Second Temple and Our Temples

Ezra Reads the Law to the People, by Dore

First reading at Holy Mass today moves the heart to exultation. Ezra acknowledged before God that the Israelites deserved their bitter exile from the Holy Land, because of their sins. But now God has, in His mercy, restored a remnant of the people to their homeland. They can build the second Temple. They can worship the one, true God without fear.

So the Old Covenant continued, after the Babylonian exile, marching toward its fulfillment. Then the Christ came, the son of a second-Temple Jew, the Blessed Virgin Mary. And, as we read in our gospel reading today, He sent His Apostles to found the Church in every city and town. The New Covenant changed the direction of holy worship. It no longer involves going up to Jerusalem. Rather, from Jerusalem the new and eternal covenant now extends out, to the ends of the earth.

As Ezra put it, “God has brightened our eyes” with a place to worship Him. We have our parish churches, sanctuaries in which we can celebrate the rite which the God-man instituted, when He walked the earth in the flesh.

Ezra did not take it for granted. Let’s not take it for granted, either. Let’s give the Lord our thanks, that we have a church, in spite of our own sins. And let’s honor those who have gone before us, whose sacrifices made it possible for us to celebrate Christ’s sacraments in peace.

Let’s follow in our forebears’ footsteps. Let’s try to prove ourselves worthy of their sacrifices, rejoicing in the Lord and thinking of those who will come after us.

Wandering Straight, Into the Darkness

St Francis Receiving the Stigmata by El Greco

 

Today we commemorate the 791^st anniversary of the holy death of Francis of Assisi. At Holy Mass, we read from the gospel about how Lord Jesus renounced all possessions and lived as a penniless wanderer. St. Francis embraced the same poverty for the sake of the Kingdom of God. This led St. Francis to wander, also—around his home country, and further afield—all for the purpose of extending the reign of Christ.

But let’s pause and meditate on this: the poverty of Christ, which St. Francis embraced so thoroughly, went way beyond just the renunciation of worldly possessions—of home, and family, and security.

Yes, the Lord Jesus did renounce home and family and security, and that allowed Him to wander, and teach and heal. But Christ did not simply wander as an itinerant rabbi–as if that alone sufficed to fulfill His mission.

In all His wanderings, Christ had a final destination, towards which He proceeded tirelessly, without swerving to the right or to the left. Now, only He could fully perceive the unfolding of this path before Him; even His most-intimate companions could not see the path. But that doesn’t mean Christ didn’t walk straight down it. He did.

The road to the cross.

A Franciscan–a Christian—renounces everything not just because that gives you greater freedom to wander the world and spread the reign of Christ. No: a Christian lets go of everything because death is inevitable, and it’s the only way to God.

A Christian knows that the only thing worth having is God. And there is no way to “have” God during this mortal pilgrim life, except by faith. We “possess” the unknowable God only in the darkness of faith.

God Himself is the light that turns the darkness of faith into the brightness of understanding—but the only way to that light is to share in Christ’s death. His death.

That’s the poverty that liberates and makes us not just wanderers but pilgrims to the Holy Temple. We believe so thoroughly in Christ’s triumph over death that everything (most of all my self) utterly pales in comparison with the prospect of sharing in that triumph.

The Mission

St. Vincent de Paul

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They set out and went from village to village, proclaiming the good news. (Luke 9:6)

What good news? That God is with us. Our brother, Jesus of Nazareth. That the Lord Jesus loves, and died for us, and rose again. That He reigns over a kingdom in which death and evil have no power at all.

The Apostles of Christ undertook their mission, The Mission–the proclamation of this wonderful news about God and our destiny as human beings.

Now, what’s the news today? September 27, 2017? Republican tax plan, football players kneeling, saber-rattling by two unpredictable men with their fingers on dangerous buttons? Well, yes, sure.

But the real news—the truly new news—is: Jesus Christ, Son of Mary, Son of God.

St. Vincent de Paul died 357 years ago today, September 27, 1660. Among many other things, he founded the “Congregation of the Mission.” Of The Mission. A name so simple and basic that it kind-of leaves you hanging. “Oh, the priests and brothers of the Congregation of the Mission… What mission?”

Well, The Mission. The saint had gone into the French countryside and found villages full of poor Catholics who knew next to nothing about Christ and their religion. So St. Vincent and some companions decided to do something about that—to preach to, to teach, and to love the people. On a regular basis.

That’s the mission! That why we have church buildings—to do that mission in them. Let’s do it!

Despair, Anger, and Christ’s Triumph

In our readings at Holy Mass today—the first reading from Job and the gospel reading from Luke 9—we encounter two intense human emotions.  Neither of them are feelings that we generally want to experience.  But we do have these feelings sometimes.

