I AM In Holy Week

The death and Resurrection of Christ Jesus are the decisive events remembered and celebrated by Christians. Our faith in Christ is in turn rooted in the faith of Israel, who trusted in the God who delivered them from slavery in Egypt, and brought them into His presence as the people of God. The Hebrew people responded in faith to the God who identified Himself as I AM WHO AM when he appeared to Moses out of the burning bush. The worship of I AM, of HE WHO IS (YHWH), is at the heart of Jewish and Christian faith. We believe that this One God created the Kosmos of space-time out of nothing, and guides the course of events through His wisdom and loving care. The uniqueness of Christian faith, as distinct from that of the Jewish people, is the conviction that the eternal I AM was fully present in Jesus of Nazareth, and in Jesus, God experienced suffering and death for every creature, to bring them from death to life eternal in union with God. To the best of my knowledge, this insight forms the centerpiece of Christian truth.

The liturgies of Holy Week demand and seek to build in us a response of living faith and of love for the I AM who experienced suffering and death in Jesus. Our task is to continue the incarnation of I AM in humankind. Crowds cheered Jesus when he entered Jerusalem, believing that he was a delivering, conquering messianic hero. They were soon disappointed by Jesus, who was put to death. In the Mass of the LORD’s Supper, we experience the pathos of self-emptying love, of utter humility, by the I AM, the One who is from all eternity: I AM in man washes the disciples’ feet. In meditating on Jesus’ agony in Gethsemane, we can feel nearly torn by the tension of truth: that HE WHO IS was in Jesus enduring torment, torture, desertion, abandonment for us. St. John captures this tension of truth in Gethsemane when Jesus declares, “I AM,” and his fellow Jews fall to the ground, as Moses did at the burning bush; but then a few moments later, the same men arrest the I AM as if He were a criminal.

And then Good Friday. The most painful paradox of all, it seems to me, is that the God-Man Jesus experiences utter God-forsakenness on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The man who embodied the I AM now feels utterly abandoned by God, experiencing in his soul what each human being deserves through rejecting God in sin. In Christ, I AM accepted our humanity, even our sinfulness and rejection of God. And all of us, with our sins, Jesus takes into God. For regardless of being tortured and feeling abandoned, Jesus remained utterly loyal to God, to “my God.” Here we see real love, true love: not sweet feelings and affections, but being faithful to one’s Beloved even when feeling tortured and abandoned.

From Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, May 1888, translated by W. Kaufmann, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, pp. 611-612. (Italics removed)

“My greatest experience was a recovery.  Wagner is merely one of my sicknesses. Not that I wish to be ungrateful to this sickness.  When in this essay I asset the proposition that Wagner is harmful, I wish no less to assert for whom he is nevertheless indispensable--for the philosopher.  Others may be able to get along without Wagner, but the philosopher is not free to do without Wagner.  He has to be the bad conscience of his time:  for that he needs to understand it best.  But confronted with the labyrinth of the modern soul, where could he find a guide more initiated, a more eloquent prophet of the soul, than Wagner?  Through Wagner modernity speaks most intimately, concealing neither its good nor its evil--having forgotten all sense of shame.  And conversely:  one has almost completed an account of the value of what is modern once one has gained clarity about what is good and evil in Wagner.

I understand perfectly when a musician says today:  `I hate Wagner, but I can no longer endure any other music.’  But I also understand a philosopher who would declare:  `Wagner sums up modernity.  There is no way out, one must first become a Wagnerian.’” I intend to write a brief piece in which I explore several related points:

1. That Nietzsche’s claim, that the philosopher needs Wagner, has much merit.
2. That a philosopher today needs not only Wagner, but even more Nietzsche. 
3. That for a person who values faith in the divine and who wants to be thoughtful or philosophical in his or her life, Nietzsche is indispensable. 
4.  That the modern-contemporary soul is especially revealed in the music of Wagner, and in the philosophy of Nietzsche.

Holy Week Note, Part I

Catholic public worship centers on the Eucharist, and the celebrations of every Eucharist center on the death and Resurrection of Christ. Although each Sunday liturgy is “a little Easter,” the great celebration in our Church year is the Triduum: Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil / Easter Day Mass. Whereas Christians have gathered to remember the death and Resurrection of Jesus from the dead since immediately following the events, observing the birth of our LORD came centuries later. Pentecost is a Jewish feast in honor of the giving of the Law through Moses, and from early centuries Christians modified that feast into thanking God for the gift of the Holy Spirit through Christ. Holy Week, Pentecost, and Christmas form the high points of the Church year--mountains rising from the sea, as it were. And without doubt, the Pascal Mystery remembered and observed in the Easter liturgies is the supreme climax and celebration of the entire year. “Christ our Paschal Lamb has been sacrificed for us. Therefore, let us keep the feast--not with the old leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (I Cor 5).

