Author: DVO

We’re told there that Jesus “spoke with authority, unlike the Scribes and the Pharisees” (many of whom were, no doubt, brilliant, learned, and sincere). What set Jesus’ teaching apart? Its effect. He cured people and changed their lives in a way none of the other preachers and teachers of his time could. The word of God coming from his mouth simply affected things in a way that this same word coming from other mouths didn’t. His words made sick people healthy, made sinners change their lives, and even brought some dead people back to life. Fr. Ron Rolheiser offers this assessment of his life regarding the topic of speaking with authority. “I’ve been in the business of teaching and preaching for thirty years and, from the normal indicators, have been successful enough. I’m in demand as a speaker, my writings are popular, and I receive my share of affirmation and compliments. After speaking to congregations and various audiences, I generally sense a positive reaction. What I don’t sense is that I speak “with authority,” even when people do positively affirm me in words. Why do I say that? I’ve never affected a physical cure, not that I’ve ever tried; never raised anyone from the dead, not that I’ve tried; and I wonder to what extent my teaching and writings have ever empowered anyone to truly convert and change his or her life morally. It’s one thing to be told you’re wonderful; it’s quite another to have someone actually change his or her life on the basis of your preaching. That isn’t true for everybody. Mother Theresa used to go out on a stage, face a thousand people, and say, “God loves you!” and everyone’s eyes would fill with tears, and they would know that this, the deepest of all realities, was true. She spoke with authority. There’s a lesson here, but it shouldn’t be misread. People will recognize us as speaking with authority only when they sense that, like Jesus, we are under divine authority ourselves, that our message is not our own, that our actual lives stand behind the message, that our words are meant to reveal God and not ourselves, that we love others enough to give up protecting ourselves, that our real concern is God’s kingdom and not how we impress others, that we consider the community bigger than ourselves, and that we are willing to sweat blood rather than get bitter or walk away.” I wonder in my own life if my failure to pass on our faith to my children, to effect forgiveness and harmony within my family and communities, isn’t predicated precisely on my incapacity to speak God’s word with authority. And that is my life’s continuing challenge to “walk the talk.”

As a youth, St. Christopher was gifted in every way except faith. He was a big man physically, powerful, strong, goodhearted, mellow, and well-liked by all. He was also generous, using his physical strength to help others. His one fault was that he found it hard to believe in God. Fr. Rolheiser writes that for Christopher, the physical was what was real, and everything else seemed unreal. However, he yearned to believe in God and deeply respected those who did believe. One night, as the legend goes, during a storm, the ferryboat capsized, and Christopher dove into the dark waters to rescue a young child. Carrying that child to the shore, he looked into its face and saw there the face of Christ. After that, he believed, for he had seen the face of Christ. The very name, Christopher, contains the legend. Christopher means CHRIST-BEARER. The story contains, within its very simplicity, a profound lesson. It gives us a practical answer to one of the most challenging questions of all: What should we do when our faith is weak? What should be our reaction in the face of the fact that God often seems silent, distant, and dead? How do we move from believing only in the physical, from believing in the reality of only what we can see, feel, touch, taste, and smell, to believing in the existence of deeper, spiritual realities? Christopher’s answer? Live as honestly and respectfully as possible and use your gifts to help others. God will appear. Faith is not so much a question of feeling as of selfless service. St. Thomas, who we celebrate today, equally had doubts. Thomas doubted the resurrection of Jesus. It is noteworthy that Jesus offers no resistance or rebuke in the face of this remark. Instead, he takes Thomas at his word: “Come here and place your finger in the wounds of my hand and the wound in my side; see for yourself that I am real and not a ghost.” The stories of Christopher and Thomas teach us that God is neither angry nor threatened by honest agnosticism. Faith, by definition, never equates to certainty. Neither is it the sure feeling that God exists. Conversely, unbelief should not be confused with the absence of the felt assurance that God exists. There are, for every one of us, dark nights of the soul, silences of God, cold, lonely seasons, and bitter times when God’s appearances to us cannot be genuinely grasped or recognized. Whenever this happens, we must become Christ-bearers, Christophers, and honest agnostics who use their goodness and God-given strengths to help carry others across the burdensome rivers of life. God does not ask us to have a faith that is certain but a service that is sure.

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. Fr. Rolheiser writes that the great Jewish prophets, the forerunners of Jesus, coined a mantra that ran something like this: The quality of your faith will be judged by the quality of justice in the land, and the quality of justice in the land will be judged by how “widows, orphans, and strangers” (biblical code for the three most vulnerable groups in society) fared while you were alive. Jesus would agree. When he describes the last judgment at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, he tells us that this judgment will not be about right doctrine, good theology, church attendance, or even personal piety and sexual morality, but how we treat the poor. Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor. Jesus and the great biblical prophets make that clear. This challenge to justice doesn’t negate other religious and moral obligations. Still, it always remains a fundamental, non-negotiable principle: We are going to be judged by how the most vulnerable groups (“widows, orphans, and strangers”) fared while we were alive and practicing our faith. The challenge is a strong one.

