Author: DVO

We all conveniently dismiss verses such as those taken from the Acts of the Apostles today. Picture St. Paul speaking to us through the millennium, calling us as Jesus’ apostles, to recognize that the Word made flesh is “the same yesterday and today and forever.” God’s word endures for all time, as does our obligation to heed his teaching to be the light and love to a world lost in the darkness of separation from God. Bishop Barron reflects on the enduring nature of God by saying, “If you had asked an aristocrat in second-century Italy how long the Roman Empire would last, he probably would have said, ‘forever.’ If you had told an English gentleman in 1900 that Britain would be a second-rate power by the end of the 20th century, he wouldn’t have believed you. Jesus unveils the true nature of this passing world so that we might not cling to it as our ultimate good. Just when we are tempted to find our security in nature, governments, cultural institutions, or the health of our own bodies, these words today from St. Paul should shake us out of our complacency and force us to wake up. Jesus, who entered into this passing world of ours but bore in his person the eternal power of God, wants us not to panic when the world and everything in it are shaken. For if we are grounded in Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, we are bonded to the eternal destiny that awaits all who are in Him.

Dr. Michael Downey, the author of many books on the spiritual nature of life, asked this question: “How do we speak of God inside a culture that’s pathologically distracted, distrusts religious language and church institutions, and yet carries its own moral energy and virtue?” Downey suggests we see Christ as the kenosis of God, the divine self-abandonment; God emptying himself in the incarnation of his Son. Fr. Ron Rolheiser explains that to self-empty in the way Jesus is described above means being present without demanding that your presence be recognized and its importance acknowledged; it means giving without demanding that your generosity be reciprocated; it means being invitational rather than threatening, healthily solicitous rather than nagging or coercive; it means being vulnerable and helpless, unable to protect yourself against the pain of being taken for granted or rejected.” This is not an easy thing at all, but that is why we have lifted our praise to Jesus for two thousand years because he showed us how to do this in his life on earth. And that’s our invitation to begin learning how to empty ourselves of “us” and to fill ourselves with more of “Him.”

Fr. Ron Rolheiser says how we conceive God, colors for good or bad, and everything within our religious practice. And above all else, Jesus revealed this about God: God is good. That truth must ground everything else: our churches, theologies, spiritualities, liturgies, and understanding of everyone else. Today’s Responsorial Psalm declares, “Forever I will sing the goodness of the Lord.” T. E. Bird notes that the psalm begins by stating that God’s mercy and truth cannot fail; his promise to the House of David can never become void. Who can compare with God, all-powerful in heaven and on earth, kind, just, and faithful to his people and their king? Then the psalmist recalls the promise made to David whereby an everlasting covenant was established and the throne secured. Even if Israel should prove faithless and have to be punished, the promise to David’s House will never be annulled. So, we can joyfully proclaim, “Forever I will sing the goodness of the Lord.”

Fr. John Meoska writes about searching for family members through what he called “the marvel of the internet” and located an elderly second cousin I had never met. The cousin and his wife lived in Colorado, so he made plans to meet them. During his visit, the cousin asked, “Are you doing the same thing I am?” “Yes,” Fr. Meoska replied, for he knew exactly what he was asking. We were both looking for family resemblances in each other’s faces, gestures, and manners of speech. “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father,” Jesus tells Philip in the Gospel today. Jesus claims more than a cursory or superficial resemblance to our Father. Jesus is “one in being” with the Father, and so is the perfect reflection of the Father, the one Word spoken by the Father. Jesus’ discourse reveals that certain family traits, ways of thinking, acting, and speaking, help identify us as God’s people and his brothers and sisters. We recognize and follow Jesus as “the way, truth, and life.” By faith, we do the works that Jesus did, and even greater works than his because he is gone to the Father. Paul reminds us that, though we are born out of time as he was, as children of our Heavenly Father, we are commissioned to proclaim the Good News of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection through our words and, most importantly, how we live our lives.

Some of us were brought into the Christian community as newborn children through baptism. That childhood faith planted a seed that grows into the mature Christian through the accompaniment and teaching of other mature Christians who came before us. While we do not precisely know who first began to describe the disciples as “Christians,” the fact that they were given a name shows that everyone recognized them as an identifiable group. St Athanasius said: “Although the holy apostles were our teachers and have given us the Gospel of the Savior, it is not from them that we have taken our name. We are Christians through Christ, and it is for him that we are called in this way.” What differentiates Christians from every other tribal definition humans carry is our daily choice to place the will of God and the grace of Jesus before our own selfish and self-centered desires. We can often fall into complacency around the word Christian and neglect its deeper intention to bring about genuine change. To be Christian is more than membership in a church. Our obligation in carrying that title is to connect all aspects of our life to the very essence and purpose of what Jesus taught. Faith is not a thing to be grasped but a life to be lived.

We are in the part of readings from the Acts of the Apostles where we witness a leadership transition from Peter to Paul. This leadership transition mirrors the transition from a Jewish church to a Jewish-Gentile church. Transitions in our lives can be challenging for us, as they were for the two apostles. Our ability to move effectively through these transitions is often a result of our inability to remain open to God’s direction in our lives. One of the transitions we face in our faith lives is moving from our childhood years of being a “babe” in our understanding of what God has given us to become a mature person of faith. That maturity is generally related to our spiritual growth. Fr. Ron Rolheiser says our growth is often hindered by three main things: narcissism, pragmatism, and unbridled restlessness. Fr. Rolheiser defines narcissism as excessive self-preoccupation; pragmatism as excessive focus on work, achievement, and the practical concerns for life; and restlessness as referring to an excessive greed for experience, an over-eating, not in terms of food but in terms of trying to drink in too much of life. One of the main aspects that hinder our growth is not seeking out the desires of our hearts, which can only be filled through God. We must listen to His voice, not the world’s, just as Peter did.     

