Becoming Catholic, Part 2

While I was in the process of becoming Catholic twenty-nine years ago (click HERE for Part 1), I tried to make sense out of the ‘historical Jesus’ problem.

We never really discussed it in RCIA class, but it seemed important to me. So I read a bunch of books about it.

What is the ‘historical Jesus’ problem?

One the one hand: Jesus of Nazareth, a human being, like Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar. We have historical records about Jesus, like we have historical records about other luminaries of the ancient world. The records about Jesus have been gathered into a unique collection called the New Testament.

Human beings wrote the records we have about Jesus. And those writers had their human reasons for writing, and particular human audiences in mind, when they wrote.

History = reconstructing the past by studying written records. Nothing magic about it, or holy. It’s a field of study that we human beings must engage in, in order to understand our situation. Jesus of Nazareth, an important man of history, fits into that study.

On the other hand: The Church believes that Jesus of Nazareth is the eternal Word made flesh, the God-man. The Church believes that He is the heart of the holy and divine Scriptures, the books that reveal God Almighty to us. God Who can neither deceive nor be deceived.

The Church reverently reads the Bible as not just true, but as the key to understanding The Truth.

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As a candidate for the Easter sacraments, I encountered some ideas about how to deal with this problem. And I couldn’t bring myself to accept those ideas.

For example:

Jesus as portrayed in the Bible is the Christ that Catholics believe in, and what actually happened in Palestine 2,000 years ago doesn’t matter. History is one thing, faith is another. There’s no point in struggling with an impossible task, namely making the Bible’s testimony about Jesus seem reasonable or accurate.

But hold on. Don’t Catholics believe in the actual, factual Jesus Christ?

As in: He instituted the Holy Mass, using bread and wine, with His own human hands and voice, at a particular Passover celebration, with His apostles.

And: He rose from the dead in the flesh.

Doesn’t the whole religion absolutely require that these are true facts?

I knew I had no intention of joining a Church founded on myths, even lovely myths.

In other words: critical thinking about Holy Scripture seemed absolutely necessary to me. Not just on the grounds that we are rational animals, we human beings. But also on the grounds that: Christians believe in a God-man who actually did walk the earth, talk, eat, sleep, bathe, etc.–like us. There is no Christianity without the actual, historical Jesus of Nazareth.

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Here’s another idea that floated my way during my RCIA year, one that I couldn’t accept:

We ‘enlightened,’ modern people have more learning than the ancients, so we can understand the human beings who wrote the Scriptures better than they understood themselves.

We now have the skills necessary to interpret Scriptural statements that seem hard to accept; we can render them perfectly reasonable. When you can psychoanalyze the human authors, and their original intended audiences, then you can understand what they really meant.

Flight Into Egypt by Giotto

For example: Matthew’s gospel says that St. Joseph took the Blessed Mother and the baby Jesus to Egypt, to escape the slaughter of the innocents ordered by King Herod.

According to the school of thought I’m talking about, a ‘naive’ pre-modern reader thinks: This means the Holy Family made a difficult journey. But an ‘educated,’ modern interpreter understands: The author traditionally known as ‘Matthew’ wrote this to tell his readers that Jesus is the new Moses. (Since Moses came from Egypt to Israel, in the Exodus, with the whole people.)

Now, Jesus certainly is the new Moses. And we could read Matthew’s gospel and know that, even without the detail about the Holy Family’s trip to Egypt.

But call me naive, I think that if the trip did not happen, then the book contains an untrue statement.

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I read and re-read the gospels, and went looking for some help in the writings of St. Augustine. The following began to dawn on me:

1. Some ‘historical critics’ insist that the gospels contradict each other on certain points. But that is not true.

Finding ‘contradictions’ requires over-interpreting the significance of particular statements, as if they were meant to exclude other related facts.

But if you avoid over-interpreting gospel details like this, then the ‘contradictions’ disappear. The apparent discrepancies arise from the multiple points-of-view that the New Testament offers: multiple points-of-view on one underlying set of facts.

That underlying set of facts is no more–and no less!–complicated than our own complicated lives, with all their relationships, conversations, confidences, etc. etc.

For example:

The gospel accounts of disciples seeing Jesus after He rose from the dead seem complicated and disjointed? How would the accounts of your friends seeing you, in different places and at different times, after you rose from the dead seem, if that happened?

How many facebook posts would be involved? Could those posts be gathered together into an easy narrative? Please. The facebook posts about your family’s last Thanksgiving dinner could hardly be gathered together into an easy, coherent narrative. Very few family Thanksgiving dinners could be.

2. The four gospels corroborate each other–and corroborate the Christian tradition–on the basic narrative about Jesus of Nazareth. If the written records of the first century A.D. give us anything, they give us a solid picture of this man’s life.

