Jesus Gives “Life to the Full”

February 15, 2015

6th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Jesus Gives “Life to the Full”

I turn to you, Lord, in time of trouble, and you fill me with the joy of salvation.

Why do we come to Jesus? What are we looking for?

The leper said to him, “If you wish, you can make me clean.” Jesus answered, “I do will it. Be made clean,” and healed him. Why, then, did he say to him, “See that you tell no one anything”?

As usual, the Responsorial Psalm gives us the key to the readings: “I turn to you, Lord, in time of trouble, and you fill me with the joy of salvation.” We turn to Jesus in time of trouble, but we don’t always find the joy of salvation. It is because we are not asking Jesus for what he came to give.

We say with the Psalm, “Blessed is he whose fault is taken away,” and it is only half true. Cleansing us of sin is only the starting point of what Jesus came to do. He told the man he had healed, “See that you tell no one anything,” because he did not want to be known as just a healer. He tells us explicitly what he came to do: “I came that they might have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10).

But we don’t come to him for that. Almost every Christian in the word, Catholic as well as Protestant, was brought up on the very thing Jesus warned us against: “Beware of the yeast of the Pharisees,” by which he meant, not just the hypocrisy, but “the teaching of the Pharisees” (Matthew 16:12, Luke 12:1). And what was that?

The Pharisees were a reform movement in Israel. They pledged themselves, and urged others, to keep the law of God. That was good.

Their problem was, they made law-observance the focus of their teaching. Gradually they passed from teaching, “A good Jew keeps the Law,” which was true, to teaching, “Keeping the Law makes one a good Jew,” which was deeply and destructively false. Saint Paul fought against this “yeast of the Pharisees”—of those both in and out of the Church—until they killed him (see Galatians, chapter 5).

But this is the teaching we were brought up on. The focus of our catechetical instruction was on keeping the Commandments and doing all the things a “good Catholic” should do—like “going” to Mass and “receiving” the sacraments.

No: we were not taught how to live the Mass or how to make what we received in the sacraments a way of life. We were not taught the mystery of offering ourselves with and in Jesus during Eucharist. We were not taught that we ourselves are in the Host that is lifted up at Mass.

We were not even taught the meaning of the three words in the ritual of Baptism that constitute our “job  description” as Christians: our solemn anointing and consecration to fulfill the messianic mission of Jesus as prophets, priests and stewards of his kingship.

We were not taught to read the Bible as the primary and self-evident obligation of every disciple of Jesus. We were not taught what St. Jerome said, “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ,” although the bishops quoted him in the Vatican II document on “Divine Revelation,” nos. 2, 21, 25:

Through this revelation [in Scripture], out of the abundance of His love, the invisible God speaks to humans as friends and lives among them, so that He may invite and take them into fellowship [koinonia, relationship] with Himself…

This sacred synod earnestly and especially urges all the Christian faithful… to learn by frequent reading of the divine Scriptures the “excellent knowledge of Jesus Christ.” “For ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ” (St. Jerome). Therefore, they should gladly put themselves in touch with the sacred text itself, whether it be through the liturgy, rich in the divine word, or through devotional reading… And let them remember that prayer should accompany the reading of Sacred Scripture, so that God and people may talk together; for “we speak to Him when we pray; we hear Him when we read the divine sayings.”

Knowing Jesus Christ was not the focus of our religion. It was keeping the rules so that we would be “clean” and go to heaven when we died. We were taught, “Blessed are they whose fault is taken away,” but not the blessing of living “life to the full” through personal relationship with Jesus by interacting constantly with him all day, every day.

We were not taught to spend our lives bringing about the kingdom of heaven “like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened” (Matthew 13:33). We were not taught to “clean out the old yeast—the “yeast of the Pharisees—so that you may be a new batch” (1Corinthians 5:7). We “turned to Jesus in time of trouble,” saying to him, “Lord, if you wish, you can make me clean.” Jesus answered, “I do will it. Be made clean.” But he did not “fill us with the joy of salvation,” because we did not go to him for that or ask him for what he came to give.

This explains—in part, at least—why so many today are like the disciples in Jesus’ day who “turned back and no longer went about with him” (John 6:66). They never were “going about with him.” They were just following the rest of the blind crowd who thought that to be a good Christian it was enough to obey the rules.

The question is: is that the crowd we belong to?

We will find the answer by asking, “What am I doing…”—no—“What clear and concrete plan do I have for growing into, for arriving at, that ‘life to the full’ that Jesus promises?”

