas, in the face of considerable ecclesial criticism, did the same thing with Aristotle. Ironically, centuries later, we now take many of their intellectual categories, which they originally took from pagan thought, as our very criteria for orthodoxy. Dare one say that Jesus did the same thing? He picked up parables and stories that were current in his culture and tailored them to further his own religious and moral teachings. Moreover, he taught, and with precious little equivocation, that we are to honor truth wherever we see it, irrespective of who’s carrying it. If one picks up truths from diverse pagan and secular sources and harmonizes them with one’s Christian faith, how does one avoid the accusation of being syncretistic? Syncretism is combining insights gleaned from everywhere in a way that is uncritical of internal contradiction. But we must not confuse tension with contradiction. Tension is not necessarily a sign of contradiction; it’s often the opposite: True faith is humble enough to accept truth, wherever it sees it, irrespective of the tension it causes and irrespective of the religion or ideology of whoever is speaking it. Big mind and big hearts are large enough to contain and carry large ambiguities and great tensions. And, true worshippers of God accept God’s goodness and truth wherever these are manifest, no matter how religiously or morally inconvenient that manifestation might be. God is the author of all that is good and all that is true! Hence, since no one religion, one church, one culture, one philosophy, or one ideology contains all of the truth, we must be open to perceive and receive goodness and truth in many, many different places – and we must be open to the tensions and ambiguity this brings into our lives.

In Luke’s Gospel for the Assumption, Mary sings of God’s mercy and his special care for those whom the world would cast aside. God has “lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things,” the young Mary says to her older cousin Elizabeth. The Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary was not defined as a dogma until 1950 but has roots as far back as the fifth century. God’s taking up into heaven of the physical body of Mary is in keeping with what we teach about both the importance of Mary and the importance of our bodies as human creatures. Mary, in her body, goes ahead of us to heaven. Mary, who experienced all the precarity and danger of being a religious minority in an occupied country, who had to flee with her family across a border to save the life of her young child, and who watched a brutal government torture and kill that child as an adult, would come to know the Magnificat in a completely different way over the course of her life. The Magnificat is Mary’s famous song of praise to God. It shakes the complacency of the powerful and reminds them of God’s strength: “He has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones.” Mary’s song and her Assumption could not be more relevant. On August 12, Bishop Vasquez of Austin, Texas, Chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Migration, issued a statement urging protection of migrant families. He declared that a new government rule, which would severely limit asylum eligibility, “jeopardizes the safety of vulnerable individuals and families fleeing persecution and threatens family unity.” The Assumption reminds us of our call to care for all who are experiencing danger, hunger, homelessness, statelessness, or are treated as outcasts. It reminds us that God cares for the least and the lowly, and so must we.

Today, we celebrate the Memorial of Saint Maximilian Kolbe. Regis Armstrong writes that Fr. Kolbe is known for giving his life to the Nazis at the Horror Camp Auschwitz in place of another on August 14, 1941. What led to this was a camp count on July 29, 1941, revealing that three prisoners were missing from Block 11 and the Camp’s Sub-Commander ordering that ten men suffer reprisal. Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritsch instructed all the men of Block 11 to form a line, which he walked selecting their life or their slow death by starvation, “This one. That one.” Amongst them was Franciszek Gajowniczek, a married family man. Before the group of 10 was marched to Block 13, the starvation bunker, Prisoner Number 16670, Maximilian Kolbe, broke rank and said: “I am a Catholic priest. I wish to die for that man. I am old, and he has a wife and children.” Maximilian and the other nine men went to a slow death of torture and starvation in the notorious Block 13. After three weeks, only four remained alive; among them was Maximilian. On August 14th, the commandant decided the bunker was needed and ordered the prisoners to be injected with carbolic acid. Still conscious, Maximilian looked at the doctor and offered his arm. The body of Prisoner 16670 was removed to the crematorium, and without dignity or ceremony was disposed of, like the hundreds of thousands who had gone before him, and hundreds of thousands more who would follow.” Survivor Jozef Stemler recalled, “In that desert of hatred, he had sown love. There was nothing artificial in his behavior; he was serious but happy and had the smile of a youth. These qualities attracted many people to him. I was coming back from the evening roll call, half-dead from work and hungry, when an SS Guard ordered me to carry two dead bodies to the crematorium. The sight of the body of a young man almost made me faint when I realized it was Father Kolbe.”