Homily — Feast of Saint Benedict

No one is to pursue what he judges better for himself, but instead, what he judges better for someone else. RB 72.7

Today’s Gospel is situated in the midst of Jesus’ final discourse to his disciples at the Last Supper. By this point in the meal, Jesus has alluded to his coming Passion, saying to them at the opening, “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer…” (Lk 22:15), he has instituted the Eucharist in the offering of bread and wine, and he has just revealed that he is to be betrayed by one them at table with him. With this news, the disciples begin to question one another, “asking which of them it was that would do this.”

Jesus had warned them of his coming passion, saying in his second passion prediction back in chapter nine, “Let these words sink into your ears, for the Son of man is to be delivered into the hands of men” but, as the narrator tells us, “…they did not understand this saying, and it was concealed from them, that they should not perceive it; and they were afraid to ask him about this saying.” (Lk 9:44-45). 

Now it appears that the inconceivable, that God’s anointed should suffer at the hands of men, is not only a possibility but an imminent reality that is now pressing down upon them. Moreover, this evil will be initiated not from some obvious and external enemy but as a deliberate act of betrayal from within their own company. 

They look about the room at one another, as people whose personal and communal sense of identity has been thrown into confusion. The common reference points around which they have been accustomed to ordering their understanding of God, world, neighbor and God’s chosen people Israel have been upended, yet they have not yet grasped what is to be set up in its place. So they grasp about for something to hold on to. 

At this point, our Gospel begins, “Then an argument broke out among them about which of them should be regarded as the greatest.”

With all these relationships in disarray from their point of view, they turn to one another, but now not like a community in process of formation by Jesus, but more like a group of individuals striving against one another in a futile attempt to reestablish order among themselves but from no other source than themselves. The Greek word, translated here as “argument” is “philoneikia” and appears only here in the NT. It means first of all “love of strife, contention” but it can also mean “love of victory”, “desire for glory”. 

Succumbing to the “love of strife and contention”, they have separated themselves from the way of Jesus, which in its own right, is a love of victory and a desire for glory, but his victory is the victory of the Cross and his desire for glory is the glorification of the Father. His way is not that of strife and contention but of peace. 

Jesus intervenes in order to steers the disciples back to his way, by placing it in contrast to worldly social models built on power and domination. 

“Benefactor” was a common term in the surrounding Greek culture of the time that in the words of biblical scholar James Edwards, “identifies a widespread class of individuals of power, position and means who celebrated themselves and were celebrated by others in public places.” The apostles would have recognized this title immediately and as members of an oppressed class who suffered under these individuals would have been quick to disassociate themselves from this term and its implications.

In Jesus’ model, the greatest are to be as though they were the youngest, like a child in antiquity, one who has no status of his own. Or like a servant who places himself lower than those whom he serves, as though they were greater, like one who serves those who sit at table. This is the way of Jesus himself. He is among them as the one who serves.

The question for us this morning is how does St. Benedict help us in a practical way to be a community that faces its trials and difficulties, including the small ones of daily life, without succumbing to the human tendency to fall back on the way of strife and contention but walk the way of transformation with Jesus, the path to true victory and glory through humble service in the patience of the Cross?

I suppose we could say that the whole of his Rule that strives to bring this about. It’s basically its purpose. Be that as it may, I propose that a good entry point is the great chapter 72 of the Rule, The Good Zeal of Monks, and its presentation of the classical “two ways”. 

The way of “philoneikia”, “argument”, would correspond to “the evil zeal of bitterness” that leads to hell, whereas the way of Jesus, humble service, would correspond to the good zeal, “which separates from evil and leads to God and everlasting life.” 

We can get a better grasp of the content of this “good zeal” in all its fullness if we read this chapter backward from v. 11, that is, “Let them prefer nothing whatever to Christ”. For he is “good zeal”, it’s source, embodiment and full realization of all of the prescriptions in this chapter, which serves a kind of summation of the whole Rule. 

