Worldliness & Other-Worldliness

Whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. (Luke 9:24)

Children of the world sometimes dismiss the Christian ideal of self-sacrifice. It’s inhumanely destructive, they think.

Somerset Maugham has a chilling passage in his novel The Razor’s Edge in which he reverses the roles in the Garden of Gethsemane. As Maugham has it, Satan manages to seduce Christ into taking up the cross.

The worldly mind–the mind intent on a good glass of wine and a choice cigar–sees the Christian spirit of self-sacrifice as the ultimate destructive force in the world.

It struck me that this criticism of Christianity would have some real merit, if it weren’t for two inescapable facts:

1. We will all die someday, and where will we get wine and cigars then?

2. Jesus Christ is not only the great example of self-sacrifice; Jesus Christ is personally God. God reconciling the world to Himself by His own self-offering of His human life.

So: We Christians do not try to take up our crosses daily solely for the sake of imitating Christ—though, of course, we do hope to imitate Him, however feebly. The main reason we take up our crosses with whatever courage we can muster is: Because God Himself has given us eternal life by taking up His cross.

Modern aesthetes and cultivated worldlings certainly have given the Creator some glory by learning how to enjoy a good meal, a good glass of wine, and a sunset. No doubt.

But we Christians hope for more than a good meal, a good glass of wine, and a picturesque sunset. We hope for something more than what anyone can share on facebook or Twitter.

We take up our crosses, however feebly, with joy. Because we hope for undying heaven.

The Holy Cross

This past weekend proved to be quite emotional.

—Dick Enberg called his last professional tennis match.

–The Brooklyn Youth Chorus sang Sarah McLachlan a cappella.

–The Washington Redskins soundly defeated the New York Giants!

But when the first cool breezes of fall begin to caress our faces, our thoughts must run to the immemorial September 14 commemoration of the cross of Christ…

The ancient Romans used crosses to execute low-life criminals of the barbarian races. The criminals often hung for days on crosses along highways. The Roman Empire made a statement this way: We will do what we need to do to maintain order.

Cicero was a philosopher and statesman of ancient Rome. He taught that a polite person should not even mention the word “cross.” Well-bred citizens did not refer to such ghastly business in pleasant conversation.

But something changed. Constantine marched toward Rome in the fall of AD 312 to unseat the tyrannical emperor Maxentius. Constantine raised his eyes to heaven to pray for help from the true God, and He received a vision. He saw a cross in the sky and heard these words: ‘In this sign, you will conquer.’

The cross had been a brutal, unmentionable means by which the Romans conquered disorder and rebellion among the nations they subjugated. But the Son of God turned the cross into something else. Christ committed no crime; He never rebelled against order and truth. But the sentence for sin fell upon Him, and He lovingly embraced it for the sake of the salvation of the world.

So now the cross signifies not death but life. If signifies not crime and punishment but mercy and kindness. Now, we do not shy away from mentioning the cross, or invoking it. The cross is not foreign to polite society. Rather, the sign of the cross adorns the lives of Christian people in every possible way.

But we owe it to ourselves to meditate frequently on the fact that the shameful cross of Cicero and the victorious cross of Constantine are not two different things, but the same thing–transformed from ugliness to beauty by the suffering of Christ.

Constantine’s mother Helen sought and found in the ruins of Jerusalem the wood of the cross on which the Lord had been crucified. This same holy relic was defended in battle by the Emperor Heraclius three hundred years later, when the Persians attacked the Holy Land.

September 14 commemorates all these events, which link us with the true cross. The cross of beauty can be none other than the cross on which Christ suffered at the brutal hands of the ancient Romans. We exult the glorious cross because the Savior of the world hung in agony on it for us.

Will He Judge?

Jesus said: “The Father commanded me what to say and speak, and I know that his commandment is eternal life.”

On a number of occasions, Christ declined to present Himself as the supreme judge which, in fact, He is.

Once, He told his audience that the Ninevites of old and the ancient Queen of Sheba would judge them, because these pagans had listened to, and heeded, the Word of God.

Christ told His faithful Apostles that they, His appointed teachers, would judge the Twelve tribes of Israel.

