Third Sunday of Advent

Philippians 4:4-7 / John 1:19-28

What sayest thou of thyself?

When we want someone to take responsibility, when when we want someone to account for what he is doing, and most especially when what he is doing is not merely out of the ordinary, but seems quite clearly out of bounds or unwarranted, we are accustomed a pointed question: Who do you think you are? Or, perhaps, less direct, but no less pointedly, we ask, What do you have to say for yourself? The idea here is that we take self-definition, self-understanding to be crucial. Who we think we are, what we have to say about ourselves, we hold to be central to assessing whether what we do and how we live is warranted. Consciously or not, we intuit the scholastic dictum agere sequitur esse: action follows being. We intuit, that is, that what things or persons do flows from who or what they are. Since it seems unproblematic that who we think we are is, if not the basis of, then at least central to the kind of person we actually are, then the question is obvious. In the face of puzzling behavior, what better query than, Who do you think you are? What do you have to say for yourself?

It is just this intuition that seems to animate the priests and Levites sent by the Jews of Jerusalem to interrogate John the Baptist.  Confronted by his baptisms, and more centrally his preaching of repentance, and even more attending to the large numbers of people heeding his words, they wanted to know just what warrant he thought himself to have to speak and act as he did. Who art thou? they ask. John, however, does not accept their line of questioning. In the face of their repeated request for a positive answer, for saying something of himself, John issues a series of denials: I am not the Christ or I am not. Pressed to the point, pressed to account for himself, that is pressed to speak his own words on his own behalf, John persists in his refusal. He does, to be sure, make a positive claim about his identity: I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness: Make straight the way of the Lord, as said the Prophet Isaias.

Even here, even when John is willing to confess who he understands himself to be, by what warrant he baptizes and preaches, he steadfastly refuses to say anything of himself. His words, the words that disclose who he is, are not his own. They are the words of the prophet Isaiah, which is of course to say, that they are the words of God. It is God, and God alone, whom John allows to define him, to give an account for what he is doing. It is God, and God alone, who authorizes his baptizing and his preaching, for it is to prepare the way for God's coming, and for this purpose alone, that he has been sent. He does not identify himself, he does not say anything of himself, not to be difficult, not as a display of passive aggression, but rather because anything he would say of himself would conceal, rather than reveal the truth. Who he is, as baptizer and preacher, who his is, as witness to the Incarnate Word and Lamb of God, is not of himself, not the product of his own decisions, but a gift, a grace. It is not what he says of himself, but what God says of him through the prophet Isaiah, that constitutes him, that makes John who he is, not merely in his natural self, but all the more as called to eternal life with God himself.

What is true of the Baptist is no less true of those who are baptized in water and the Spirit. We are who we are in Jesus Christ, not because we have made it so. We share in the life of faith not as the product of our own efforts, our own self-definition. Rather, our new life in Christ, our being called to share in the peace of God, which surpasseth all understanding, is a calling, not an accomplishment. To the query Who art thou?, each of us might have a quite different answer to give, but in this we share a common reply with John the Baptist. It is what God has made of us, who God has called us to be, that makes us to be who we are. This is the source of our rejoicing, this is our motive to cast aside all worrying as though our worries and troubles have the final say. We are who who are, and we say of ourselves, simply that we are Christian, and keep our minds and hearts neither on ourselves nor on our troubles, but in the only source of hope and joy and rejoicing, in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Second Sunday of Advent

Romans 15:4-13 / Matthew 11:2-10

What is it that Jesus Christ came into the world to reveal? We might quite easily answer that he came to reveal God, and God's will for man, and this would surely be correct. The Scriptures, St. Paul tells us, were written for our teaching so that we might have hope. And why hope? That we might with one mind and with one heart we may glorify God and the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ. When John the Baptist sent two of his disciples to Jesus, it was precisely that he might know who Jesus was, to be certain whether Jesus is in fact the one who is to come, the promised Messiah, or whether he needed to look for another. That is, he looked to Jesus to know just who Jesus is, to find in him, or not, a clear revelation of the saving will of God.