Job cursed the day he was born.  He prayed for death.  We might call that:  Despair.  Hopelessness.  Now, Job had pretty much every right to feel this way.  He had lost everything and suffered miserably.

In the gospel we read about how the Lord’s disciples reacted when the Samaritans treated them rudely and contemptuously.  “Shall we call down fire from heaven on the Samaritans?”

The disciples had suffered mistreatment, so they were angry.  They wanted revenge.  Again:  we would probably feel the same way; probably have felt the same way, under similar circumstances.

Life can be rough.  Anger, despair—sometimes we come by these feelings honestly.  The question is:  Can we find any medicine for them?

We heard in our gospel reading that the Lord Jesus “resolutely determined to journey to Jerusalem.”  Now, why did He resolutely determine to journey to Jerusalem?  Was he headed to see a playoff game at Mount Zion Stadium?  Between the Jerusalem Templeminders and the Capernaum Tilapia Tuggers?

No.  He resolutely determined to journey to Jerusalem because “the days for Him to be taken up” had arrived.  His Hour had come.  He went to Jerusalem to die on the cross.  And to rise again from the dead.  And to ascend to the right of the Father in heaven, whence He shall come to judge us all.

Human life involves suffering.  Some suffer more than others.  But no one skates through totally unscathed.  Sometimes we get angry.  Sometimes we despair.

But Jesus is alive.  That is the medicine.  He suffered for us, with us–in us, and us in Him.  But that’s not all.  He suffered so that we sufferers could share in His victory and His glory.  He suffered, and He triumphed.  Triumphed over suffering, over death, over all evil.

That’s the truth.  To hold fast to that truth; to hold fast to Christ Himself—the living, breathing Jesus, Who dwells in heaven, Who knows all, Who understands all—to hold fast to Him, and to build our lives on Him, on faith in His immortal life:  that is the medicine for anger and despair that we really need.

Fortnight for Freedom Homily

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We pray and fast during this Fortnight for Freedom for one precise purpose: that our Church would enjoy the liberty to do the work we need to do, the work our divine Founder has commanded us to do. [Click para leer en español.]

We hear in our Sunday gospel reading how the Lord passed through Samaritan territory on His way to Jerusalem.  The straight way from Galilee passed through lands occupied by the remnants of the northern tribes of the Hebrew people.  Nearly 1,000 years of history had passed since all the children of Jacob had been united in religion and government.  The northern tribes had never accepted Jerusalem as a capital or site for the Temple.

Although Jesus grew up in the north, He belonged to the tribe of Judah, the southern tribe whose land included Jerusalem.  Galilean Jews like Him usually crossed to the east side of the Jordan River to travel south by a safer and more welcoming road, in order to reach the Temple for the annual feasts in Jerusalem.  In other words, they generally took the long way, in order to bypass hostile Samaritan territory.

But for His own mysterious reasons, the Lord decided on this particular trip to take the more direct route, straight through Samaria.  Which meant risking harsh treatment and rejection at the hands of the unsympathetic natives.

I think maybe we can relate to the emotions that the Apostles experienced when the Samaritans mistreated them.  It is a particularly painful, agonizing thing to be mistreated when you are a stranger and a sojourner in a land that is not your own.

Anyway, as we read, the Lord would have none of the Apostles’ angry reaction to this.  He insisted that everyone stay focused on the one thing necessary:  to keep moving toward the goal.

Now, honest and good people can disagree about the particulars of immigration policy.  There is no easy prescription for resolving all the problems involved.  But I think we can safely say we find ourselves at a crossroads as a nation.  Will we continue to welcome immigrants?  If we speak about immigrants with fear and defensiveness, we will not prosper.  America has prospered precisely because we have been a country that welcomes Jesus and His companions, when they wander among us as strangers.

Now, maybe we Catholics are just silly idealists on this subject?  After all, here in the halls of the Church, we exercise no border controls at all.  Every baptized person belongs.  Every baptized person belongs.  And any unbaptized person can join our church by receiving Holy Baptism.  There are no other criteria for membership.  If you’re baptized, you’re a member of our church.

As you know, we read the same Sunday readings every three years.  Three summers ago, the US Congress labored through the summer on “immigration reform.”  A lot of people of good will spent a lot of energy—me included—to try to find a solution to the problem of immigrants living in the shadows here in America, utterly unprotected by our laws, because they don’t have certain ‘papers.’

Now, three years later, I think it’s fair to say that we find ourselves in a much, much bleaker situation.

What kind of nation are we?  Do we think that two wrongs can make a right?  Is it right to respond to craven acts of violence by defensively imagining that we can seal ourselves off from danger?  If we think deporting immigrants and shutting our borders will keep us safe, we utterly delude ourselves.  The more closed-off and self-centered we try to become as a country, the more violence will find its way to us.