During the homilies this week-end through Easter, and on Passion (Palm) Sunday, I will offer some thoughts on the meaning of the death and Resurrection of Christ for us. I encourage as many as possible to attend the liturgies of Holy Week, to prepare before each service with some quiet prayer, and to be attentive during the liturgies. The Catholic Church offers these “high holy days” for our benefit, to bring us closer to God through Christ. The services are a gift of Christ in the Church.

This year on Passion / Palm Sunday, we read St. Mark’s account of the Lord’s suffering and death for us. Only twice in the Church year do the faithful hear an entire Passion narrative: on Passion Sunday and on Good Friday.

Three main services compose the Triduum--Mass of the LORD’s Supper on Holy Thursday; the Good Friday liturgy; the Easter Vigil / Easter Mass. These three are integrated liturgies, representing the Passover of the Lord. Hence, we are instructed to celebrate them in one church. Holy Thursday and the Vigil are joyful, although Christ’s Passion overshadows the Mass of the Lord’s Supper. Washing of feet symbolizes Christ’s self-giving love. After Mass we repose the Blessed Sacrament outside the sanctuary, with space for the faithful to remember and to adore. Good Friday, the one day in the year when Mass is not celebrated, focuses on reading the Passion according to St. John, prayers for all, the veneration of the Cross, and holy communion. The Vigil and Easter are joy to those who made the Passover with the Lord.

Lent IV: A Prayer For The Light Of Christ

LORD God Almighty, creator and sustainer of all that is, we your human creatures ask for the light of your truth. Let your truth, LORD, illuminate our minds, expose our defections to each of us singly in the depths of our hearts, and intensify our love for You, who are indeed all good and worthy of undying love.

Father of all that is, we believe that in Jesus Christ, we see and experience your truth and your goodness. You give us Christ as our most sure way to return to You. You give us Christ as your Truth dwelling in our minds, and as the cause of our love and joy. You give us Christ with his teaching and His love to inspire us to live well, to expose our shortcomings, to reconcile us to You.

In Christ Jesus we glimpse your utter goodness--a most generous love for each of your creatures, bringing each and all to perfection. In Christ we behold a beauty beyond and within all that is beautiful, and you give us a joy beyond words.

Therefore, LORD God, we thank you and praise your goodness, we choose to listen to Christ for our personal guidance and correction, we delight in your beauty, we celebrate as a people together your Oneness drawing all into Yourself. By your searching Spirit, keep us faithful to Christ’s penetrating words, turn us away from all that would harm us or others, and help us to help one another for our lasting good.

To You, all holy One, be our true love and devotion, now and into the age of ages--into that timeless time that is not time, but Eternity. In You alone, LORD, each finds our true home, now and forever. Thank You, LORD. Amen.

Lent III: The Cleansing Of The Temple

How bold should we be? How bold are we? Do we love truth more than our worldly positions? Do we act for justice--as we understand justice or right--or do we “play it safe,” “go along to get along,” be “good little boys and girls,” and say what those in authority wants us to say? Are we men and women of conviction, who risk ourselves through speech and action, or are we “game-players?” We know the kind of persons those in authority all-too-often praise: “Yes men,” people who do not “rock the boat,” or dare to “think outside the box.” Social systems are more or less rigidly fixed, and those who lead them and represent them usually do not want their system challenged.

In the cleansing of the Temple, one may see, among other things, the radical side of Jesus Christ. Clearly, Jesus did not “play it safe,” but engaged the “powers that be” in a provocative, very bold, even revolutionary action when he “cleansed the Temple” of “money-changers.” Jesus was, in more ways than we probably grasp, radical in its literal meaning of “going to the roots.” In this one public action, Jesus in effect overturned the most sacred, established, power-institution of his culture: the Temple in Jerusalem, and what it stood for. Jesus was visibly demonstrating that God is the God of all human beings, not of a religious cult or sacred tradition. In this one action, Jesus sided with faith over religious belief, with obedience to the Holy Spirit over religious traditionalism, with the true and living God over a mummified “God of the fathers.”