If you don’t have one, go to the website www.immersedinchrist.org, and you will find it.

Here is the question whose answer determines whether you will experience the “joy of salvation”: “Do I choose to let Jesus guide me into the fullness of life?”

Pray: “Lord, what must I do to be ‘perfect’?”

Practice: Read Reaching Jesus or one of the other “five step” books on immersedinchrist.org.

Discuss: Do you know of any book that presents a clear and simple plan for growing to “perfection” as a Christian?

Appendix to the February 14 Blog Post

Appendix to the Blog Post on February 14th 

In our post on for February 14, we talked about giving expression to the Mass and suggested discussion about this question: 

"How can we have reverent ritual without excluding personal self-expression?"

Here is an article that may inspire more discussion: .Carol Glatz, Catholic News Service,  Feb. 19, 2015 The FrancisChronicles, Vatican City:

Jesus Opens Our Mouths

February 14, 2015

Saturday of week 5 in Ordinary Time

(Saints Cyril, monk, and Methodius, Bishop)

Memorial Mass in Honor of St Charles Lwanga and the Ugandan Martyrs 

Jesus Opens Our Mouths

“How many loaves do you have?”

When Adam and Eve sinned, “the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they were naked; so made loincloths for themselves….” They were no longer free, open and spontaneous with each other. They were “clothed” in reserve.

Jesus came to reverse this; to free us from our fear of expressing ourselves.

If we let him do it, one of the first things we will see is a new enthusiasm at Mass. If the Mass drives people away instead of attracting them, it is because people are hiding their faith, their love for God and each other, and any devotion or joy they might feel. To focus on one detail, the real reason some won’t sing at Mass is that they are afraid of “letting go,” of getting involved in communal enthusiasm, of revealing too much of themselves in a crowd.

Mass shouldn’t be a crowd. It should be a community, a “common unity” of shared belief, shared ideals, shared hopes and joy. And it can be if these are expressed. But too often we won’t express them because we are afraid to be vulnerable. We don’t know what others really believe, what Christian ideals they have personally embraced, what they actually feel about Jesus or about the rest of the congregation. Or about us. So we play it safe. We just blend into the crowd. We say and do only what everyone else does, and in a way that won’t be noticed. If we do start to feel any emotion, any enthusiasm, we hold it in.

Jesus can nourish us at Mass the same way he nourished the group that followed him out into the desert. Those at Mass depend on everyone’s sharing if they are not going to “go away hungry to their homes” and daily lives, and “collapse on the way.” If everyone just shares the little bit of faith, the little bit of enthusiasm they have, Jesus will multiply it like the seven loaves. Then all will “eat and be satisfied.” Mass is an experience of mutual giving. Jesus wants us to experience being loved and fed by one another, not just by himself.

This is consistent with God’s way of saving the world. God the Son became a human in Jesus so that the human race would be saved “by one like themselves.” And he continues to give human beings a role in saving one another. His “great commandment” to those in pastoral ministry is, “If you love me, feed my sheep” (John 21:16).

Divine life is shared by being made visible, by being expressed in physical, human words and actions. If we are afraid to give expression to the faith, the hope, and above all to the love in our hearts, we make Mass a cold, impersonal routine.

The “liturgy” can actually encourage this if not properly understood. It is “ritual,” not spontaneous self-expression. We are Catholics, not “holy-rollers.”

“Ritual” is defined in the Microsoft dictionary as “a religious or solemn ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order… a series of actions or type of behavior regularly and invariably followed.”

If we don’t take care, ritual can become robotic. “Robotic” is defined, when used of a person, as “mechanical, stiff, or unemotional.” The word was coined in the 1920’s from the Czech, robota, meaning “forced labor.” This is an accurate description of the way many Catholic congregations comes across at Mass: “mechanical, stiff, unemotional.” 

If improperly trained, priests will preside at Eucharist like robots. I know. I am a priest. That is the way I was trained. And my generation was not an exception. Just read the General Instruction of the Roman Missal for the “general impression” it gives.

True: no one ever said we should be “stiff or unemotional.” But “mechanical,” yes: the “type of behavior” required, even insisted on for the presider at Mass is “a series of actions regularly and invariably followed.” Priests must read every word in the “Roman Missal” exactly as it is written, not changing or adding anything, and perform every gesture just as it is described in the “rubrics” (from rubeus, the “red print” instructions that accompany the text).

