Sermon on the Mount and Last Word

[written 3/6/20]

Whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment. (Matthew 5:22)

Now, injustice naturally makes us human beings angry. If we saw an injustice, and didn’t get angry about it, that would indicate that our souls have fallen into a nearly lifeless state.

Also: the world abounds with injustice. It’s a fallen world. Some people try to act as if we live on some dream planet, where everything is hunky dory and nice. And when they carry on like that, it’s enough to make a person angry.

So, are we totally stuck? On the one hand: Reality, dripping with injustices, each of which make any healthy human soul angry. On the other hand, the incarnate Son of God saying: ‘You’re liable to judgment for harboring anger against your brother in your heart.’

How can we resolve this? There’s only one way.

His countrymen convicted Him of blasphemy. The colonial governor wrongly condemned Him to death, knowing full well that the sentence did not fit the situation at all. The soldiers brutalized Him mercilessly. They stretched out His arms and nailed Him on the cross to die. Nothing more wrong, nothing more unjust has every happened.

He said…

Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.

Now, only God knows the full contours of the vision of reality that the Lord Jesus had in His mind when He said that. We can say this much about what He hand in His mind: He knew that He offered Himself as a perfectly innocent victim of the injustice of the world, in order to reconcile the sinful human race with our Maker. In order to bring about peace between heaven and earth. To reconcile the cosmos, and bring everything back into harmony.

He alone can give us our own little share in that vision of total reconciliation. When He does give us that insight, by the power of His grace, then we forget our quarrels. We take steps to restore relationships. We live as humble participants in the much-bigger reality. That is, the reality of Jesus Christ saving us sinners from everlasting sin.

We all have that in common, the mystery of salvation. And it looms much larger than the little beefs we have among ourselves.

We can’t escape the judgment we deserve for falling into unjust anger over the injustices we witness and suffer. We can’t do that on our own. Without a share in the mystery of the mind of Christ on the cross, it’s hopeless.

But: With Christ crucified, we can. We can learn to forgive. We can find the path to peace with any fellow sinner.

Faith in the Marriage Bond

The prophet Elijah suffered. Because the nation of Israel had broken faith with her Lord. Israel was governed by cynical world-lings who knew no law other than their rapacious short-term appetites.

But God is faithful, faithful to His promises and His covenant. He did not vanish from the life of His chosen spouse. He stayed close. He continued to guide His people into a better future. The nation had abandoned God, but the story of love and friendship between God and man was not over.

Spouses need to live and breathe this history of Israel. Because anyone who has been married for more than ten minutes knows that: Marriage is no picnic.

I mean, hopefully it does involve picnics. Frequent picnics. But:

Human beings have grave difficulties getting along. Human Nature 101: Getting along takes work, requires compromises, and inevitably means humbling yourself sometimes.

So the mystery of the ancient Scriptures, the mystery of God’s faithfulness in His union with an unreliable, capricious spouse: that mystery of God’s unswerving dedication must be the spiritual air that married couples breathe. Marriage requires one thing, above all: Believing in this God.

He loves to the end. He did not abandon His chosen Bride, even when she abandoned Him. To the contrary, He took His bride’s nature to Himself and became a man. Then He let His recalcitrant spouse take out all her destructiveness on Him. Even then, as His bride killed Him, He did not give up on His marriage bond. “They know not what they do. Forgive them, Father.”

So: If your cellphone removes you from the mystery of the ancient Scriptures, cut it off and throw it away. If you’re gossipy friends make suggestions that involve divorce, shut them up and tell them to get lost. Better to live in the life-giving truth of the ancient Scriptures, without knowing whether or not your high-school classmates have gotten fat, than to enter Gehenna with 1,000 facebook friends.

World Cup and World Peace

If you come to the altar and there recall that your brother has anything against you, go first and be reconciled with your brother. (Matthew 5:23-24)

“Come to the altar.” When we pray and seek a friendship with the Almighty, the altogether True and Good, we examine our consciences. We measure ourselves against the fidelity, kindness, and love of Christ. Then we realize: Yikes, I have offended my neighbors. I have wronged them in such-and-such way, at such-and-such times. I have not fulfilled God’s command to love my neighbor as much as I love myself. So I must “go and be reconciled.”

