Monastery of the Holy Cross

Et Incarnatus Est – The Prior’s Blog

Homily for Corpus Christi

What goes into preparing the food that we eat?

Ten years ago, a man named Andy George decided to try and find out by making a chicken sandwich completely from scratch. This meant growing, harvesting and grinding wheat, slaughtering a chicken, collecting salt water to extract salt, growing and pickling cucumbers, pressing sunflower seeds to extract the oil to make mayonnaise, and, last but not least, milking a cow and making his own butter and cheese.

This process took a mere six months and cost Mr. George $1500.00. Even worse than the cost: the sandwich didn’t taste all that good, at least according to his less-than-amused family members, who shared it.

And of course, there still was quite a bit of work that predated Andy George’s foray into deep agriculture. He didn’t have to domesticate a cow or a chicken. He used an electric fan to winnow his grain and an electric blender to grind it.

What all of this says is that we are very dependent on a whole series of systems in order to eat well. In fact, it’s a kind of miracle that we can go to the store at all and buy bread, deli chicken slices, pickles and onions, mayonnaise, and cheese.

Every meal is a faint glimpse of human unity and cooperation, and unconscious yearning of men and women for a common, shared life.

By calling it a miracle, I mean to imply that behind it all is a mysterious God Who has made the human race in such a way that we can cooperate and provide for one another, with systems too complex for anyone to fully understand…except God Himself.

Every meal is a sign of God’s bountiful love. But since everything happens so routinely, we can easily miss out on the wonder of it all.

It is a good practice to take a moment before we eat to ask God to bless all the persons whose work made the meal possible: from the farmers to the cheese and bread factories, meat processing plants or butchers, truck drivers and grocers.

The Israelites, after they left Egypt, suffered a bit from the myopia that often afflicts us when it comes to eating. Egypt was one of the most sophisticated civilizations of the day, and this meant that they could provide a variety of foods for delectable consumption. The Israelites forgot that much of this luxury was produced on the backs of foreign slaves. We all have selective memories sometimes.

The bigger problem was their inability to trust that if God were to lead them forth, that He would know how to provide nourishment for them. He did this through the miracle of the manna, the bread that came down from heaven.

And Moses tells us that this sign was about more than making regular provision for the people. It was a visible reminder that we depend on God for everything. We live by God’s Word.

This is the same Word through Whom all things were made, and the same Word that became flesh to walk among us. The Greek term for Word is logos, and like the Hebrew word for Word, davar, it has a much broader meaning than simply “word”. Our English term “logic” derives from logos, so that when we say that through the word of God all things were made, we are saying that God’s creatures participate in a king of logic, a rationale, a purpose.

This is why things like food distribution can work in spite of the complexities being beyond human comprehension. All things are governed by God’s Word.

God oversees and underwrites our lives. I’ve already said that the fact that we are able to eat each day because of the manifold activities given by God for men and women to carry out is a kind of miracle. This is the case for the sustenance of our natural life. What we celebrate today is the sustenance of our supernatural life. The life given to us in baptism is now nourished and grows by the gift of the Holy Eucharist.

No longer do we discern God’s Word through the insights we get into the complex interaction of God’s creatures. Rather the Word comes to us very directly, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity under the appearance of bread and wine. We discern His presence by faith rather than by deduction.

It has long interested me that the elements consecrated at the Eucharist are not “natural” in the sense of being directly taken from the fields or vineyards. They are the product of human artifice, just like our everyday food. Someone harvests the grain, someone grinds it, someone adds water and bakes it until it becomes bread, a symbol of the entire human cooperative project. And then God receives and blesses this offering. Our project is no longer human only, but all of our natural human projects have now been taken up into the divine project of salvation, the reclamation of humanity from sin and dispersion.

Many grains and many grapes go into the production of the bread and wine that become the Body and Blood of the Only-Begotten Son of God. He is bringing unity out of our diversity, showing what true unity and cooperation are, and not only unity with our fellow men and women, but unity and cooperation with God Himself.

And today, we will take this message out quite literally to the world, maybe just a small portion of our neighborhood, but the symbolism is that of a grand cosmic vision. As we process with Jesus, we are a sign of His desire to gather all peoples into one. We will be a silent invitation to everyone we meet to return to God, to discover in Jesus Christ the answer to our deepest longings for life and love.