Even Vatican II’s decree On the Liturgy (no. 3) says:. “Therefore no other person, even if he be a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority.” Taken literally (which the bishops did not mean it to be), this says priests should celebrate like robots—which is a contradiction in terms.

Before ordination each of us had to pass an individual qualifying exam by celebrating a “dummy Mass” with a professor. My coach was a world-renowned Scripture scholar with books in various languages, an inspiringly spiritual man. But others warned me before the exercise that he would focus only on details: I had better get every word and every movement right. As predicted, that was all I was judged on.

But presiders should judge themselves, first of all, by what is clearly expressed in the General Instruction of the Roman Missal:

3. In the celebration of Mass the wondrous mystery of the Lord’s real presence is proclaimed … by that interior disposition and outward expression of supreme reverence and adoration in which the Eucharistic Liturgy is carried out.

The instructions call for presiders to insert some comments. And many priests, by their voice inflection and body language, inject personal feeling and devotion into the Mass. But those who are “mechanical, stiff, unemotional,” are never corrected by their bishops.

In “law and order” dioceses, it is allowed to be an animated robot, but a robot you have to be. In 2012 Bishop Edward Braxton of Belleville, Illinois, forbade all exercise of priestly ministry to Father William Rowe, a seventy-one-year-old priest who had been the devoted and faithful pastor of St. Mary’s parish for 17 years. Father Rowe’s only offense was that, in an effort to make the liturgy more relevant to his people, he refused to stick slavishly to the precise words of the liturgical text, and specifically to the new “Roman-English” travesty-translation of 2011. His bishop said not to be a robot was to be a rebel. Because of this kind of attitude, too many priests choose to be robots. It doesn’t even occur to them to change one word in what they read. In every Easter preface, for example, they proclaim repeatedly to mystified Americans,  “It is truly right… to laud you.” And on the feast of Mary’s Immaculate Conception, they dutifully clarify to the theologians in the congregation that we “profess her, on account of… prevenient grace, to be untouched by any stain of sin.”

Priests like this insulate themselves from the congregation in a “prevenient cloud” of ritual that excludes awareness of human communication.

But theologically, it is the robots who are disobedient to the Church. Vatican II, “On the Sacred Liturgy” insists (no. 11):

In order that the liturgy may be able to produce its full effects… something more is required than the mere observation of the laws governing valid and licit celebration; it is [pastors’] duty also to ensure that the faithful take part fully aware of what they are doing, actively engaged in the rite, and enriched by its effects.

This calls—and empowers—priests to go beyond the “robot rules,” and to make whatever adaptations are necessary (with moderation and fidelity to the meaning and intent of the liturgy) to ensure “full, conscious, active” participation by each particular congregation.

The laity are as responsible as the priests for enlivening the liturgy. It is Catholic doctrine that every Christian becomes a priest by Baptism. And all are supposed to exercise that priesthood during Mass through “full, active, conscious participation” in the celebration. This requires every person present to totally involved. To sing! To recite the “responses” and other parts spoken by the laity (e.g. Gloria, Profession of Faith, the Sanctus or “Holy, holy, holy…”) with as much reverence, enthusiasm and personal feeling as the presiding priest should display. It is just as much a sin (yes, let’s call it what it is) for the priests in the pews not to sing as it would be for the priest behind the altar to simply omit parts of the Mass he doesn’t like to say. All present are priests. All have a role. The effect and fruitfulness of the celebration depends on how everyone celebrates.

But for this we have to dare to be vulnerable. And Jesus shows us how. Jesus did not restore the primitive nakedness of Eden. In a world where sin exists, it is naïve to wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve. Instead, Jesus gave us the white robe of the wedding dress: a garment one puts on as a pledge to take it off: a promise to become naked to another in heart and mind and soul.

Jesus was naked on the cross; and, predictably, we stabbed him. But instead of closing up, he left his heart open until the end of time. He showed, and still shows us, the way. Do we choose to follow it?

Do I choose to let Jesus open my lips and my heart?

Pray the prayer of the sinner (Psalm 51): “O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.”

Practice: Sing at Mass. If you already do, sing louder.

Discuss: How can we have reverent ritual without excluding personal self-expression?

Jesus Opens Our Ears—And Our Eyes

February 13, 2015

Friday of week 5 in Ordinary Time

Jesus Opens Our Ears—And Our Eyes

Open our hearts, O Lord,

to listen to the words of your Son.

Jesus tells us the truth about ourselves. Is that something we really want?

