Author: CCW

“Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of?

And so it begins. We enter into deep Lent, into Passiontide, which is nothing less than our participation in the Passion of Christ which enfolds us into the life of the Trinity. We enter into the radical mystery of God’s love which turns the world on its head. It is profoundly counter-culture, the counter to the culture of fear and resentment that seeks power and dominion at all costs and at the expense of the deeper truth of God and of our humanity in God. The paradox of Passiontide is set before us in today’s readings and on a Sunday which also marks the commemoration of St. Patrick. The conjunction is, I think, wonderfully providential.

Christ is “an High Priest of good things to come,” Hebrews states, but only in the paradox of being victim and sacrifice, for “by his own blood, he entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us.” Priest and victim. The Gospel reading from Matthew emphasizes the same paradox: not power but sacrifice. “The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.” This is a complete inversion of the power structures of the world and a complete counter to the victimhood culture of our day. Christ is priest and victim. God provides himself the lamb for the sacrifice that redeems us to eternal life; our life in God.

The medieval historian Jacques Delarun captures this in a book entitled “To govern is to Serve.” It chronicles some remarkable experiments in the ordering of monastic communities among a number of twelfth and thirteenth century orders influenced by the personalities of St. Dominic and St. Francis. They were attempts to embody the radical equality of Christ as the shepherd of the sheep who cares for one and for all equally; omnes et singulatim, all together and each one individually. To enter into the Passion is to learn the sacrificial nature of the divine life, the self-giving life of God as Trinity.

The mother of Zebedee’s children comes with her sons to Jesus seeking preferment and privilege for them, that they “may sit, the one on thy right hand, and the other on the left, in thy kingdom.” His gentle yet firm reply to her speaks to our humanity in its ignorance and presumption. “Ye know not what ye ask.” It is a striking indictment of our fallen humanity and anticipates his first word from the Cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” The privileges we seek for ourselves are invariably at the expense of others and negate our common humanity by treating some as better and greater than others. Jesus then addresses her sons. His questions point explicitly to his Passion and stand in complete contrast to the presumption in their quest and to that of the ten disciples as well. “Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?”, he asks. The questions point to our sacramental participation in Christ’s own sacrifice through baptism and communion.

(more…)

Print this entry

“They filled twelve baskets with the fragments of the five barley-loaves”

Paradise and wilderness are the complementary images that belong to the pilgrimage of Lent as the pilgrimage of our souls to God. Today’s Gospel wonderfully encapsulates the soul’s journey as imaged in other cultures, religions, and philosophies in one way or another, such as: The Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Plato’s ascent from the Cave (and the descent back into the Cave!), Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Bonaventure’s Journey of the Mind into God, Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologicae and the Summa Contra Gentiles, and of course, Dante’s great poetic and theological master-piece, The Divine Comedy, to name but a few. Yet the story which informs this Gospel most completely is the story of the Exodus in the Hebrew Scriptures.

We so easily forget that the Christian faith largely arises out of the Fathers reading of the Hebrew Scriptures first and foremost. That has shaped profoundly the doctrinal, devotional, and liturgical reading of the Scriptures as a whole in the life of the Church, and often expressed in the hymns of the Church. This Gospel story is essentially a recapitulation and intensification of the themes of the Exodus, the paradigmatic journey par excellence of the pilgrimage of our souls. This mid-Lent Sunday highlights the images of paradise and wilderness. For the pilgrimage journey to God cannot be accomplished simply by us on our own strength and merits. With this Sunday we begin, paradoxically, to enter into the deeper meaning of the Lenten pilgrimage: it can only happen through the provisions of God’s Providence for us in the way of our journeying. This Sunday sets before us ‘a taste of paradise’ in the wilderness of human experience. God provides out of our lack or little. Ultimately, God provides himself as Holy Week and Good Friday show us.

John’s Gospel begins with an emphasis upon God’s all-knowing and all-embracing will in contrast to our human limitations. Jesus in the wilderness sees a great multitude and asks Philip “whence shall we buy bread that these may eat.” John immediately adds parenthetically that this is to prove or test Philip “for he himself knew what he would do.” This already alludes to the Exodus in which Israel was put to the test while also presuming to put God to the test. Philip’s response is about our human limitations and inadequacy to solve the problems of the world through economic means. “Two hundred penny-worth of bread is not sufficient for them, that every one may have enough.” It is a telling critique that extends to our modern world. The expansion of production in part through the techniques of industrialization and the false infinity of consumer desire haven’t and can’t solve the problems of the world to which they themselves contribute. The problems of our world and ourselves are fundamentally spiritual, not merely material.

(more…)

Print this entry