Author: DVO

Nearly 2,000 years ago, two disillusioned youths consoled each other as they walked that seven-mile stretch of road separating Jerusalem from Emmaus. Fr. Rolheiser writes that they moved slowly, depression having taken the spring from their steps. A double feeling clung to their hearts that day. They were hurting, and there was reason. Their messiah and their dreams had just been crucified. A deep, dark disappointment dampened their spirits. And there was fear. Most of all, there was fear. Not fear that they themselves might be crucified. That prospect loomed more welcome than the thought of going on. Theirs was that more horrible fear, the fear that comes from the realization that perhaps nothing makes a difference after all; maybe our dreams and our hopes point to nothing more real than Santa and the Easter Bunny. The uncrucified Christ had filled them with a dream. With that dream had come a new innocence, freshness, energy, and a feeling absent since they had been children, which, prior to meeting Jesus, they had, long ago, unconsciously despaired of ever feeling again. Dreams are giving way before the caveat of the cynic; faith is daily being displaced by doubt; and perseverance and long-suffering are all but extinct in culture and church of release and enjoyment. Worst of all, there is fear, an unconscious fear whose tentacles are beginning to color every facet of life. It is the fear that perhaps our Christian hopes and dreams point to nothing beyond our own hopes and dreams. Perhaps faith is, after all, only a naiveté. Isn’t Christ as dead as he was on Good Friday? Who, save perhaps for a few good thieves, is still turning to a cross for salvation? Yet there is something else: The dream still clings to us, refusing to let us go. It burns holes in us still, hanging on to us, even when in infidelity and despair, we can no longer hang on to it. Hope is still more real than death. In our hurt, we are struggling for words and grasping for trust. We need to remain on the road to Emmaus. The stranger still stalks that same road. In his company, we need to discuss our doubts, discuss the scriptures, and continually offer each other bread and consolation. At some moment, our eyes will be opened, too. We will understand, and we will recognize the risen Lord. Then, the dream will explode anew like a flower bursting in bloom after a long winter. We will be full of a new innocence. Easter Sunday will happen again.

When Mary fell on Jesus’ feet, he resisted her embrace, “do not cling to me.” Every time I read these words, my heart breaks for Mary. She had been through so much, having witnessed the betrayal of her dear rabbi, followed by the mock trial and the horrific scourging, the long walk to Golgotha, and the brutal hours at the foot of the cross. Could she not be allowed to embrace her resurrected Lord? Scholars and commentators have mused over this strange scene, but Fr. Ronald Rolheiser sees the Paschal mystery in play. The process of transformation is available to all of us who are willing to die to our ideas and certainties, what we might experience as physical realities, and enter the mysterious new life of the resurrected Jesus. If we review our lives, most of us can name some painful losses along the way. Whether it comes in the form of death or disease, we endure broken dreams and disappointments, each of which is a genuine loss. Will we find resurrection and new life on the other side? Only if we refuse to cling to the life we knew before. If Mary were to receive her Lord and his resurrection, she would need to release the physical presence of Jesus of Nazareth. She could not cling to Jesus as she had known him. She had to let him go. Only then could she embrace her own calling. Empowered by the call of her master, she left the garden for a final time that day to tell the disciples that she had seen Jesus alive! Jesus commissioned her as the first preacher and proclaimer of the Good News of his resurrection.

The Gospel passage for Monday in the Octave of Easter tells of Mary Magdalene and the other Mary’s encounter with the risen Jesus and the joy and hope that comes with the Resurrection. The women’s fear and confusion are replaced by a profound sense of awe and worship when they see Jesus alive again. Jesus’ words of comfort and reassurance, “Do not be afraid,” remind us that He is with us always, even in our most challenging and frightening moments. The passage also reveals the lengths to which the religious leaders went to deny the Resurrection. The chief priests’ decision to bribe the guards to lie about Jesus’ body being stolen demonstrates their desperation to maintain their power and authority, even if it meant denying the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection. The first reading from Acts today also highlights the theme of witnessing to the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection. Peter boldly proclaims the message of the Gospel, declaring that Jesus was raised from the dead by the power of God and that he and the other apostles are witnesses to this truth. This theme of witnessing to the truth is central to our Christian faith and is a call for all believers to share the good news of Jesus with others. At times, witnessing to the truth can be challenging, especially in a world that often rejects the message of the Gospel. However, we can draw inspiration from Peter and the other apostles, who were empowered by the Holy Spirit to boldly proclaim the truth of Jesus, even in the face of persecution and opposition.