Yet, we find something curious about Jesus' reply. To be sure, Jesus answers John's question. He directs John's disciples to consider what they have seen and heard: the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead rise again, to poor have the gospel preached to them. The signs are clear and unambiguous, at least for those who already trusted in the words God spoke through his prophets. However, at this point, Jesus turns the question around. He asks the crowd what they looked for in going out to see the John the Baptist. He notes that they cannot have gone to see anything other than one whom they took to be a prophet. Here is where the interesting turn happens. If Jesus is the one whom the signs prove him to be, that is, knowing Jesus to be the promised Christ, then who does this mean that John the Baptist is? He cannot be a mere prophet, as Jesus notes, but more than a prophet, the one of whom it is written: Behold I send my angel before thy face, who shall prepare thy way before thee.

A similar turn happens in Paul's letter to the Romans. Noting that for the Jews, the circumcision in Paul's language, the merciful revelation in Jesus Christ is a reaffirmation of the promises they already held, a reassertion if in a fuller way of a God whom they already knew. Yet, for the Gentiles, the revelation in Christ reveals who they are as well. In Jesus, we find that the Gentiles are, as much as the Jews, part of God's plan all along, that the saving mission for the promised one of Israel is, at the same time, the one in whom the Gentiles shall hope. Despite all appearances, the Gentiles, no less than the Jews, occupy a crucial place in the total plan of God's saving work.

What this suggests is that, in coming to know and confess who God really is, in coming to know God in the Incarnate Word, in Jesus Christ, and in knowing his saving plan for us, we at the same time come to a revelation of ourselves. In seeing who Christ is for us, we see at the same moment who we are meant to be for him, how we have played and continue to play a role in his saving work. This is why Advent is part of why Advent is a time of penance, a time of transformation. Advent summons us to abandon our false selves, to let go of the persons we thought ourselves to be. Advent invites us to enter in hope and joy into the identities God has revealed for us in his merciful coming, whom God has made known in the cave at Bethlehem, on the Cross at Golgotha, in the empty Tomb, and will make known for all to see in his glorious return.

Saint Nicholas, Bishop and Confessor

Hebrews 13:7-17 / Matthew 25:14-23

There is a hiddenness that is commendable. This is the hiddenness we find in the famous story of St. Nicholas and his liberation of the young women from a life of sexual servitude. In putting the money at the window, or down the chimney, and, as some legends say, into the stockings hung up to dry, while himself endeavoring to remain unseen, unknown, unacknowledged, Nicholas acted rightly. His acts of charity, even as ours, while meant to bind us more deeply to our neighbor, ought even more to direct both us and them to the very source of that charity, to the Lord Jesus Christ, who suffered for us on the Cross with ineffable charity that he might sanctify the people by his own blood. It is this same hiddenness that animates those secret, latter-day helpers of St. Nicholas by filling stockings and shoes across the world with candy, fruit, and presents, that those who receive might be directed not to the earthly minister of these kindly gifts, but to the joy and to him who is the author of all joy.

There is another hiddenness that is altogether detestable. This is the hiddenness we find in another story about St. Nicholas, in which the wonder-working bishop, stopping by an inn while on a journey, discerns by supernatural insight that the meat he would be served by the innkeepers is in fact the flesh of three boys, slain by the innkeepers, their bodies picked in a barrel and meant to be provided as food for the guests. This is the hiddenness inherent in all wickedness, the hiddenness that perfers the obscurity of darkness over the manifest glory of the noon-day sun. This is the hiddenness that seeks to plunge not only itself, but all the world, into and unending and unrelenting night of terror rather than turn from its self-inflicted horror and be saved. This is the hiddenness that even today prowls the world, snatching the innocent and helpless, the poor and lonely, and most especially children and the elderly, as its preferred victims. This is, of course, also the hiddenness that cannot escape the penetrating and luminous gaze of the Father of lights, nor the gaze of those filled with his light and truth.

