Sexagesima Sunday

2 Corinthians 11:19-12:9 / Luke 8:4-15

I imagine that there is a time in the life of every child, at least every boy in the United States of America, at which he wishes he had super powers. Reared on the comic books, movies, and games directed his way, he delights in the thought that at some time, maybe soon, maybe right around the corner, he will discover that he has abilities far beyond those of mortal men. He will learn that his anxieties, his awkwardness, his seeming powerlessness in the face of those who would abuse him, comes only from the fact that he is different from his peers, and that through unseen and unappreciated excellence. If only one day, one day soon, he could finally fly through the air, see through walls, move objects with his mind, lift trucks with his bear hands, and repel buffets and blows as a steel wall repels the onslaught of a rubber ball — then he will be able to set things right, then his suffering, his being done to by the less than tender mercy of others, will be put to an end.

St Paul in his own way appears to harbor just such a vision of himself. Acknowledging the longsuffering endurance of the Christians of Corinth, he rhetorically thumbs his nose at those who would puff themselves up at his or his flock's expense. He is, he reminds them, just as qualified as those who were undermining the preaching of the apostles. He, too, is a Hebrew, a son of Abraham. They may be ministers of Christ, but he is far more than they are. He has suffered more for the Gospel, endured more at the hands of the enemies of the Good News, fell victim to the winds and storms of the sea in its service, and still be more fruitful in his apostolate than any other. More than that, he has a secret. If not a super power, he nonetheless has heard secret words that man may not repeat. He may not fly through the sky, but he has been caught up to the third heaven.

Yet, for all of that, Paul chooses to glory in his infirmities. It is not for his chosen lineage, nor his ministry, nor his suffering for that ministry in patience, nor even his hearing the secret counsels of heaven, that Paul will glory, but rather for the thorn for the flesh, a messenger of Satan, that was given to him. It is as though Superman rejoiced in kryptonite, Green Lantern in the color yellow. He glories in what makes his task harder, what may even prevent him from accomplishing what he hopes to accomplish in the service of Jesus Christ. This, his infirmity is his glory, because, as the Lord told him: My grace is sufficient for you, for strength is made perfect in weakness.

Do we trust our infirmities? When we cannot keep our attention on our work at hand, and so struggle to accomplish what we have set out to do, do we thank God? When our resources seem stretched beyond our needs, and it is then that we find the pressing call to spend — for the baby unexpected and newly conceived, for the new priory to house the brethren, for food and shelter for an island nation broken by the fragile fault lines of the world — do we rejoice there in God's bounty? Perhaps not, but Paul has directed us precisely to do so. As tempting as our childhood dreams of super powers, of the native or infused capacity to do what needs to be done, God has other things in mind. He wants to accomplish his will not through our ease, but through our difficulty, not in light of our abundance, but in light of our paucity. He wants the world to see in him what was the source of all of its plenty to begin with, in him the very root of the wealth and power it had foolishly imagined to be its own.

This week, the Church has turned us to make as our prayer an appeal to turn away from the desire to accomplish by native or donated powers what we ought to seek rather to come from God and his saints, to our joy and their glory. Today, let us make that prayer our own:

O God, you see that we do not trust in anything that we do of ourselves; mercifully grant that by the protection of the Doctor of the Gentiles we may be defended against all adversities.

The Presentation of the Lord

Malachi 3:1-4 / Luke 2:22-32

No one from the English-speaking world with anything of an ear for music can hear the lessons for today's Mass and fail to hear them set in his own native tongue. Can one attend to the words of the prophet Malachi and not hear the melodies of George Frederick Handel in one's head? If less known among the Catholic faithful, will those musically sensitive not have a favorite setting of Simeon's canticle, the Nunc dimittis, from that most melodious of Gospels which brings us so many of the Church's songs — the Ave Maria, the Gloria in excelsis, the Benedictus, and the Magnificat?

Septuagesima Sunday

1 Corinthians 9:24 - 10:5 / Matthew 20:1-16

You can see them on the streets of La Paz, Bolivia, all lined up with the tools of their trade, waiting expectantly in the crisp, cold air of the early morning. You can see them, too, at carefully regulated centers and less than regulated convenience store parking lots of Arlington, Virginia. They are plumbers, carpenters, electricians. They will dig, prune, and plant. They will work for whatever seems fair or less than fair. They are the day laborers.