He traveled Palestine as an itinerant rabbi; He taught a distinct message about His identity and His significance in Jewish history that got Him crucified. His followers claimed that they had seen Him after He rose from the dead (even though it cost many of them their own lives to make that claim). They celebrated Baptism and the Eucharist at His command.

Thoroughly verifiable historical facts, these.

3. Most of the content of the gospels, however, can neither be proven to be true history, nor disproven. You can’t prove that Jesus said all the things the gospels say He said. But you can’t prove that He didn’t say them, either.

These books give the reader the intimate point-of-view of the disciple of Christ. They were written by disciples for disciples, by Christians for Christians. These books continue the experience of intimacy with Christ that the disciples had; the books allow the authors’ experience to continue now.

It is an undeniable historical fact that the original disciples had the experience of intimacy with Christ. What that experience involved can only be known by fellow believers. When you read the New Testament, as a member of the Church, you have it–the same experience as the gospel authors.

That is, the experience of communion with the triune God, on the terms that Jesus laid down in His teaching and example. (And made possible by His gifts of grace.)

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I realized, twenty-nine years ago: Historical inquiry gets you right to the front door of the church, without any doubts. Or any leaps of faith.

Then the Catholic, apostolic faith gets you inside, to hear and read the gospels for what they are.

There’s nothing irrational about believing every word of the Bible, assuming we are humble enough to admit that we don’t fully understand them all.

We quickly leave the question of historical accuracy behind, however, as we enter the realm of intimacy with God that the New Testament open up to us, here and now.

St. Luke Feastday Homily: Growing up with Jesus

Maybe all of us can relate to the experience I had when I was growing up:

At some point—maybe seven or eight or nine years of age—I began to grasp somewhat the readings from the gospel in church. The readings from St. Paul’s letters still sounded like a foreign language. But the gospel readings penetrated my mind.

By the time I was ten, certainly, I had reached this conclusion: Jesus Christ makes life make sense. He had the most interesting things to say of anyone, ever. And He lived the most beautiful life. I need Him; I need to hear His words and the account of His deeds. He teaches life and love and truth.

So just as I was realizing that I was my own person with my own decisions to make, Jesus Christ became the center of my reflections about life. And for one reason: Because I heard readings from the gospel regularly, every Sunday in church, through the years of my childhood. Jesus, the real Person, was a living presence in my mind.

I don’t think I’m so unusual here. This is the most common way that Christian experience develops, I think. The supernatural effect of the sacraments, of course, transcends what I am talking about. But on the level of human experience and the maturation of a person’s mind and morals, I think the experience of hearing the gospels read regularly in church, every Sunday, year after year while you’re growing up—pretty fundamental.

So, the significance of this: Jesus, the four canonical gospels, the Church, Sunday Mass—these are all connected at a level so deep, so “organic,” that they simply cannot be separated from each other or from the absolute essence of Christianity. Jesus lives in His Church; the Mass is where we find Him and become His friends, become part of His Body. And hearing the words of the gospels, on a regular basis, puts Him in our minds. He unites Himself with us as the most important and most intimate companion we have.

For over a century, people have used the phrase “organized religion” to dismiss the experience I am talking about. Whenever anyone uses this phrase, it is pretty much always to excuse their own absence from church on Sunday. “Organized religion” supposedly has its problems, seems foreign to modern life, limits my wonderful individuality.

Indeed, anything involving human beings always has problems, always falls short of what it should be—including any given Sunday Mass in any given parish church. It’s never everything that it should be, because fallible human beings are involved.

But: The means by which we come to be united with the most sublime and wonderful person ever, the most interesting and genuinely helpful role model, the most beautiful soul—can this be dismissed as “organized religion?”

Isn’t church on Sunday; isn’t hearing the gospel, week in and week out—isn’t it something much more than that? Isn’t it the love of God at work in the world, giving us Jesus Christ?

St. Luke Day Homily

The four gospels provide us with our clear picture of the living Son of God. Four men composed these books, with the Holy Spirit guiding them, and using all their skill as writers, too.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John have achieved a great literary feat. The subject of their writing emerges in vivid color, and they themselves disappear.

St. Luke did not write about himself; he wrote about the Son of God. Ditto for the three other invisible word-portrait painters. When they wrote, they forgot about themselves and gave us Christ.

Luke and John, though, do each provide one sentence to explain their goal in writing, namely to give true testimony. St. Luke spells it out most clearly. He addresses us directly:

Many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as those who were eyewitnesses have handed them down. I decided, after investigating everything accurately anew, to write it down in an orderly sequence for you, most excellent lover of God. (Luke 1)

We have two extremely solid reasons, then, for trusting the four gospels of the New Testament as the definitive standard when it comes to information about Jesus of Nazareth.

1. If we hold the Christian faith, then it is because the Church has taught it to us. We believe that the Sacred Scriptures provide us with infallibly true teaching because the Church says that they do.