Easy. When I’m honest, humble, and full of trust in God.

Not so easy, when I’m the normal kind of obtuse, anxious, self-centered mortal that most of us are. A fearful soul who sees things only as they affect me, and who would rather eat dirt than sincerely apologize for anything.

The Lord Jesus began the Sermon on the Mount by declaring peacemakers blessed, along with the poor in spirit, the meek and merciful, the clean of heart, the zealous for justice, those mourn the sins of the world and do penance.

Like I said: Making peace is easy, when your heart harmonizes perfectly with the Heart of Jesus Christ. But reaching that kind of harmony with divine love requires the spiritual battle of a lifetime. The constant renunciation of self; daily meditation on the true meaning of life; constant practice in honest communication.

The World Cup tournament can help build international peace. And the highly televised Singapore summit earlier this week. Let’s hope for the best. The greatest force for international peace is, of course: intermarriage and child-bearing.

When Serbs marry Croats and have Serbo-Croat babies, and Bosnians marry Hungarians and have Bosno-Hungarian babies, and Tutsis marry Hutus and have Hutu-Tutsi babies, and Germans marry Slavs and have Germano-Slavic babies, and whites marry blacks and have tan babies, and Latinos marry Italian-Americans and have babies who look like Selena Gomez… we wind up in a good situation.

The grandparents simply cannot order the grandchildren into war against each other when those grandchildren are literally brothers and sisters.

Maybe we need to encourage our American children to marry Canadians at this point. To avoid a re-eruption of the French and Indian War…

But the most important world-peace-making work of all involves: getting my self reconciled with God and His truth. Getting myself reconciled with myself. If, by God’s grace, I can make a true, enduring peace with myself, then I can make peace with anyone.

Sermon-on-the-Mount Sentence

Settle with your opponent quickly while on the way to court with him. (Matthew 5:25)

Sobering thought: all of us are on our way to the Judge. And not just any judge, but the One Who sees all, knows all, and judges with perfect righteousness. Unlike us, who tend to see only what we want to see. And to judge rashly and blindly, because we care, above all, about: me, me, me.

Not that we never have a right to get angry or to judge anything. Injustice will anger us. Someone punches you in the face, you get angry. And if someone does you wrong, and a remedy for the wrong stands available for you to pursue, you pursue it. Calmly, according to law.

But sometimes there’s no remedy. And even if there is one, it won’t touch the heart of the matter anyway. Because the heart of the matter is this: We all have something in common. All of us—the good, the bad, and the ugly. We all have this in common: We can make no claims on God Almighty.

Almighty God gives out of love, not out of indebtedness; not because some law of justice governs Him. So: if someone wrongs me, okay. I have been wronged. But I still have much more than I could ever claim to deserve, because God gave me everything I have in the first place, without me “deserving” it at all.

I think it’s easier to make peace with our neighbors on the way to altar when we remember this. Yes, maybe I have a right to be mad at so-and-so, because of such-and-such. But I have no right to imagine that such-and-such amounts to a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. Plus, there are plenty of people out there who have a right to be mad at me, about far-more-serious matters.

The world abounds with little tribunals seeking justice, with varying degrees of success. But, in the end, every human being will face the same tribunal of justice. And at that ultimate and definitive judge’s bench, we all have only one real hope. Namely, that the Judge will look upon us with mercy.

The same mercy that moved Him to make the sun rise this morning, even though the human race hardly deserves such a favor. Our hope for Judgment Day is: that Jesus Christ, with His Heart wounded for us, will be the One sitting behind the judge’s bench.

Jesus: The all-knowing, perfectly righteous Judge. Who has shown Himself to be the infinite goodness and kindness and mercy of God.

What Will Endure?

If what was to fade was glorious, how much more will what endures be glorious. (II Corinthians 3:11) What does endure? What will endure even beyond the “passing away of heaven and earth?” (Matthew 5:18)

The answer resounds right in front of our noses. “The chalice of My Blood, the blood of the new and eternal covenant.” We do not go too far when we say: Our religion is the Mass.

Not that we do no other acts of religion. We pray at other times and in other places. And we try to act justly and kindly all the time and everywhere we go, out of duty to God. But none of our prayers or religious acts outside of Mass make any sense at all without the Mass.