True, some may work only long enough to get by and spend their wages without a thought for tomorrow. But most of them toil for themselves and a family besides, perhaps sending money far away to feed a wife and children, often laboring under the cloud of a less than certain legal status. Their work is hard, but work they must, and this too many of their employers know too well. Some are fair, some are just, some are generous. Too often, far too often, they are not. They reach out the promise of a full day's pay for a full day of work. Go you also into the vineyard, and I will give you whatever is just. With the setting of the sun, what come to their hands and into their pocket is, with alarming regularity, far less than what is just.

How disconcerting, then, to read about the paterfamilias in the Gospel today whose wage scale would hardly pass legal muster. True, he is altogether generous with those who worked from the eleventh hour, those who received the full day's wage for an hour's work. And those who toiled the whole day through? Those who have borne the burden of the day's heat? Sure enough, they received precisely what they were promised. Yet, do we not feel for them, that a man so generous with those who have been left idle all day because no man had hired them could not also show that same generosity by enlarging those who had done their work from the very first hour?

Paul, after all, in the Epistle to the Corinthians might seem to be on their side! Run the race as though one only were to receive the crown, he tells us. Subject the body to toil and labor so as not to lose the reward. Work in the way of righteousness matters. Even with a full share in the spiritual blessings poured out upon the people of Israel in their Exodus from Egypt, and so also Paul reminds us even for those of the Christian faith who share those same spiritual blessings in Baptism and the Eucharist, with most of them God was not well pleased. Work hard, he tells us, and do not be idle. Strive daily and be willing to endure much and forgo even more. God will reward those who run such a race.

We know, of course, that the paterfamilias has acted rightly, and we know that Paul does not contradict the Gospel. But why? Why on the one hand are we warned to work hard in the service of Christ so as to receive an imperishable crown and yet on the other hand told that whether we have worked long in God's service or been slipped in at the last hour, there is no distinction?

Whatever the deeper truths of this mystery, it may be helpful to be altogether certain in our indignation that we are among those working from the first or third hour, and not the eleventh. For all of our protests that we have labored long in the vineyard, are we so ready to place our record of love of God and neighbor to public scrutiny. Do we really wish to risk our wages of eternal life to a moral and spiritual audit, to see that denarius we were sure to receive slowly whittled away by every last inattentive prayer, every idle word or impatient grumbling, our sluggishness in coming to the aid of those who ask or our resentment when our contributions are less trumpeted than unacknowledged? Might we not rather breathe a sigh of relief that we who are all too likely part of that idle gang, loitering the street corners of life in the gloaming of the day, can still rejoice in a God so generous that his merciful bounty does not so much violate justice as wink at it in our favor?

The Conversion of St Paul

Acts 9:1-22 / Matthew 19:27-29

We are not altogether comfortable with the story of the conversion of St Paul. Indeed, we are decidedly of two minds about stories of conversion in general. On the one hand, we are very much fond of stories in which the persecutor has a change of heart, in which he is not defeated, but won over. To move from breathing threats of slaughter to having left all and followed the Way, becoming the most storied, respected, and influential witness to the Gospel — that is a story even unbelievers can appreciate. Even children not versed in the sacred Scriptures have heard the echo of Paul's conversion to Christ in the person of Dr Seuss' Grinch. It is a story we applaud, and with good reason.

We are no doubt all the more likely to find Paul's conversion hopeful in these recent and troubled times. The kind of zealot who delights to find any men or women belonging to the Way that he might bring them in bonds to Jerusalem is precisely the kind of religious believer most distasteful to us. We have seen and had enough of zeal which puts men and women in chains, which tears their very limbs apart with heartless calculation. To find someone happy to see the pain in those who belief is other than his own able, and by a short and radical turnabout, to become one of the very people he had despised — to hear this story and know it is true reminds us that, however grim the purveyors of credal and confessional violence may be, even they are not beyond the power of sovereign love to restore.

Yet, while we applaud the tale so far, its aftermath leaves the contemporary mind more than a tad disappointed. Were we to write the story, Paul would move from the position of intolerance and exclusivity rooted in violent oppression to tolerance and radical inclusion rooted in open dialogue and a solidarity grounded in diversity. However, that is not quite what we see. To be sure, the violence is gone. Whatever violence Paul comes to know in his following of Christ is only that which others inflict upon him, never what he brings upon others. Likewise, there is in the converted Paul a kind of radical inclusivity — without failing once to be a zealous lover of the Torah, Paul also becomes just as willing to identify, even to live, as a Gentile among the Gentiles. His boast is in the Cross of Christ, not the Torah, in the blood of Christ which draws the two so long apart into one, not in the Law that divides.