The parable of the Good Shepherd in today’s Gospel from John brings into view the power of the voices we listen to in our lives as it presents the reality that Christianity is not a set of ideas; it’s not a philosophy or an ideology; it’s a relationship with someone who has a voice. If we go back to the very beginning of our story to the Garden of Eden, the entirety of the temptation story is one of voices. Eve first heard her doubts and anxieties and then listened to the serpent’s voice, which kept amplifying those feelings. Adam listened to the voice of his own discontent when Eve had risked the forbidden and then listened to her voice, inviting him to join her. What happened in the Garden of Eden still happens today. We listen to the voice of our doubts, fears, and discontent, and the Evil One amplifies that voice and adds his voice of lies and deception. We know that the Evil One tempted Jesus in the desert. He sought to leverage the weakness of Jesus – food for a hungry body, a test to make God prove Himself, and finally, a shortcut to get what He was here to accomplish on earth. But Jesus did not listen to the voice inside Him crying out for the easy path. He did not hear or heed the voice of desire. Instead, Jesus was listening to another voice, the voice of the Father. Sin speaks the voice of the moment, the voice of desire, the voice of want. The Spirit speaks the voice of truth, faith, and righteousness. Jesus tells us whom we should listen to by listening to the voice of the Spirit, who speaks to us through Sacred Scripture. That is what makes us strong. What enables us to resist temptation is not that we are better than others but a matter of whose voice we choose to listen to. Let us listen to the voice of Jesus, who will lead us to a renewed and transformational life with God.

Christianity calls the human creature to be something it desires at its deepest levels: love of oneself and others. But this effort appears throughout human history to be the most challenging to practice carrying out because of our inability to be obedient to that call, that desire. We “try” to obtain that virtue through unvirtuous behaviors. The one human (and divine) being who taught and showed us how to achieve our deepest desire was Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ. Jesus was the consummate example of being an example of love to the core of what we are created to be. As the Son of God, he could have certainly been the most dominant leader the world had ever seen by wielding his divine power to bring us all in line with the ways of God. But he chose to wield his power and authority through forgiving and healing, always appealing to our free will and never forcing himself on anyone. That defines being a servant leader, and this, in my experience, is the hardest saying we have difficulty dealing with. And because we have difficulty with this teaching and therefore fail to provide others with a model of this kind of “lived love,” many baptized Christians have turned to what the world models as the “way to live” and turn their back on anything related to what they believe is a failed way to live life. The most earth-shaking thing I think any faithful follower of Jesus can hear from people is, “God has no place in my life. He is not relevant.” When the author of life is no longer relevant, our response should be to double down on being his light and love because light dispels the darkness of this thought process, and seeing love lived out concurs all. People will come to love’s light when they see its impact on how we live our lives as his disciples, obedient to love’s calling of fostering a servant’s heart.

Christianity is the earthiest of all religions. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that Christianity doesn’t call you out of the physical, out of the body, or out of the world. Instead, Christ enters the physical, becomes one with it, blesses it, redeems it, and tells us there is no reason to escape it. Something in that statement goes against the grain. Christ’s relationship to the physical, his language of eating him, was perceived as cannibalism that literally scandalized his contemporaries. It is still hard for us to accept today. But it’s also a wonderful part of Christianity. In the Eucharist, our skin gets touched. Given all our tensions, we need that touch, frequently, daily even. The late essayist and novelist Andre Dubus once wrote an excellent little apologia about why he went to Eucharist regularly, “This morning I received the sacrament I still believe in. The priest elevated the host, then the chalice, and spoke the words of the ritual, and the bread became flesh, the wine became blood, and minutes later, I placed on my tongue the taste of forgiveness and love that affirmed, perhaps celebrated, my being alive, my being mortal. This has nothing to do with immortality, with eternity. Although I believe in that life, I love the earth too much to contemplate life apart from it. No, this has to do with mortality and the touch of flesh, and my belief in the sacrament of the Eucharist is simple: without touch, God is a monologue, an idea, a philosophy; he must touch and be touched, the tongue on flesh, and that touch is the result of the monologues, the idea, the philosophies which led to faith; but in the instant of the touch there is no place for thinking, for talking, the silent touch affirms all that and goes deeper: it affirms the mysteries of love and mortality.” Skin heals when touched. It’s why Jesus gave us the Eucharist.

What is the provenance of this distinctively Catholic conviction that Jesus is “really, truly, and substantially present” under the Eucharistic signs of bread and wine? Bishop Robert Barron would suggest that we begin with the breathtaking discourse of the Lord, found in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John. Astounded by the miraculous multiplication of the loaves and fishes, the crowds come to Jesus, and he tells them not to search for perishable bread but rather for the bread that “endures to eternal life.”  He then specifies, “I am the living bread come down from heaven…the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” The central claim of the New Testament is that Jesus is not simply one teacher among many, one more in a long line of prophets, but rather “the word made flesh,” the incarnation of the divine word which made and sustains the world. At the consecration at every Mass, the priest takes bread and wine and pronounces over them, not his own words, but Christ’s. He acts not in his own person but in persona Christi, and hence he affects the transformation that Catholics call “transubstantiation,” the changing of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. And this is why, in the presence of those transformed elements, the only proper action is to fall down in worship.