We do not go too far when we say: Our religion is Jesus Christ. Jesus, the incarnate Word of the eternal Father, makes Himself our sacrifice and our food in the Holy Mass.

Yes, we sacrifice other things; we strive to sacrifice our whole lives to God. But no sacrifice we can make pleases the Father unless we unite it with Christ’s sacrifice. And, in truth, we need make no sacrifice other than the sacrifice of Jesus—since, in offering Himself, He offered everything good and worthy in us. After all, He made us according to the infinite Wisdom He possesses in His unfathomable mind.

Sometimes non-Catholics try to confuse this issue of the absolute centrality of the Holy Mass and the sacred priesthood in the Catholic Church. They note that the New Testament contains relatively few references to the Mass, or the priesthood, or the Real Presence.

But this criticism actually misses the obvious context of the New Testament itself. What is the New Testament? Is it a collection of moral instructions? If so, it is not a coherent one. Is the New Testament an account of first-century Mediterranean-basin history? If so, it is a terrible, practically unreadable one.

The New Testament makes perfect sense, however, as a collection of documents written by churchmen—men who maintained intimate communion with Christ through the Holy Eucharist. Documents, in other words, written by priests of the new and eternal covenant, for the benefit of their people, namely the people who participated regularly in the celebration of the Holy Eucharist.

The living, breathing reality of the Church—priests and people celebrating Jesus’ Mass together: that is the gloriously glorious thing that will not pass away. Even on the other side of the final and all-encompassing purification of heaven and earth, we will gather together around the altar to offer Jesus and receive Jesus.

Sabbath Dispute

Moses by Michelangelo

At Holy Mass this coming Sunday, we will read St. John’s account of the Lord Jesus giving sight to a man born blind. Jesus worked the miracle on the Sabbath day. So a dispute ensued, regarding the Law of Moses.

Some of the Pharisees concluded that obeying Moses and following Christ were incompatible pursuits. They reasoned thus: Jesus, breaking the Sabbath to heal the blind man, while at the same time professing to do God’s work, either…

a. rendered the Law of Moses null and void, or

b. disqualified Himself as a prophet by unrepentantly violating a valid divine law.

Now, we could reject this reasoning as prissy, pointless pharisaism—if Lord Jesus Himself had not so punctiliously insisted that the Law of Moses does indeed remain altogether valid. Every jot and tittle remains in force, “until all things have taken place” (Matthew 5:18), as we read at Holy Mass today.

In fact, rejecting the Old Testament is a heresy that has a name: Marcionism. An orthodox Christian, on the other hand, believes that Christ Himself, the eternal Word, gave Moses the Law. The Law of Moses is Christ’s Law.

But: We can eat bacon-wrapped shrimp. And we regard circumcision as a medical matter, not a religious one. And we don’t have to wail at the Wailing Wall. And we’re not still waiting for the Messiah to make Himself known.

What we cannot do, however, is: Imagine that we are any other people than the children of Abraham. Who are we? We are the same people that Moses led out of slavery in Egypt. Our forefathers and mothers prayed and waited for the Messiah to come, listening carefully to the words of the prophets. But then, when He came, we rejected and killed Him. Then, when He rose from the dead, we began to repent and believe in Him. He grafted our Jewish and Gentile forefathers together into His chosen people.

The Law began in the very beginning. Christ hallowed the Sabbath with His own rest on the seventh day of the world. Since, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, He is the Creator. The one God made human life what it is: namely, an existence that only makes sense when we worship, love, and obediently serve the Almighty.

Sabbath-breaking remains a grave sin, graver than ever. Christ has enlightened the eyes of our minds: We know who we are. We are freeborn children of God’s household. We are no man’s slaves, because we serve the divine Master. The Pharisees who objected to Jesus had it right—except that they were too blind to see that the one and only place where mankind can actually keep the Sabbath is in the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Nazareth.

Solidarity

Gospel reading at today’s Holy Mass seems eerily familiar.  We just heard it a Sunday Mass 3 ½ weeks ago. Lord Jesus explaining the Ten Commandments.

Christian morality all begins with the fundamental truth: “I am the Lord, your God.”  That sentence is enough, really, to indicate all the demands of Christian morality.  The Sermon on the Mount just spells things out.

