Author: DVO

Gail Goleas wonder’s if you feel the same way as she does about products advertised with a lifetime guarantee. She asks, “Does that guarantee refer to the product’s lifetime or the company selling it? Is it guaranteed as long as I live? As nice as it would be for my purchases to be unconditionally guaranteed, I won’t count on it. When it comes to our life, there are even fewer assurances. Jesus reminds us of that in today’s gospel. He does not promise us freedom from pain. He doesn’t gloss over the fact that we will all face hardships. It is clear that suffering will be ours to endure. That is not comforting, and I would rather not dwell on it. But I must. When troubles do come, as we know they will (and pray they won’t), Jesus urges us to be courageous.” How do we get so confused today that we fail to understand what he has conquered? So many of us strive to find joy and happiness in conquering the world so we might gain its riches and thereby find our joy and happiness. C.S. Lewis notes in “Surprised by Joy” that true joy is the ache for something beyond this world, like those little moments in life when the light falls in just a certain way on a summer evening that it stirs within you a deep longing that’s hard to define. Earthly pursuits cannot fill the void. The quest for true joy and happiness is connecting to something, not of this world, and that would be the movement of the Holy Spirit in your life. The spirit will use this restlessness to awaken a spiritual hunger within you, this ache for something beyond this world. It will push you deeper and deeper into your relationship with God. Pursue Him. Allow that longing for Him to become the hottest fire in your heart; that is where true joy and happiness are found.

Our faith should correspond to God’s faithfulness and veracity. Our obedience should also correspond to His authority. Our hope is to possess God as He possesses us. The words of a father are always precious since we must believe someone who speaks out of love. A father’s love is nothing when compared with the love of God. God became human in the form of Jesus, who also spoke and left us a testament: “I am with you always, until the end of the age.” Whoever directs their lives toward unity has understood the heart of God. In “Essential Writings,” Chiara Lubich says we are all brothers and sisters in this world, yet we pass by each other as if we were strangers. And this happens even among baptized Christians. The Communion of Saints, the Mystical Body, exists. But this Body is like a network of darkened tunnels. The power to illuminate them exists; in many individuals, there is a life of grace, but Jesus did not want only this when he turned to the Father, calling upon him. He wanted heaven on earth: the unity of all with God and with one another; the network of tunnels to be illuminated; the presence of Jesus to be in every relationship with others, as well as in the soul of each. This is his final testament, the most precious desire of God, who gave his life for us.

Louis Klopsch, a German immigrant writer, published the first modern red-letter edition of the New Testament in 1899, with the first modern New Testament bible published in 1901. This all came about from his reading of Luke’s Gospel, becoming captivated by the words, “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which I shed for you.” This image of the blood and its red color led him to publish the red-letter New Testament. What is the purpose of the red letters, you may ask? Red lettering has been used since antiquity to indicate importance. For instance, in the Roman Republic, important days were displayed in red on a calendar. In medieval manuscripts, initial capitals and highlighted words were written in red ink to indicate their importance. In earlier times, the Church would note festivals or saint’s days in red letters. The use came into broader practice when the first Book of Common Prayer included a calendar with holy days marked in red ink. I found it interesting how the words of the Lord impact people. Again, we can hear Jesus speaking to the disciples before his transfiguration to ensure their “joy may be complete.” That is the power of God’s Word, the desire for all of us to be joyful and complete.  

In her writing, “The Listening God,” Sr. Miriam Pollard says that praying for the world is like slipping into its bloodstream and knowing that the blood is Christ’s. “It’s letting go and believing that these moments of presence to its hurts and disabilities, to its beauty and accomplishments, are healing moments. They give life because he does, and his prayer is what I’m bringing into bruised and infected places. Prayer for the world means not letting your vision be cramped by what you determine is there to be seen. Prayer for the world means hope. We must let go of our refusal to believe in what we cannot see. Prayer is an act of confidence, a cutting free from our anger at a world that does not re-style itself to our satisfaction. This great thing I can do; this is my privilege and joy. I lean into the prayer of Christ, into his offering. I run into it after the fashion of young children into the sea. It carries me. It carries the world.” Fr. Billy Swan notes that Jesus has gone before us on this path of intercessory prayer by offering himself as priest, victim, and sacrifice. Sharing His priesthood means opening up our personal lives, social lives, and indeed the life of the world to the transforming power of his divine love. We offer our prayers for humanity, with Jesus, to the Father, but we receive back from God the purifying and renewing power of the Spirit that restores a sick world to health.