He asked an aggrieved plaintiff, “Friend, who appointed me your judge and arbitrator?”

And right before the Last Supper, the Lord Jesus insisted: ‘I came to save, not to judge. My doctrine itself will judge those who fail to heed it.’

Death-Defying

The man is incredible:

…

Whoever wishes to come after me must take up his cross and follow me. –Mark 8:34

This is what the Son of God said. He went to heaven after He rose from the dead, so we certainly want to follow Him.

But wait: Are we fools to want to follow Christ? To come after Him, we must take up our crosses. This is what He clearly says. We have to be clear on what He means.

The cross was the implement the Romans used to kill their worst criminals. The cross may mean many things to us, but when the Lord first used the term 2,000 years ago, the cross meant one thing: execution, the death penalty.

Among Christians, to speak of one’s crosses has become a metaphor for all kinds of difficulties. It is a good metaphor.

But: We cannot use the phrase as a metaphor if we do not first consider the literal meaning. We cannot forget what the cross essentially is. The cross is an instrument of one thing—death.

Straight Answer

When he had come into the temple area, the chief priests and the elders of the people approached him as he was teaching and said, “By what authority are you doing these things? And who gave you this authority?”

Jesus said to them in reply, “I shall ask you one question, and if you answer it for me, then I shall tell you by what authority I do these things. Where was John’s baptism from? Was it of heavenly or of human origin?”

They discussed this among themselves and said, “If we say ‘Of heavenly origin,’ he will say to us, ‘Then why did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ we fear the crowd, for they all regard John as a prophet.” So they said to Jesus in reply, “We do not know.”

He himself said to them, “Neither shall I tell you by what authority I do these things.”

This conversation between the Lord Jesus and the high priests recounted in Matthew 21:23-27 is hard to understand. Why wouldn’t the Lord give a clear answer to the high priests’ question?

Explanation of First Corinthians 2-3

 

http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/1corinthians/1corinthians2.htm

St. Paul preaching in the town square

We are not born knowing how to live.  We do not have a built-in “philosophy of life.”  In order to learn how to think, how to judge situations, and how to make decisions, we listen to what other people say, and we try to find some kind of wisdom.

 

These days we can watch talkshows, or read newspaper columns, or surf the world-wide web in search of wisdom.  But in ancient times, people sought wisdom by listening to wandering teachers who went from town to town, speaking in public squares to anyone who would listen.  These teachers presented themselves as philosophers, and curious people came out to listen to what they had to say and to ask questions.

 

In his first letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul tries to explain the difference between the teachers of the Church and these philosophers.  The Apostles have not come to the city of Corinth to teach a “philosophy of life.”  They are not offering advice, tips to increase self-esteem, or dietary hints.

 

The Apostles have come, St. Paul insists, to bear witness to something that has happened, something that affects everyone on earth.  God has become man, and He has done what needs to be done for all sins to be forgiven.  The Son of God died on the Cross for us, and then He rose again from the dead.  This happened.  The Apostles came to tell everyone that this happened, and for no other reason.

 

This section of I Corinthians is very illuminating and encouraging for us, because we are up against the same problem.  We are surrounded by the suggestion that Catholicism is one “philosophy of life” among many; it is a “tradition” that is good for a lot of people, but not for everybody.  Christianity is one of mankind’s “great religions.”  The preachers and teachers of the Church must fit in; we must take our clerical place alongside all the preachers and teachers of all other religions, and Oprah, the Dalai Lama, Richard Simmons, and the yoga instructors of the world.

 

To this, St. Paul replies:  We do not offer yoga instruction, or self-help classes of any kind.  St. Paul insists:  I am not a philosopher; I have nothing whatsoever of my own to teach you.  I am not an expert of core-muscle toning or low-carb desserts.

 

I came to tell you that your Creator, the Almighty One Who made you out of nothing, died on the Cross for you, so that you can go to heaven.

 

 

Take Up Your Cross

 

 

 

Since Archbishop Wuerl wrote to us priests and asked us to make his points about Church teaching on abortion in our homilies this morning, I never got to give the homily I had prepared for today.  So here it is—a “web exclusive.”

