Homily — 1st Sunday of Lent, Year A

Drama in the Desert

From the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew and all the way to Golgotha, we see plainly that Christ Jesus did not come into this world to tread the broad and easy way. As his disciples, we should keep that fact foremost in mind. On the contrary, under the impulse of the Holy Spirit he goes without detours to the place where divine battles are fought: that is, to the depths of the human heart, symbolized in Matthew, first, by the depths of Jordan’s waters, where demonic monsters were thought to lurk, and, today, by the desert, where only the saint or the demon can survive. If Satan is the hero of the world—the lord of the earthly-minded, plotting the disruption of the divine order of unity and love at every step—Christ is the divine Hero who comes to confront Satan’s logic with clear-headedness, dogged determination and humility. In this forbidding wilderness two diametrically opposed solutions to the human plight are at loggerheads: on the one hand, capitulation to the comforts of the satanic suggestions; on the other, surrender to the mercy of God’s Providence. Either option requires listening and yielding to a voice from beyond ourselves, though resonating in the depths of our being. Who can doubt that such a tug of war is at the center of the human drama? And to which voice will I pledge my allegiance and devotion? 

The desert is the place of utter poverty and, therefore, an invitation to heroic trust in God. When we experience our own barrenness, when we are most in need, then it is that we are the most vulnerable and that the decisive crises arise. Will I accept quick fixes and adore their Pusher, thus betraying my identity as a person begotten of God, my Creator? Or will I agree to wait in silence and privation, fasting from all the world has to offer, for the perfect length of God’s pleasure, represented by the forty days and nights that recapitulate Israel’s historical wandering in the desert? 

The story of humanity’s Fall through sin is explained today in the tale of our first parents’ seduction through the temptation to become like God. Genesis shows us that God did not create the Human in a condition of alienation from itself but rather in a relationship of graciously bestowed friendship with the Creator. Harmony and not disruption is our origin. Because God creates us in the divine image, God gives us the highest of gifts, freedom—a gift that puts us squarely before the challenge of accountability: this single truth is the source both of our greatest difficulties and of our highest dignity as spiritual beings. A creature cast in unvarying moral uprightness as in a block of concrete would not be free at all. Goodness, like love, can never be the product of an automatic-response mechanism, but only the fruit of a free and personal act.

Now, this is where the plot of salvation-history thickens. God knows “in advance” that humans, enjoying such freedom of choice, will yield to the temptation to want to become like God.  This foreknowledge on God’s part, far from inducing a divine mistake, is rather a measure of how highly God regards the freedom he conferred on us. Yes, God is willing to risk the defeat of his wondrous design of friendship with man. It seems that for God everything hinges on our possessing by nature the privilege of freedom of choice. The reason must be that, without such freedom, there can be no authentic, reciprocal love, which is ultimately what God is after. God does not only wish to “make us happy” in a generic and static manner; God wants for us to enjoy forever the blissful intimacy of his love, and for this a reciprocal relationship is necessary which can be entered into only through the portal of total freedom. God always bestows his love, but we must actively embrace it and live accordingly. 

But God’s factual foreknowledge of humankind’s Fall is accompanied by an even deeper redemptive foreknowledge: namely, by the Father’s intention to send his Son into the world as the One who would face the very same temptation as Adam and Eve, but this time overcoming it. Today’s desert scene is, in fact, Paradise revisited: this is the scene of the unimaginable opportunity whereby the Lord Jesus undoes by his fidelity and obedience the evil that had been perpetrated there, and so re-establishes the innocence of our first condition. This is a victory that only a simultaneously divine and human Savior could accomplish for us. The decisive significance of today’s drama in the desert is that Christ does not triumph over temptation only for himself but for all humankind and each of us, for all who form his Body, so that every one of us can participate in his victory over proud rebellion and puffed-up self-aggrandizement and delusional phantasms of power and glory. Let’s be honest: We do not have to be princes, politicians or mega-CEO’s to be eminent practitioners of the dark arts of selfishness!

The Gospel today portrays Jesus’ victory as occurring after a 40-day fast, that is, at a moment when humanly speaking he is at his weakest and most vulnerable. Make no mistake about it: the temptations he undergoes are genuine temptations. They are not a show of pious make-believe enacted merely to teach us a moral lesson. Jesus may not have experienced the seduction of evil superficially, that is, as an enticement to crude sensual gratification. But surely for him it’s all the worse, because he is tested at a much deeper level of his being.  He suffers temptation in its pure state as a colossal gravitational pull to disobedience against his Father’s mission. What is here dramatized is nothing less than Satan instigating Jesus by every means available to his demonic know-how to abandon his divine Filiation and instead worship the Father of lies. In his well-aimed replies to each of Satan’s enticements, Jesus uses solely the words of Scripture. In this way he shows us that only total obedience to God, total interior identification with God’s Word, can transform mere freedom of choice into perfect freedom of heart and soul.  Indeed, we are most fully and gloriously ourselves only when God’s Word pervades and animates our whole being as the motivating source of all our thoughts, decisions and actions.  