Yet there is another hiddenness which, if less obviously detestable, is nonetheless no better in the long run. This is the hiddenness of those who would shrink back from hope, the hiddenness of the talent placed in the hole dug in the earth by the fearful servant. It is not that the servant did anything positively horrible, but all the same his action, or better yet his inaction, proved ultimately fatal. Why? In seeking to preserve the little he had been given, in acting out of fear rather than hope, in seeing the demand of his master not as the promised assurance of one with confidence in abundant success, but rather a veiled threat of certain failure, the servant prevented himself from entering into the joy of his lord. Said differently, if we do not dare to hope, dare to act in confidence that what God has given us, however little, will and must be abundant in grace, then we have made ourselves to be the kind of people that cannot, that will not be able to enjoy an eternity with God, who have refused to take sure and certain hope in the life-giving power of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Saint Francis Xavier, S.J.

Romans 10:10-18 / Mark 16:15-18

...they shall take up serpents; and if they shall drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them...

The missionary journeys of St. Francis Xavier are famous, inspiring, fantastic and, for many, a little too much to believe. Could any one man really convert so many thousands of people, thirty thousand by some estimates? Or, if he brought that number to the font, can we really believe they knew anything of the Christian faith?

It's easy enough to dismiss such numbers as incredible, when we might find it hard to convince even one friend to join us for one week at Mass, much less tens of thousands to come to Christ in baptism, thousands who did not even speak the same language as the one making the appeal. We might be tempted to think this is pious exaggeration, a way of insisting on his heroic sanctity through an inflation of the actual numbers. Although, even then, are we more likely to follow this heroic missionary if we knew the numbers he converted were more "reasonable"? How much fewer did he need to call to faith for us to believe such a thing is even possible? Or, how many need there be, at which point we might imagine that mission for Christ is worth the effort? Had he brought only one person to Jesus Christ, would we then be more willing to share the faith?

If we doubt the witness of Francis Xavier, how much more we must doubt the promises of Jesus Christ to his disciples when he sent them out to the whole world to preach and baptize. If we can lead ourselves to accept the casting out devils, and just might squint at the speaking in tongues to be less outright miracle and more divinely-inspired language training, we are more likely to pause at the claims which follow: snake-handling, immunity to poisons, healing by the laying on of hands.

While it is true that we have no right to expect any specific miraculous intervention in our giving witness to Christ—as the life of St. Paul himself could easily attest—it is just as spiritually dangerous to live as though we cannot hope in doing great things, indeed superhuman, miraculous things, in the service of the Gospel. The promises of Jesus Christ are not to be trifled with, they are not to be dismissed with the condescending wave of our hand. Rather, we might well ask ourselves whether we even believe God might do such things. If not, we might well wonder why we have cast our lot with the man who was born of a Virgin, who healed the sick, who was raised from the dead and ascended into heaven. That is, if we do not live and act not merely as though Jesus could intervene on behalf of the Good News in dramatic ways, but really and truly believing that he might, might this not explain, at least in part, the paltry show we can give of those who have been brought to Christ by our witness?

Advent is a season of hope, a season of renewed confidence in God, who brings light where there was gloom, abundant food where there was want, joy in place of sorrow, life in the shadow of death. Shall we not, this Advent, renew our faith in God who has, still does, and ever will work mighty deeds?

St. Bibiana, Virgin and Martyr

Ecclesiasticus 51:13-17 / Matthew 13:44-52

The Kingdom of heaven is like unto a treasure hidden in a field.

We don't know much for certain of the life of St. Bibiana. Skeptics suggest that everything told of her life was merely concocted to account for the presence of the church now bearing her name in the city of Rome, and etiological myth. Those less cynical must nonetheless admit that our knowledge of the details of her life and martyrdom are, at best, less than certain. One thing that we are assured, however, is that St. Bibiana, like many martyrs before and after her, experienced joy during her martyrdom. First punished with the deprivation of food, then alternately seduced and beaten by a cruel woman, and then finally tied to a column and whipped with scourges tipped with lead, Bibiana yet remained joyful.