“Zeal” indicates intense striving. Good zeal, St. Benedicts says, must be practiced with “ferventissimo amore”, the most ardent love. It is the soul that has been overtaken by this most ardent love that is able to drive out the promptings of evil zeal from the heart. The love of contention and strive that the apostles experienced we can arouse easily enough on our own, but this most ardent love for the good zeal that is Christ is a gift, always only the fruit of grace. 

St. Benedict grounds the practice of this good zeal in chapter 12 of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans: They should each try to be the first to show respect to the other (Rm 12:10). This striving after mutual respect is a competition for a new kind of greatness in which everyone is raised up and that builds community. A greatness that is that is rooted in the dignity of the human person and his true status as being “in Christ.” 

Many things could be said about each of the verses of this rich chapter, but I will conclude with v. 7, as a practical example of good zeal, which St. Benedict places at the center of Chapter and which Aquinata Bockmann claims is the goal toward which the whole of the Rule wishes to train us: “No one is to follow what he judges useful to himself, but what seems more useful to the other.”

To follow what I judge more useful to myself is to allow myself to be guided by ego-centric choices that may seem good to me and to my fulfillment and happiness, but do not actually have their origin in Christ and are thus exercised outside of him and place us at the margins of the community as his body. 

It is matter of being habitually turned to the other in a self-forgetfulness that truly sees the other in the light of Christ and is ready to serve him in this light. It means seeing my brother not first of all as someone that needs to be changed according to some personal ideal but being open to seeing him in his uniqueness, in his mystery in Christ, as someone whose qualities, abilities, history and so on are different than mine. In him there is a ray of the divine glory that is to be discovered as well as the reality of what St. Benedict says in the next verse, weaknesses of body and character that are to be borne with the utmost patience. 

This task is easier to the degree that each of us recognizes in himself his own weaknesses and need to be borne with with the utmost patience. For in some respect each of us is weak and each of us is strong. It is from this self-knowledge that we can genuinely see ourselves as lower than the others and look up to them. Here, it is helpful to recall the seventh step of humility: if we see ourselves as the least and believe it in our hearts it is quite natural to give honor to others. 

Lastly, St. Benedict concludes this chapter with the words, “and may he bring us altogether to everlasting life.” The Lord leads us “all together”.  When I love my brother with good zeal, I walk along with him at his side, at his pace, speeding up where I need to or slowing down where it is called for, always attentive to what is useful to him, and always mindful that it is “all together” and not simply as individuals that Christ is leading us to everlasting life. 

St. Benedict shows us the path in service of the true king, Christ the Lord, victor over sin and death, who leads on to everlasting glory. 

Let us pray that the Lord may bring about this mystery among us. 

Prayer is of the Heart

We are seeking in our prayers that God might be attentive to us, according to the text: Be attentive to me and hear me (Ps 55:3). Now how likely is it that he will do this, if we are not attentive to ourselves? It is from the heart that prayer takes most of its power. According to Saint Isidore: "Prayer is of the heart, not of the lips." For God does not attend merely to the words of the one beseeching him, but he looks rather on the heart of the man who prays. So the man who does not have his heart in his prayer takes away from prayer what is best in it. So it is clear from all this that the heart’s intention is necessary in prayer. So that this may be more easily done, the heart must be first recollected when one comes to pray.

BLESSED HUMBERT OF ROMANS, O.P.

Self-knowledge

When a house is shut up, the sun's ray's do not enter, and so we don't see how much dust is found therein. But when the sun's rays penetrate, we soon realize how full of dust the house is. Self-knowledge is just such a ray...

ST. ANTHONY OF PADUA

The Holy Eucharist

Let us learn the wonder of this sacrament, the purpose of its institution, the effects it produces. We become a single body, according to Scripture, members of his flesh and bone of his bones. This is what is brought about by the food that he gives us. He blends himself with us so that we may all become one single entity in the way the body is joined to the head.