 

 

You duped me, O LORD, and I let myself be duped;
you were too strong for me, and you triumphed.  Jeremiah 20:7

 

The prophet Jeremiah cries out his complaint to the Lord, and then resigns himself to his fate.  At the time when Jeremiah was called to prophesy, the people of the kingdom of Judah had fallen so far into paganism that they had taken up the practice of sacrificing children to Baal.  The Lord ordered Jeremiah to speak out and condemn this.  Jeremiah was to prophesy that the people’s apostasy and evil would cause them to lose their homeland and be taken away in exile.

 

Jeremiah made his resigned complaint after the High Priest of the Temple struck him and ordered him put in the stocks because the prophet declared that doom would befall Jerusalem.

 

Jeremiah was not naturally inclined to make trouble; he was no grandstander.  He would have preferred a quiet life.  But the Lord compelled him to speak the truth and warn the people about the coming wrath.  Even though obeying the divine summons cost him abuse, imprisonment, and exile, Jeremiah wistfully acknowledged to the Lord that he could not help but obey Him.  There is nothing sweeter, in fact, than to suffer for the Lord by bearing unflinching witness to the divine truth of Revelation.

 

Then Jesus said to his disciples,“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself,
take up his cross, and follow me.”  Matthew 16:24

 

This verse comes shortly after the verses we read at Holy Mass last week ( https://frmarkdwhite.wordpress.com/2008/08/21/caesarea-philippi/ ).  When the Lord told them to take up their crosses, His disciples were still with Him at the foot of Mt. Hermon.  As we recall, St. Peter had just declared the truth about Christ for the first time:  You are the Son of God.  You are divine.  This is what has been revealed to us:  Jesus of Nazareth is the eternal truth. He is the Lord of heaven Who compelled the prophets to speak.  Christ is the Holy One of Israel for Whom Jeremiah freely chose to suffer.

 

So St. Peter had declared the Catholic faith for the first time ever.  You might think the Lord Jesus would have patted him on the back, and then they might have spent some time basking in the moment.

 

Instead, Christ declared:  I, the Almighty Master of all things, I will bend my neck beneath the yoke of suffering and give myself over into the hands of my enemies.  I, the immortal One, will suffer and die.  This is my destiny; this is my mission.  And it is not to end in disaster, but in the triumph of life over death.

 

Let us try to put ourselves in the place of the disciples who first heard Christ tell them that in order to follow Him, they must take up their crosses.  Now, two millennia later, we know that the cross is the symbol of the perfect sacrifice of atonement offered by the Son of God.  We know that it is the symbol of our Redemption and eternal life.

 

For the original disciples, however, the cross was only a perverse instrument of torture used by their foreign overlords to make a public example of anyone who dared try to stand up against them.  No fate could be worse, in the mind of any Jew, than to be condemned to crucifixion and be driven by Roman centurions through the streets with whips, dragging your hundred-twenty-five-pound cross along with you pathetically on your shoulder.  Then you would spend two or three agonizing days hanging by your arms, with birds picking at you.

 

This is the metaphor that God incarnate used to describe what it was like to be His disciple.  Even the prophet Jeremiah might have quailed at this.

 

The crucial phrase in the Lord Jesus’ words, however, is:  “and follow me.”  God Himself has walked the way of the cross ahead of us, and He has risen again from the dead.  From heaven, He pours out His graces on us so that we can accept His invitation and become His disciples.

 

What are the crosses we have to take up in order to follow the Lord?  Each of us has his or her own.  Our crosses are formed by two beams.  The one beam is reality and the truth:  the law of God, the duties we have.  The other beam is our own smallness, selfishness, weakness, and fear.

 

It would be easy to imitate the virtues of Christ if we weren’t sinners; it would be easy to be humble, gentle, kind, chaste, courageous, and unswervingly faithful and honest.  Our crosses would be weightless if we weren’t so miserably inclined to run away from reality and the mission the Lord has given each of us to accomplish.

 

Let us resign ourselves like Jeremiah.  Living in the truth is an agony of self-purification and self-denial.  The truth makes demands of us.  But what else are we going to do?  God is God.  His grace is sufficient; His grace will be our strength.  If we lose our lives for His sake, we will find life.  And when He comes again in glory, we will shine like the stars in the sky.