Sunday, April 16, 2017

Christ is Risen!

El Greco, The Resurrection
My pastor told a great story in his homily last night at the Easter Vigil that I’d like to share with you.  Unlike in the West where we say, “Happy Easter,” the Easter greeting in the Eastern Christian tradition is “Christ is Risen,” to which the faithful respond: “He is truly risen.”  One day, there was a public debate between an Orthodox Patriarch and an atheist about the Resurrection.  The atheist went first, presenting a long discourse on how Christ’s resurrection is scientifically and logically impossible.  When it came time for the Patriarch to speak, he stood before the assembled crowd and proclaimed, “Christ is Risen!  Without missing a beat, the audience responded, “He is truly Risen.”  The people had spoken, and the Patriarch sat down. 

The fact is that the Resurrection is the sine qua non of the Christian faith.  Without it, Christianity is meaningless.  Christ either rose from the dead, or he did not.  There’s no middle ground.  As Bishop Robert Barron puts it, “It comes down to this:  if Jesus was not raised from death, Christianity is a fraud and a joke.  But if he did rise from death, then Christianity is the fullness of God’s revelation, and Jesus must be the absolute center of our lives.  There is no third option.”[1]

          It should be no surprise to the readers of this blog that I believe that Jesus rose from the dead.  While I’ve spent a considerable amount of time weighing the evidence and studying the arguments put forth by the Church, atheists and scientists, the most profound, the most convincing evidence I have come across is the voice of the people.  For nearly 2,000 years, billions of people have believed that Christ is Risen, including my forebears, my parents, my grandparents and generations of Meyers, Gallos and O’Boyles before them.  In the end, faith is a matter of trust:  trust in God; trust in ourselves and trust in our teachers, mentors and role models.  They have spoken, and I believe that Christ is Risen.  He is truly Risen!



[1] Bishop Robert Barron, Lenten Gospel Reflections, April 15, 2017.

Friday, April 14, 2017

The Passion

                About ten years ago, I started a Good Friday tradition of watching The Passion of the Christ, the 2004 Mel Gibson-directed film starring James Caviezel as Jesus.  It’s a powerful movie that I recommend highly, but be warned, it’s brutally graphic.  So much so, that my tradition only lasted a few years.  As I became more and more familiar with the movie, I started to anticipate the rough scenes and found myself preemptively closing my eyes to shield myself from the horrors of the crucifixion.  Well, if I’m going to close my eyes for two-thirds of the movie, what’s the purpose of watching it?

                It’s embarrassing to think that if I can’t handle the crucifixion in a movie, how would I have handled the real thing?  As much as I’d like to think that I’d bravely join Mary and John at the foot of the cross, I suspect that I would have been one of the disciples who ran away and hid. 

                It’s easy for us today to be numb to the horrors of the crucifixion.  We didn’t witness it for ourselves, and we know that the story has a happy ending.  Besides, who wants to think of such things when they remind us that Jesus wouldn’t have had to go through it if we weren’t a sinful people in the first place?  It’s much easier to focus on the resurrection than it is to contemplate Good Friday.  But as the saying goes, without Good Friday, there’s no Easter Sunday.  The resurrection only makes sense in the full context of Jesus’ life, passion, death and resurrection.  We need to consider Good Friday in order to understand what Easter Sunday really means.

          Since I’ve wimped out of watching The Passion of the Christ, I try to take some time on Good Friday to imagine how Jesus felt.  What it felt like to be falsely accused and condemned to death, scourged at the pillar, crowned with thorns, crushed under the weight of his instrument of execution, stripped, and nailed to the cross.  Of course, I can't really imagine what it was like for Jesus, but this little meditation certainly helps put my own Good Friday “sufferings” in context:  when I’m feeling tired from hours of liturgies; when I'm hangry from fasting for a few hours; and when I grouse about not having enough time to get things done.  It’s humbling to think that Jesus’ Good Friday was much worse than mine could ever be.  And a little humility seems to make Easter Sunday all the more meaningful.

Thursday, April 13, 2017

Boundless Love

For the third time in his four-year papacy, Pope Francis has taken the Mass of the Lord’s Supper to prison.  Shunning the majestic confines of Saint Peter’s Basilica, Pope Francis has traditionally brought today’s special Mass to those most in need of God’s love at the margins of our society – to the poor, the sick and, especially, the imprisoned.  The Pope’s gesture is particularly appropriate because the Mass of the Lord’s Supper kicks off the Triduum – the most sacred three days of our liturgical year when we celebrate Jesus’ greatest gift to us; his boundless love.

When we think of the Lord’s Supper we usually think of the institution of the Eucharist, Jesus offering himself to us in the bread and wine consecrated into his body and blood.  It may seem strange, then, that at the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, our Gospel reading doesn’t mention the Eucharist at all.  We hear of the Jewish Passover in our first reading from Exodus, and we have a brief mention of the Eucharist in Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, but our Gospel, the very voice of Christ himself, recalls Jesus washing his disciples’ feet.  Only one Gospel mentions the washing of feet at the Last Supper – the Gospel of John that we read; the other three focus on the institution of the Eucharist.  With three out of four Gospels pointing to the Eucharist, why did the Church choose the washing of the feet as our message for today?

 Jesus’ entire life is meant to be our best example of a life well-lived, a life lived the way God intends for us to live it.  So in washing his disciples’ feet, Jesus is teaching us by humble example that our whole purpose in life is to love God by loving our neighbor.  Washing the feet of guests was a common ritual in Jesus’ time because guests often traveled to their hosts’ homes on foot through the dusty roads of the Holy Land.  Interestingly, though, it was servants and slaves who washed the guests’ feet, not the host.  Yet, Jesus, the host of the Passover meal, washed his disciples’ feet.  As Pope Francis so beautifully explained, “The love that Jesus has for us is so big that he became a slave to serve us, to take care of us, to purify us.”[1]  Now, that’s boundless love.   
  
Jesus gave of himself both in charitable service and in the Eucharist, so the institution of the Eucharist and the washing of feet at the Last Supper are inseparable.  We need Jesus’ real presence in the Eucharist to strengthen us to carry out his mission of loving our neighbor through humble service.  Whether we’re tall, short, handsome (like me), or not so good looking, healthy, sick, rich, poor, free and yes, even imprisoned, every one of us, no matter what our circumstance, can love our neighbor because Jesus, no matter what our circumstance, loves us with God’s boundless love.  Whether it be through heroic works of charity, prayer, or even a simple smile, every one of us can change someone’s life for the better by sharing the boundless love we receive from Jesus with others.  
   
          I was blessed today with the opportunity to bring Jesus in the Eucharist to inmates in our local prison.  I explained to them that when Pope Francis visits prisons on Holy Thursday, he follows the ancient tradition of washing the feet of twelve inmates, and makes a point of telling the inmates that the twelve whose feet will be washed represent all prisoners everywhere.  I also told them that our pastor will wash the feet of twelve parishioners at our Mass tonight.  Those twelve represent all of our parishioners, including those in prison.  We do this to remind ourselves that Christ’s love extends to everyone, that all of us, no matter our circumstance, deserve to have Christ’s love shared with us, and that we all have an obligation to share Christ’s love with others.  We do this because Christ’s love is boundless love.


[1] Pope Francis, Holy Thursday Homily, April 2, 2015.