JOHN CHRYSOSTOM Homily on John, 46

Homily — Cistercian Disciples

Pentecost happened four weeks ago, and Ordinary Time started the next day, but today is the first Sunday in Ordinary Time on which we are not celebrating a particular solemnity of the Church Year. It’s the first truly ordinary Sunday in Ordinary Time this year. I remember how Father Eddy used to breathe a sigh of relief around this time and exclaim with a big smile: “Thank God for Ordinary Time!” Beyond no longer needing to worry about special Easter texts and rubrics, he understood that Ordinary Time has a special character of its own. It isn’t a blank liturgical period. Though he never said so explicitly, I would guess that what Father Eddy had in mind was that, after we have delved deeply over many months into the mysteries of our salvation as lived by the Lord Jesus, now comes the moment when we are invited to hunker down personally and live these mysteries ourselves, in our “ordinary, obscure and laborious” Cistercian existence. Ordinary Time urges us to make the Paschal Mystery permeate our concrete, ordinary circumstances. Despite the mostly nose-to-the-grind exterior of our life, it is only here that our mystical transformation into other Christs can take place.  

Today’s reading from the Gospel of Luke gives us the perfect theme to explore the actualization of the Paschal Mystery in our lives: namely, Christian discipleship, the existence of those Jesus first calls to himself as disciples and then sends out as apostles after making them into “a new creation in the Spirit”. For us monks, discipleship means specifically Cistercian discipleship, a topic of great relevance as we enter our yearly retreat today as a community and ponder our specific charism. 

Christ Jesus himself is, in a real sense, the one and only Apostle, the One sent forth from the Father as bearer of the world’s salvation. And yet he has chosen to share his redemptive mission with us through our active participation in it. No one, least of all we monks, can honestly bear the name of Christian without becoming a disciple through intimacy with the Lord and then sharing, as apostle, in Christ’s mission to save the world.

Today’s gospel contains a rich teaching concerning the particulars of Christian mission. The disciples are explicitly sent out to prepare the way for the coming of Jesus into people’s lives. Our mission, whether visible or hidden, is always a clearing of the way for the person of Jesus so that he will come to mean to others what he already means to us. The Lord is himself the greatest treasure we possess, the Peace that inhabits our hearts; and the quality of our love for both Jesus and others is shown by the intensity of our desire to share that treasure with everyone. The disciples are sent out two by two because our fraternal communion with one another as disciples is already in itself a manner of proclaiming the nearness of the Kingdom. In this Kingdom, interpersonal communion and joyful unity reign supreme as the visible realities that best reflect God’s Trinitarian nature as continual circulation of love. The very heart of Jesus’ Gospel is love, and this truth can best be witnessed to not primarily through words but through lived relationships by persons who help and support one another, who find the meaning of their individual lives within a God-established network of relationships. In our lives as Christians, we are called to become the visibility of Jesus as the loving Heart of God’s Kingdom. Such should be the witness borne by the monastery as an ecclesiola or “small local church”.

Those whom Jesus sends out are very few indeed, considering the enormity of the harvest, and they are not given many provisions and even fewer certainties. The disciples are poor, a tiny minority hidden in a huge mass of people, and their existence is precarious. All of this, in and of itself, is obviously quite negative; and yet Luke presents these facts not at all as regrettable obstacles impeding the mission but, paradoxically, as the very conditions that Jesus himself imposes on the mission! The poverty of those sent, it seems, is meant to underscore the fact that the Christian mission has to be enacted by the whole of a person, with nothing held back, and relying on none of the gimmicks (like colorful appeal and guarantees of success) that the world considers essential. The apostles are, after all, proclaiming the Word made flesh, and so it isn’t enough for them to lack sufficient means: they must be poor in actual fact. Nor is it enough for them to proclaim the Kingdom of God with words: they must actually be men of God. And it isn’t enough for them to proclaim peace: they must actually be peace-makers. 