Some may worry that these stories of joyful martyrs are cruel, even dangerous. On this worry, they suggest that we should not be moved by the real suffering, indeed the real acts of torture, that continue to be perpetrated before us and in our name. The worry is that, in telling the stories of martyrs joyful in their martyrdom, we become calloused against the brutality—physical, psychological, spiritual—of abuse, comforting ourselves in the thought that it can't really be so terrible, if it would be possible, with enough faith, to endure it with joy.

But, this worry is mistaken, and for two reasons. The first reason is that the joy of the martyrs in their martyrdom is known and accepted to be exceptional, a special grace like the working of miracles. When Jesus Christ himself endured great agony, pain so intense that his sweat came from his body like drops of blood merely in anticipation of his Passion, long before a single hand had touched his sacred and innocent body, we can be under no illusion that we are guaranteed to be spared terrible pains, should they be directed our way. We can hardly expect that a Christian death ought to expect, in the norm, to be exempt from the example of Christ.

The second reason is that the joy of the martyrs in their martyrdom is meant to be a sign of hope. This is not the hope of a kind of spiritual anæsthesia that numbs us against the pains of the world. Rather, it is the hope of a sure and certain knowledge of the presence of God in the lives of the faithful, not merely generically or remotely, but deeply, intimately, like a treasure hidden in a field, a treasure so great that, against all reasonable expectations of those who do not know its value or even its presence, one would sell all she has to obtain it, even when, to outward appearance, the exchange is without sense—a fortune for a seemingly empty field. In the joy of the martyrs, we are awakened to the hope that in our sufferings, which are certain to come, we are not alone. Rather, the one whom we love most, the one who loves us more than we can ever know or tell, is with us in the midst of our sufferings. Indeed, what we want above all in our every searching for happiness, that is God himself, is already present in and to those who love him, not less but even more so in their suffering.

This is why the pains of martyrdom cannot annul joy. This is why Advent can be, and ought to be, penitential and joyful all at once. We must awake ourselves and the world to the joyful news that he who has come, and will come again, is already here in our midst. He has come, and will come, and for those who have received him in faith and love, in already and abidingly present with us. When he whom we love above all things, when he who has loved us with a love beyond all telling from before the foundation of the world, is with us, what pain would not be transformed into joy? What sorrow would not be swallowed up in hope?

Blessed John of Vercelli, O.P.

Much will be asked of us in the Christian life. Much was asked of Bl. John of Vercelli. From his studies in theology and canon law, John would come to be asked by the Order of Preachers to take up the mantle of leadership, first as prior of the priory in Bologna, then as prior provincial of the province of Lombardy, and finally as Master of the Order, a post he held for nearly twenty years until his death. His gifts as a leader, whose humble witness in visiting the friars across Europe, traveling by foot, caught the eye of the pope, who would come to ask him first to direct the Order to assist in bringing peace to the warring states of Italy, then to serve in the ecumenical council of Lyons and seek the union of the Greek Church in the East with the Latin Church in the West, and then to promote in the Church devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus, all of which he did willingly.

Towards the end of his life, John was once again asked to take up an important task, this time the office of Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, but this title he refused. We might well assume that John had finally had enough, that he was no longer willing to do new and difficult work in the Church. To be fair, there may be something to this. No one can responsibly receive every task or mission he is offered. It is untrue to his own limits and, in the end, unfair as well to the one who asks, who needs someone who can give his full effort to the work at hand.

