Tag Archives: Lent

Jesus’ Hope

09 Saturday Mar 2019

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Jesus in the desertHave you ever noticed that each of our Lord’s temptations in Luke’s Gospel is a temptation to something within the immediate and that our Lord responds to each temptation by his hope in the future? That Jesus responds by not getting stuck in the immediate but by looking beyond the immediate to the infinite?

The gospel tells us that our Lord, after fasting for forty days was hungry. That is an immediate need. We all know that when we are hungry it is hard to even think about anything else. The devil plays on this. “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.” Answer this immediate and pressing need! Satisfy your hunger! Our Lord responds, “… One does not live on bread alone.” Our Lord’s hope is not in a quick fix or easy answer right now but on that which is truly enduring and lasting – relationship with the Father.

The devil again tempts the Lord, “I shall give you all this power and glory … all this will be yours, if you worship me.” Okay, Jesus has come to be savior and king – the devil concedes this – but he need not go through the pain and struggle, suggests the Father of Lies. Jesus need not go to Jerusalem and walk the way of Calvary. He can be king now, immediately! Jesus can be king without the cross! Certainly tempting, but our Lord responds, “You shall worship the Lord, your God, and him alone shall you serve.” Jesus answers by showing where his hope lies – not in the devil and his power and neither in any power that the world affords in the here and now but in the Father and his will. Jesus hopes in the Father and the Father alone will Jesus serve.

If not through need nor through power will the Lord be tempted then through love will the devil try to tempt the Lord. Make the Father show his love here and now, force his hand! “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written: “He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you…” The Son will not force the Father to prove his love. His hope in the Father’s love does not need to be proven at any point, it endures even to the cross. “You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.”

Jesus overcomes these temptations in the immediate not through his own strength of will but through his hope in the Father. It is the Father who summons the Son into the future – into the desert, into ministry, to Jerusalem, through the cross to the resurrection and into the fullness of the Kingdom! God summoned Jesus and Jesus put his trust in the summons of the Father. And God summons us! God calls us forward into the future – not as we might have it or envision it – but into the fullness of His Kingdom! To be a Christian – to confess with our mouths that Jesus is Lord and to believe in our hearts that God raised Jesus from the dead – means to be a person never resigned to the immediate nor the status quo nor to the sad belief that it is solely up to our own effort. These are the illusions of the Father of lies. That things cannot change. That there is no hope. That we are abandoned.

Jesus is risen from the dead! Hope ever endures! The Father summons us into the Kingdom!

The hymn has it right. “My life flows on in endless song above earth’s lamentations! I hear the real, though far off hymn that hails a new creation! No storm can shake my inmost calm, while to that rock I’m clinging. Since love is Lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?”

We are members of the Body of Christ and Jesus’ hope is our hope! We turn our gaze to the Father…

Christ “lifted up” (4th Sunday of Lent – B)

10 Saturday Mar 2018

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christ-on-the-cross-sketch-eug-ne-delacroixNicodemus is an interesting figure in the gospel. He is a devout man and someone who is intrigued by Jesus. Nicodemus believes the Jesus is a teacher of God and that the signs which Jesus does prove that God is with him yet Nicodemus wants to fit Jesus into his own paradigm, into his own narrative about how God should act. Before the passage we just heard we are told that Nicodemus comes to Jesus, “by night”. Nicodemus is attracted to Jesus but he is still in the darkness of his own presumptions. How often we are like Nicodemus. How often we know people like Nicodemus.

The dialogue that Jesus has with Nicodemus is a continual invitation (using a play on words) by Jesus to Nicodemus to take that necessary step in faith into the fullness of life – the Kingdom of God – that Jesus alone is the way into. It is an invitation to step away from our limited certainties of how things are and will always be (including God) into God’s own free action of love.

One such invitation (and play on words) is found in the term “lifted up”. “Jesus said to Nicodemus, ‘Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.” The Greek word for “lifted up” is a word that has a double meaning. First, it does mean a physically “lifting up”. Just as Moses hoisted the image of a serpent as the means for the healing of the people so will Jesus be physically hoisted upon the wood of the cross for the healing of the world. The Christian God is a God of paradox – and eternal and immutable God who was born, who suffered and who died. If we are to be Christian then we must enter into this paradox and learn what it both teaches about God and also about ourselves and where true life is found and lived.

The Greek word for “lifted up” also means “exaltation”. For the Christian to be authentic in his or her life that means that Christ/God must be exalted. Simply put, Christ/God must be the center of the Christian’s life and anything or anyone else that would vie with God for this center must be put in their proper place.

Our lives must be centered on God. If this is done then everything we do and all we are derive from God. We will be moral, honest and honorable. We will seek to tell the truth and not distort the news. We will not spread falsehoods. We will not gossip. We will pursue righteousness, devotion, love, faith, patience and gentleness. God must be exalted in the life of every Christian and this means that God alone is the center.

We can all be like Nicodemus. Attracted to the light of Christ yet still clinging to the darkness of our own presumptions. Jesus’ invitation to Nicodemus is his invitation to us. Take that step in faith – the mystery of a God who suffered and was lifted up on a cross and a God who must be exalted in our lives.

