Keep the End in Mind - A Homily for Good Friday Morning Prayer

My oldest daughter, always a voracious reader, has the curious habit of skipping ahead to read the end of a story first.  As you might imagine, my Teutonic DNA simply can’t fathom reading a book out of order.  How can you understand the end of the story, without knowing what leads up to it?  Caitlin takes the opposite view, of course:  How can you appreciate the story without knowing how it ends?  Well, looking at our reading for Morning Prayer, it seems that Caitlin and the prophet Isaiah take the same approach.  They prefer to keep the end in mind.

Our passage from Isaiah comes from the very beginning of the Suffering Servant narrative, where Isaiah tells us the end of the story first.  Before we learn of the suffering that God’s servant will undergo, we hear how it all turns out:  “My servant shall prosper, he shall be raised high and greatly exalted.”  It’s the same with the Gospels.  Jesus teaches us about the wonders of the coming Kingdom before he speaks of his passion and death.  I guess God’s not German.  Don’t tell Pope Emeritus Benedict.

Why would God, through Jesus and the prophets, tell us the end first?  Perhaps it’s because we couldn’t handle the brutality of the passion without knowing that everything turns out alright.  Perhaps it’s because we couldn’t handle the challenges of life without knowing that everything turns out alright.  There’s a lot of suffering in this world, and more and more people seem to be turning away from God because of it.  But if we turn away from God, if we reject his promise of eternal salvation, happiness and peace, then we have nothing to hope for.  God tells us the end of the story first to give us hope.

Knowing, indeed, believing the end of the story carries us not just through the events of Good Friday, but through every challenge we face in life.  The hope of salvation sustains us in times of trial and gives us the strength to persevere.  With hope we can bind our sufferings with Christ’s on Good Friday and every day, knowing that in the end, “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

          As hard as it is for me to admit, maybe Caitlin and Isaiah are right:  We have to keep the end in mind.

What More Can I Say?

                I was absolutely stunned when I signed on to the internet this morning to learn that there had been yet another senseless terrorist attack in the world – this time in Brussels.  My heart went out to the victims and their families.  I prayed for them, and I prayed for an end to such horrific violence.  I felt an urge to blog to try to address violence in the context of our faith, but I didn’t know what to say.  In the past six months alone, I’ve blogged twice about terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, about the need to pray, about the power of prayer and about trusting that God will keep his promise of an eternal life of perfect love and happiness.  What more can I say?

                Later in the day, I came across Anthony Esolen’s commentary on the Inferno that discusses Dante’s understanding of violence.  The premise of Dante’s Divine Comedy is the unique opportunity given to a sinner (Dante himself) to get a glimpse of hell, purgatory and heaven so that he can make his earthly choices more wisely before his time is through.  In canto twelve of the Inferno, Dante visits the seventh circle of hell, the circle reserved for the violent, who float along in a boiling river of blood.  They are guarded by the Minotaur and centaurs, who are shooting arrows at the sinners as they try to escape from the river.  The Minotaur and the centaurs are apt images for the bestiality of violence.  As Esolen explains it, “[t]o kill, rape, maim, and pillage is to be as heartless and ferocious as a tiger.  It is unworthy of man.  For the Christian, it violates the rights of God (as all sin does), for it turns the created world into an arena of destruction.”[1]  This is especially true when violence begets violence.

                Faced with violence, we often feel the urge to respond in kind.  This response reflects our bestial nature at work.  Violence is contrary to human nature and human dignity, and it flies in the face of our creation in the image and likeness of God.  Violence can never conquer violence; it simply encourages more violence.  Now I’m not saying that we don’t have a right, indeed, an obligation, to defend ourselves against violence, perhaps even with the use of force, and to bring the perpetrators of violence to justice.  But we have no right to indiscriminate violence against the perpetrators of violence and certainly not against innocent classes of people with whom the perpetrators of violence may be associated.

               So what’s the proper response to violence?  Love.  God became man to free us from the beastly ways of sin and return us to his image and likeness.  God became man to teach us that “love conquers all.”[2]  We conquer violence when we love our neighbor.  We conquer violence when we feed the poor, clothe the naked, comfort the ill and visit the imprisoned.  We conquer violence when we pray for the victims of violence and their families.  We conquer violence when we pray for the violent.  Our reaction to violence must always be horror, because violence is unworthy of man.  But our response to violence must always be love.  As we remember during Holy Week, when faced with violence and death, Jesus loved, and in loving, he conquered sin and death.  What more can I say?

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[1] Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, notes to canto 12, trans. by Anthony Esolen (New York, Random House, 2005) at 451.

[2] Virgil, Ecologue X.

What Are You Waiting For? - A Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent

            Over the past few weeks, several people have approached me to share a common frustration.  You see, they live good lives; they go to church; they pray, but they still seem to be challenged by sickness or death in their families, financial trouble or great disappointments of one kind or another.  When these difficulties befall them, they pray all the more.  But sometimes things still don’t turn out as they had hoped, so they get frustrated with God.  It’s probably safe to say that we’ve all shared that frustration at different times in our lives, times when we’ve considered God’s promise of eternal happiness, turned our eyes to the heavens and asked, “What are you waiting for?”  In today’s Gospel, Martha and Mary shared that frustration.  Jesus provides the answer.