What we need is real faith.  Faith in the sure and loving hand of God.  Over and over again I find myself stunned by the technocratic impulse of these times.  When the shooting happened in Orlando, before the dead were even all identified, much less peacefully buried–before we stopped to pray in silence for the repose of their souls–the shouting about how to “fix” it erupted.

But, before we get all depressed about our political situation, let’s remember this:  Here on earth we have no lasting city.

A whirlwind carried the prophet Elijah from this world up to heaven.  Our Savior, when He walked the earth, had no home in which to lay His head.  He revealed to us what our life here really is:  a pilgrimage.  An arduous journey toward a goal.  All Americans are immigrants, to be sure.  But even more so:  All Christians are emigrants.  We are on our way somewhere else.

We do not see our destination.  We believe in it.  Why can’t we see it?  Why can’t we see the heavenly Jerusalem?  Because it is invisible?  No.  The angels know how brightly that city shines—a million times more splendid than the Manhattan skyline on a starry night.  We can’t see the heavenly homeland now because our eyes do not possess adequate seeing power.  Our minds, that see by faith—our minds perceive reality more comprehensively than our eyes.  That is, provided we live by the Spirit and not by the flesh.

Let’s pray and fast this Fortnight for the freedom to love our neighbors with pure hearts.  In the heavenly Jerusalem, chaste and true love is the very light and air by which everyone sees and breathes.  We pray for our own interior freedom, and we pray for our country, that our laws will always serve the cause of justice, protect the innocent, and foster the peace and tranquility of brotherly love.

Unswerving and Kind

First let’s try to understand some of the tricky aspects of the gospel reading for today’s Holy Mass.

“When the days for Jesus to be taken up were fulfilled…”

What does this mean? The time had come for the Lord’s…Passion, death, Resurrection, and Ascension—His Paschal Mystery.

Lord Jesus went to what city in order to complete the Paschal Mystery? Jerusalem!

“On the way, they entered a Samaritan village.” On the way from where? Galilee. The land of Samaria lies between Galilee and Jerusalem.

“But the Samaritans would not welcome him.”

Why wouldn’t they? This one is difficult.

The Jews who lived in Jerusalem practiced which religion? Judaism, of course. And the Jews in Galilee? Also, Jewish. What about the Samaritans? Jewish also!

Problem is, the Samaritans had their own version of Judaism. According to the Samaritans, the Temple of God was not located in Jerusalem. Where was it located, according to the Samaritans? Trick question! Nowhere—it used to be in the city of Shechem, but it had been destroyed hundreds of years earlier. The Samaritans thought that the temple in Jerusalem was only a counterfeit temple.

“Lord, do you want us to call down fire from heaven to destroy the Samaritans?”

The disciples thought, “These enemies are being mean to us, even though we are making the most important journey ever made. Therefore, let’s destroy ‘em.”

Lord Jesus did not even deign to reply. No fire from heaven. We journey on.

Now, we sometimes encounter people who seem to wander without a good, clear path to God, people whose path “is hidden from them,” as Job puts it in the first reading at today’s Mass.

Let’s always remember both aspects of the Lord Jesus’ demeanor during His trip to Samaria. On the one hand, He would not swerve from the path which the Father had laid out for Him. He must go to Jerusalem. The Samaritans were wrong to reject Christ’s pilgrimage to the holy city.

On the other hand, Jesus would not give a thought to violence towards anyone. He would not let Himself be distracted by self-righteous meanness, even towards people who were self-righteously mean to Him.

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.

Welcome Here

We pray and fast during this Fortnight for Freedom for one precise purpose: that our Church would enjoy the liberty to do the work we need to do, the work our divine Founder has commanded us to do.

We hear in our gospel reading how the Lord passed through Samaritan territory on His way to Jerusalem. The straight way from Galilee passed through lands occupied by the remnants of the northern tribes of the Hebrew people. Nearly 1,000 years of history had passed since all the children of Jacob had been united in religion and government. The northern tribes had never accepted Jerusalem as a capital or site for the Temple.

Although Jesus grew up in the north, He belonged to the tribe of Judah, the southern tribe whose land included Jerusalem. Galilean Jews like Him usually crossed to the east side of the Jordan to travel south by a safer and more welcoming road, in order to reach the Temple for the annual feasts in Jerusalem. In other words, they generally took the long way, in order to bypass hostile Samaritan territory.

But for His own mysterious reasons, the Lord decided on this particular trip to take the more direct route, straight through Samaria. Which meant risking harsh treatment and rejection at the hands of the unsympathetic natives.

I think maybe we can relate to the emotions that the Apostles experienced when the Samaritans mistreated them. It is a particularly painful, agonizing thing to be mistreated when you are a stranger and a sojourner in a land that is not your own. Maybe some of us can relate to that. I daresay some of us have experienced similar mistreatment from unsympathetic natives, when we traveled, at some point in our lives.