Adam and Eve were happily naked—and not even conscious of it—before they sinned. When they had nothing to hide, they didn’t know the difference between naked and clothed, or between being open with others or closed. Neither do we, until we become afraid to reveal ourselves.

That happens pretty fast. We do something we are ashamed of. Or others make fun of us. Then we become afraid to say what we think, and even more to express our emotions. Fear suppresses expression; then human life—which, like the life of the Trinity, requires interaction and relationship—is bottled up in itself and stifled.

Sin is the source of separation. When Adam and Eve sinned, “the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves….” They were no longer free, open and spontaneous with each other. They were “clothed” in reserve.

Later when they heard the sound of God’s voice, “the man and his wife hid themselves from the Lord.” We are not even honest in our dealings with God. We silence or engage in doubletalk with our conscience. And we steer away from reading or hearing God’s word, much less reflecting on it seriously, lest he challenge our values and undermine our complacency.

The result? Separation. Non-comprehension. Being on a different wavelength from God. Shallow relationship with Jesus. Self-exclusion from intimate knowledge of his mind and heart. Losing “the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:18). We can’t refuse to talk and expect to be able to listen.

So the Responsorial Psalm has us pray: “Open our hearts, O Lord, to listen to the words of your Son.” Jesus can re-establish dialogue. That is in his role as Word of God.

The Gospel tells us about “a deaf man who had a speech impediment.” This was a physical condition, but meant as a symbol of spiritual refusal to listen or respond to God. Jesus took the man “off by himself away from the crowd.” Often we can’t hear God because we are listening to everyone around us—and not even listening to them reflectively or critically; we are just filling our heads with noise. We need to “withdraw,” “go away” with Jesus “to a deserted place all by ourselves and rest a while” (Mark 6:31; see Matthew 4:14; 14:13). If only for a few minutes each day.

Then Jesus “put his finger into the man’s ears and, spitting, touched his tongue; then he looked up to heaven and groaned, and said to him, ‘Ephphatha!’ – that is, ‘Be opened!’” This is what Jesus has the power to do if we “go aside” with him. He can open our ears when we are afraid to listen, and loosen our tongue when we are reluctant to speak. He can do that because he is not just a human; he is the Word of God.

And immediately the man’s ears were opened, his speech impediment was removed, and he spoke plainly.

The Gospel doesn’t say it, but the man was restored to full relationship with others; to full communication. The separation brought about by sin—which separates us all from one another in some degree—can be overcome by Jesus the Savior. This is because he can free us from the sins that are the source of separation.

We have the courage to let Jesus show us our sins, because he can “take them away.” He is not just a counselor, much less a critic; he is the “Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” The Psalm says: Blessed is he whose fault is taken away…

We can even have this experience physically, in a human interaction with Jesus speaking in and through a priest in the confessional.

Then I acknowledged my sin to you, my guilt I covered not.

I said, “I confess my faults to the Lord,”

and you took away the guilt of my sin.

Oddly enough, the devil’s false promise to Adam and Eve, “You will be like gods who know what is good and what is evil,” is fulfilled for our good by Jesus. When we listen to him, and let his words enlighten us, then we “will know the truth, and the truth will make us free” (John 8:32). We will be free to reveal ourselves to others without fear, to be and express our true selves, to enter into authentic relationships. Then we can live “life to the full,” divine life, the life of the Trinity, which is a life of relationship based on communication between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. We will “be like God.”

Do I choose to let Jesus open my ears so that I might open myself to the world?

Pray: “Open our hearts, O Lord, to listen to the words of your Son.”

Practice: Reveal some of your deep thoughts and desires to a friend you can trust.

Discuss: How often do we talk about our deep religious feelings with others?

Jesus Is Company

February 12, 2015

Thursday of week 5 in Ordinary Time

Jesus Is Company

“It is not good for the man to be alone.”

God himself said it is not good for anyone “to be alone.” We are made in the image of God, and God’s life is relationship—interaction between the Father, Son and Spirit. So human life calls for personal relationships—interaction on the level of shared thoughts, feelings and desires—with other human beings. It is “not good” when that is lacking.

But it is lacking to countless numbers of people. Some are lonely because they have no contact with others. Some because they have only superficial relationships, whether merely professional, social but shallow, or spousal but vertically severed. Those who do not share their thoughts and feelings with others, or experience an expressed “common union” of ideals and goals, of faith, hope or love, are essentially alone. And this—whether the absence of deep, personal interaction is due to personal choice or imposed by circumstances—is, in the words of God, “not good” for a human being.

