Author: DVO

As we approach Palm Sunday, Saint Peter Damian’s beautiful prayer foreshadows the hope for a nation of believers in what our savior will endure for us. “When your soul goes forth from your body, may the radiant company of angles come to meet you, and may your judge, the senate of the apostles, release you; may Christ, who suffered for you, rescue you from punishment; may Christ who was crucified for your sake, free you from excruciating pain; may Christ, who humbled himself to die for you, free you from death; may Christ, the Son of the living God, set you in the evergreen loveliness of his paradise, and may he, the true Shepherd, recognize you as one of his flock, may he free you from all your sins and assign you a place at his right hand in the company of his elect. May you see your Redeemer face to face, and standing in his presence forever, may you behold with blessed eyes Truth revealed in all its fullness. And so, having taken your place in the ranks of the saints, may you enjoy the sweetness of divine contemplation forever and ever. Amen.”

Looking at the world today, it is not easy to believe that everywhere Christ is born again, that God looks down on the wreckage and misery, the fiasco if you like, that we have made of the world, and, seeing us in the midst of it says, “This is my well-beloved Son!” Caryll Houselander writes that this is so, and however difficult or insignificant our life may seem, it is precious to God as Christ is precious to God. On each one in whom Christ lives, God’s infinite love is concentrated at every moment. If this were realized, there could be no one who could not fulfill the first condition of rest, which is trust. If it were not for Christ in us, we would be unable to trust. We are too weak and could not believe in God’s goodness if we had only ourselves to believe in; neither could we love one another if we had only ourselves to worship. We can trust God with Christ’s trust in the Father; that is the trust which is our rest. Our rest in a world that is full of unrest is Christ’s trust in his Father; our peace in a world without peace is our surrender, complete as the surrender of the sleeping child to its mother, of the Christ in us, to God who is both Father and Mother. 

Jesus was not concerned with the controversy many of his pronouncements created. Today was one of the most striking statements made to his Jewish audience, “Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM.” In our catechesis, we learn early in our faith lives this wording of “I AM” was how God identified himself to Moses in the story of the burning bush, “If the Israelites ask me, ‘what is his name?’ what am I to tell them?” “God replied, ‘I am who I am.'” Jesus was making a direct statement of his relationship with the Father. Bishop Barron asks, “What does that mean when God defines himself this way? God is saying, in essence, that he cannot be defined, described, or delimited. God is not a being but rather the sheer act of to-be itself. The sheer act of being itself cannot be avoided, and it cannot be controlled. It can only be surrendered to in faith.” This was a revelatory moment and one that set the Lord on his journey to the cross.  

To “remain in my word” is to make our home in the heart of Christ. Fr. Kevin O’Brien writes that in that heart, we see ourselves as we truly are; beautifully gifted, flawed, and complicated creatures, called to serve as disciples amid an equally beautiful and broken world. We long for truth; we love it and endlessly search for it because it is the goal of our being. And one day, we will possess it completely. We want to live the spiritual life intensely and deeply, the interior life, the beginning of eternal life, and we wander blindly along this path of good, which we find most lovely, and upon which we sow our efforts, our struggles, and our desires. The gratuitous search for beauty, the passionate concern for justice, and the love of truth are so many paths that lead to God. The truth sets us free from all that gets in the way of our loving and being loved. While this interior work is not an easy grace, the freedom it leads to is transformative.

Fr. Herbert McCabe in God, Christ, and Us writes that it is hard to think of God but easy to think of the gods. If God were one of the gods, a powerful, the most powerful, inhabitant of the universe, then if we did what he decided we should indeed not be doing what we decided. We should be his puppets, manipulated from outside by another being. But God is not an inhabitant of the universe. He is not another being alongside us and competing with us. God the Creator is the author of the entire universe and of all that is in it. He is so far outside it that he is in every bit of it while not himself being a bit of it. He is not one of the beings. He is within every being keeping it in being. He is within you making you to be you. What you do freely you do from the depth within you that is yourself. But you also do it from the even greater depth within you that is God making you to be yourself. There are things in our universe that are not free but are always moved by other things. And there are things like ourselves that are sometimes not determined by other creatures but are free. But God is the author of them all.