Do not murder, do not despise, do not yell at people. Do not nurse so much as the smallest grudge.

Why?  Because God will judge justly. He is the Lord our God. He is everybody’s God.  Judging other people’s souls is above our pay-grade.  We are much better suited to kneeling down and begging God for mercy, for me personally and for the whole human race.

Also: the Lord, our God, will provide. He provides what we need.   So we don’t have to fight amongst ourselves.  We don’t have to contend for what we think we ought to have, to wrench it out of the hands of someone else.  God will give us our sufficient portion.  Our job is to be friends, as best we can.

The Catholic buzzword is “solidarity.” Might be a buzzword, but it’s also a real thing. Pope Pius XII put it like this:

The law of human solidarity and charity, dictated and imposed both by our common origin and by the equality in rational nature of all men, whatever nation they belong to. This law is sealed by the sacrifice of redemption offered by Jesus Christ on the altar of the Cross to his heavenly Father, on behalf of sinful humanity.

We are in this together. We are sinners together. We need Christ together. And we can and do successfully work together and accomplish great things together! When we have the humility to listen respectfully to each other, think of each other’s well-being, and learn to love each other. All of us have this in common: we are perfectly lovable shambling messes.

May we never think of another person as if he or she were a member of a different species. May we never give up hope on communication and concord. May I never forget that one thing, and one thing only, keeps me from going to hell like I deserve: God’s mercy.

And God’s extends that same exquisite mercy to even the smelliest, shrillest, nastiest, most altogether insufferable people in the world. So I had better do the same thing. Since I am one of the smelly, shrill, nasty, insufferable people.

Giving and Getting It All

The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise. That they are vain. (I Corinthians 3:20)

The wise of the world. Like Oprah Winfrey or Mark Twain. Like Socrates. Like the framers of the US Constitution–Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Co. Like the entrepreneurial geniuses–Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk. Or the gray eminences of Hollywood–Samuel Jackson, Shirley MacLaine, Denzel Washington, or Meryl Streep. Even the the sage of the ultimate mystery, NCAA bracketologist John Lunardi.

[Click HERE to read in Spanish.]

All their thoughts–about who will get into the tournament, or about how to make money, or write a book, or please an audience, or govern a country–all of those human brainwaves: completely vain, saith the Scriptures.

Let’s go a step farther. Who’s the wisest Christian who ever lived? Gotta be St. Thomas Aquinas, right?

Near the end of his life, someone asked him about all his voluminous writings of wisdom. He said, “It’s all straw.”

Something transcends it all. By comparison with its wisdom, the deepest thoughts of men mean nothing. And that something is Christ crucified.

St. Paul went on to write: “So let no one boast of human beings, for everything belongs to you…the world, or life or death, or the present or the future: all belong to you, and you to Christ, and Christ to God.”

Wow. But how to understand this? How do we understand St. Paul telling us that everything–as in: the whole cosmos–belongs to us? To try to understand, let’s work our way down, in order to work our way up. We have to let the commands of Christ humble us utterly, so that His sacrifice can utterly exalt us.

In the gospel at Sunday Mass we hear Jesus tell us: “Offer your left cheeck to the one who strkes your right. Love your enemy. Pray for the one who persecutes you. Do all of this to live as children of your heavenly Father, Who makes His sun rise on everyone, and Who loves everyone perfectly.”

Now, Who must this man be, Jesus, to issue such commands? No human being ever made the sun rise, or prevented its rising. No human being has ever known better than God when it should rain, or when it should stop raining.

When Jesus speaks, we hear the voice of the One Who owns and operates everything. He knows every human mind, and He knows that not one of them contains enough knowledge to judge a human soul. If I think so-and-so is my enemy, I may have my human reasons for thinking that. But it could be that God gave me so-and-so as a friend. What I know for sure is that God made so-and-so to be His, God’s, friend.

The doctrine of Christ utterly humbles us. Because Christ’s wisdom is not human wisdom. It is divine wisdom. Jesus is something other than a wise sage, something completely different from an “expert.” Jesus is a man with God’s Mind in His Head. God owns and operates the cosmos, whole and entire. And everything that God owns and operates, Christ owns and operates. And everyone that God loves, Jesus loves. And that’s everyone.