It is also never necessary or unavoidable. The fact is that deep, experienced, personal interaction is always possible—and on a human level—with Jesus Christ.

First, Jesus exists. He is real, and he is present to all of us—all of the time and everywhere.

And he is present in his humanity. He is not just present as the transcendent, infinite God is present. Jesus still has a human body. We don’t need to see him with our eyes to know that the Jesus present to us is present just as he was to those who walked and talked with him in Judea and Galilee. It is the same Jesus, human as well as divine, and we can interact with him the way we interact with any other human person. We can talk to him without seeing him, the way we talk to others on the phone. And when we use our imaginations to observe his reactions—to “see” his facial expression, or read his body language—what we perceive is not just imaginary. The fact is, we know—sometimes, at least—what his reaction is just as clearly and as certainly as if we saw him with our eyes and heard him answering with our ears.

When we receive a letter from a close friend, don't we know how he or she looked when writing it? Can’t we “just hear” his voice or hers as we read the words? It is the same with Jesus, after we have dealt with him long enough to grow into intimate friendship.

Saint Teresa of Avila writes about this:

The soul can picture itself in the presence of Christ, and accustom itself to become enkindled with great love for His sacred Humanity and to have Him ever with it and speak with Him, ask Him for the things it has need of, make complaints to Him of its trials, rejoice with Him in its joys... It has no need to think out set prayers but can use just such words as suit its desires and needs. This is an excellent way of making progress, and of making it very quickly; and if anyone strives always to have this precious companionship, makes good use of it and really learns to love this Lord to Whom we owe so much, such a one, I think, has achieved a definite gain (Autobiography, chapter 12).

I used to try to think of Jesus Christ, our Good and our Lord, as present within me, and it was in this way that I prayed. If I thought about any incident in His life, I would imagine it inwardly… (Autobiography, chapter 4).   

This doesn't require a vivid imagination, however. We don’t need to create a clear or detailed picture; just enough to be aware of Jesus present in his humanity. Teresa continues, “My imagination is so poor that, even when I thought about the Lord's Humanity, or tried to imagine it to myself, as I was in the habit of doing, I never succeeded.”

I had so little ability for picturing things in my mind that if I did not actually see a thing I could not use my imagination, as other people do, who can make pictures to themselves and so become recollected. Of Christ as Man I could only think: however much I read about His beauty and however often I looked at pictures of Him, I could never form any picture of Him myself. I was like a person who is blind, or in the dark: he may be talking to someone, and know that he is with him, because he is quite sure he is there—I mean, he understands and believes he is there—but he cannot see him. Thus it was with me when I thought of Our Lord. It was for this reason that I was so fond of pictures. Unhappy are those who through their own fault lose this blessing! It really looks as if they do not love the Lord, for if they loved Him they would delight in looking at pictures of Him, just as they take pleasure in seeing pictures of anyone else whom they love (Autobiography, chapter 9).

Look at how pictures have proliferated on cell phones! Teresa would have loved that!

The important thing is not a good imagination, but enough awareness of the human presence and of human interaction with Jesus to be able to share our thoughts, feelings and desires with him, and experience an expressed “common union” with him in faith, hope and love. With this we are never alone.

One proof that this is possible is the existence of happy celibates. Long before and after the Church made celibacy mandatory for priests, and regardless of the “administration’s” reasons for doing so (which Pope Francis has said he is willing to put back into the hands of national bishops’ conferences), there were thousands of monks and nuns who embraced celibacy voluntarily and gladly. And there still are. There are even hermits who live in almost complete isolation. What does this tell us?

The first thing it tells us is that they are not alone. Celibacy is proof and witness that it is possible to have with Jesus Christ now, on this earth, a relationship of love that is just as real as marriage, just as developmental of loving persons as marriage is, and just as satisfying as marriage.

How is that for throwing down the gauntlet?

In the proclamation that is it possible for every Christian, in whatever state of life, to have a deep, experienced, personal relationship of love with Jesus Christ, celibates are those who put the Church’s money where her mouth is. If we proclaimed this, and professed to believe it, but assumed that every Christian had to have a wife or husband to be happy, we would obviously not believe what we preach.

The truth is, no one can be happy without love; love given and received. I believe we can extend that to personal, intimate love, the love of deep sharing and union of mind and will and heart. Love of “humanity” is not enough, even if realized in heroic service to others. “It is not good for humans to be alone.” And even when immersed in a crush of people for whom we are lovingly sacrificing ourselves every minute of the day, we can be deeply, achingly alone.