Even so, there is perhaps more in this late refusal by one who had made himself so much at the disposal of the Order and the Church. We might think that making oneself open to the needs of others is a zero sum game, that we have a finite resource which we must divide between ourselves, others, and God, and our task is seeking to find some kind of balance. However, this view, reasonable as it seems, is mistaken. Our task, which is also, or ought to be our joy, is to give ourselves entirely and without reserve to God. It is in that unhesitating self-donation to Jesus Christ, and only there, that we will find what truly gives us life, what truly opens us up to what best fulfills our time on this earth. More than that, it is only in a life of prayer to the Lord that we will have the true wisdom to see when our service to others flows from the life we have with God, and when it flows from something else: our pride, our delusions of omnicompetence, our need to feel wanted or useful, our fear of being misunderstood in refusing, or many other reasons. When we do not become prompt to see the signs of the Spirit active in the world and in our hearts, we can just as easily refuse a task that would have made us more like Jesus Christ, or take on a task that uselessly burdens our hearts.

In Advent, we are called once again to see the signs in the world, to read what seem to many to be calamities, what might well cause the hearts of others to draw back in fear. We, however, are asked to hold our heads erect, not to be bowed down by what is being asked of us by God. We are called, as was John of Vercelli, to see those signs not as unfamiliar and terrifying, but as the clear and comforting language of a God whom we have come to know well in our daily, humble, and open prayer.

First Sunday of Advent

Romans 13:11-14 / Luke 21:25-33

It's very early in the morning, and we see someone in the street who strikes us as risible at best, pathetic more likely, shameful at worst. She is a woman who is still, or yet once again, in her evening gown, a man in his once neatly-pressed nighttime finery, now rumpled, uneven, untucked. Even should we laugh, we do so because such a person is not so much in the wrong place as at the wrong time. The night is passed and the day is at hand. The moments before the dawn are the time to rise, the time to prepare for a new day, the time to let whatever mischief might have tempted us in the hours of darkness be be left definitively in the past.

However, we might be tempted to think that it is we who believe in the Gospel who are the risible, the pathetic, or the shameful, behaving in a manner entirely out of step with the time. In the face of the material and technical success of modern science, do we not seem like the woman in heels, the man in his tuxedo at the dawning of the day, dressed in what may have once impressed, may indeed have once been appropriate to the moment, but now an embarrassment to ourselves and to those around us? Can we still speak of sin, of redemption, of Virgin Birth and Empty Tomb and not appear to have refused what the modern world can offer?

Likewise, and perhaps more tellingly, can we speak of God's love, of his victory over sin and death, while the faithful have their heads removed, systematically and mercilessly, uploaded to the internet for all to see, the world and the Church powerless to stop it? When news reports speak of not dozens, not hundreds, but over ten thousand persons bound in slavery in the United Kingdom alone, much less across the world, can we speak without seeming hopelessly, even dangerously naive, in proclaiming the Good News of our deliverance from slavery by the merciful coming of our Lord Jesus Christ?

Yet, what God reminds us today in the Scriptures is that it is not we, but the world, that is out of step, dressed to the nines when it ought to be getting ready for a new day. Where the world would invite us to join in with its rioting and drunkenness, its chambering and impurities, its contention and envy, we insist on a more temperate life, we choose to walk honestly, as in the day. We do so not because we are killjoys, or not because we want to stand as countercultural symbols against the time. No, we do so because the night is passed and the day is at hand. We do so because to behave otherwise is to share in the ignorance of the world, a world which thinks the dawning of the light is not real, a world which prefers to keep its eyes closed rather than to see what time it really is, the time of the Lord's coming.

By the same truth, we are therefore, or should be, able to remain calm, even confident in the face of the distress of nations that otherwise finds men withering away for fear and expectation of what shall come upon the whole world. It is not that we are unmoved by the plight of the victims of hatred and injustice. Rather, we know that these disturbances, this confusion of the roaring of the sea and of the waves, does not herald a final collapse of all that it good and true. It is not an indication that the old counsels of meekness, peace, piety, and patience must yield to the cold, hard reality of a cruel and unfeeling world which only gets worse, not better. No, even while doing what we can, even urgently, to meet the troubles of the day, we can and must look up and lift up our heads, because our redemption is at hand. We know, even if the world in its confusion and fear does not, that we draw closer not to catastrophe, but to God's eucatastrophe, to the in one way unexpected yet nonetheless foretold overturning of things that leads not to a final defeat, but to a wonderful and irreversible redemption.