Even so, Paul's new mission as one converted is unambiguously one that seeks to convert. Paul does not merely share in his own personal encounter with Christ and declare how that encounter was true for him, exhorting others to find their own truths, their own encounters. No, Paul after his conversion is unequivocally partisan for Christ and his Gospel. The inclusion he preaches is not one that leaves others alone, free to imagine that God has a way to himself different for each people and each person, so that some may choose to come to him apart from his Incarnate Word. Rather, Paul's message is clear: Saul grew all the stronger and confounded the Jews who were living in Damascus, proving that this is the Christ.

Ultimately, the truth never excludes. We are, all of us, made to know and love the Truth. Even so, we can most certainly divide ourselves from what is true. To reject what is true, stubbornly to cling to what is wholly true as though it were the whole truth or true of the whole — this is the stance that divides. Yet, Christ is Truth, he is Truth Incarnate, and so there is no teaching so correct, no piety so laudable, no ethic so righteous that it can excuse the rejection of the Word made flesh. There are, then, many paths, many ways which lead us further and further from the Way, and whose travellers benefit not at all from their journeys. All the same, there is no path so perilous, no way so crooked, that Jesus Christ will not haste his way along it to meet his wayward sheep. That is the hope we have in the conversion of St Paul. That is the hope we have in the Way who is at once our Lord and our Friend, Jesus, who is the Christ promised from before all ages.

Christmas Day

Isaiah 52:6-10 / Hebrews 1:1-12 / John 1:1-14

God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, last of all in these days has spoken to us by His Son ...

Why do they gather at the manger, those shepherds of old? Curiosity, perhaps. A humble submission to the word of an angel? Most assuredly. Delight at the song of the heavenly hosts? Perhaps even that, too.

Why do they gather at the manger, those wise men from the East? Are they following their own holy books, seeking to find whole, pure, entire what they find there only in broken and partial ways, alloy of divine truth, the best of human hopes, and empty imaginings, both malevolent and benign? Undoubtedly. Might they also intuit that this star which guides them speaks a truth more than the stars in their cold, unchanging light can ever know, that perhaps the local, specific, even narrow revelation to the long-humbled people of Israel may hold a truth greater than the whole world could contain, now made even more miraculous by its coming in a little cave in Bethlehem? We may never know.

Why do they gather at the manger, those faithful at Church last evening, at midnight, at dawn, and during the day? Have they come with a long-stable and fervent faith, rejoicing in words they know too feeble to celebrate the Word made flesh? Quite certainly, for many this is so. To fulfill an old family custom, as much out of intertia and a worry that Christmas is not Christmas without a dollop of church on the side as of any remnants of lively faith? Because the beauty of the music, the majesty of the words, the poetry of the story itself, if not believed, is at least evocative of meaning, what truth ought to look, sound, even smell like, if only it were so? For these and countless other reasons.

Yet, come they do, and for that we ought not to shake our heads in dismay but instead rejoice in wonder. It should have been altogether easy for the people of promise to recognize his first coming, but He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not; He came to his own, and His own received Him not. He was received by many — the lowly and the powerful, shepherds and magi. He was worshiped by all, by the brute beasts and the awesome and terrifying bodiless hosts of heaven, and by the sons of earth as well, the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve whom he had come to save, whose kin he had become, whose lot he had chosen to share. It mattered little what brought them there. What mattered in the cave at Bethlehem was what would matter some thirty years later at another cave in which no one had been laid. What matters is that they saw and believed.

The world holds forth many reasons not to believe: pain, sorrow, a lack of confidence in prophecy or even that the prophets spoke of a future at all. Fine, then, we will speak another way. We will proclaim the Word made flesh with words old and new, and with no words at all. We will appeal to God's prophets to Israel, of course, but if these will not be heard, we will point to the providentially vatic words of those far from the faith. Si non suis vatibus, credat vel gentilibus; Sibyllinis versibus haec praedicta. "If not their own prophets, let them at least believe the Gentiles; in the sibylline verses these things were predicted." And if by the Sibyl, why not also in the Vedas or the stories passed on by elders and medicine men along the banks of the St Lawrence? Scruple not what brings them to the Christ child. Let them come, let them see and believe!

ET VERBUM CARO FACTUM EST, ET HABITAVIT IN NOBIS.

Third Sunday of Advent

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

A young man receives a gift from his mother. It's not much, just a few dollars. It comes, however, with a request, "Do something nice for yourself! I don't want to see this going for groceries or paper towels!" She means well. More than that, she is altogether in the right. She has heard in her son's voice of late a tension, an anxiety, a worry that things are not going as they should and that perhaps what he had hoped and dreamed would be his life may never come to pass. She knows her token will not dispel his difficulties or troubles. Even so, she knows that there is more to the world than his anxieties, and in the middle of his dark season, she sends a rosy message of hope: Rejoice!

