Be Holy

Do not aspire to be called holy before you really are, but first be holy that you may more truly be called so. Live by God's commandments every day; treasure chastity, harbor neither hatred nor jealousy of anyone, and do nothing out of envy. Do not love quarreling; shun ignorance. Respect the elders and love the young. Pray for your enemies out of love for Christ. If you have a dispute with someone, make peace with him before the sun goes down. And finally, never lose hope in God's mercy.

ST. BENEDICT The Rule

Above All, Clothe Yourselves With Love

At the close of life you will be examined as to your love: learn to love God as he wishes to be loved, and give up all that is your own.

SAINT JOHN OF THE CROSS Spiritual Maxims

Homily For The Fourth Sunday of Easter

Does it not strike you how much the Lord loves to spoil us, especially during these Fifty Days of Easter? All the texts of the Liturgy overflow with expressions that should fill our hearts with joy and gratitude. On this 4th Sunday of Easter, for instance, the Church invites us to contemplate the image of Jesus the Good Shepherd. This is much more than just a comforting theme, since it is not any poet or preacher who announces it to us but the Lord Jesus himself. He looks into our eyes and, with all the ardor of his Heart, reveals to us his identity: I am the Good Shepherd! It is the Son of God himself, dead and risen, who speaks to us. And what does he seek from us by doing so? Quite simply, that we give him permission to take care of us! 

Jesus is indeed the Good Shepherd; but are we humble enough to allow him to cast us in the role good sheep? Do we even want to be such? Admittedly, it is more than a little humiliating to be called a “sheep”, an animal famous for its stupidity… There are so many things that must first change in me if I am finally to rejoice in having been elected to the humble flock of Jesus Christ!

First of all, I must agree to be a follower rather than a leader when it comes to the spiritual quest, and I must admit to my existential condition of being lost, of having gone astray. I will only be sensitive to the approach of this divine Shepherd, and tuned in to the sound of his voice, if I feel the urgent need to be sought and found by Someone who can save me from my lost condition. For this I need humility and realism, springing from a certain honest knowledge of myself, out of a bitter experience. Sometimes we first have to fall very low for our pride to finally surrender to the action of grace, and for me to cry out from the bottom of my heart: ‘Lord, save me! Now I truly know that I cannot save myself!’

Within our family and community, we must have the humility and realism to look at ourselves and each other and admit with good humor that we are all of us, most of the time, rather stupid and lost sheep, and that it is not from someone in our midst that we will find a shepherd who saves us: neither heads of state, nor politicians, nor scientists, nor economists, nor (believe it or not!) abbesses or abbots or superiors ad nutum, nor above all the generals and their soldiers, whose god is war. And yet, socially and culturally speaking, it is not so easy to give up our instinctive search for salvation from among those whom the world presents to us as the “wise and strong” who will “take good care of us”.

No, we must definitely look elsewhere, realizing that the only one who can save us is the One who declares to us today in the tone of a lover: I am the Good Shepherd, [and] a good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. This moving and consoling statement is nevertheless difficult to accept, for two further reasons. First, it seems insane to us that a shepherd could save his sheep by offering himself as a sacrifice to the wolf. Why would this wolf ever stop his carnage after having devoured the shepherd? And the second reason touches us even more closely: If this Shepherd saves others by giving his life, will not his own tough logic apply to us, too, as having been saved: namely, that we also, in turn, become shepherd for others and give our own lives so that they may be saved? Something in us recoils at that thought, and whispers: ‘Yes, you want to be a good Christian, but surely not a fanatic!’

The Word of God we have just heard, on the other hand, intends to persuade us to become more available, more consenting, to the action of God in our lives through the coming of his Son. The Paschal Mystery requires that I radically change the commonly shared logic I have received. Like Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, I must come to be totally convinced that only God can raise from the dead the One whom human beings have put to death. God follows precisely the logic that you and I conventionally reject, in order to bring about the salvation of the world, instanced here in the healing of a cripple: There is no salvation through anyone [other than Jesus Christ, the Nazorean]; nor is there any other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved. The strength and courage to affirm such an unheard-of thing, first in our own inmost heart and then before the hostile world, can only come to us from the power Holy Spirit dwelling within us, as in the case of St Peter.