This is why Advent, for all its rightful penance, is always ready to burst out into rejoicing. We know what time it is. We know that the arrival of invincible and unassailable joy is right around the corner, and we know what it takes to share in that joy. Let us, then, put aside our evening finery. Let us cease trying to impress a world whose clock has long ago ceased to tell the right time. Let us rather get dressed for the new and everlasting day, and put on the Lord Jesus Christ.

Monday of the 1st Week of Lent

Leviticus 19:1-2, 11-18 / Matthew 25:31-46

You shall not curse the deaf.

In the list of commands given by the Lord to the people of Israel in Leviticus 19, the command not to curse the deaf stands out. It is not, of course, that we imagine cursing the deaf to be a good thing to do, and so find ourselves shocked that God disapproves. Rather, it might not seem as obvious why cursing the deaf is especially a bad thing to do. After all, as opposed to cursing those who can hear, in cursing the deaf, the object of our malediction may well not know he has been cursed at all. If he should not hear about it, literally or figuratively, then where precisely is the harm in my speaking ill of him. For that matter, if I should speak ill of anyone in such a way that they do not hear about it, how can I be said to have harmed them?

Despite what we might imagine at first glance, there is in fact real and grave harm in speaking ill of another without his knowledge. In part, the harm is done to the person's good name. We are, after all, social creatures, made by God to thrive not each on our own in an isolated way, but in relation with others. When we speak ill of another person, even if what we say should be true, and even if he should never hear of it, we do real harm in how other people, or at the very least how we ourselves, see him. In cursing, which is to say, in speak ill, we make it more difficult for him, and depending on what we have said, we may even make it impossible for him to have those ordinary and general, as well as those particular and intimate connections with other persons, without which real human living cannot be had.

More than that, secretly speaking ill of another does real harm to the one who curses. Our standard, as God reminds his people Israel through Moses, is not to be harmless, but to be holy. So long as we think we can speak ill of others, even to think ill of them, only on the condition that it remains a secret, then we remain far from the holiness of God, which holiness is both our measure and our goal.

As we begin our Lent, we must attend not only to our public selves and the visible harm of our external acts, but perhaps even more we need to be attentive to the part of us which is too willing to curse the deaf. Let us, instead of gossip and detraction, submit our weakness in hope to the one who does not curse us in our deafness, but rather blesses us with his mercy, the Holy One, our Lord Jesus Christ.

First Sunday of Lent (A)

Genesis 2:7-9; 3:1-7 / Romans 5:12-19 / Matthew 4:1-11

We have, since Lent began only a few days ago, no doubt heard much about those three foundations of our Lenten discipline, namely, fasting, prayer, and almsgiving. There is, to be sure, good reason to have reminded ourselves of these indispensable means of turning back to God, of setting ourselves on the path to righteousness and the joy of the empty Tomb. Moreover, so clear are these themes in the early days of our Lenten reading that we can find them without too much difficulty even in those selections from the Scriptures set before us today. Might we not see in Jesus' powerful and decisive refusals of his temptations after the forty days in the desert an affirmation of these foundations? In Jesus' reminder that man does not live by bread alone, uttered even in his own hunger, do we not hear and discover the true meaning of fasting? In his refusal to put God to the test, are we not given important directives about the kind of prayer pleasing to God? In his clear rejection of having the world meet his needs and desires by his service to the Devil, does not Jesus turn this on its head, committing himself to serve God alone through meeting the needs and hopes of the world, and so outline for us the right inspiration of almsgiving?

In contrast, we can also see in Eve's first sin in the Garden an image of what we repeat daily in our own sinful lives precisely by failing to submit to the triple discipline of Lent. When Eve listened to the words of the serpent, rather than the clear words of the Lord, that warning she herself had just repeated, she set out precisely the life of a soul which fails to pray. When she gazed upon the fruit and attended to its goodness, and so neglected what she knew, recognizing only that it was good for food, and pleasing both to the eyes and for wisdom, she played out for us the turning away from good in a life which has never fasted. When she offered the fruit to her husband Adam, and when he took what she ought never to have offered, they enacted the very kind of illicit exchange, promoting and indulging false and imagined needs, which makes a mockery of the true generosity that is the soul of almsgiving.