Celibacy, if embraced—whether in a community of religious vows, or as a hermit, or as a single person in ordinary life—as a commitment to developing deep, total, personal, even passionate love for Jesus Christ, bears witness to a real belief that such a relationship is possible. If the celibate is happy, then it is a proof.

What if the celibate is not happy? There are plenty of unhappy married people also; and it just means that in the marriage there is a failure on the part of one or both to interact as they should. An unhappy celibate is simply not interacting properly with Jesus.

That is why celibacy is developmental. Jesus is not always easy to get along with. Celibates, like married couples, spend years learning what it takes to love. There is no way to live fully except by dying to self. Celibates who do not find Jesus requiring that of them are not interacting  unreservedly with him. And they are not unreservedly happy.

The point is, this demanding, rewarding, sometimes crucifying and always lifegiving interaction with Jesus can and should be taking place in every Christian’s life. We are all called—in every walk of life—to “spousal love” of Christ (see Ephesians 5:25). The Church is the Bride of Christ, and all of us are “brides in the Bride,” committed to seeking perfect union of mind and will and heart with him.

Anyone doing this is never alone.

Do I choose to let Jesus be my constant companion, and to share my heart and soul with him?

Pray: “Jesus, make me your friend. Make known to me everything you have heard from your Father” (John 15:15).

Practice: Do everything with Jesus that you do with your closest friends. Be creative.

Discuss: Is real, human friendship with Jesus possible?

Jesus Gives Everything Spirit And Life

February 11, 2015

Wednesday of week 5 in Ordinary Time

or Our Lady of Lourdes

Jesus Gives Everything Spirit And Life

Send forth your Spirit, and our hearts will be regenerated;

and you will renew the face of the earth.

What sexual actions are “dirty”?

The short answer is: “None is, unless it comes from a dirty mind.”

And no sexual action is loving, either, unless it comes from a loving heart.

Jesus said in today's Gospel, “Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile.”

Nothing we do with our bodies can make us clean or dirty as persons unless it is the expression of our souls. We can roll in the mud, take a bath—or even get baptized (if we have reached the age of reason)—and it does not affect us as persons unless it is the expression of our heart.

(If we really go into this, however, we will see that every human action, if it is conscious, is the expression of our heart—even though we frequently don’t know what we are expressing).

What makes any human physical action good or bad is something spiritual. Ultimately, it is the human being’s awareness that performing the action in these circumstances is or is not according to the will of God, combined with the free choice to do it.  (For those who know the term, we are not talking about “situation ethics” here).

When Jesus said, “Nothing that enters one from outside can defile a human person,” he was saying that that the human spirit, which does not come from earth, cannot be either destroyed or defiled by anything that comes from earth—or the flesh. Spirit—or the “soul”—can be united to matter and act through matter, but it can never be simply identified with matter or material actions. Its continued existence is not dependent on matter, nor can its value be affected, for better or worse, by anything material, but only by its own free, self-determining choices.

The human spirit, like God, is free; free to do good or evil. What the spirit does, it becomes. Our free choices create us, determine the meaning of our “names” as persons. The “who” we are at any given time is the cumulative result of all the free, life-orienting choices we have made up to that moment. It is the choices that proceed from our spirit—our “soul,” our intellect and will—that make us better or worse, purify or defile us.

(Note: God cannot do evil, but it is not because God is not free; it is because God is all Being, Truth and Goodness, and there is nothing outside of God that could tempt or attract God to do evil. That is why those who possess God totally in heaven cannot sin, although they are still free human beings: there is nothing they don’t already have and enjoy in God that could tempt them to separate themselves from him).

The key word here is “awareness.” Jesus had just quoted Isaiah, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.” He could say the same about many at Mass: “Their bodies are in the pew, but their minds are somewhere else.” Saint Teresa of Avila says about saying prayers that, if we are not aware of who we are, and who it is we are speaking to, and what we are asking for, it is not prayer at all, “no matter how much the lips move” (see The Interior Castle, “First Dwelling Places,” chapter 1, no. 7, free viewing available at www.ewtn.com; see document library).

How aware of this are we at Mass? For example, are we really aware of “who we are, and who it is we are speaking to, and what we are saying” when we recite in the Gloria, “We praise you, we bless you, we adore you, we glorify you, we give you thanks for your great glory…”?

“Nothing that enters one from outside can either defile or sanctify; but the things that come out from within are what defile or sanctify.”