The older I get, the less confident I become in some ways. I sometimes wonder whether I’m following Christ properly or even know exactly what it means to follow Christ. These words from Fr. Ron Rolheiser echo with many followers of Christ. He goes on to write that to be human is to be inadequate. Only God is adequate, and the rest of us can safely say: Fear not, you are inadequate! But a God who made us this way surely gives us the slack, the forgiveness, and the grace we need to work with this. I take consolation from the gospel parable of the ten bridesmaids who all fell asleep while waiting for the bridegroom, wise and the foolish alike. Even the wise were too human and weak to stay awake the whole time. Nobody does it perfectly, and accepting this, our congenital inadequacy can bring us to a healthy humility and perhaps even healthy humor about it. The Eucharist is, among other things, a vigil of waiting. When Jesus instituted the Eucharist, he told the disciples to keep celebrating it until he returned again. I stake my faith on an invitation that Jesus left us on the night before he died: To break bread and drink wine in his memory and to trust that this if all else is uncertain, is what we should be doing while we wait for him to return. The biblical scholar Gerhard Lofink puts it this way: The early apostolic communities cannot be understood outside of the matrix of intense expectation. They were communities imminently awaiting Christ’s return. They gathered in the Eucharist, among other reasons, to foster and sustain this awareness, namely, that they were living in wait, waiting for Christ to return. The Eucharist is our gathering point in our waiting for the Lord.

Today, we read in Mark’s Gospel of the synagogue official Jairus falling at the feet of Jesus, pleading earnestly with him, saying, “My daughter is at the point of death. Please, come lay your hands on her so that she may get well and live.” Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that sometimes we can be very naïve about faith and its dynamics, thinking that faith in God is a ticket to earthly peace and joy. But faith isn’t a path to easy calm, nor does it assure us that we will exit this life in calm, and that can be pretty unsettling and perplexing at times. Henri Nouwen received a call that his mother was dying back home in the Netherlands. On his flight home from New York to Amsterdam, he reflected on his mother’s faith and virtue and concluded that she was the most Christian woman he had ever known. With that as a wonderfully consoling thought, he fantasized about how she would die, how her last hours would be filled with faith and calm, and how that faith and calm would be her final, faith-filled witness to her family. But that’s not the way it played out. Far from being calm and unafraid, his mother, in the final hours leading up to her death, was seemingly in the grip of some inexplicable darkness, of some deep inner disquiet, and of something that looked like the antithesis of faith. Why would his mother undergo this disquiet when she had been a woman of such strong faith for all her life? Initially, this unsettled him deeply until a deeper understanding of faith broke through: His mother had been a woman who, every day of her adult life, had prayed to Jesus, asking him to empower her to live as he lived and to die as he died. Well, seemingly, her prayer was heard. She did die like Jesus, who, though having a rock-solid faith, sweated blood while contemplating his own death and then cried out on the cross, anguished with the feeling that God had forsaken him. In brief, her prayer had been answered. She had asked Jesus to let her die as he did, and, given her openness to it, her prayer was granted to the confusion of her family and friends, who had expected a very different scene. That is also true for the manner of Jesus’ death and the reaction of his family and disciples. This isn’t the way anyone naturally fantasizes the death of a faith-filled person. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross submits that each of us goes through five clear stages in dying, namely, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Kathleen Dowling Singh suggests that what Kubler-Ross defines as acceptance needs some further nuance. According to Singh, the toughest part of that acceptance is full surrender and, prior to that surrender, some people, though not everyone, will undergo a deep interior darkness that, on the surface, can look like despair. Only after that, do they experience joy and ecstasy. All of us need to learn the lesson that Nouwen learned at his mother’s deathbed: Faith, like love, admits of various modalities and may not be judged simplistically from the outside.

Bishop Robert Barron writes that in honoring Saints Peter and Paul,  we see two indispensable players, the ones without whom Christianity would never have gotten off the ground. What they held crucially in common was their love for Jesus Christ, a love that brought both of them to their death. They represent two essential archetypes in the life of the Church. Without the creative tension between the two, the Church would not have had the capacity to survive in the course of these two millennia. Peter is the archetype of order and office. Without leadership based upon a clear confession of faith, the Church would have, long ago, fizzled and fallen apart. Peter represents leadership, integrity, form, and structure. Paul represents mission, theology, and evangelization, the outward and energetic dimension of the Church’s life. Paul was the first theologian in the tradition, the first to practice the art of faith seeking understanding. Mind you, this speculative, adventurous, theological effort must be disciplined by Peter; otherwise, it would become unruly and self-defeating. And this is why it is altogether fitting and proper that we celebrate these two great saints together.

