Daily Virtue

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.”

The term “eternal” in “eternal life” refers not so much to the length of life as to its fullness. To enter eternal life is to become fully alive with God forever, to experience untold joy, serenity, and peace in an eternal embrace with Him forever. Having our communion with God perfected, we will also have our communion with one another perfected. We will be caught up in the great movement of love that is the life of the Trinity. It’s not about houses and seats of honor; it’s about a place in the heart of the God who made us and loves us. It is to become fully alive and perfect as the Father is perfect. To be in eternal life is to imagine ourselves outside the temporality that imprisons us and, in some way, to sense that eternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality—this we can only attempt. It would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time—the before and after—no longer exists. We can only attempt to grasp the idea that such a moment is life in the full sense, a plunging ever anew into the vastness of being, in which we are simply overwhelmed with joy. This is how Jesus expresses it in Saint John’s Gospel: “I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you” – Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI

Jesus sees the man lying on his mat next to a pool and asks, “Do you want to be well?” The man says yes, and Jesus replies, “Rise, take up your mat, and walk.” Immediately, the man is healed. Bishop Robert Barron writes that things heat up at this point in the story. One would expect that everyone around the cured man would rejoice, but just the contrary: the Jewish leaders are furious and confounded. They see the healed man, and their first response is, “It is the Sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to carry your mat.” Why are they so reactive? Why don’t they want this to be? We, sinners, don’t like the ways of God. We find them troubling and threatening. Why? Because they undermine the games of oppression and exclusion that we rely upon to validate our egos. In many peoples’ minds, the story of Jesus healing the ill man on the Sabbath was ample justification for God to punish him. You see, their God is vengeful, and since Jesus broke the law, they expected Jesus to “pay” for his transgression. Yet Jesus reminded them and us that God’s ways are not ours. God, who is love, seeks to nurture and care for them and to be in communion with them. Our challenge in this story is to determine how we see God. What is our image of God? Because that image is going to shape everything we do in our life.

We celebrate the feast of St. Joseph today. I am drawn to the very human predicament presented to Him. He has met the girl he has chosen to spend his life with, and during the betrothal period, this woman he has given his heart to betrays him. The character of the man is that even in this troubled state, he chose to divorce her quietly. The most fantastic aspect of Joseph’s story is his “yes” to God. Like Mary’s “yes” to God, it is foundational in bringing Christ into the world. Edward Hahnenberg writes that when a friend wounds you, it can seem impossible to forgive. Keep in mind Joseph never gets definitive proof that Mary is innocent. Instead, he chooses to trust. Joseph decides to let go of whatever hurt, doubt, or grievances he is entitled to carry. Had he not, had he instead held onto these things, bearing a grudge against Mary, it would have poisoned their life together. Instead, Joseph found liberation in letting go. Bishop Robert Barron notes that Joseph realized these puzzling events were part of God’s much higher plan. “Joseph was willing to cooperate with the divine plan, though he in no way knew its contours or deepest purposes. Like Mary at the annunciation, he trusted and let himself be led.”