Thoughts on the Sunday readings: God in the thorns

27 Saturday Feb 2016

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moses-and-burning-bushJewish midrash is a way of interpreting Hebrew Scripture that seeks to fill in the gaps and therefore bring forth truths of faith. A midrash on the scene of God appearing to Moses in the burning bush that we heard in the first reading (Ex. 3:1-8a,13-15) holds that the bush had thorns.  God witnessed the suffering of the Hebrew people in Egypt, their daily struggle and pain, and therefore God chose to reveal Himself to Moses in the midst of a thorn bush to show that He is a God who is present in the midst of the suffering of his people.

The classic translation of the name that God provides Moses is “I am who I am.” Some scholars suggest that this translation relies too heavily on Greek thinking which tended more toward the philosophical and abstract.  A translation that would lean more toward the Hebraic way of thinking which is more concrete and dynamic in its understanding of being is “I am the one who I am there.”  In this understanding, the revelation of the name of God is immediately connected with his covenant to the people of Israel.  God is not removed, God is revealed as a God who is in the midst of his people.  God’s very being is a “being-for-His-people.”

In the first letter of John we are given the singularly important teaching that “God is love”. This is first and foremost but the way by which we know God as love is the way of mercy.  Mercy is God’s love poured out, given that we might have life.  When we were lost, when we had sinned and wandered far from God, God sought us out.  God sought out Abram and made a covenant with him and his descendants.  God hears the cry of his people in Egypt and he seeks them out.  God enters into their suffering.  God is “I am the one who I am there.”

The fullest revelation of who God is; is our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Christ fully reveals both the love and the mercy of God and Christ is that full revelation of the name of God.  In Christ, God fully enters into the thorns of our suffering.  God is revealed in the very midst of our pain, our loss and our weakness.  I am the one who I am there.

But we on our part need to make a choice. This is part of the gospel message for today (Lk. 13:1-9).  Through the incarnation God has entered into his creation and its injustices and tragedies.  I am who I am there.  Christ acknowledges the unjust killing of the Galileans by Pilate as well as the tragic death of those people killed when the tower collapsed.  We each have only so many days allotted us, what choice are we going to make?  CSacred-heart-of-jesus-ibarraranhrist comes to reveal the truth of who God is and to call us into relationship with Him because here and only here is where we will find true life.  What choice will we make?  We each have only so many days allotted us.

The midrash teaches that God revealed himself to Moses in the midst of a thorn bush. Isn’t it interesting that when Jesus, who is God with us and for us, is being scourged he is crowned with a crown of thorns?  In a couple of weeks we will hold the Enthronement of the Sacred Heart Mission here at St. Dominic Church.  The image at the center of the mission is the Sacred Heart of our Lord – a heart both divine and human and a heart surrounded by a crown of thorns beating in love and mercy for us.

The Transfiguration of our Lord: Extraordinary and Ordinary

20 Saturday Feb 2016

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The Transfiguration of our Lord by Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo

We can say that Lent is an extraordinary time lived in an ordinary season. We fast, we pray, we do works of charity – all while we also go about the ordinary rhythm of our lives.  We still go to work, we still go to school, we visit with one another, we pay bills…  The ordinary rhythm of life continues on even while we make the extraordinary journey of Lent.

We have echoes of this “extraordinary in the ordinary” in our readings for this second Sunday of Lent. In the gospel (Lk. 9:28b-36) our Lord takes Peter, James and John up on the mountain to pray.  The three disciples experience the transfiguration of our Lord as he is in prayer to the Father.  They catch a glimpse of the truth of who Christ is and they are awestruck … but the world continues on.  The other nine disciples were probably about the duties of an ordinary day, for the people in the closest village it was just another day like any other.  The world did not stop even as this amazing event occurs.  Peter, understandably, wants to remain in this extraordinary experience but the gospel goes on to say that he “did not know what he was saying.” Our God does not disdain the ordinary.  For God the extraordinary and the ordinary are not opposed.

Just as Jesus took the three disciples up the mountain to pray, we are told that God “took Abram outside” to see and count the number of the stars (Gen. 15:5-12,17-18).  Our God values our company.  He does not like to walk alone.  Even with the surreal and mystical image of animals being sacrificed and Abram in a trance, God binds himself to an ordinary group of people, Abram’s descendants, in order to walk with them through the running of time and history and thereby bring them (and through them all of humanity) into the fullness of his Kingdom.  Christ himself values our ordinary company.  The gospels are consistent in this message.  Christ does not see himself as some tragic, solitary hero.  Christ binds himself to his ordinary, little group of followers even as he is fully aware of their weaknesses and their limits.

“Yes,” says the author of Philippians, “our citizenship is in heaven” and to this we direct our lives but we now live our lives here in this world so “stand firm in the Lord” (Phil. 3:17-4:1). Our actions here in our ordinary world and lives should reflect the extraordinary glory of our citizenship in heaven which is the hope we journey toward.

For God the extraordinary and the ordinary are not opposed. The same ought to be true for us.  We can be awakened, our eyes can be opened to see the extraordinary in the ordinary if we allow ourselves to be “taken up” by Christ.  Just as Christ took the three disciples up the mountain to pray, just as God took Abram outside to gaze at the heavens, we need to allow Christ to take us and pull us away from our own selfishness and draw us into his own life.  If we allow this to happen then we can participate in a greater reality, our eyes will be opened and we will begin to see as Christ sees.  We also can be transfigured.

It has been said that the transfiguration “means breaking boundaries. It means contemplating how good the Lord is, how wide his horizons are, and how deep the demands of his Gospel are.”  May each one of us be a little more transfigured during this extraordinary time lived in an ordinary season.