It’s a stubborn point, in fact, that Christians profess the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. This story is so familiar to us that we can sometimes lose sight of how stunning it must have been for Jesus’ closest disciples to arrive at his burial place only to find an empty tomb. For, as the Gospel writer John points out, they did not yet understand the Scripture that he had to rise from the dead. Our Easter Gospel contains St. John’s magnificent account of the Resurrection. Bishop Robert Barron speaks to three key lessons that follow from the disquieting fact of the Resurrection. First, this world is not all there is. The Resurrection of Jesus from the dead shows as definitively as possible that God is up to something greater than we had imagined. We don’t have to live as though death were our master and as though nihilism was the only coherent point of view. We can, in fact, begin to see this world as a place of gestation toward something higher, more permanent, more splendid. Second, the tyrants know that their time is up. Remember that the cross was Rome’s way of asserting its authority. But when Jesus was raised from the dead through the power of the Holy Spirit, the first Christians knew that Caesar’s days were, in fact, numbered. The faculty lounge interpretation of the Resurrection as a subjective event or a mere symbol is exactly what the tyrants of the world want, for it poses no real threat to them. Third, the path of salvation has been opened to everyone. Jesus went all the way down, journeying into pain, despair, alienation, and even godforsakenness. He went as far as you can go away from the Father. Why? To reach all those who had wandered from God. Considering the Resurrection, the first Christians came to know that even as we run as fast as we can away from the Father, we are running into the arms of the Son. Jesus Christ invites each of us to new life. We begin by opening our hearts to him in the mystery of the Resurrection. Two thousand years later, there are many who, for whatever reasons, do not believe, they do not profess, and they do not yet recognize with the eyes of faith. But we, by virtue of our baptism, are called to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ, truly risen from the dead for the salvation of the world, to the world that still lives in darkness. Let us not domesticate these still-stunning lessons of the Resurrection. Rather, let us allow them to unnerve us, change us, and set us on fire.

For Christians, the Easter holiday is about recapturing the surprise, excitement, and strangeness that the Resurrection brought to Jesus’ first followers. Bishop Robert Barron writes that he has always been drawn to the tombs of famous people. When I was a student many years ago in Washington, D.C., I loved visiting the Kennedy brothers’ graves on that lovely hillside in front of the Custis-Lee Mansion. In Paris, I frequently toured Père Lachaise Cemetery, the resting place of, among many others, Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Abelard, and Jim Morrison. When on retreat at St. Meinrad Monastery in southern Indiana, I would often take a morning to visit the nearby Lincoln Boyhood Memorial, on the grounds of which is the simple grave of Nancy Hanks, Abraham Lincoln’s mother, who died in 1818. I always found it profoundly moving to see the resting place of this backwoods woman, who died uncelebrated at the age of 35, covered in pennies adorned with the image of her famous son. Cemeteries are places to ponder, muse, give thanks, perhaps smile ruefully, and ultimately, places of rest and finality. The last thing one would realistically expect at a grave is novelty and surprise. Then, there is the tomb featured in the story of Easter. We are told in the Bible that three women, friends and followers of Jesus, came to the tomb of their Master early on the Sunday morning following his crucifixion to anoint his body. Undoubtedly, they anticipated that, while performing this task, they would wistfully recall what their friend had said and done. Perhaps they would express their frustration at those who had brought him to this point, betraying, denying, and running from him in his hour of need. Certainly, they expected to weep in their grief. But when they arrived, they found, to their surprise, that the heavy stone had been rolled away from the tomb’s entrance. Had a grave robber been at work? Their astonishment only intensified when they spied inside the grave, not the body of Jesus, but a young man clothed in white, blithely announcing, “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him.” Unlike any of the other great religious founders, Jesus consistently spoke and acted in the very person of God. Declaring a man’s sins forgiven, referring to himself as greater than the Temple, claiming lordship over the Sabbath and authority over the Torah, insisting that his followers love him more than their mothers and fathers, more than their very lives, Jesus assumed a divine prerogative. And it was precisely this apparently blasphemous pretension that led so many of his contemporaries to oppose him. After his awful death on an instrument of torture, even his closest followers became convinced that he must have been delusional and misguided. The Resurrection of Jesus from the dead showed that this spiritual resistance was not in vain. When he appeared to his disciples, the New Testament tells us, the risen Lord typically did two things: He showed his wounds and spoke the word Shalom, peace. On the one hand, Christians should not forget the depth of human depravity, the sin that contributed to the death of the Son of God. We know that God’s love, his offer of Shalom, is greater than our possible sin. Christians understood this precisely because human beings killed God, and God returned in forgiving love. In achingly beautiful poetry, St. Paul expressed this amazing grace: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

