God's Fatherly Love

God's Fatherly love flows over a man as God created him. That is to say over a man that God created free, because for Him only a love freely given possesses worth. But because he is free, man is also fragile. It is this man that the Father in His love leads gradually across the scheme of time toward complete fulfillment. This is the whole mystery of divine teaching, of the progressive education of humanity. This man, that God created in order to heap him with His gifts, has closed himself to God in his thirst for independence. That is why he needs to be saved—that is, to be restored to his integrity.

JEAN DANIELOU God’s Life In Us 

The Gift of Self

There are souls who seek solitude merely in order to find themselves: there are others who seek it so that they may give themselves. Still, it remains to be lived! Happy those who know how to put their whole soul into all they do. Because they are giving themselves, they will be able to bear much suffering, but their happiness will exceed their suffering, since the gift of self is the source and condition of life, and therefore of spiritual growth and joy. Go on, then, giving yourself: go on suffering… seek your joy in that precious suffering that the gift of self entails. God who became man new no more excellent way than this when he was on earth.

AN ANONYMOUS CARTHUSIAN They Speak by Silences

God’s Better Gift

If God at times seems to be slow in responding, it is because he is preparing a better gift. He will not deny us. We well know that the long-awaited gift is all the more precious for the delay in it's being granted… Ask, seek, insist. Through this asking and seeking you will be better prepared to receive God's gift when it comes. God withholds what you are not yet ready for. He wants you to have a lively desire for his greatest gifts. All of which is to say, pray always and do not lose heart.

ST. AUGUSTINE

Prayer and Works of Charity

When I see people very anxious to know what sort of prayer they practice, covering their faces and afraid to move or think, unless they should lose any slight tenderness and devotion they feel, I know how little they understand how to attain union with God, since they think it consists in such things as these. No. Our Lord expects works from us! If you see someone sick whom you can relieve, never fear losing your devotion; have compassion on her; if she is in pain, feel it as if it were your own, and when there is need, fast so that she may eat, not so much for her sake as because you know your Lord asks it of you. This is the true union of our will with the will of God. If you possess fraternal charity, I assure you that you will attain the union I have described.

ST. TERESA OF JESUS

Love Gains Love

Have a great love for those who contradict and fail to love you, for in this way love is begotten in a heart that has no love. God so acts with us, for he loves us that we might love by means of the very love he bears toward us.

ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross

God’s Patience

God remains in history the beggar who waits at each person's gate with infinite patience, begging for love. His silence, with which we sometimes reproach him, only shows his consideration for us. The cross and the resurrection coexist. ‘Christ will be in agony to the very end of the world’, he will suffer, according to Origen, until all humanity has entered the Kingdom.

OLIVIER CLÉMENT The Roots of Christian Mysticism

The Breath of God

God has given to the earth the breath which feeds it. It is his breath that gives life to all things. And if he were to hold his breath, everything would be annihilated. His breath vibrates in yours, in your voice. It is the breath of God that you breathe—and you are unaware of it.

THEOPHILUS OF ANTIOCH Three Books to Autolycus

Someone Already Risen

Someone, I was told, at the sight of a very beautiful woman, felt impelled to glorify the Creator. The sight of her increased his love for God to the point of tears. Anyone who entertains such feelings in such circumstances is already risen…before the general resurrection.

JOHN CLIMACUS The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 15th Step 

Homily—Third Sunday of Lent, Year A

THE ABANDONED JUG

8 March 2026

(Ex 17:3-7; Rom 5:1-2,5-8; Jn 4:5-42)

The wonderful encounter on this Third Sunday of Lent  between the Lord Jesus and the Samaritan woman is surely one of the towering masterpieces of biblical narrative. In the most palpable way possible, it represents nothing less than the face-to-face encounter between the Incarnate Word and sinful humanity, so desperately in need of salvation. Jesus of Nazareth, who walks on the land of Israel with his feet of flesh and bone received from his blessed Mother, and who is himself thirsty and hungry after trudging all these miles from Jerusalem to Sychar—this same Jesus is the eternal Logos in whom and for whom everything was created in the beginning. And this remarkable woman of Samaria embodies the whole of humanity, the men and women of every historical moment and every geographical location. The passionate dialogue that follows between Jesus and the woman impacts us as a summary of the entire history of salvation. Each of us this morning should make the effort of imagination and will of becoming this Samaritan woman so that we, too, can encounter our Lord in the intimacy of our souls, and be saved by the encounter. 