2. If we read documents with an historian’s critical eye, we recognize that the four gospels of the New Testament have a much higher level of credibility than any other source of information about Jesus of Nazareth. All the other sources—the “apocryphal gospels” and other fragments here and there—were all written generations later than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And many of the other supposed sources of information have obvious axes to grind, whereas the canonical gospels have, as we mentioned earlier, an evident purity of intention in their presentation.

So: Talk-show hosts and other sensationalists might jump all over so-called “discoveries” that Jesus was married, or had a girlfriend, or lived to be seventy, or wore a bandana and combat boots, or was a Hindu, or preferred horseback riding to religion. But anyone who actually knows something about this just laughs. We appreciate what Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John did to give us information about the Son of God upon which we can absolutely rely.

Seven Years, Season of John

No French cuffs. But an unforgettable moment nonetheless. Ad multos annos, Holiness.

…Everyone knows that we read from the Bible according to a three-year cycle at Sunday Mass? Year A, Year B, Year C. And, for the most part, the gospel readings come from either Matthew, or Mark, or Luke—depending on which year of the cycle we are in.

Great system. We thoroughly read all three gospels. All three—Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

Wait. What? Of course. The gospel of the eagle.

St. John’s gospel gets its props every year during Lent and Easter.

This is the week of John 3. We were here back on the fourth Sunday of Lent also. During Lent we had weeks for John 5 and John 8. Next week is John 6. Then we roll into John 14, 15, 16, 17—which recount all the amazing things the Lord Jesus said at the Last Supper.

…One way or another, everyone who has ever walked the face of the earth has known God. Everyone has had a relationship with God—a relationship of some kind. God gives existence to all existing things. So: to exist is to have a relationship with Him, and to know about existing is to know God.

So we all know God. Except we don’t. God gives existence. But the way that God Himself exists? His infinite being? Totally beyond us.

Totally beyond all of us. Except one. One man knows God from the inside, knows Him like a fish knows water. Jesus.

All the gospels present this fact to us—the fact that the mind of Jesus truly knows God, that Jesus’ knowledge of God is utterly unique among all those ever born of a woman. All the gospels teach us this fact.

But we have St. John to thank for recording all the intimate and sublime ways in which the Lord Himself explained it. And we have the Easter season to luxuriate in reading it all.

Why was Christ Baptized? (The LONG answer)

Today the Church commemorates the occasion on which John baptized Christ. This commemoration inevitably gives rise to the question: Why did Jesus go to John to be baptized? After all, Christ did not need to repent of sin and be cleansed.

Confronted with this eminently reasonable question, I have frequently proposed the following: The waters of John’s baptism did not cleanse Christ. To the contrary, by going into the Jordan, Christ conferred on water the capacity to give saving grace through the sacrament of Holy Baptism.

I have not and do not propose this answer by myself. Countless saintly catechists of the past have proposed as much, including St. Ambrose of Milan. And I do not propose this as the answer, but rather as an answer—i.e., a true, though not exhaustive, answer.

Here, however, is the problem. The response I give can be greeted in three ways.

1. Accepted as coherent.

2. Accepted as a viable statement of Catholic piety, but dismissed as far as being an historically defensible assertion.

3. Rejected as a kind of theological fantasy that does not correspond with the facts of history.

If your reaction is #1, feel free to give up on this little essay, which will doubtless prove to be tedious.

Completing the Prophets’ Picture

The saints who wrote the four holy gospels had an enormous task, namely to present to us the Person of Jesus Christ, the God-man.

The evangelists’ primary literary means for doing this was to recount the ways in which Christ fulfilled all the prophecies that had foretold His coming.

The prophecies express the beautiful vision of salvation. And yet, the picture does not come fully clear in the Old Testament books. Only when they were fulfilled in Christ did the meaning of the prophecies fully emerge.

The evangelists grasped this, and wrote their books in order to complete the Bible, to make the Old Testament make sense by writing the New.

The vision of the prophets included the healing of the blind and deaf, and many other miraculous works which transcend the fallen state of created nature.

Above all, the prophets foresaw the New Covenant as a whole: the state of reconciliation and friendship between sinners and the Creator, Who had previously been justly offended by sin.

This is why the four evangelists narrate the miracles worked by Christ as a series of preludes, leading up to the miracle of His death and resurrection. Faith in the New Covenant made in Christ’s blood is the ultimate miracle. It is the miracle of the restoration of the original friendship between God and man. This friendship, which we have by faith in Christ, is itself the foundation of all the many other gifts of the Creator, like sight and hearing, knowledge and wisdom.

Unforgiving Steward, Dishonest Steward

As I reflect upon my meager efforts to discharge faithfully my sacred duties, I recall that I have tackled a good number of the Lord Jesus’ parables.