When the Romans designed crucifixion as their means of capital punishment, they had more in mind than simply putting someone to death. They wanted to accomplish something else, too, namely, to make this death a spectacle to serve as the ultimate deterrent so that anyone seeing it would think twice about committing the offense for which the person was being crucified. Perhaps most cruel of all, crucifixion was designed to utterly humiliate the body of the person being executed. So, the person was stripped naked, his private parts unprotected, and when his body went into spasms, as surely it eventually would, his bowels would release, all in public view. Is there a humiliation worse than this? Fr. Rolheiser writes that there are, in his view, human sufferings that approximate or equal that. There are daily instances of violence in our world – domestic violence, sexual violence, torture, heartless bullying, and the like – which mirror the humiliation of the cross. As well you sometimes see this kind of humiliation of the body in death by cancer and other such debilitating diseases. The person here doesn’t just die; she dies in pain, her body humiliated, its dignity compromised, that immodesty exposed, as it was for Jesus when dying on the cross. Nothing, absolutely nothing, pushes us to a depth of heart and soul, as does humiliation. Drinking the cup of humiliation, accepting the cross, is, according to Jesus and according to what’s most honest in our own experience, what can bring us genuine glory, namely, depth of heart, depth of soul, and depth of understanding and compassion. Humiliation will make us deep, but it might not make us deep in the right way. It can also have the opposite effect. Like Jesus, we will all suffer humiliation in life; we will all drink the cup, and it will make us deep, but then we have a critical choice: Will this humiliation make us deep in compassion and understanding, or will it make us deep in anger and bitterness? That is, in fact, the ultimate moral choice we face in life – not just at the hour of death but countless times in our lives. Good Friday and what it asks of us confront us daily.

Fr. Ron Rolheiser in his book, “Our One Great Act of Fidelity,” writes that the Eucharist is the ultimate sacrament of reconciliation. It is the ancient water of cleansing, now turned into the new wine of reconciliation, that purifies us so that we can enter the house and celebrate. When John describes Jesus as taking off his outer garment, he means more than just the stripping off of some physical clothing, some outer sash that might have gotten in the way of his stooping down and washing someone’s feet. To let go of the pride that blocks all human beings from stooping down to wash the feet of someone different from oneself, Jesus had to strip off a lot of outer things – pride, moral judgments, superiority, ideology, and personal dignity –  so as to only wear his inner garment. What was his inner garment? It was his knowledge that he had come from God and was going back to God. Therefore, all things were possible for him, including his washing the feet of someone whom he already knew had betrayed him.

Psalm 69 is “A Cry of Anguish in Great Distress,” which speaks to what our Lord Jesus Christ bore in the sufferings described within the psalm uniquely. This accounts for the fact that, after Psalm 22, this is the psalm most quoted in the New Testament to show that it was fulfilled in Jesus Christ and to exhort us to find in its text, as in all Scripture, the consolation that helps to keep our hope alive. Today, our reflection verse from Psalm 69 speaks of communication with God. This communication is traditionally characterized as prayer. Why do you pray? What do we seek from God? Oblate Fr. Robert Michel asks: What exactly does it mean to pray affectively? His response might be summarized this way: “You must try to pray so that, in your prayer, you open yourself in such a way that sometime – perhaps not today, but sometime – you are able to hear God say to you: `I love you!’ These words, addressed to you by God, are the most important words you will ever hear because, before you hear them, nothing is ever completely right with you, but after you hear them, something will be right in your life at a very deep level.” Oblate Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that Fr. Michel’s words are simple, but they capture what we ultimately try to do when we “lift mind and heart to God” in prayer. In the end, prayer’s essence, mission statement, and deep raison d’etre are simply this: We need to open ourselves to God so that we are capable of hearing God say to us individually, “I love you!” Part of affective prayer is also that we, one- to-one, with affection, occasionally at least, say the same thing to God: “I love you!” In all long-term, affectionate relationships, the partners must occasionally prompt each other to hear expressions of affection and reassurance. It’s not good enough to tell a marriage partner or a friend just once, “I love you!”. It needs to be said regularly. The relationship of prayer is no different. Prayer, it is said, is not meant to change God but us. True. And nothing changes us as much for the good as to hear someone say that he or she loves us, especially if that someone is God.