All the requirements made of the disciples by Jesus are, thus, at the level of personal identity and existence. At bottom, the many necessary actions and words of Jesus’ followers have to flow forth from their unique personhood as Christians, that is, from their joyful and vital symbiosis with the Lord Jesus. Their ministry does not at heart have to do with pre-set official functions performed exteriorly, or with precisely worded formulas and definitions, divorced from personal experience. Their highly personal identification with Christ—the fruit of grace, prayer and intense struggle—is what enables the disciples to truly become lambs who follow the Lamb of God himself wherever he goes, and who therefore offer themselves as an oblation in union with Christ. 

When you are poor in fact and not only in theory, then, as an evangelist, you have only yourself to give away, as conformed with the Word of God living in you. “Mission” has meaning only if it is but a single thing with the following of Christ. This truth has particular significance for us Cistercian monks that we are. Our special contemplative mission in the Church has nothing to do with going out physically from the monastery into the world, but everything to do with our actually becoming conformed with Christ in our inner being. The brunt of our monastic missionary effort consists in concentrating all the energies of our heart on intimate union with Christ, so that the Lord may then take the substance of our surrendered being and do with it as he wishes throughout the body of humanity and the cosmos.

And yet, we monks are very ordinary human beings, living physically in this world for the time being and, thus, coming into contact more or less directly with all sorts of people. In faith we believe that Jesus is subtly “sending us out” to every person we encounter in whatever manner. In every case, the personal poverty and vulnerability we have deliberately embraced by our vows can become the space where God’s Spirit is manifested. Radical poverty, both material and spiritual, freely embraced, brings with it extraordinary power: Lord, even the demons are subject to us because of your Name. The disciples have renounced all earthly power and personal influence, and therefore the power of God is free to work the most splendid things through them. And the disciples’ necessarily self-effacing attitude makes their mission to be a non-threatening invitation to those who welcome them. They, therefore, inspire trust. Through their smallness as individuals, they open up a space for the miracle of conversion to Jesus. The witness of their own harmony of hearts, furthermore, shows clearly that authentically lived Christian faith drives out all fear, distrust and mutual recrimination. Where faith dwells, a truly Edenic condition flourishes which all rational beings yearn for. Isaiah embodies this condition of pure, universal joy in a glorious vision of Jerusalem as mother of all nations, where God will spread prosperity like a river and all may suck fully of the milk of her abundant breasts, a vision made real at this Eucharist.

Jesus does not send out missionaries who carry food, clothing or money to the needy. Rather, he sends persons without any money or provisions. The only thing they take with them is the all-sufficient Word of the Kingdom, which proclaims the necessity of conversion. This conversion has such urgency that the disciples musn’t waste any time along the way, greeting people and engaging in idle chatter. The radical Jesus excludes everything non-essential from the disciples’ words and actions, and this gives their mission a very ascetical, almost monastic flavor. Those Jesus sends are bearers of nothing but the living and naked Word, a Word they are called to embody in their existence as other Christs. This requires of them that, like St Paul, they never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. Being Jesus’ intimate companion on the redemptive cross is both the form and the means of the Cistercian monk’s apostolate, which as such never requires that he leave the enclosure. Welcome, at last, to Ordinary Time! 

The Last Judgment

The Last Judgment will come when Christ returns in glory. Only the Father knows the day and the hour; only he determines the moment of its coming. Then through his Son Jesus Christ he will pronounce the final word on all history. We shall know the ultimate meaning of the whole work of creation and of the entire economy of salvation and understand the marvelous ways by which his Providence led everything towards its final end. The Last Judgment will reveal that God's justice triumphs overall the injustices committed by his creatures and that God's love is stronger than death.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1040

A Holy Calling

Do not be afraid to set your sights higher, to allow yourself to be loved and liberated by God. Do not be afraid to let yourself be guided by the Holy Spirit. Holiness does not make you less human, since it is an encounter between your weakness and the power of God's grace. For in the words of Leon Bloy, when all is said and done, "the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.”

POPE FRANCIS Gaudete et Exultate