Author: DVO

Melanie Rigney asks the question, “Does it sometimes seem that God loves someone else more than he loves you? Maybe it’s a friend whose life is golden: great health, a circle of wonderful family and friends, a workplace, or a volunteer ministry that suits them perfectly. Meanwhile, you seem to face a new challenge, large or small, every day. Where’s the justice in that? Jesus tells Peter in response to his question in today’s gospel reading of his relationship with John, “What concern is it of yours? You follow me,” his friendship with others isn’t our business, beyond the gift we may have of introducing Christ to those who don’t know him. All we need to focus on is listening to his call and following where he leads. There’s an enthusiasm that comes from the wetness of fertility that can make the soul swell with feelings of creativity, warmth, and immortality. God is in that. But there is also a bareness that comes from a deeper place, a heat that threatens to dry out the very marrow of the soul, a dryness that shrinks all swelling, especially pride, and leaves us vulnerable and mortal by bringing the soul to kindling temperature. God is in that dryness no less than in the wetness of fertility because, in that painful longing, we feel the eros of God and the motivation of Christ.

St. Catherine of Siena asks, “How do we show love to God who is in need of nothing?” We demonstrate that we love him through our neighbors. Jesus says three times to Peter, “Do you love me?” When Peter answered that Jesus knew very well that he loved him, Jesus then said, “If you love me, feed my little sheep.” It is as if Jesus was saying, “Here is how I will know whether you love me: if, since you cannot be of any service to me, you come to the aid of your neighbors, nurturing them and giving them your best efforts in true holy teaching.” To be affirmed is a human need. We are made to get and give love. Today’s interaction between Jesus and Peter connects to many people who long for that second chance. One of the lessons on love is hidden in the exchange between Jesus and Peter. Jesus assures us that God’s love is always both unmerited and unconditional. Nothing we do can make God love us, just as nothing can stop God from loving us. God loves just as God does everything else – perfectly.

Today we read the classic text of the ecumenical movement, which seeks full unity among all Christians. The Catholic Church officially joined this movement in 1964. Fr. Rolheiser writes that one of the most ancient problems in philosophy is the question of ‘the one and the many,’ whether reality is ultimately a unity or a plurality, and how these interrelate. We might ask the same question regarding the plurality of religious faiths, churches, and forms of worship in our world. Is there some inherent oneness there, or is it all plurality without anything binding us together in some kind of community that transcends our differences? All of us who have a sincere belief share a common faith because we ultimately share a common God. Moreover, since we share a common God, we also share a common problem; namely, we struggle equally in trying to conceptualize this non-conceptualizable God. The first dogma about God in all valid religions is that God is holy and ineffable, meaning that God can never be circumscribed and grasped in a concept. Avery Dulles taught that the way forward for Christian ecumenism and interreligious dialogue is not the way of conversion – trying to get others to convert to our particular church. The way forward (in his words) is the way of “progressive gradualism,” namely, of each of us being ever more faithful to God within our tradition so that as each of us grows closer to God (and, for Christians, to Christ), we will grow closer to each other and all people of sincere faith. The unity we seek lies not in one church or faith community, eventually converting all others to join it, but in every one of sincere faith becoming progressively more faithful to God so that the unity we desire can take place sometime in the future, contingent on our own deeper fidelity inside our own faith tradition. None of us is living out the full truth of our faith traditions. Therefore, The path forward lies in a deeper personal conversion within our own faith traditions that will lead to a more empathic relationship with other faith traditions.

Today, we continue in John’s Gospel with Jesus’ Prayer to the Father. He speaks powerfully to the nature of truth. He has sought to concentrate the faithful in the truth and nature of God. Fr. Rolheiser writes that we have lost any sense of what truth is. Our facile denial of whatever truths we judge as inconvenient are labeled as “fake news,” “alternate facts,” or phantom conspiracies. Social media, for all the good it has brought, has also created a platform for anyone to make up their own truth and then work at eroding the truths that bind us together and anchor our sanity. We now live in a world where two plus two often no longer equals four. That plays on our very sanity and has created a certain social insanity. The truths which anchor our everyday life are becoming unmoored. What frightens and unsettles me more than the threat of the Covid virus, the growing inequality between the rich and the poor, the dangers of climate change, and even the bitter hatred that now separates us from each other is our separation from truth. One of the central lessons in the gospels is this: lying is the most dangerous of all sins. And this doesn’t just play out regarding our relationship with God and the Holy Spirit. When we lie, we’re not only playing fast and loose with God, we’re also playing fast and loose with our own sanity. Our sanity is contingent on what classical theology terms the “Oneness” of God. What this means in lay terms is that God is consistent. There are no contradictions inside of God; because of that, reality can also be trusted to be consistent. Our sanity depends on that trust. For instance, should we ever arrive at a day where two plus two no longer equals four, then the very underpinnings of our sanity will be gone; we’ll literally be unmoored. Our personal sanity and our social sanity depend upon the truth, upon us acknowledging the truth, upon us telling the truth, and upon two plus two forever equaling four.

Home. In both of our readings today, we have the image of home placed before us. In John’s Gospel reading, Christ is praying before his disciples as he knows the hour has arrived when he will be arrested and begin his passion journey leading to his return to the Father in heaven. In our verse from the Acts of the Apostles, St. Paul is in Ephesus and knows that his journey on earth is also coming to a close, yet he hopes “I may finish my course.” These are stories of mission that highlight the transitory nature of our earthly home. Like St. Paul, we are fulfilling a mission of one sort or another, either for the transitory things of the world or in the struggle to reach our eternal home. I was recently reading an article penned by Kathryn Butler, a critical care surgeon and homeschool mom who was speaking about our image of home. “Home is a word we brandish casually, its colors weathered, its edges frayed from careless use. Christ offers us, at long last, the promise of an eternal home, eternal peace, and eternal belonging for which we all thirst.” St. Paul said, “For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent, we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling.” This earthly sojourn is temporary. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ has promised all believers that one day, just as the father embraced the prodigal son who returned home, our Heavenly Father will rush to us with His arms wide open and welcome us to our eternal home where all things will be new.

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.