Sister Ephrem Hollermann writes that day after day, our faith affirms that God’s love is ever-present and generous. Stories from Sacred Scripture have taught us this truth, and we stake our lives on it. In today’s reading from Matthew, the leper makes his wish known, and the response of Jesus is instantaneous: “I will do it. Be made clean.” If we read the Scriptures too simplistically, we may think we have been “set up” by biblical stories such as these when God’s response to our requests seems far from immediate, often disappointing, or even nonexistent. Many of us have joined the vast communion of people praying for peace in the world, and yet violence and warfare proliferate around the globe. Who of us has not experienced the deafness of God in our deepest times of personal desolation? Who of us has not prayed for healing for a loved one who has fallen gravely ill but dies? Biblical writers recorded stories that had been passed down through the oral tradition for a very long time. When they come together in the biblical narrative, each of them is no longer a single, isolated story of God’s love. Rather, they form the “big picture” of covenant love initiated by God since the dawn of creation. “I will be your God” is God’s immediate and everlasting response to humankind. If God seems to delay or we feel unheard when we make our specific needs known, our faith reminds us to turn our gaze to the “big picture” of covenant love and to remember the wonderful works God is doing in the world all the time.

In Matthew’s gospel, we read that God’s unchanging nature and word are the “rock” that life should be built upon. A builder knows the importance of using the proper materials, the right location, and the appropriate knowledge to erect a house that will survive the storms of life. This raises the classic question regarding our faith life: “What is the foundation on which our life is built upon?” We have many choices in life, and today’s reading speaks to the importance of what we choose to build our lives on. Some will build their life around education, common sense, healthy living, wise investments, or even family. All of these are good to have but are more like the walls and floors of our house of life. But are any of these strong enough to be the foundations upon which a house is built? Scripture is clear that only our deep and abiding relationship with Jesus, the Incarnate Word of God, has the capacity and strength to provide a foundation that will never falter, for it is built on solid rock that will never crumble. The rest is like shifting sand; as valuable as it may be, God, the ultimate builder, has given us the materials needed to build a solid faith to get through any change or storm that life can throw at us. We need to hold fast to the promises written throughout scripture, not only in the crazy times of life but, more importantly, in those times of peace when we can reflect on the truth of those promises. We can quickly forget how God has been with us in all aspects of life, in the joys and the tribulations. God’s word is the rock and anchor we can build our life on to know and trust in his unchanging nature. God’s character and promises are fixed forever.

All of us know a lot of people who seem so immersed in this life, in their marriages, their families, their jobs, in entertainment, in sports, and in their daily concerns that they don’t seem at all to have God as the center of their conscious attention for any significant portion of their daily lives. Indeed, sometimes, these people do not even attend church and often have very little formal or private prayer in their lives. Their default consciousness focuses on the things of this world, its joys, and its sorrows. A shift in consciousness would need to occur for any explicit notion of God to enter their lives. For these good people, ordinary consciousness is primarily agnostic. Fr. Rolheiser asks, “Are we going to hell in droves because we can’t give God more of our conscious attention and because we can’t be more explicitly religious?” By their fruits you will know them! Jesus said that, and it must be our criterion here. If people live inside an honesty, generosity, goodness, warmth, health, solicitousness, intelligence, and life-giving wit, can they be much out of harmony with God? Moreover, we need to ask ourselves: If we are born into this world with such a powerful, innate gravitation towards the things of this earth if our natural (default) consciousness wants to fix itself more upon matter than spirit, and this seems to be the case for most people, how then do we read the mind of our Creator? What divine intelligence manifests within the natural instinct to give ourselves over to this life, even as we carry a faith that gives us a vision beyond this world? Perhaps God is mature enough not to ask for or want our conscious attention most of the time. Perhaps God wants us to enjoy our time here, the experience of love and friendship, family and friends, eating and drinking, and (at least occasionally) seeing our favorite teams win a championship. Perhaps God wants us, in the famed words of Yogi Berra, to sometimes just sit back and enjoy the game! Perhaps God is like a blessing old grandparent; perhaps we pray rudimentarily when we healthily enjoy the gift of this life; and perhaps there are less-conscious ways in which we can be aware of God.

Scripture often describes life as a choice between two ways. The teaching today by Jesus takes the form of the broad and narrow ways. His use of the broad and narrow paths is a straightforward, black-and-white view of our human conduct that focuses on the final outcome of our decisions. Our lives depict the relationship between our choices and the consequences they bring us. We often lie to ourselves by seeing this reasoning as too simplistic. That is usually because of the lens through which we view life, which only sees things in shades of grey. We either decide to follow God’s way or our own way, and there is a significant difference between the two. One thinks, for example, of the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve had to decide between the way of obedience and the way of disobedience, symbolized by the Tree of Life and the other by the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that threatened death. Let us not forget that God did not send his Son into the world to condemn it but for the world to be saved through him. God gave us the freedom to wear the light of Christ or the shroud of the darkened world. The choice is and always will be ours to make.