This short passage, which brings the Gospel of St Matthew to a close, is of great importance. Seeing the risen Christ, the disciples adore him, worshipping him as God. This shows that, at last, they are fully conscious of what, from much earlier on, they felt in their heart and confessed by their words that their Master is the Messiah, the Son of God. The Master addresses them with the majesty proper to God: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” omnipotence, an attribute belonging exclusively to God, belongs to him: he is confirming the faith of his worshippers, and he is also telling them that the authority which he is going to give them to equip them to carry out their mission to the whole world, derives from his own divine authority. On hearing him speak these words, we should bear in mind that the authority of the Church, given for the salvation of humankind, comes directly from Jesus Christ and that this authority, in the sphere of faith and morals, is above any other authority on earth. Christ also passes on to the apostles and their successors the power to baptize, that is, to receive people into the Church, thereby opening the way to personal salvation for them. The mission which the Church is definitively given here at the end of St Matthew’s Gospel is one of continuing the work of Christ, teaching men and women the truths concerning God and the duty incumbent on them to identify with these truths, to make them their own by having constant recourse to the grace of the sacraments. When Holy Scripture says that God is with someone, that person will be successful in everything they undertake. Therefore, the Church, helped in this way by the presence of its divine Founder, can be confident of never failing to fulfill its mission down the centuries until the end of time.

The Lord knows us so well. In the midst of his farewell address to the apostles, he tells them that there is so much more for them to understand and discover. He would tell them, but he realizes they cannot bear his words. Have you ever been put in a situation that required you to carry something you thought was impossible to take? I remember being told that my mother had to go into the hospital for surgery when I was a young boy. We weren’t told what it was for, but later that evening, my Dad said we needed to see our mother the next day as there had been some complications in the surgery, so she couldn’t see us right now (my sister later told me it was because she almost bled to death). I was scared beyond anything. I had a nightmare that evening where I imagined going into the hospital and seeing people crying because the doctor just gave them some bad news. I couldn’t bear it. When our father asked us to come inside once we arrived at the hospital, I told him I couldn’t and ran back to the car. I believed that if I didn’t go in, I wouldn’t see the doctor come out and give us bad news so that she would be all right. Crazy kid thinking. We are often asked to bear hardships in life. The remarkable beauty of our faith is that the Lord has provided us with the Advocate who walks with us side-by-side as we go through those things we cannot bear. From what the Lord taught us, I know that “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.” Having gone through several hardships in life, I can positively say to you that it’s our belief in Him we channel in these challenging times, His strength that helps us endure all things, and the hope of His promises that gets us through it all. Why? Because His love never fails!

In his remarkable book, “The Inner Voice of Love,” Henri Nouwen shares these words: “The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to try to understand them, better to let them enter into your silence than to talk about them. The choice you face constantly is whether you are taking your hurts to your head or to your heart. In your head you analyze them, find their causes and consequences, and coin words to speak and write about them.  But no final healing is likely to come from that source. You need to let your wounds go down into your heart. Then you can live them through and discover that they will not destroy you. Your heart is greater than your wounds.” We need to embrace our wounded humanity and not act out. To grieve our human limitations and endure hunger, emptiness, disappointment, and humiliation without looking for a quick fix or for a fix at all is to not try to fill our emptiness too quickly without sufficient waiting. We won’t ever make peace with our wounds without sufficient grieving.