In today’s encounter between God’s Incarnate Wisdom and the arch-Tempter we see that Satan, for all his angelic intelligence, did not understand the divine logic of salvation: namely, that obedient weakness is transmuted into spiritual power by the alchemy of the Father’s delight in the Son’s fidelity. Only faith can understand this, because only faith can understand the paradoxes of divine love. Satan juggles rationality and irony masterfully, but he is woefully ignorant of love’s readiness to embrace weakness for the sake of the beloved. When Satan gets his sharp teeth into Jesus’ flesh, his fangs crumble like sandstone grinding against steel. Sly, relentless, elemental Temptation then becomes elemental Overthrow of the Tempter. Satan thought he was testing the weakness of a generic holy man, yet all the while the Wisdom of God was, in fact, exposing, for all to see, the ultimate impotence of the Deceiver in the face of obedient fidelity and love. Satan is wholly ignorant of the power of fidelity out of love, and this is his Achilles’ heel. Loving fidelity to our Creator and Savior is thus our own strongest weapon in any temptation.

And behold angels approached and served him: I suggest that in these last seven words of today’s gospel text we have nothing less than the surprising fulfillment, by Jesus’ heavenly Father, of precisely the three offers Satan has just made to Jesus. As temptation leaves our Lord, fulfillment approaches. Instead of his (1) eating the bread Satan tempted him to create out of stones, angels now wait on him as at the heavenly banquet, where the sole nourishment is the Word of the Father. Instead of (2) casting himself down from the temple parapet, thus coercing the Father to send protecting angels to prove his love for him, now the Father, unbidden, sends a host of angels to take up, on earth, their jubilant task of waiting upon the eternal King of heaven. And, because the Incarnate Word plainly (3) refuses obeisance to anyone but the Father, Jesus himself receives the adoring service that Satan had tried to wrest for himself from him, the humble Son. 

Do we not ourselves experience—very palpably at times—God’s marvelous generosity with us when, after we have struggled to serve only him, God then overwhelms us with the very things we thought we had renounced forever, only now raised to an infinitely higher potency of truth, durability, and delight?

In conclusion then, brothers and sisters, let us embrace the freedom given us today by the power of the words of this Gospel and by the grace of this Holy Eucharist we are celebrating, and choose with a joyful heart to follow Christ more intimately step by step wherever he may lead us during this particular Lententide. And let us likewise allow Christ the freedom to fulfill our needs, desires and expectations beyond our most extravagant imaginings, for he can surely do it. Christ, I would say, is constitutionally incapable of leading us anywhere but to Paradise!

Heart on Fire

One who watches carefully over the heart will quickly see how the heart of its own nature is emitting light. As a coal catches fire, or as the fire lights a candle, so does God set our heart ablaze as it looks in contemplation at him who is dwelling in our heart.

HESYCHIUS OF BATOS On Vigilance, 104

Homily — Ash Wednesady

I would like to focus on one important grace of this Lenten season, that is, prayer. St. Paul said to the Corinthians, “Working together, then, we implore you not to receive the grace of God in vain.” Prayer – individual prayer and prayer in common – are two expressions of this very important grace, and each of them finds a place in today’s readings.

First, our prayer begins with God and goes to God. It is our exchange with God, our contact with God in faith, hope and love. It is inspired by the Holy Spirit but it is prone to attack from all that is against God. Jesus shows one way that prayer is under attack. It happens when our pride wants to take credit for prayer and boast before others. After all, prayer sets us apart from the majority of men. It elevates us, or seems to. We have something special, and we know it. This kills prayer, so Jesus immediately prescribes steps to remove this exaltation. He tells us to pray in secret, closing the door of our inner prayer room, and then simply to pray, not with many words. There is no praise of men to fuel our prayer at that point. All we have is the Father seeing us. We have to be satisfied with being seen by the Father, which of course, is the greatest gift we can receive. For the Father’s gaze is like healing radiation therapy on a cancer victim. It burns away whatever attacks our prayer. The only reason to pray is to be seen by our Father. But that is precisely the reward we most need, the Father’s gaze.

Next, God wants our prayer to be supported by a community, that is, the Church. St. Paul hints at this communal support for our prayer when he speaks on behalf of the Church, “Working together, then, we implore you not to receive the grace of God in vain.” Prayer is such a grace, and we need the help of others to hold fast to this grace. We cannot overcome the attacks against prayer without working together. In our case, that means working together with others in a community of prayer. Singing, listening, praying the way Jesus did with psalms and hymns and inspired songs allows us receive the grace of God worthily. The attacks against prayer are beaten back by the prayer of a community. For wherever two or three are gathered in imitation of Jesus’ prayer, there is Jesus himself. The surest way to receive the grace of prayer is to receive it in and through the Body of Christ. That is what our Lenten observance teaches us.