Now, does everything that Christ owns and operates belong also to us? Including His universal love?

Lord Jesus stretched out His arms on the cross not just for those who love Him, but also for those who hate Him. They took His cloak, His tunic, and His sandals. They beat and battered Him. They scourged Him and spat on Him, and yet He peacefully offered more. He opened His Hands and relaxed His Feet for the nails. And, as the hammer fell, He loved the very men who pounded the spikes into His flesh. He gave everything and held nothing back for Himself. He gave His very life’s breath to His enemies.

An utter fool, the Uncreated Divine Wisdom. An utter fool for love, His Blood dripping to the ground below, as He said, “Father, forgive them,” about the men who at that moment mocked Him and spat with contempt on His wounded ankles.

But the Fool for Love reigns. Even hanging on His Cross, Christ our God owned and operated everything, with His infinite divine power and knowledge. And at that moment, He handed it all to us. The cosmos. And His infinite Love.

For free. For nothing. As a gift.

He made this gift to both those who love Him and those who hate Him. God gave to sinners the gift of His loving friendship. All things work to the benefit of the friends of God, by His power and grace. Not because we are good, or wise, or cute–but because He is generous: We have it all.

Light in R-Rated

I hesitate to get into this. But it’s time to acknowledge a true leader. I know these debates can get quite emotional. I for one have seen a lot of hate spewed in recent days–about a man who is a constant winner and overachiever. He’s out there proving his haters wrong time after time. Some people get jealous of such a consistent winner. Throw in a beautiful foreign model for a wife, and people hate him even more. Maybe you didn’t want him in the role he has today, but there’s nothing anyone can do about it now.

Like it or not, Tom Brady is in the Superbowl again.*

Before the game, though, let’s turn inward. Who calls him- or herself a disciple of Christ?

Therefore we must listen carefully.

Last week He taught us where we can find true blessedness. Christ’s Beatitudes describe a kind of happiness that lies hidden from the world’s eyes. Poor in spirit, meek, merciful, pure-hearted, longing for justice and truth–there we find the invisible happiness of inner communion with God.

Today at Holy Mass we hear the Lord command us to let a light shine that will move people to glorify God. “You are the light of the world,” He tells us.

In a month, Lent will arrive, and we will celebrate the Stations of the Cross on Fridays, as we customarily do. We have lovely, evocative stations at St. Andrew’s in Roanoke. We can use them outside of Lent, too, of course. A unique light shone from Christ throughout His pilgrim life. But when we imagine His bitter Passion and crucifixion, we see that light at its purest.

Theologians debate the question of whether Jesus had the virtue of faith during His earthly life. St. Thomas Aquinas says No, because Christ had the beatific vision from the moment of His conception in the Virgin’s womb. In His mind, Lord Jesus always beheld the glory of God. What we believe, and hope to see, Jesus always saw interiorly and knew.

In the end, I think the debate on the the question of Jesus’ faith doesn’t serve much of a purpose, because the essential fact for us is: The strength and serenity that Jesus possessed during His Passion. We have faith–we have faith precisely in that inner source, the life of the soul of Christ, which gave Him the love by which He offered Himself to the Father, for us, on the cross. We believe that the inner source of Christ’s perfect life is God. The source of Jesus’ strength and serenity during the Passion is the God in which we Christians believe. Feel me?

As we gaze at the fourteen Stations, we see light. An intense paradox draws us into the true meaning of our lives: These bas-relief sculptures depict a hideously dark sequence of events. If we didn’t hold the Christian faith, we wouldn’t want our children exposed to these images. When Mel Gibson made his Passion movie, people complained about the violence. But Good Friday–the real, original day–it was an R-rated movie. If they gave a rating to our Stations of the Cross, it would have to be R.

But we see light. At Mass at St. Andrew’s, we find ourselves in a shiny, sparkling, gaudy building–and right in the center, with every architectural line converging on it–is the rendition of a crucified man. And to us, this is the brightest light of all, the shiniest part of the beautiful building. This is our God. His light, altogether invisible to every eye but the eye of faith–His light shines brighter than any other light. The Passion, darker than any Hollywood horror movie–and yet we see the Light of the World shining.