The one who feeds on me, says the Lord, will have life because of me.

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: The Second Precaution Against the Devil

The second precaution that Saint John of the Cross offers the religious is to see Christ in the superior. Again, this is not possible in a strict sense outside of religious life, but when he expands this precaution, we can get some insight into the principles behind it. The monk must obey the office, not the personality of the one inhabiting it. We do not obey authority to curry favor, nor do we resist authority because we don’t like the person wielding it.

One of the strangest aspects of the modern liberal order is the corruption of our understanding of authority. There isn’t space to go into detail on this question, but we have a default conviction that authority is bestowed by competency, and that it is mostly a question of power. All true authority derives from God, as we read in the Scriptures. It manifests itself in any corporate exercise: in the governance of a city or state, or of a university, family, team, or business. To be a university president, it is not necessary to be the best scholar. But whoever the president is, he or she has the authority to act in the interests of the university by setting policy. The presumption is that these policies should be followed, whether we like the person who is president or not, and even whether we even think the policies are unwise or unjust. When the latter is the case, we do have a certain right to raise the issue, perhaps first with someone with mediating authority, but it always must be done with respect for the office. Respect for authority is respect for all the persons under that authority.

To see Christ acting directly through authority figures is not strictly necessary and perhaps not advisable. We may be involved in an instance of accepting God’s permissive will rather than His positive will. Think of Saint Thomas More as he went to his execution: “I die the King’s good servant, and God’s first.”

(Here is the Introduction to the whole series. Here are The First Precaution Against the World and The Second and Third Precautions Against the World. Here are Part 1 of the Introduction to Precautions Against the Flesh and Part 2 of the Introduction to Precautions Against the Flesh. Here are The First, Second and Third Precautions Against the Flesh. Here is The Introduction to Precautions Against the Devil. Here is The First Precaution Against the Devil.)

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: The First Precaution Against the Devil

John of the Cross offers us three precautions when engaging in spiritual warfare against the Devil. He is writing for contemplative religious, and so we will need to translate these into terms that will make sense in the world. But it probably is good to bear in mind his original teaching in its religious context, so that we don’t subtly weaken his points.

The first precaution is that we never take on any good work, outside of what is assigned under obedience and the obligations of our state. In translating this to the secular situation of the laity, it’s important to note that we cannot, for example, equate a boss, or a pastor, or even a spouse with a religious superior, to whom religious make an explicit vow of obedience.

Outside of the cloister, this then calls for discernment and an earnest effort through prayer and consultation to hear the Holy Spirit and have the docility to say yes. How does this work, practically?

First of all, the obligations of our state in life do present an analog between the cloister and the Christian life of the laity in the world. If we are students, we have an obligation to do our study, show up for class and the like. If we are parents, we have obligations to our spouses and children. If we are employed, we have obligations to our company and coworkers, and so on. If a new project will cause us to fail to meet these obligations, then it is probably not from God.

In cases that are unclear, Ignatian spirituality offers us a method for discernment. First, we must be clear about the likely outcomes of competing plans of action. Let me use an example from the late Cardinal George of blessed memory. When he returned from the conclave that elected Pope Francis, he spoke to a meeting of religious leaders and described the awesome responsibility of choosing, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the next successor to Peter.

The first question is, who are the candidates likely to be in the running? If there are, let’s say, three strong candidates, I need to ask myself: What are their strengths and weaknesses? What situations in the Church is each one likely to address? Are there situations in the Church that I find urgent, and how will each one meet these challenges?

The next step is the one that calls for prayer and deep faith. I need to imagine each person being chosen pope and imagine the likely good or lack thereof that will come of each candidate’s potential papacy. Only when I arrive at peace with the prospect of each candidate as pope, with all of his strengths, weaknesses, and personal experiences, will I be ready to vote. At that point, I will no longer be at the mercy of my own fears, whims, preferences and agendas. I can ask myself: which one of these options genuinely seems best for the Church? And answer it honestly.

So when we are presented with an initiative of some kind, if a colleague asks me to join in a new project, I need to be clear about what the likely effect will be of saying yes and of saying no. When I am ready to accept both options with peace in my heart, then I am ready to ask which one is best for me, for my family, for the Church.