One of these days, I will present you with a handy compendium of my many tedious commentaries on the little stories of our Lord. In the meantime, here goes a ‘compare & contrast’ to whet the appetite…

The parable of the dishonest steward presents us with a great challenge. What does it mean?

Book of the Holy Gospels

Maybe it will help to compare and contrast this parable with the parable of the unforgiving steward.

Both parables present the same set of circumstances: a failed bureaucrat gets called to account by his master. Both stewards find themselves in desperate straits, because their boss has discovered their enormous incompetence.

But the two stewards react in diametrically opposed ways. The unforgiving steward initially begs his master’s mercy—and receives it—only to lose it by being stingy and unmerciful himself.

The dishonest steward, however, compounds his dishonesty by secretly forgiving his master’s debtors. Then he finds himself praised by his master for doing so.

One element of the stories that leaps out is this: The unforgiving steward utterly failed to understand his master’s thinking, whereas the dishonest steward understood his master even better than he knew.

The first steward promised to repay his own enormous personal debt to his master. The master knew that would never happen, so he wrote off the debt for good. But the servant failed to grasp that his master was being merciful with him. The steward marched out into the street believing his own nonsense about coming up with lots of money that he didn’t have and never would have.

The dishonest steward, on the other hand, was actually remarkably honest and practical with himself. He knew his limits and immediately took action to turn a desperate situation into a livable outcome. He knew that his very survival depended on his cultivating friends, so he used the means he had at hand to win some people over.

Can we doubt that his master smiled at this behavior precisely because this is the way in which he himself became rich? When he saw his steward seizing his opportunity, he thought to himself, ‘This dude really isn’t as much of a numbskull as I thought he was.’

Another common element of the two parables is this: In both cases, the masters possess enough wherewithal to write off massive losses indulgently. They both lose a lot of money because their stewards are incompetent, but they do not give the lost money a second thought. Instead, they focus on the persons before them.

So, the moral: God smiles on us when we humbly and practically seek the help we need to get our sinful butts to heaven.

Acceptable 2010 starts with St. Luke

The Hoyas tore up the hapless Rutgers Scarlet Knights this afternoon.

The most interesting part of the game was a Subway radio commercial. The delirious announcer promises a hot pastrami sandwich, “We will follow you blindly, like nearsighted bison on a flavor stampede.”

Here is a homily for tomorrow’s Holy Mass:

Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning and ministers of the word have handed them down to us, I too have decided, after investigating everything accurately anew, to write it down in an orderly sequence for you. (Luke 1:1-3)

In the synagogue in Nazareth, the Lord Jesus said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. He has sent me to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.”

Our kind and loving Creator is giving us this year of 2010. He has given us almost a month of it already. What are we going to do with this precious gift?

We are not little amoebas floating in the waters of time. We are not bystanders of 2010, watching it flow by, as it becomes the kind of year that is not acceptable to God, with nothing for us to do about it. No. We can take a firm grip on A.D. 2010 and turn it into something beautiful and good.

Now, let me tell you the first thing we are going to do to make this year acceptable. This year we are going to read the Holy Gospel according to St. Luke.

There is Always Hope

This scene is not in the book (like a lot of the movie version of Two Towers). But it is pretty sweet.

…Did you know that when a man is ordained a bishop, two deacons hold the book of the Gospels open over his head?

Meanwhile, the ordaining prelate prays the consecratory prayer.

…Speaking of hope, here is today’s homily…

Jesus summoned the Twelve and began to send them out two by two…He said to them, “Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave from there. Whatever place does not welcome you or listen to you, leave there and shake the dust off your feet in testimony against them.” (Mark 6:7, 10-11)

The Lord Jesus sent the Apostles out to teach the human race about getting to heaven. The Apostles preached repentance and healed the sick. They were able to restore those who believed to moral and physical health.

Admissions, Etc.

Book of the Holy Gospels

I admit that my NBA Finals prediction has proven to be woefully inaccurate.

I admit that my last post was both 1) random, and b) insensitive to “Babe” lovers. (“Babe” is the best pig movie ever.)

I admit that I was hoping against hope that we would not have to watch the puppets during the NBA Finals–but these hopes have been mercilessly dashed over and over again.

(I thought it would be brutta figura to run these ads after the Cavs lost, and LeBron did not make the Finals. But apparently Nike does not share these sensibilities.)

Yesterday, I had the privilege of witnessing the ordination of a friend to the transitional diaconate. This means that he will be a deacon for a year or two; then, please God, he will be ordained a priest.

It is a thoroughly moving ceremony. One of the questions that the bishop asks the candidates is based on I Timothy 3:9.

After the newly ordained deacon is vested, the bishop hands him the book of the gospels and commisions him:

Believe what you read. Teach what you believe. Practice what you teach.

May the good Lord help us to fulfill this demanding mission!