Finally, the attacks against prayer are often caused by our negligence. Negligence is a constant threat in monastic life. To some extent, this attack is related to a kind of individualism. Rather than enter into the inner room of our heart, we choose to create a DO NOT ENTER zone which subtly excludes even God from entering. It does not like God poking around in its business. Negligence has many other causes, but St. Paul’s admonition “Working together…” gives us communal protection and enables us to take advantage of all the graced moments of prayer. 

Lent is a time for us to wake up and simply pray, not with many words, but with purity of heart and the confidence that God is looking down upon us. This is the reward and gift that the Lord has prepared for those who love him.

Answering Love With Love

Faith is to know that we are loved. It is to answer love with love. ‘Love me with love, you who are loved.’ To love God is not a duty but a cry of recognition, when we understand that he has first loved us, even to the horror of the cross, of hell. Then our timid liberty is stirred, our heart is moved and all that matters henceforward is that wound by which life comes to us.

OLIVIER CLÉMENT The Roots of Christian Mysticism, Ch. 3

Christ’s Blood and Words

We are said to drink the blood of Christ not only when we receive it according to the right of the mysteries, but also when we receive his words, in which life dwells, as he said himself ‘:The words that I have spoken to you are a spirit and life’ (John 6.63).

ORIGEN Homilies on Numbers, 16,9 

Homily — The Sixth Sunday of the Year A

Today, in the United States there is so much controversy about who is an American citizen, and even about who can become an American citizen.  It is a painful period in our history.  In the time of St. Matthew, the evangelist of today’s gospel, there was tremendous controversy over who can become a Christian—was it only for Jews?  What started as an all-Jewish movement of the Spirit after Pentecost quickly began to encounter non-Jews impelled by Jewish Christian preachers (such as Paul) and moved by the same Holy Spirit to become themselves followers of Christ. The Jewish Christians found the idea of eating, praying and associating with non-Jewish Christians repulsive as it was against their traditions to eat and voluntarily associate with the “unclean” gentiles—they still thought of themselves as Jews.  This occurred even though all these people, Jews and gentiles alike, were saved by the same Lord Jesus into the Church, which was seen by Jewish Christians as the fulfillment of their Jewish religion.  Today’s Gospel touches on what this “fulfillment” meant to Jewish Christians and the first gentile Christians. 

       

All Jews of Christ’s time never associated with gentiles; so how could they now begin to do so at this turning point in their history as some of them became Christians and gentiles wished to join them without embracing Jewish practices, particularly male circumcision.  To many Jewish Christians of the time this was no case of “much ado about nothing”: it was a matter of obedience to God and of their Jewish identity: the gentile converts must, in their opinion, embrace Jewish circumcision and the Torah with its 613 positive and negative commandments.  They insisted that they become Jews in order to be fully Christians.  Gentile converts to Christianity looked upon the Jewish practice of male circumcision as a horrible mutilation of the human body—as did all gentiles. You can see how heated the controversy between the Judaizing Christians and the gentile Christians was in the exasperation of St. Paul, who wanted the gentile converts to be free of the burden of circumcision and the Law of Moses. He wrote to his Galatian gentile converts who were being pressured by Judaizing Christians this egregious remark, “Would that those who are upsetting you might also castrate themselves!”   Here he must have taken a deep breath. Paul calms down two verses after this outburst and writes that the “whole law is fulfilled in one statement, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”

In the opening verses of today’s gospel, Jesus seems to hold to the opinion of the radical Judaizers. He says to his disciples (including us) “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets. I have not come to abolish, but to fulfill. Amen… until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter (a jot) or the smallest part of a letter (a tittle) will pass from the law, until all things have taken place.” This passage has proven to be one of the most confusing in the Bible. It seems to put the teaching of Jesus in complete conflict with that of St. Paul about freedom from circumcision and the Law. However. both Jesus and Paul are correct. 