The intimacy with himself to which Our Lord invites us today is so extraordinary that it can have its source in only one place: the sphere of the Blessed Trinity, and more precisely in the mutual love and trust existing between the Son and the Father in the bond of the Spirit. Let’s listen carefully to what Jesus is revealing to us today: I am the good shepherd, and I know [my sheep] and [my sheep] know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. This revelation seems to me almost unimaginable: the same reciprocal and eternal knowledge and love between two divine Persons who are inseparable and necessary to one another—this same mutual knowledge and love has been communicated to us, poor creatures that we are. We exist within the Trinitarian relationship; the roots of our life suck up sustaining sap from the ground of God’s own intimate life! 

As if that weren’t enough, the Lord adds: This is why the Father loves me: because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. Now, for whose sake exactly is Jesus laying down his life? For the Father’s sake, since he says: the Father loves me because I lay down my life? But the Father has no need of such a sacrifice! For what precisely, then, does the Father express so much gratitude to the Son? It must be for Jesus’ laying down his life for our sake. The inevitable conclusion may sound blasphemous to rigid ears: namely, that the Father must not love us any less than he has loved the Son from all eternity. I leave you to ponder this unbelievable truth, which we must nevertheless believe because nothing less would be worthy of the God we worship, and nothing less can raise us from the dead. As we have just heard in the First Letter of John: See what love the Father has bestowed on us, that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are! … We shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

Changing the Tide of History

Selfishness makes people deaf and dumb; love opens eyes and ears, enabling people to make that original and irreplaceable contribution which – together with the thousands of deeds of so many brothers and sisters, often distant and unknown – converges to form the mosaic of charity that can change the tide of history.

ST. POPE JOHN PAUL II World Day of Youth, 26 Nov. 1995

Homily: All You Need is Thirst

Have you ever been struck by this astonishing fact of the Easter Mystery: that the risen Jesus, instead of returning immediately to the Father in heavenly glory, insists rather on pursuing his beloved disciples doggedly over the course of fifty days by visiting them repeatedly wherever they may be, searching for their love and wanting to heal them with his presence? When the Risen One appears to them today, we hear that they were startled and terrified. And what Jesus does on first encountering them is to take away the fear they feel thinking they are seeing a ghost. He does this by urging them to explore his corporeality in the most tangible way possible. Yes, he offers them his body for palpable contact, with repeated protestations of love in the form of commandments to intimacy: Peace be with you! It is I myself! Touch me! He seems bound and determined to remove any obstacle still separating him from constant union with his friends. He knows his work of redemption will not be completed until he accomplishes this; only then can he return to the Father.

Now, the Greek word psêlaphêsate, here translated simply as ‘to touch’, has the more precise meaning of ‘examining closely’ or ‘searching by feel’, just as blind persons do with their hands when feeling their way in the dark. It is as if the Lord were saying to his apostles: ‘You are blind with fear and unbelief. But go ahead: handle me familiarly. Through your eager touch I, who am the Light, will enlighten the eyes of your heart!’ 

Indeed, any true lover always wants to know, without intermediaries, all the details of the beloved’s whole being. Jesus clearly wants his friends to see and touch the wounds on his hands and feet; he wants them to handle him intimately to make sure that he really has a human body like their own; and he also wants them to see him eating very earthly food, to be assured that he is not removed from their own sphere of experience. A ghost has no flesh and bones as you see that I have, he tells them with some humor. How fundamental to our faith is this bodily and, indeed, Eucharistic experience of Jesus’ presence! 

But this encounter between Jesus and the disciples in the truth of the flesh is only the preamble to what Jesus really wants to teach them: namely, that his bodily Death and Resurrection is the ultimate fulfilment of God’s age-old plan of redemption from the beginning. Jesus wants them to know that all prophetic allusions to salvation in the Old Testament have now become palpable reality in himself: Everything written about me … must be fulfilled, he affirms. Now, in the context of traditional Jewish piety, this is truly an earth-shaking claim on Jesus’ part: that the deepest meaning of the Law and the Prophets—that is, what Israel held most sacred as God’s revelation of himself to them—was always a hidden reference to himself, Jesus of Nazareth, and that this fulfilment is communicated to all humankind in the historical and mystical event we call the Paschal Mystery. It all comes down to the truth of his body, because only a body is capable of undergoing both death and resurrection. In this way we can clearly understand the close link that Jesus establishes between his bodily truth (flesh and bones) and the victory over death communicated by participation in the Paschal Mystery. Jesus is no mythological figure and his death and resurrection are no merely helpful Jungian symbols. Here we are talking real and concrete human existence, both before and after the Resurrection.