In preaching the cleansing of the Temple, one can emphasize many themes: The nature and purpose of true worship; the staleness of religions that place outward observance above spiritual life; the universality of the God of all creation; the truth that “Christ is the end of the Law” in the sense explored by the Apostle Paul; the need for a continuing cleansing of all religious institutions, including the Catholic Church; the even greater and more pressing need for ongoing conversion to the Gospel of Christ; the preference for truth and justice to merely traditional beliefs and ways.

Given our hearing of this Gospel story today, what shall we emphasize in our preaching and action? No doubt the formulations will vary in our four homilies this week-end, but my hope is that each of us hears the call to seek the inner cleaning of the Holy Spirit, and that we seek to share in the renewal of the Church through truthfulness, honesty, right priorities, deeds of justice tempered by mercy. Pretending to be religious and “holy” must be rejected for being transparent and honest with one another. Above all, each of us must seek again and again to become living temples of the Holy Spirit.

The Questions Of Jesus (The Beginning Of A First Draft)

Whatever good work you begin to do, beg of God with most fervent prayer to perfect it,” to bring it to completion. (Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue)

God of all creation, through your wisdom and goodness help me to write a short essay on the questions of Jesus. Long have I wanted to write on Jesus’ questions, because he is a master-questioner, and his questions deserve to be pondered. LORD, by your Spirit, assist me in this effort to help your beloved people to seek You and to find their true life in You. Amen.

First, LORD, how shall I present the questions? They are embedded in the context of our four canonical Gospels. It would not make sense to reproduce the entire Gospels, highlighting the questions. If I just list the questions, some of them may not be understood well, because one would need to know the context for the question. Other questions, although embedded in particular stories or narrative by the evangelists, seem to be able to speak for themselves, and may be lifted from their Gospel contexts without distorting them. Should I not concentrate on these questions first--the ones that speak to the heart even when the original context in a particular Gospel is not so well known or remembered?

Jesus is a master story-teller, as virtually every Christian and some non-Christians know. His parables, often rooted in his rich Jewish story-telling tradition, communicate the wisdom and transforming love of God to the hearers--or at least to those who reflect on the parables, who “ponder these things in their hearts.” Millions of people are familiar with the parable of the prodigal son, with the parable of the good Samaritan, with the short but rich parable of the man searching for fine pearls. The meanings of such stories are so rich that I truly believe one could keep reflecting on any of these parables, and not exhaust its meaning. For the parables are rooted in God, in the divine mystery itself, and there is no limit, no boundary, no end to the living God. The parables bring the responsive hearer under the Reign of God.

Jesus is also a master questioner, although I have rarely encountered someone who seems to be aware of this truth. It is not only his stories that recur in my mind, but his probing questions. Apparently Jesus asked these questions, they reverberated in the hearts of his disciples, and the evangelists preserved them. Or perhaps the risen LORD, radiating his wisdom in the heart of an evangelist, moved the writer to ask these searching questions for the benefit of readers throughout the centuries. In any case, the questions of Christ are a wonderful gift, and a gift made increasingly precious as the questions receive a sound hearing in the hearts and minds of the faithful. Or even in the minds of unbelievers, for the questions of Jesus Christ are penetrating, often containing a power to turn our souls around and help us to reorient ourselves to the true and living God--if we will but attend. Christ’s questions open the responsive heart to the Presence of God.

Now, how to present the questions of Jesus to benefit the reader? LORD, help! And thank you for assisting by your indwelling Spirit.

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Part I: Questions that emerge in consciousness without reviewing the Gospels

As a beginning, I shall allow the questions of Jesus that remain alive in my soul (consciousness) come to light, list them, and then give brief comments on their meaning, consider why they would remain active in my spiritual life, and suggest their relevance to the faithful. I list them in the order they come to consciousness now:

1. “What are you seeking?” The first words of Jesus in St. John’s Gospel.

2. “Who do you say that I am?” The Great Question of Jesus that serves as the center around which St. Mark unfolds his Gospel, climaxing in the death-Resurrection of Christ.

3. “Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?”

4. “Woman, why are you crying? Whom are you seeking?” Jesus to Mary Magdalene in the Garden.

5. “Now, which one did the will of his father?” Parable of two sons, one gave lip service, one acted.

6. “Simon, son of John, do you love me [more than these]?” The Resurrected to Peter.

7. “If I tell you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things” (Jesus to Nicodemus)

8. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

9. “What were you discussing along the way?” Jesus to the Twelve, quibbling about who of them was the greatest.

10. “How long has he been like this?” Jesus asks a father about his son, who is very ill

11. “Why did you strike me?” In at least one Synoptic Gospel, Jesus before the Jewish authorities.