Indeed, even as Jesus speaks with the authority of God himself in the Sermon on the Mount, the Law and the Prophets are being fulfilled in the very person, words and deeds of Jesus, the Son of God, the son of David, the Son of man, the Prophet of Prophets.  Nothing of Genesis or the history of Israel, with its great prophet Moses and the reception of the Torah or Law,  nothing of all the prophets and kings and men of wisdom, is forgotten, nothing; but all of it comes to a magnificent fulfillment that transcends, but does not disregard, the Old Covenant as we now in Jesus move on to the New.  We know that salvation is from the Jews, namely, in Jesus Christ, a descendent of King David and Savior of the World.  Time and time again leading up to today’s Sermon on the Mount (and throughout the Gospel of Matthew for that matter), the author shows how events in or surrounding the life of Jesus are the fulfillment of passages, prophecies in the Bible pointing towards him as the Messiah and King of the Jews. The gospel begins declaring Jesus to be the longed-for Messiah (in Greek, Christ) as well as the son of David the King and the son of Abraham the father of the Jewish people.  A long genealogy roots Jesus in the entire history of Israel. The narrative of the virgin birth of Jesus is, for example, explained as the fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah, “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call him Emmanuel, which means God is with us.”  A quote that makes explicit the divinity and humanity of Jesus. This is the pattern Matthew follows throughout to show that Jesus is solidly rooted in the salvation history of the Jews and fulfills it.  In the temptation scene, Jesus himself quotes the last book of the Torah, Deuteronomy, saying, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”  In the very next chapter of Matthew these words of Jesus take on a new and fuller meaning as we hear the word of God from the mouth of Jesus.

After the temptation scene, Jesus selects his first disciples and then goes up the mountain to deliver the famous sermon in which he does indeed modify the jots and tittles and even corrects passages of the Torah or fulfills their meaning.  He does so with the authority of God Himself who gave the first Torah to the Jews through Moses.  What comes forth from Jesus has the authority of what comes forth from the mouth of God. We are being called in the Sermon on the Mount to live by his every word, but not in a legalistic way as it was understood by the contemporaries of Jesus, but rather in a way that involves personal union with Jesus who is more than someone who gives a new Torah—he gives us a new life in Him.  Pope Benedict XVI remarks on this that in the case of Jesus, “It is not the universally binding adherence to the Torah that forms the new family. Rather, it is adherence to Jesus himself and his Torah. …If Jesus is God, then he is entitled and able to handle the Torah as he does--universalizing the essential content of the Torah and thus truly ‘fulfilling’ it.” ( Jesus of Nazareth)

In the examples given today we see the way he rewrites the Torah, making it a matter of the heart, not the written law. If the Torah mediated by Moses says DO NOT KILL, that of Jesus says OVERCOME YOUR ANGER WITH RECONCILIATION impelled by the heartfelt beatitudes of meekness and love of justice. Furthermore, he says that reconciliation and true worship go hand in hand: a teaching of Jesus dear to the heart of our father St. Benedict.  Where the Torah of Moses says YOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY, Jesus says OVERCOME YOUR LUST WITH GOD’S GIFT OF PURITY OF HEART. Where the Torah of Moses allows for divorce for even paltry matters, Jesus establishes marriage as a lifelong bond of love and fidelity between husband and wife in which THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH. In this Jesus hearkens back to the original Torah teaching about marriage as found in the Book of Genesis.   It is not a male dominated institution in which the wife can be sent away like a servant fired for burning the roast. Again, it is through the purity of heart, the humility and love that are the gifts of the Holy Spirit of the Risen Jesus that marriages can succeed.   Where the Torah of Moses says MAKE GOOD TO THE LORD ALL THAT YOU VOW, Jesus says DO NOT SWEAR AT ALL.  His point is that if you truly follow him, you will become a person of such integrity that YOUR YES WILL MEAN YES AND YOUR NO WILL MEAN NO.  Swearing to High Heaven is from the evil one.

St. Thomas Aquinas writes that the New Law is the grace of the Holy Spirit poured out into our hearts.  This New Law is a Law of Freedom, but not a freedom that gives license to the impulses of the flesh, but one that gives us the power to become other Christs.  After the Council of Jerusalem which ended the requirements of circumcision and of the acceptance of the Torah, and as Jewish Christians grew in Christ’s gift of himself in the Eucharist and the Holy Spirit, and as many new gentile converts came to be seen not as barbarous invaders, but as brothers and sisters in the Lord, in time more and more Christian synagogues matured as Christian Churches in which there were no longer gentiles and Jews at odds with each other, but one body in Christ. 

Our monastic community here on this little mount is composed of monks from every inhabited continent in the world, except for Australia, composed of every age group from the early thirties to the high nineties, composed of every ethnic and cultural background—yet we live together in Christ as one.  This is a gift, a witness, we give in the Church and to our divided nation—may our country become once again through the work of the Holy Spirit and the prayers of our patroness Immaculate Mary what we pledged about every morning as little children: one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Yes, withliberty and justice for all!  Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the Kingdom of God.  Let us now receive the King of the Kingdom in our reception of the Eucharist, the first fruit of which is the unity of the Body of Christ.

The Heart’s Doorkeeper

Be the doorkeeper of your heart and do not let any thought come in without questioning it. Question each thought individually: ‘Are you on our side or the side of our foes?’ And if it is one of ours, it will fill you with tranquility.

EVAGRIUS OF PONTUS Letter 11