Soren Kierkegard, in his spiritual writings, writes that Christ consistently used the expression “follower.” He never asked for admirers, worshippers, or adherents. No, he calls disciples. It is not adherents of a teaching but followers of a life Christ is looking for. Christ came into the world with the purpose of saving, not instructing it. At the same time, as is implied in his saving work, he came to be the pattern, to leave footprints for the person who would join him, who would become a follower. This is why Christ was born and lived and died in lowliness. There is absolutely nothing to admire in Jesus unless you want to admire poverty, misery, and contempt. What, then, is the difference between an admirer and a follower? A follower is or strives to be what he admires. An admirer, however, keeps themselves personally detached. They fail to see that what is admired involves a claim upon them, and thus, they fail to be or strive to be what they admire. To want to admire instead of follow Christ is not necessarily an invention by bad people. No, it is more an invention by those who keep themselves detached, who keep themselves at a safe distance. Admirers are related to the admired only through the excitement of the imagination. The difference between an admirer and a follower remains, no matter where you are. The admirer never makes any true sacrifices. They always play it safe. Though in words, phrases, and songs, they are inexhaustible about how highly they prize Christ; they renounce nothing, give up nothing, will not reconstruct their life, will not be what they admire, and will not let their life express what it is they supposedly admire. Not so for the follower. No, no. The follower aspires with all their strength, with all their will, to be what they admire.

Today, Monday of Holy Week, we are given a Gospel text, the Anointing at Bethany. The anointing of Jesus at Bethany is an event that is narrated in the accounts of the four evangelists, something which is relatively rare. The details differ slightly from evangelist to evangelist. Matthew and Mark have the woman who carries out the anointing anoint Jesus on the head, and Luke and John have her anoint his feet. It was customary for a woman on her wedding day to bind her hair, and for a married woman to loosen her hair in public was a sign of grave immodesty. Mary was oblivious to all around her except for Jesus. She took no thought for what others would think. In humility, she stooped to anoint Jesus’ feet and dry them with her hair. In this holy week, we can ask ourselves, how do we anoint the Lord’s feet and show him our love and gratitude? Her deed of love shows the extravagance of love, a love that we cannot outmatch. The Lord Jesus showed us the extravagance of his love by giving us the best he had by pouring out his own blood for our sake and by anointing us with his Holy Spirit. Joy is an infallible indication of God’s presence, just as the cross is an infallible indication of Christian discipleship. What a paradox! And Fr. Rolheiser writes that Jesus is the reason. We see, for example, in John’s Gospel account of Mary anointing Jesus’ feet at the banquet. All that lavishness, extravagance, and raw human affection is understandably unsettling for almost everyone in the room except for Jesus. He’s drinking it in, unapologetically, without dis-ease, without any guilt or neurosis: Leave her alone, he says, she has just anointed me for my impending death. In essence, Jesus is saying: When I come to die, I will be more ready because tonight, in receiving this lavish affection, I’m truly alive and hence more ready to die. In essence, this is the lesson for us: Don’t feel guilty about enjoying life’s pleasures. The best way to thank a gift-giver is to enjoy the gift thoroughly. Genuine enjoyment, as Jesus taught and embodied, is integrally tied to renunciation and self-sacrifice. And so, it’s only when we can give our lives away in self-renunciation that we can thoroughly enjoy the pleasures of this life, just as it is only when we can genuinely enjoy the legitimate pleasures of this life that we can give our lives away in self-sacrifice.