Jesus would say, “No words you recite from a book outside of you can make you holy, but the words that come out from within your heart are what make you holy.” So we need to make the words of the book our own and speak them consciously from the heart.

We need to realize, however, that we cannot do this—it is impossible for us—unless Jesus sends his Spirit into our hearts.

Jesus was extending the creation story when he said: “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (John 6:63).

The creation story tells us human life—rational or “spiritual” life—did not come from the earth but directly from God. No arrangement of material elements, like brain cells, can explain what the human intellect and will do. (This is not the place to provide that philosophical analysis, which does not depend on faith or divine revelation; here we will just accept it from Scripture).

The Lord God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being.

Genesis doesn’t say this about other forms of life:

God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.” And it was so.

It was afterwards that God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness” and “blew into his nostrils the breath of life.”

For human beings, the “breath of life” comes directly from God. Our “souls” are not simply the product of physical reproduction. Every human, spiritual soul is created individually by God.

It is even more obvious that divine life comes only through an explicit act of God. We are “reborn” in Baptism “of water and Spirit,” not “of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13; 3:5).

Without the gift of divine Life, the gift of God’s Holy Spirit, nothing that “comes out from within us” is divine. Nothing we do is “holy” unless it is simultaneously our self-expression and the self-expression of the Holy One within us.

Then it is Jesus acting with us, in us and through us. It is his Spirit taking flesh in action.

Everything we receive from God is the gift of the Father, Son and Spirit acting together. But Jesus is the key to the gift of divine life, which we call “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ” (2Corinthians 13:14). He said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John14:6; and vice-versa: “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me,” John 6:44). We are sons and daughters of the Father—filii in Filio—only because we are “in him” who is the “only Son of the Father” (John 1:14, 18; see Matthew 11:27).

It is by being incorporated into Jesus as his body that we receive his spirit, the Holy Spirit. John the Baptizer said, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming… He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Luke 3:16). Jesus spoke both of “the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name,” and of “the Advocate whom I will send to you from the Father” (John 14:26; 15:26). After his resurrection, he “breathed on” his Apostles as God had “breathed into the first man the breath of life” (Genesis 2:7), and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:2). He told them before his ascension into heaven: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

It is through Jesus that we are in relationship with the Father and the Spirit, because it is through him that we share in God’s divine life, which is the relationship—the interaction—that makes the Three Persons who they are. And it is our relationship with the Three Persons that makes us who we are (see John 14:20; 17:21). It all comes through our relationship with Jesus Christ.

So why should we respond to Pope Francis’ invitation “to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ”? It is because relationship with Jesus gives us the Holy Spirit. And it is the “breathe of the Spirit” within us that gives the “breath of life” to everything else we do.

Do I choose to let Jesus give Spirit and Life to everything I do?

Pray: “Lord, send forth your Spirit, and our hearts will be regenerated.”

Practice: Be aware of what you are saying at Mass.

Discuss: Is any physical action “intrinsically evil”; that is, good or bad “by nature”?

Jesus Makes Tradition Lifegiving

February 10, 2015

Tuesday of week 5 in Ordinary Time

(Saint Scholastica, Virgin)

Jesus Makes Tradition Lifegiving

You have given him rule over the works of your hands.

As the creation story continues, two things stand out: fertility and responsibility. And with responsibility comes authority.

God wants life in abundance: ““Let the earth bring forth all kinds of living creatures.” But he also wants order in the universe. We attribute the work of ordering creation to God the Son, the “Word” of God’s intelligibility, “through whom and for whom all things have been created, and in whom all things hold together” (see Colossians 1:15).

This work God has entrusted on earth to humans.

“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and the cattle, and over all the wild animals and all the creatures that crawl on the ground.” God created man in his image, in the divine image he created him.

God wants humans to co-operate with him in the work of creation through fertility and responsibility. Responsibility necessarily entails the authority to bring about that which we are responsible for.

“Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth... Have dominion over… all the living things that move on the earth.”

God made humans the “stewards of creation.” Humans are in charge. Humans have decision-making authority over the management of the universe. But as “stewards” they must manage everything according to the will of the owner, and to bring about everything he desires.

This can cause problems. It is not always easy to maintain the balance between obedience and responsibility, especially since the “balance” requires giving full value to both.

Paradoxically, those who insist too narrowly on obedience wind up disobeying God by refusing to accept the responsibility of making personal decisions. This was (and is) the sin of the “Pharisees.”