All of this is quite true, but it misses something crucial, another deep and important truth set before us as we begin our Lent. What this retelling misses is precisely the fact that the proper context of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving involves not merely us and God, but a third and by no means disinterested party. Said plainly, we have forgotten the Devil. It can perhaps be assuring to imagine that our faults and cravings, our weaknesses and the desires of our heart, are our affair alone. It can perhaps even be soothing for the repentant sinner with a blackened soul to think that the path before him to God, while doubtlessly hard and long, is straight and clear. The truth, however, is quite different. The truth is that there exists someone who has committed the whole of his life to undoing the work of God, someone unimaginably more powerful, more intelligent, more cunning than we are, and who has at his disposal countless legions of similarly minded spirits who tirelessly seek our undoing.

In reminding us of the Devil at the beginning of Lent, the Church wants us to attend to two important truths. The first is that Lent is not merely an annual project of moral improvement. That is, Lent does not merely call upon us one more time to try to acquire good or better habits while pruning away bad or unhelpful ones. Lent is not a gymnasium, a spa, or a sanitarium. Lent, we are reminded, is a military exercise on a battlefield. Our disciplines, however peaceful they are and must be on the physical plane, however much they call from us not less but greater acts of charity to our neighbor, are nonetheless weapons of war, the spiritual armaments that we need to be equipped against our murderous foe, the Evil One, the Devil.

At the same time, we are reminded of the Devil precisely to remind us of what he cannot do. The Devil is not the all-powerful Lord of Evil, the dark parallel of God. He is a creature with limits. More than that, while the Devil and his angels may be our foes in battle, they are the enemy forces in a ware that they have already lost. Already in Jesus' temptation in the desert, we are meant to see not the Devil's power, but his impotence against the Victor, who is also our Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ. By the Cross and the power of his Blood, Jesus has definitively broken the power of Hell, and it has no power to prevail over those whom Jesus has claimed as his own. As Paul reminds us in the Epistle to the Romans, it was by man's work, by the collusion of Adam and Eve with the temptations of the serpent, that death and sin entered the world. Even before his defeat by Christ, our first parents had what they needed to repel our ancient Foe. Now that we have Jesus Christ as our Head, we are not less, but better equipped to put to flight the Devil and his angels.

This is why we ought not to fear the Devil as though he can undo the work of God, even while we must be attentive to the fact that, until he is finally and unequivocally bound in the Final Judgment, we will have to contend with him. The example of Eve's failure is meant to recall for us that, even in a condition of grace, we ought not be inattentive to the gifts of God, and so become easy prey for the Devil. However, our Gospel, our Good News, is that the work of Christ in the desert, indeed the whole of his saving work, remind us that the Devil not only does not have the final say, but we also can drive him off even at his first promptings. We have, as our companion none other than Jesus Christ, the very Son of God, and as our Advocate the Holy Spirit. With God himself dwelling within us and striving for us, without any foolhardiness concerning the malice of our Enemy, how much more joy and hope we ought to know this Lent in the love and goodwill of our Friend.

Thursday after Ash Wednesday

Deuteronomy 30:15-20 / Luke 9:22-25

Dethe spareth not low ne hye degre
Popes kynges ne worthi Emperowrs
When thei schyne moste in felicite
He can abate the fresshnes of her flowres
Ther briʒt sune clipsen with hys showres
Make hem plownge from theire sees lowe
Maugre the myght of al these conquerowres
Fortune hath hem from her whele ythrowe.