Let’s not forget, in the first place, that God’s grace always precedes all our own feelings, thoughts and actions. God’s grace always comes to us, mysteriously, ahead of anything else, while we are still sinners, even before we become aware of our sinful condition and begin to desire forgiveness. This is the central theme that runs through all three readings today. On a certain blessed midday, a poor solitary woman went to Jacob’s well just outside the hamlet of Sychar in Samaria, to draw water; she went at that sun-scorched moment of the day to avoid the glances of others, who scorned her as a great public sinner. At that moment combining stress, shame and exhaustion, she could not have known that at that very same time, in total synchrony with her, the Son of God had already mapped out for himself a route through Samaria, with the intention of making his journey as the weary Savior of the world converge with the journey of the woman, who was so weary from both her sin and her ostracism. 

The Samaritan thought she was alone, isolated, abandoned; but that was not, in fact, true. All the while Jesus was already seeking her and loving her, without her knowing it! Her climax of disgrace and drudgery became a kairós of salvation with Jesus’ arrival on the scene. At the well, Jesus breaks into her awful solitude, so that it is two weary people who meet and gradually come to recognize each other through a dialogue of mutual attraction. From all eternity, the divine Word had already been making his way toward this woman, to take her as his mystical bride, as a figure of the Church and of each one of us! 

In the Book of Exodus, we see that the people are dying of thirst in the desert, and they mutter against Moses and, through him, against God himself. The Israelites do what is strictly forbidden by the first commandment: they protest against God’s plan and test the Lord. Two weeks ago in the desert, the devil tried to seduce Jesus with the same temptation. Moses cries out today to the Lord because he does not see a way out of the situation. But God carries on with his plan of salvation against all human opposition. He shows his mercy by responding favorably to the murmuring of his people, even though it was a great sin. How can the God of compassion not be magnanimous in the face of people dying of thirst? God answers them by bringing water out of the hardest and driest rock. This detail from Exodus then becomes the main theme of the story of salvation in the Gospel, the theme that contains everything else: namely, that God always brings the water of his life out of the hard rock of our hearts.  

In the second reading, from Romans, St Paul takes up the same theme in different language when he states that God has given us his grace without us deserving it in any way. Christ died for us not because we were “good” or “righteous”. Beyond all our understanding, Christ died for us while we were still sinners, rebels against God. Who would ever conceive of dying for an enemy? Only God! Already at that moment, he called us his “friends”, for whom he wanted to die in order to show us his love. We must believe what is truly incredible: that God imagined us as his friends when we were still his enemies! And yet we become his friends only by virtue of his Son’s death, when God’s love was poured into our hearts from Jesus’ pierced side, when he breathed his last on the cross and, by breathing his last, breathed his Holy Spirit into us.

These first two readings prepare us for Jesus’ extraordinary conversation with the woman at the well. It is the longest, most detailed and most profound dialogue Jesus has with anyone in all four Gospels. And it is not a parable: it is a lived historical narrative. In the course of this riveting dialogue, Jesus does three great things for the woman. First of all, he requests of the woman that she give him a drink. What a paradox! The Incarnate Word feels tired from walking so far in our flesh, and so he asks a fellow human being for help! He does not come to us as a triumphant king riding on a white stallion. Divine omnipotence, because it is all love, approaches us in the form of weakness: here the mystery of the cross already glimmers. When Jesus then says to the woman, Give me a drink, this burning thirst on the part of the Word anticipates the cry of Jesus crucified: I thirst. Yes, Jesus is always thirsty for our faith, for our love. Jacob’s well emerges here as a prefiguration of the Lord’s pierced side, from which blood and water will flow on Good Friday. In Jesus, God gives himself to us as a suffering man. Eternal life, which is his property, comes to us in him hidden deep within his human weakness. Of course, at this point the sinful woman does not understand this gift to her of Jesus’ weakness, but neither does she refuse his request.   

The second great grace Jesus gives the woman is his offer of living water to her, that is, the heavenly gift of eternal life, in ironical exchange for her gift to him of earthly water. The sinner understands this offer least of all! Only the third grace begins to penetrate her heart: it is the confession of sin that Jesus grants the woman from the depths of his own know-ledge of her. Only now is she ready to accept the word of the One she herself proclaims to be a “prophet”. At this stage of the dialogue, the theme becomes the worship of God. After the initial two steps, and still guided by Jesus’ word, the woman now catapults from the depths of sin to the heights of contemplation in her desire to worship in Spirit and Truth. She can now finally welcome Jesus into her heart as he reveals himself to her as the Messiah, the Christ of God.  