And that makes us the light of the world. It’s good to be nice, but being nice doesn’t make anyone the light of the world. It’s good to be smart, but being smart doesn’t make anyone the light of the world. When does our light shine before others and make them glorify our heavenly Father? When they see within us the same light that shone within Jesus on Good Friday.

The world needs our Christian interior life. We need a Christian interior life. How did Jesus give heaven to the human race? By living from the deep secret within Himself, His secret divine union with the Father.

Which means that we need to wall-off a sancutary in our souls. We need an inner tabernacle that no e-mail, no facebook, no Superbowl, no President, no news media can touch. We need to cultivate the interior life. The world needs us to cultivate the Christian interior life.

How? How about at least fifteen minutes of absolute silence per day? If we wonder, What do we need to survive life in the USA in 2017? let’s listen to this. St. Francis de Sales said, “I pray an hour a day, except when I’m really busy. Then I pray two hours a day.” Or Martin Luther: “I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours praying.”

What’s Christian meditation? It’s as easy as walking quietly from one Station of the Cross to the next. Or just trying to pay attention at Mass. Or opening up the New Testament and starting to read from Matthew 1:1.

Our light will shine. When we let the light of Christ crucified shine inside us. Through daily silent prayer.

————

* Thank you, David “Dutch” Massingham, for this joke.

Orlando and the Sermon on the Mount

Our heavenly Father makes the sun rise on the bad and the good. He makes the rain fall on the just and the unjust. (see Matthew 5:45)

I think meditating on these words will offer us Americans a salve, some balm in Gilead. Here in Hokie Nation, we suffer from special ghosts whenever someone shoots a building-full of innocent people.

Let’s meditate on what Lord Jesus means. He follows His command for us to love our enemies with the assertion that the Father shines His sun on the just and unjust alike, and pours rain on good and bad.

1. God has enemies. To set yourself against an omnipotent Opponent involves absurd self-delusion, to be sure. But Satan and his servants have done it, and God has enemies among the children of Adam and Eve, too.

Some of us sin through weakness, or through confusion—because we human beings tend to be muddled messes. But some of us sin through deliberate choice. Some have freely chosen to embrace a lie, or a half-truth, or selfishness plain and simple—and have given over to it completely. Enemies of God.

2. God loves His enemies. He wills their good. He has a plan for healing everything. So: time marches on, and the sun doesn’t explode, and Christ doesn’t come riding back on the clouds just yet. He patiently waits for everyone to choose the truth and live in humble love.  Even the hardened sinners, His enemies.

3. Our heavenly Father does not make the sun shine equally on just and unjust alike because He doesn’t care, doesn’t see any difference, makes no judgments. To the contrary: God judges like nobody’s business. God judges so precisely, so meticulously, so penetratingly, that any honest man can and must tremble at the prospect.

All truth will out. For now the sun may shine on a man with a darkened heart just as brightly as it shines on a man with a humble one. But what lies hidden will be revealed. In God’s time.

4. What God cares about is people’s souls. He cares about our bodies, too, of course. He hardly wills the death of the human body. He put us in Eden originally to live forever. But He allows fallen man to die, because it serves His wise plan for gathering souls to Himself.

Now, we Christians have something, which I think we tend to take for granted, but which we really must consciously cultivate in ourselves, so that we can teach the world.

We presume that we are all in this together. That one, same God shines the sun and rains the rain on us all—the one Father. We presume that all people are God’s children. We start from: human solidarity.

I don’t mean to be morbid or harsh when I call this fact of history to mind. But: the idea that no one should arbitrarily kill a building-full of people of whom he disapproves—the idea that everyone has a right to live in peace, free from the threat of spontaneous violence—that idea is a fruit of the coming of Christ. Our shock, and sadness, and confusion—it is a fruit of the coming of Christ.

In the ancient pagan world, people killed each other like this all the time. Such killings did not shock. They didn’t use machine guns, of course. They used machetes, or swords, or set fires, or just lined people up at spear point and then slit their throats.

The sense of universal human brotherhood–it does not come naturally to fallen man. What comes naturally is: We are good, but they are bad, and they deserve to die if they make nuisances of themselves.

That is not the way God is. Lord Jesus has taught us. God loves all His children. And He wills our good. He sends rain when we need rain. And the sun when we need cheering-up.