12. “Whom are you seeking?” In St. John’s Gospel, the Garden of Gethsemane

13. “What would it profit a man, if he should gain the whole world, and lose his soul??

14. “What can a man give in exchange for his soul?”

15. “Did you not know that I had to be about my Father’s business?”

16. “Woman, what have I to do with you? My hours has not yet come.”

17. “What would you have me do for you?”

18. “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Jesus to Paul in the Acts

19. “Will you abandon me also?” Jesus to the Twelve at the end of the Bread of Life discourse, Jn 6.

20. “I AM the Resurrection and the Life....Do you believe this?” Jesus to Martha, John 11.

21. “What does the Law say? How do you read?”

22. “Now, which one proved neighbor to the man who fell among thieves?”

23. “Do you say this on your own, or has some one told you about me?”

24. “Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me, Philip? Do you not know that whoever has seen me has seen the Father?” St. John, chapter 14.

25. “...If I had not, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you?”

26. “What father among you would give his son a snake if he asks for bread?”

27. “Do you not know that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?”

28. “When we fed the four thousand, how many baskets full of bread did you pick up? And when we fed the five thousand, how many...?”

29. “Do you still not understand?”

30. “Are there not twelve hours for work?”

31. “If the blind leads the blind, will they not both fall into a pit?”

32. “If you can? If you have faith like a mustard seed...”

33. “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest?”

34. “Whose image is this, and whose inscription?” (holding the coin of Caesar)

35. “First I will ask you a question. John’s baptism: Was it of God, or of human origin?”

36. “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God.”

37. “Do you understand these things?” “Yes.” “Then blessed are you if you do them.”

38. “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?”

39. “Who has the greater sin?”

40. “Do you believe because I said, `I saw you under the fig tree’? I tell you, you will see the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.” (Jn 1)

41. “What is it to you if.... You follow me” (Jn 21)

42. “Who touched me?”

43. “Will you, Simon? Before the cook crows twice, you will deny that you know me thrice.”

44. “Who do the people say that I am?”

45. “Who are my mother and brothers and sisters? Whoever does the will of my Father ...”

46. “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?”

47. “Which is easier: to say, `Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, `Rise, take up your mat, and walk’”?

48. “Do you think that they were worse sinners because the tower fell on them?”

49. “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

50. “Do you think that I have come for peace? No, I tell you, for division..."

Lent II: Our Journey's End Without End

One charged with preaching Christ must ask: Is the interpretation I offer in the pulpit both true to Christ and the best that I can do? Or, am I simply repeating what I have said in other years when these Mass readings have been appointed to be read? Am I falling back on thoughts that occurred to me years ago? Have I ceased reading the Gospels and the Scriptures with a searching, open mind? Have I perhaps grown spiritually lazy, and just repeat the old, stale thoughts of yesteryear? More broadly: Do I really pray, or am I going through the motions? And you, are you listening?

Today’s story of the Transfiguration of Jesus is a case in point. Typically I emphasize that by having the faithful hear the story of the Transfiguration on the Second Sunday of each Lent, the Church is displaying to the eyes of faith our spiritual goal. One must know the goal as one sets out on a journey, or one may wander in the wilderness indefinitely. Through seeing Christ transfigured, we are glimpsing what we shall be. As disciples of Christ, our goal is not vague or unknown, but displayed to our minds: To become filled with divine Presence, as Christ was seen to be by his three disciples who witnessed the Transfiguration. We must “keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith” to persevere in the journey, and win through to the prize that God has in store for each of us: complete and eternal union with God in Christ. This divine-human union is what we call “eternal life.” That is the typical interpretation I offer on the Second Sunday of Lent.

Surely one could say more about the Transfiguration--such as the fact that Christ eclipses both the Law (symbolized by Moses) and the prophets (embodied in Elijah). God’s plan of rescuing humanity from its self-destructive, evil impulses culminates in the gift of Christ to humankind, so that all of us may reach the goal of life in God.

What are we missing when we follow this interpretation? Consider the context: Jesus is transfigured immediately following his prediction of his Passion and his call for disciples to die to themselves to find true life. Is our attention not being drawn to the pre-condition for our transfiguring union with God: namely, self-sacrifice, our willingness to embrace the crosses God gives us in our life, and to give ourselves back to God in the daily decisions we make? Is this the main point the Church wants to present to our minds? That without dying to ourselves, you and I “will not see the Kingdom of God”? Unless we imitate Christ and truly and fully give ourselves back to God---even embracing death--we will not see our journey’s true end.