Phariseeism is the corruption of religion that makes law observance replace personal, interactive relationship with God. Pharisees begin by saying that a religious person obeys God’s laws, which is true, and end up believing that obeying God’s laws makes one a religious person—which is the most distorted and destructive falsehood infecting the Church today.

Jesus warned his disciples against it for all time: “Beware of the yeast of the Pharisees… Then they understood that he had told them to beware of the teaching of the Pharisees” (Matthew 16:11).

Today’s Gospel shows us Jesus telling the Pharisees that their obedience to written laws was making them disobedient to the living God: “You disregard God’s commandment but cling to human tradition.” For the Pharisees, once God’s will is codified in the words of a law, all human interaction with God’s mind stops. The focus is on the law alone. And Phariseeism allows no interpretation, much less any creative or compassionate application of the law to circumstances or individual needs. Phariseeism is an idolatry that puts the dead letter of the law on the throne of the living God. The idols of the Pharisees are not “silver and gold,” but they are equally “the work of human hands,” because they are freeze-dried formulae, inflexible “traditions” which allow no dialogue:

They have mouths, but they do not speak; they have eyes, but they do not see;

they have ears, but they do not hear, and there is no breath in their mouths.

Those who make them and all who trust them shall become like them (Psalm 135:15).

In fact, that is what happened to the Pharisees in Jesus’ time. Jesus said about them that “they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn—and I would heal them”  (Matthew 13:13; Mark 8:15).

The Pharisees hated Jesus because he wanted them to accept the responsibility of being human, of being co-operators with God, and to enter into dialogue with the living God. They were afraid to do that. Like their ancestors who said to Moses when he went up the mountain to receive the Law, “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we will die” (Exodus 20:19), the Pharisees of every age refuse to encounter God face to face. They deal with him only through his written laws, and never ask him for light to see what their deep purpose is or how to apply them to the changing circumstances of human life.

Jesus said, “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (John 6:63). And Paul echoed him: “We speak as... ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2Corinthians 2: 17).

The letter not only kills; it changes those it has killed into the living dead who try in turn to kill everyone who lives by the Spirit.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. You do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them… You cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves” (Matthew 23:13).

Pope Francis wrote in The Joy of the Gospel:

49… I do not want a Church… caught up in a web of obsessions and procedures. If something should rightly disturb us and trouble our consciences, it is the fact that so many of our brothers and sisters are living without the strength, light and consolation born of friendship with Jesus Christ, without a community of faith to support them, without meaning and a goal in life. More than by fear of going astray, my hope is that we will be moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security, within rules which make us harsh judges, within habits which make us feel safe, while at our door people are starving and Jesus does not tire of saying to us: “Give them something to eat” (Mk 6:37).

To feed is to nourish life—of body and soul. Those who take seriously their responsibility as “stewards of creation” (Eucharistic Prayer IV) and “good stewards of the manifold grace of God” (1Peter 4:10) look always to the goal, the purpose, the intent of God’s laws and of the rules of the Church, knowing it is always to give life, excite love, expand faith, encourage hope, so that all may “know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, and be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:19). They accept the responsibility, and claim the right—because it is an obligation—to interpret and adapt the rules, applying them to concrete circumstances and obeying them in a way that achieves their true and ultimate goal. Those with authority in the Church, if they are not Pharisees, follow and enforce all rules in a way guided by the great “pastoral commandment” Jesus gave to Peter: “If you love me, feed my sheep” (John 21:15).

Authentic stewardship is to “serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received” in a way that “promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love” (1Peter 4:10; Ephesians 4:16).

This stewardship extends to the whole of creation. It calls us to change cultures, transform society, and take responsibility for “all the living things that move on the earth.”

Pope Francis again:

183… An authentic faith – which is never comfortable or completely personal – always involves a deep desire to change the world, to transmit values, to leave this earth somehow better that we found it. We love this magnificent planet on which God has put us, and we love the human family which dwells here, with all its tragedies and struggles, its hopes and aspirations, its strengths and weaknesses. The earth is our common home and all of us are brothers and sisters. If indeed “the just ordering of society and of the state is a central responsibility of politics”, the Church “cannot and must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice.” All Christians, their pastors included, are called to show concern for the building of a better world.

Do I choose to let Jesus free me from the paralysis of frozen tradition and empower me to “renew the face of the earth”?

Pray all day: “Lord, let me hear your voice.”

Practice: In everything you do, especially in obedience to rules, respice finem, “look to the end.” Obey with authority.

Discuss: Where do you see Phariseeism in the observance and enforcement of rules today?