Will he be able to receive her message of joy? It all depends. If he knows, or at least trusts that his darkness will come to an end, that is does not have the final say, that in fact he will never escape his anxieties so long as he lives in them utterly, so long as he will not refuse to bend his knee to fear and instead, even when it seems folly to do so, sets aside the troubles of his heart and indulges in joy — then his mother's gracious gift may well be received in good cheer and to good effect. But if he cannot, or will not see that there is any end to his worry, if he has no grounds for hope, then even the most delightful good news from the most loving of persons does not have a chance to be planted, much less thrive and bloom in his heart.

Our holy Mother, the Church, has given us a good message today. She has donned the color of rose and has called us, with the words of her Apostle Paul to rejoice in the Lord always. Can we hear her message? Does it seem real to us? Can we set aside our worries and anxieties? In the end, do we really, truly believe that our Lord's coming is certain and sure, and that he will not delay? Can we, in the midst of the very real gloom that may cloud our lives and darken our hearts, step out for a moment, set aside the very real and pressing cares that strive so mightily to hold our attention, and instead choose to rejoice in the Lord?

Second Sunday of Advent

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

Paul presents us with a bit of a puzzle today. First he reminds us of the inspired character of Scripture, and moreover that the Scriptures are fundamentally directed not to some person in the past only, but to us also: Whatever things have been written have been written for our instruction. The puzzle is what comes next. From the fact of the inspiration of the Scriptures and their being addressed to all believers, Paul makes what looks to us like a bit of a logical jump: May then the God of patience and of comfort grant you to be of one mind toward one another. How did we get from the doctrine of the inspiration of the Scriptures to ecclesial unity?

This is a puzzle for us especially who have been led to think of religious teaching, especially explicit doctrine with direct appeal to the revealed and inspired Word of God, to be divisive rather than unitive. The principle of etiquette is clear enough — at dinner parties, never speak of politics or religion. We worry that such talk will get tempers to flare, unkind things to be said, and little to no good will come of it. Unity, or at least unanimity, we suspect to require the absence of doctrine, of party, of loyalty. Hold what you will if you must. Indeed, the world is better for the variety of things held. But, whatever else you do, hold your tongue! Don't even suggest that you hold any view about which one could divide.

While this is a common enough worry, the readings today invite, require even, that we see things quite differently than this. To be sure, the worry of dinner party etiquette does get one thing quite right — a too narrow view of things, a too doctrinaire approach to life and to God's Word, will actually close our eyes to the crucial doctrine God means to give us. When the disciples of John came to Jesus, they needed to ask if he was the one, or whether they should look for another. Jesus invited them simply to recall what the Scriptures said and to judge based on what they had seen — Go and report to John what you have heard and seen: the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers and cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead rise, the poor have the gospel preached to them. The answer to their question is the the very place where the question itself arises, namely from an attentive concern to the whole of what God has revealed about his Anointed.

Jesus then does the same for the crowd, but this time about John. If Jesus was the one who was sent, then who was this captivating figure John, a preacher so powerful one might easily have thought him to be the one the Father had sent. This is he of whom it is written, 'Behold, I send my messenger before Your face, who shall make ready Your way before You.' If you would know who John the Baptist was, know all the Scriptures.

Paul, of course, must do the same with the Church in Rome. Does Paul's mission to the Gentiles mean that God has abandoned his people, or that Paul preaches another God than the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? No, for Christ Jesus has been a minister of the circumcision in order to show God's fidelity in confirming the promises made to our fathers. But does that mean that the Gentiles have a second place in God's heart? Not at all, for the Gentiles glorify God because of His mercy. Mercy and fidelity — both are from God, neither is known without the other. To see in the mercy to the Gentiles a rejection of Israel is to fail to hear God's Word. However, to speak of the faithfulness to Israel as though it alone mattered, or that it is independent of or anything other than the very work of Jesus Christ, that also is to fail to keep God's Word.

To be one, to be true to what God wants of us, and to find among ourselves true unity and oneness of mind means heeding the whole of the Scriptures. It means abandoning any strategy of reading that would leave out what is uncomfortable, whether the teaching seem too severe and restrictive or conversely whether the teaching appear too indulgent, too inclusive, too permissive. God is simple and one, and does not admit to parts. If we would have him, we cannot have him only partially. We must then receive, in all its richness, in all its fulness, ready to be surprised again and again by the riches it holds, the whole of the Bible and the whole of that Body to whom it is addressed. It is in our fidelity to the Word that we will have unity, that the God of hope will fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope and in the power of the Holy Spirit.