At the conclusion of the drama, the water of grace has penetrated to the depths of the sinful soul, has purified her, and has suddenly stimulated her to engage, surprisingly, in a truly apostolic action among her townspeople. Being now full of Christ’s grace, she casually abandons the jug of her original intention at the well’s edge, since she no longer needs to draw material water by her own effort. The abundant apostolic fruit of proclaiming the Gospel springs spontaneously out of the woman and demonstrates the authenticity of her conversion. Above all else, she now burns to share with the whole world the liberation she has received from Jesus. The woman instantly accepts Jesus’ accusation regarding her five so-called “husbands”; but her acceptance of the accusation and her repentance are almost a minor detail compared to the action of grace, which God has been pouring into her since the beginning of her existence. The grace of God given by Jesus, the grace of God that is Jesus, is the true protagonist of the story, and not the woman. Amazingly transformed from repentant sinner into ardent apostle in the course of one poignant conversation, she now hurries to her fellow citizens to announce the Gospel to them. She wants them, too, to believe and know the joy of salvation given to her by Jesus. 

Today, my brothers and sisters, the sacramental mystery of the Sacred Liturgy transforms Whitethorn into Sychar. Our little chapel here, lost in the backwoods of the Lost Coast, becomes the site of our Jacob’s well. We, make no mistake about it, are today that Samaritan woman. Today the long-suffering and weary Jesus has come to seek out and find us in our own weariness and despair, so that we might drink from the abundant water of eternal life from his pierced Heart—the water of his love and compassion, poured into our hearts along with his Body and Blood at this Eucharist. Let us rejoice and be glad!

The Progress of the World

The whole progress of the world points to there being a creator whose purpose is to bring about, by means of his creative powers, a free response from his creatures below, so that they may move toward him and finally be united with him in a marriage of love.

HANS URS VON BALTHASAR The Moment of Christian Witness, 76

The Eyes to See

Two men who wanted to see the sunrise would be very foolish to argue about the place where it will appear and their means of looking at it, then to let their argument degenerate into a quarrel, from that to come to blows and in the heat of the conflict to gouge out each other's eyes. There would no longer be any question then of contemplating the dawn…  

Let us who wish to contemplate God purify our hearts by faith and heal them by means of peace; for the effort we make to love one another is already a gift from him to whom we raise our eyes.

ST. AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO Sermons 23,18

Our Spiritual Homeland

Purify yourself and you will see heaven in yourself. In yourself you will see angels and their brightness, and you will see their Master with them and in them… The spiritual homeland of the person whose soul has been purified is within. The sun that shines there is the light of the Trinity. The air breathed by the entering thoughts is the Holy Spirit the Comforter. 

ISAAC OF NINEVEH Ascetic Treatises, 24

Homily — Second Sunday of Lent

And he was transfigured before them; his face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light.

Last week, as we began to undertake our Lenten discipline the Church presented us with the mystery of the temptation of Jesus in the desert. Although, as God, he is without sin and unable to sin, he still humbled himself to undergo baptism, purification by fasting, and battled with the temptations of Satan in the desert. 

This Sunday, we have the mystery of the Transfiguration. On one level, the Church places the Gospel of the Transfiguration here in the opening weeks of Lent to give us encouragement and consolation. Our process of purification and participation in the Cross is to be seen in the light of the victory of Christ in the Resurrection. At a deeper level, because the Transfiguration belongs to the pedagogy of Christ himself, who uses the transfiguration to instruct his disciples about the nature of God and therefore their own and their discipleship.

In all three synoptic Gospels, the transfiguration is placed after Peter’s confession of faith, and Jesus’ first passion prediction.

Jesus is moving toward his Passion. He knows this but the disciples do not. He needs to bring them into a deeper understanding of himself and his mission if they are to follow him as he needs them to.

In his confession of faith, Peter has shown he is on the right path, he has opened himself enough to the light of Christ that he is able to witness before the Lord and the other disciples, with great confidence and conviction, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. He has attained a certain level of faith.

But when Jesus follows Peter’s confession with his first passion prediction, Peter responds with a rebuke: “God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.”

Jesus makes it quite clear that Peter has badly misunderstood him and the nature of his mission. He responds to Peter with a rebuke of his own, “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me you are thinking not as God does but as human beings do.

It is not enough for the disciples to acknowledge Jesus as the Christ they must also align themselves with his mission. The two must line up. There is no other way. Peter’s standpoint is an obstacle, a stumbling block, he is blocking Jesus view of his Father, whose will, desire and plan is always before the eyes of Jesus; guiding him in every step.