 On any reasonable view of the world, loss is inevitable. Physicists assure us that entropy, to move from order to chaos, from dynamic energy to stasis, is the unavoidable future of the cosmos. Our own experience in life, so poignantly if shockingly portrayed in Medieval renderings of the Dance of Death, reminds us that nothing, however good, lasts forever, and that mortality is the great equalizer. At the end of every life, whether lived long or short, poorly or well, befriended or alone, the is the inexorable coming of death.

We might like to think that the spiritual life proves an exception to this rule. In a crucial way, of course, it does. We are confident with blessed assurance that in Jesus Christ there is new and eternal life, that in him and through the shedding of his blood on the Cross, his rising from the Tomb, and his ascension into glory, we can come to know a life without loss. This promise is at the heart of the Gospel, that life in Jesus Christ just is a sharing in God's own inexhaustible life, a light which never dims and admits no shadow, an unconquerable joy.

Even so, our coming to this life is no less marked by loss than anything else in the world. As Jesus reminds us: Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. We do not do well to focus so much on the final words, that we will save our lives, if in doing so we become vulnerable to confusion and despair what the loss assured by Jesus comes our way. What the Gospel tells us, what Jesus wanted his disciples to see by foretelling his suffering, his rejection and betrayal, and his being put to death, and then in his invitation that they, and we, should take up our crosses, was that the loss rooted in the world is not merely present in the way to God, but is indeed at its heart.

The difference, however, is that Jesus wants us to see that we can, in a significant way, dictate the very terms of that loss. We will be crucified, but it can be we ourselves who, like Jesus, choose to pick up the cross in freedom and love, rather than have it imposed on us. We will be denied, but it can be we ourselves who, like Jesus, knowingly and with forgiveness and mercy, choose to deny ourselves, rather than face a denial that will inevitably come from others. In short, the question is not whether or not there will be loss. The question is whether or not we will claim that loss as our own, and by embracing it in freedom, in generosity, and in mercy, find that we have lost nothing that we have not had returned to us, that we have, in losing, gained the deepest desire of our heart.

Ash Wednesday

Joel 2:12-18 / 2 Corinthians 5:20 - 6:2 / Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18

We might be excused for associating the discipline of Lent with exhibiting a lack of self-worth. After all, we are, right at the very beginning, with the imposition of ashes, likely to hear the words: Remember you are dust, and unto dust you shall return. Today, and throughout the season, the word that jumps out repeatedly is Repent. And, even in our first fervor to embrace some spiritual practice to assist our sanctification, we discover all too quickly, sometimes even before the week is out, the extent of our weakness and the intensity of our cravings.

However, the Church places before us today not a message of gloom, but the joyous announcement of our great honor: We are ambassadors for Christ. Now, an ambassador has no glory or honor of his own. It is certainly true that an ambassador does not speak from his own authority, nor does his pursue his own agenda. Rather his authority and his agenda come from the king who sent him.

Even so, an ambassador is not a mere messenger. He acts not simply to convey a message, but with the great authority and status which have been conferred upon him. He can, both in the days of St Paul and in the present, meet personally with princes, kings, and heads of state, no matter what the condition of his birth because, as an ambassador, he shares in the authority and status of the one in whose name he acts.

More than that, the ambassador acts not automatically, not in the mode of a recorded message, nor as the mere mouthpiece of another. Rather, he is intended to draw upon his own freedom and to use to the full his own gifts and creativity in advancing the cause of his king and country. He does not choose the message, but he is free to, indeed he is both expected and obliged to make known that message as he best sees fit, as his own talents and insights provide and allow.

This is why we take on once again the discipline of Lent. It is not as though we are trying to chastise an unworthy self. Instead, we seek better to accomplish our noble and exalted task as ambassadors for Christ, announcing to the world the will, the saving and redeeming will, of God our King. So, we pray, that we might better know Christ's will, by whose authority we speak and act. We fast, that we might better pursue not our own purposes, but those of him who sent us. We give alms, that others may better know through our very personal, individual, creatively free responses to the forgiveness that we have received in the Gospel, the reconciliation offered to the whole world in Christ Jesus our Lord.