          In our Gospel passage, we hear the familiar story of the raising of Lazarus.  Lazarus is dead, and Jesus brings him back to life.  But the story isn’t that simple.  When Jesus learns that Lazarus is ill, he doesn’t rush off to cure Lazarus, as we would expect.  He does something very strange, almost preposterous.  “[H]e remained for two days in the place where he was.”  Lazarus, Martha and Mary are Jesus’ friends and disciples, but when they call on him in their hour of need, Jesus waits.  What was he waiting for?  Not surprisingly, Martha and Mary greet Jesus with frustration and disappointment.  But interestingly, Martha’s and Mary’s identical statements of disappointment, are also “implicit acts of faith.”[1]  “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  Martha and Mary called on Jesus because they believed that Jesus is the Son of God.  They were disappointed with him because he didn’t do what they expected him to do, but they wouldn’t have had any expectations of him at all, if they hadn’t believed that Jesus was the Messiah in the first place.

I think there’s a little bit of Martha and Mary in each one of us.  “Who hasn’t felt that God wasn’t doing what God should be doing in a painful situation?”[2]  We serve the Lord, we listen to his word, so we’re disappointed when God doesn’t seem to answer when out of the depths of our sorrow we cry like the psalmist:  “Lord, hear my voice!”  (Psalm 130: 1-2)  Like Martha and Mary, our disappointment arises from an implicit faith – from our hope and expectation that Christ will save us.  We want God’s promises to be true, and we want to believe that God will deliver.  Still, we just can’t help asking, “What are you waiting for?”

Such is the challenge of the spiritual life.  God never stops calling us to life in the spirit, as St. Paul tells us in our second reading.  God calls us to life in the spirit because faith in God gives us the hope of eternal happiness.  “When we believe that God is as Jesus said, we become absolutely sure of his love . . ., [and] we enter into a new relationship with life.”[3]  Believing that God is love gives purpose and meaning to our lives.  Believing that God provides all that we need gives us comfort and security.  Believing that God “will open [our] graves and have [us] rise from them,” (Ezekiel 37:12) frees us from fearing illness and death.  Believing that Jesus is the resurrection and the life gives us the remedy for all of our disappointments.  Jesus is the bridge between the spiritual and physical worlds.  Through Christ’s Spirit dwelling in us, we draw on the eternal joy and peace of the heavens as we face our earthly challenges.  “Christian spirituality is neither escape from real life nor denial of its pain but a way of living that is transfigured even now by the resurrection and the life, which is Jesus.”[4]  Even in their grief and disappointment, Martha and Mary believed in Jesus, and they had hope:  a hope that “keeps [us] from discouragement; sustains [us] during times of abandonment; [and] opens up [our] heart in expectation of eternal beatitude.”[5]

It’s not always easy to believe.  In a world dominated by rationalism, we’re encouraged to ignore spirituality and religion – to ignore God’s call to eternal happiness – and we’re scorned and ridiculed when we dare to express religious belief in the public forum.  We’re told that believing in God is chasing a fiction, and when God doesn’t act the way we want or expect him to act, we begin to believe it.  The sad result is that more and more people eschew religion and live in fear – fear of disappointment, fear of illness and fear of death – “the fear [that] is characteristic of a godless life.”[6] 

Faced with the choice of denying God and living in fear, or believing in God and living in hope, one would think we’d all choose to believe.  But not everyone does, and even those of us who do, aren’t always steadfast in our faith because in making that choice, we have to deal with the Martha and Mary problem:  God doesn’t always act the way we want or expect him to, so we become frustrated and disappointed.  When we choose God, we have to accept that God’s ways aren’t necessarily our ways – that God acts in God’s time and in God’s way – and that God’s ways are the best and the only ways to live.  To have faith, we have to trust God when he tells us, “I have promised, and I will do it.”  (Ezekiel 37: 14)  God always delivers, but he does so in his time and in his way. 

          Life will always have its disappointments.  God never promised that it wouldn’t.  It’s our challenge, then, to work through our frustration and disappointment with God when things don’t go as we want or expect them to.  It’s our challenge to listen for God’s voice and to keep accepting God’s invitation to rise to the new life of hope that he offers us, just as Lazarus did.  God never stops calling us to eternal life in the spirit, a wonderful way of life that’s available to us here and now if we only believe.  The choice is ours, and if we listen really carefully, we might just hear God ask us, “What are you waiting for?”

Readings:  Ezekiel 37: 12-14; Psalm 130; Romans 8: 8-11; John 11: 1-45

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[1] Sandra M. Schneiders, Written That You May Believe:  Encountering Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (New York, The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2003) at 181.

[2] James Martin, Jesus:  A Pilgrimage (New York, HarperCollins Publishers, 2014) at 322.

[3] William Barclay, The Gospel of John, vol. 2 (Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press, 1975) at 95.

[4] Schneiders at 179 (emphasis added).

[5] Catechism of the Catholic Church 1818.

[6] Barclay at 95.