In today’s reading from John’s Gospel, Jesus tells the woman caught in adultery, “go and sin no more.” The connection between Jesus and the woman is not the consequence of condemnation but rather the fruit of forgiveness offered and accepted. Nothing is as important as forgiveness. It is the key to happiness and the most crucial spiritual imperative in our lives. The ability to forgive is more contingent upon grace than upon willpower. To err is human, but to forgive is divine. This little slogan contains a deeper truth than is immediately evident. What makes forgiveness so difficult, existentially impossible at times, is not primarily that our egos are bruised and wounded. Instead, the real difficulty is that a wound to the soul works the same as a wound to the body; it strips us of our strength.

People wonder what is meant by having a “relationship” with Jesus. We see his example of that so clearly in the story of Lazarus. His relationship with Lazarus and his two sisters, Mary and Martha, wasn’t a relationship of acquaintance but of closeness, caring, commitment, and love. We might define that today as “close friends.” Studies indicate that we are very fortunate to have a handful of close friends in our lifetime. That’s because of the nature of commitment to each other that this human interaction requires the unconditional love that is needed and lived out in the relationship. This is what Jesus shows us in his behavior today. He cared so much for Lazarus and his sisters that for only the second time, recorded in scripture, “he wept.” Henri Nouwen speaks to the wonder of friendship: “Friendship is one of the greatest gifts a human being can receive. It is a bond beyond common goals, interests, or histories. Friendship is being with the other in joy and sorrow, even when we cannot increase the joy or decrease the sorrow. It is a unity of souls that gives nobility and sincerity to love. Friendship makes all of life shine brightly. Blessed are those who lay down their lives for their friends.”

The words from Hebrews allow us, as it were, to look into the unfathomable depths of this self-abasement of the Word incarnate, his humiliation of himself for the love of all humankind, even to death on the cross. The source and primary cause of our sanctification is the will of God, who so loved the world as to give us his only Son. The meritorious cause of our sanctification is the voluntary oblation of Jesus Christ, who sacrificed for us upon the cross. Saint Pope John Paul II speaks to the mystery of Christ’s willingness to sacrifice for us. “Why this obedience, this self-abasement, this suffering? The Creed gives us the answer: ‘for us men and for our salvation’ Jesus came down from heaven so as to give humankind full entitlement to ascend to heaven, and by becoming a son in the Son, to regain the dignity he lost through sin. Let us welcome Him. Let us say to him, ‘Here I am, Lord; I have come to do your will.'”

In our Gospel today, Jesus declares his relationship with his Father: “I did not come on my own, but the one who sent me, whom you do not know, is true. I know him because I am from him, and he sent me.” Our Lenten liturgy will not allow us to miss what lies ahead as we will follow Jesus into that moment which will be the culmination of his life and the transformation of ours. The decisive “hour” for humanity is arriving, a moment that will forever separate grace from the law, love from fear, and hope from anxiety. Fr. Paul Philibert says that heaven will embrace the earth when that hour comes, and the Son of God will pour his redeeming blood over all humanity. His “hour” will also be our “hour” since he has invited us to follow him and to share in the sacrifice he offers for our salvation.

The first who heard Jesus speak were astonished by the authority of his speech. That wasn’t simply because he spoke with conviction and enthusiasm; it was because he refused to play the game that every other rabbi played, tracing his authority finally back to Moses. He went, as it were, over the head of Moses, as he did at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount when he said, “You’ve heard it said…but I say.” Jesus tells the religious authorities today, “If you had believed Moses, you would have believed me because he wrote about me.” His listeners knew they were dealing with something qualitatively different than anything else in their religious tradition or experience. They were dealing with a prophet greater than Moses. Bishop Robert Barron writes that Jesus had to be more than a mere prophet. Why? “Because we all have been wounded, indeed our entire world compromised, by a battle that took place at a more fundamental level of existence. The result is the devastation of sin, which we know all too well. Who alone could possibly take it on? A merely human figure? No. What is required is the power and authority of the Creator himself, intent on remaking and saving his world, binding up its wounds and setting it right.”