As our faults become more manifest in a relationship, others’ affection for us often does lessen. So, Fr. Rolheiser says, we do what comes naturally; we hide our faults and failures and try to reveal our strengths and achievements instead. This then carries over into our prayer, church, and even our most intimate relations with God. The same is true in our church lives: Invariably, when we most need God and the support of the community of faith, we stay away from church and community. This is manifest everywhere, sadly so. I know so many people, especially young people, who stop going to church because something is wrong in their lives. They stop going to church precisely until such a time when all on their own, they can somehow rectify the problem, and then they go back to church and present their “unsullied” selves, now seemingly more at rights with holiness and goodness. Generally, this expresses itself this way: “Given how I’m living, I would be a hypocrite if I went to church! I’m too honest and humble to go to church right now.” That may sound noble and humble, but it betrays a false understanding of God and ultimately does us no favors. For we can easily, if we are open to hearing, God say to us, “You must not know me very well if you think that a detailed account of your faults would in any way lessen the tenderness I feel towards you.” In fact, we might learn a lesson from Adam and Eve on this score. After they sinned, they too did what comes naturally; they hid and tried to camouflage their shame by their own efforts at clothing themselves. But their shame remained until God found them and gave them real clothing with which to cover their guilt. We do not know God very well when we fear coming into God’s presence, replete with all that is within us, weaknesses and strengths. Nothing we do can ever lessen God’s tenderness toward us.

We often too easily read this verse simplistically, romantically, and in a one-sided, over-confident manner. What does it mean to obey Jesus’ commandment to love? Fr. Rolheiser writes that this command to love one another, as Jesus has shown us his love contains the most important challenge of the gospel and, like the deepest part of the gospel to which it is linked, the crucifixion, is very difficult to imitate. Why? It’s easy to consider ourselves as loving if we only look at one side of things, namely, how we relate to those people who are loving, warm, respectful, and gracious towards us. If we rate ourselves on how we feel about ourselves in our best moments among like-minded friends, we can easily conclude that we are loving persons and measure up to Jesus’ command to love as he did. That command, love and forgive your enemies, more than any creedal formula or other moral issues, is the litmus test for Christian discipleship. We can ardently believe in and defend every item in the creed and fight passionately for justice in all its dimensions. Still, the real test of whether or not we are followers of Jesus is the capacity or non-capacity to forgive an enemy, to remain warm and loving towards someone who is not warm and loving to us. There’s a sobering challenge in an old Stevie Nicks song, “Gold Dust Woman,” when she suggests that it’s good that, at a point in life, someone “shatters our illusion of love” because far too often, blind to its own true intentions, our love is manipulative and self-serving. Too often, the song points out, we are lousy lovers who unconsciously pick our prey. What shatters our illusion of love is the presence of people who hate us in our lives. They’re the test. Here, we have to measure up: If we can love them, we’re real lovers; if we can’t, we’re still under a self-serving illusion.

Our Gospel verse brings forth a warning of hatred in the world for believers. Jesus told the apostles, “Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Fr. Rolheiser says, “We know this works for love, but does it also work for hatred? Can someone’s hatred follow us, even into eternity? That is not an easy question. Leo Tolstoy once said: “There is only one way to put an end to evil, and that is to do good for evil.” We see that in Jesus. Some hated him, and he died like that. However, that hatred lost its power over him because he refused to respond in kind. Rather, he returned love for hatred, understanding for misunderstanding, blessing for curse, graciousness for resentment, fidelity for rejection, and forgiveness for murder.” The choice is ours. Another person’s hatred holds us, but only if we meet it on its terms, hatred for hatred. We cannot make someone stop hating us, but we can refuse to hate them, and, at that moment, hatred loses its power to bind and punish us. Granted, this isn’t easy, certainly not emotionally. Hatred tends to have a sick, devilish grip on us, paralyzing in us the very strength we need to let it go. In that case, there’s still another salvific thing remaining. God can do things we cannot do for ourselves. Remember, we “can do all things in God who strengthens” us.