Thinking of Peter here, I was reminded of the third century bishop, Clement of Alexanderia’s distinction between the Pistic and the Gnostic Christian. The “pistic” is one who lives by “pistis”, which, in Greek, means ‘faith’. For Clement, the ‘pistic’ signifies the ordinary faithful believer, one who trusts in God, accepts the tenets of revelation and the apostolic teaching as given, and is obedient to Christ. This person practices virtue, worships regularly, and lives a moral life in a straightforward way. Clement does not intend this term to be pejorative. He insists that the way of the pistic is good, holy, and salvific, but it is not yet a mature faith. In Peter’s case, although his life has been turned upside down by his encounter with Christ, has left all things to follow him, and has come so far as to make this bold confession of faith, his understanding remains very limited. Jesus has more in mind for Peter. In comparison with where Jesus needs Peter to be if he is to fulfill his role as Jesus has laid it out for him, his faith remains immature. Jesus needs him to become what Clement calls the ‘true gnostic’ (from gnosis, meaning knowledge), as opposed to the heretical Gnostics he was battling against as bishop. 

Clement describes the true Gnostic as “a mature Christian whose faith has blossomed into deep, contemplative understanding. One who has undergone intellectual, moral, and spiritual purification. Someone who reads Scripture with spiritual insight, who is capable of discerning its symbolic and mystical depths. 

For Clement, The life of the true Gnostic is marked by perfect charity, (that is, love, for Clement, is the highest knowledge), and has achieved ‘apatheia’, that is freedom from disordered passions. Clement was perhaps the first to apply “apatheia” to the spiritual life.  The true gnostic, in other words, is the pistic whose faith has reached its full flowering. 

Jesus wants to see this kind of growth in Peter. 

Jesus follows his passion prediction with a teaching about the conditions for discipleship: “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

On the mountain Jesus’ primary intention is to show the disciples the truth of who he is: in his radiant splendor with all the theophanic signs that accompany him in the vision: the mountain, the shining face and garments, the present of Moses and Elijah, and the voice from the cloud - all point to his equality with God and his role as the one who is to come. 

What’s more, the saying of the voice from the cloud, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him”, refers to the prophecy of the Servant of the Lord in Isaiah 42:1, as does the almost exact saying of the voice that came from heaven at the Jesus’ baptism. In chapter 12, Matthew provides the whole quote: “Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved in whom I delight; I shall place my spirit upon him, and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles. He will not contend or cry out, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets. A bruised reed he will not break, a smoldering wick he will not quench, until he brings justice to victory. And in his name the Gentiles will hope” (Mt 12:18-21).

Peter will become the true Gnostic when he is able to see the splendor of the transfigured Lord manifest in the servant of the Lord. He will be able to set up his tent and abide in the rapt ecstatic movement of being caught up in God that he knew on the mount when his heart abides in the Lord who has set up his tent among us, who has come among us in free self-emptying love, who has willingly taken upon himself all our sins, sorrows, trials and difficulties, in a simple, lowly, hidden life, and when he follows the Lord by conforming his own disposition and behavior to his. Passages in the Scriptures that had seemed obscure will light up and unveil their meaning for him. And although his journey will not be without its humiliations and failings, in the end he will follow his Lord to the Cross. 

Let us, too, put on the mind of Christ as we continue our Eucharistic celebration. 

The Abyss of Humility

We need to exercise our ourselves greatly, to lay upon ourselves many hidden labors after a life of negligence, in order that our spirit which resembles a greedy and irritable dog may obtain purity and vigilance through simplicity, gentleness and fervor. However, be of good heart. If the passions lord it over us and we are weak, let us with great confidence offer to Christ our spiritual weakness and our impotence; let us confess them before him. He will help us irrespective of what we deserve, on the sole condition that we descend continually to the bottom, into the abyss of humility.

JOHN CLIMACUS The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 1st Step

Mistakes at Prayer

What a mistake it is to be tormented and sad because you have no light or consolation in prayer, to strain your head seeking after sensible devotion at Holy Communion, and to neglect little faults, small observances, and occasions for mortifying your own will and desires, for conquering your human respect and for procuring your own humiliation before others! If we were reasonable, we should think only of these last and not make the slightest effort to succeed according to our own ideas; because, as a matter of fact, we never succeed better than when we humbly endure dryness and the privation of this false fervor that nature so loves and that the real love of God despises and even rejects as far as it is able.

ST. CLAUDE DE LA COLOMBIÈRE Letter 7

The Discipline of Contemplation

Contemplation should not be exaggerated, distorted, and made to seem great. It is essentially simple and humble. No one can enter into it except by the path of obscurity and self-forgetfulness. It implies also much discipline, but above all the normal discipline of everyday virtue. It implies justice to other people, truthfulness, hard work, unselfishness, devotion to the duties of one’s state in life, obedience, charity, self-sacrifice. No one should delude himself with contemplative aspirations if he is not willing to undertake, first of all, the ordinary labors and obligations of the moral life.

THOMAS MERTON The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation

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.