Further, at the heart of this Paschal Mystery is the forgiveness of sins: all of our torturing guilt is wiped away because the Lord has taken on, in his body, the consequences of everyone’s failings. The passion that always drives Jesus’ love is the forgiving of the sins of all, the removal of all guilt. He fervently wants everyone to feel forgiven and thus loved by his Father. This mystery of forgiveness through Jesus’ death and resurrection must from now on also be preached to all peoples by Jesus’ own chosen witnesses. Of this you are witnesses, he solemnly declares to them, which means: ‘You must proclaim and give to others the forgiveness you have already received from me. Share generously with all my gift to you: your own joyful experience of being forgiven!’

In his sermon in the temple Peter shows that he understood this well. He first rebukes the people harshly for their crime, saying: You have killed the author of life; but immediately he softens his tone and adds that the people and their leaders had acted out of ignorance because they had not understood the Prophets’ teaching that the Messiah should suffer. Here we see a magnificent example of the forgiveness of others that authentic faith demands. From his personal experience of redemption and conversion, Peter first rebukes his listeners as he had indeed rebuked himself so bitterly; but immediately afterwards he spontaneously forgives them, excusing their infidelity, because he cannot forget what the Lord had already done for him in the face of his own unfaithfulness and inability to accept a suffering Messiah. Peter does not ask whether this ignorance on the part of the Jews was culpable or innocent; he simply addresses to them the same exhortation he directs to all: Repent and change your lives, that your sins may be blotted out. 

This universal forgiveness and remission of sins is celebrated in the second reading as an event full of consolation and hope for everyone: We have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous one. He is expiation for our sins. Each of us can indeed participate in this immense absolution pronounced by God upon the whole world. The only condition is that we convert our hearts and return to Jesus. Conversion is always necessary because those who call themselves “Christians” but do not keep God’s commandment are liars and stubbornly persevere in pre-Christian ignorance. They are a living contradiction and the truth is not in them. Without repentance and conversion, we cannot live in truth nor can we enjoy God’s mercy given to us in his beloved Son. Mercy is not like rain falling idly on a cement sidewalk. The cement merely gets wet and there the effect ends. Mercy, rather, is like rain falling on sensitive seeds buried deep in the ground, seeds that have to open up thirstily to the promise of growth that the water brings. As our Guerric of Igny has written: To benefit from “the living waters of Christ, you do not need merit: all you need is thirst”. But this thirst is an absolute requirement. How thirsty are we, in fact, right now, for Christ’s love? How eager are we to touch him? How willing to put him at the center of our lives, where he belongs, no matter what the cost to our ego?

Hidden With Christ in God

The unbounded loving surrender to God and God’s return gift, full and enduring union, this is the highest elevation of the heart attainable, the highest level of prayer. Souls who have attained it are truly the heart of the Church, and in them lives Jesus’ high priestly love. Hidden with Christ in God, they can do nothing but radiate to other hearts the divine love that fills them and so participate in the perfection of all into unity in God, which was and is Jesus' great desire.

SAINT TERESA BENEDICTA OF THE CROSS (EDITH STEIN) The Hidden Life

There Are No Bad Things

That “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” contains a subtlety which the popular pessimist cannot follow, or is too hasty to notice. It is the thesis that there are no bad things, but only bad uses of things. If you will, there are no bad things but only bad thoughts; and especially bad intentions. Only Calvinists can really believe that hell is paved with good intentions. That is exactly the one thing it cannot be paved with. But it is possible to have bad intentions about good things; and good things, like the world and the flesh, have been twisted by a bad intention called the devil. But he cannot make things bad; they remain as on the first day of creation. The work of heaven alone was material; the making of a material world. The work of hell is entirely spiritual.

G.K. CHESTERTON St. Thomas Aquinas