There is one more piece to this process for those who do not have a religious superior. Are there persons in my life from whom I am obliged to seek counsel before a decision of this weight? Are there persons whose counsel I respect who could help me think through the decision? I said a moment ago that a spouse is not a religious superior. Spouses are not bound to obey each other in the way a religious obeys a superior. But married persons are bound to make important decisions only after consulting their spouses and listening to counsel openly, without trying to sway their response with emotional reactivity. The decision may still be yours to make, but it should take into consideration the counsel of the spouse. And if we trouble someone for advice, we should take it very seriously.

Another thought along these lines: when should I help someone? In the monastery, I’ve discovered that this isn’t as obvious as it sounds. Monks like to be helpful, but not everyone wants to be helped. Important questions include, “Has this person asked for my help, and am I willing to offer the help that he says that he needs?” “Is someone else supposed to be helping, and will my help be an implied criticism of someone in charge?” Helping someone can be delicate if there is an imbalance of power. Can I help in such a way that the person isn’t shamed by my magnanimousness? Can I do so as a true sister or brother rather than as a benefactor?

(Here is the Introduction to the whole series. Here are The First Precaution Against the World and The Second and Third Precautions Against the World. Here are Part 1 of the Introduction to Precautions Against the Flesh and Part 2 of the Introduction to Precautions Against the Flesh. Here are The First, Second and Third Precautions Against the Flesh. Here is The Introduction to Precautions Against the Devil.)

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: Introduction to Precautions Against the Devil

By the sixteenth century, the era of Saint John of the Cross, the Church recognized three particular enemies of the soul: the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. While this formulation doesn’t appear explicitly until the high Middle Ages, the monastic Fathers wrote about spiritual warfare from a similar set of considerations. Their view of the soul was based on the three appetites or desires that move us to act. The lowest, the concupiscible, is our desire for bodily life and pleasure. The corruption of this desire is what Saint John calls the Flesh. He also says that the attacks against by the Flesh are the most tenacious and continue as long as the old Man survives in us. This comports well with what the monks of old warned their disciples, that sexual desire and the desire for inordinate eating will be temptations to the end of our lives for most of us.

The virtues that help us to govern these desires are especially temperance and courage.

More noble than the concupiscible desires are the irascible desires, which we normally think of as related to emotions like anger and sadness. We desire safety, honor, recognition, and the freedom to act, and when these are thwarted we are tempted to lash out in anger or grow sullen and cynical. These desires are nobler because they relate our souls to the world around us, rather than simply to our own bodies. The corruption of these desires is what John calls the World. He says that these are the simplest temptations to vanquish.

The virtues that we need to cultivate to fight back against the World are courage and especially justice.

The most difficult temptations to understand arise from the Devil, and these attack the intellect and will. The will is our “intellectual appetite,” meaning it is what we want to do after we’ve weighed options and made a decision. The vice that is especially dangerous here is pride, which is the vice that characterizes the Devil himself. The cardinal virtue that needs cultivating in this case is prudence. The Church’s own reflection on the Incarnation helps us to see the importance of the dispositions of humility and obedience.  These two stances, modeled for us by Christ Himself, show us how to develop a truly Christian prudence, one that can fight back against the Devil’s temptations.

What are these temptations? The Devil wants us to misjudge, to choose what is evil disguised as good. In other words, we are likely to be led astray by projects that appear to be good, but in fact weaken our docility to God and to the obligations attached to our state of life. This is connected to pride because we often choose tasks with an unrealistic view of our own ability to bring them to a good completion. We may seek out projects that will make us appear more virtuous to others than we are, rather than choosing a less spectacular path that leads to genuine virtue.

John of the Cross offers us three precautions when engaging in spiritual warfare against the Devil. He is writing for contemplative religious, and so we will need to translate these into terms that will make sense in the world. But it probably is good to bear in mind his original teaching in its religious context, so that we don’t subtly weaken his points.

(Here is the Introduction to the whole series. Here are The First Precaution Against the World and The Second and Third Precautions Against the World. Here are Part 1 of the Introduction to Precautions Against the Flesh and Part 2 of the Introduction to Precautions Against the Flesh. Here are The First, Second and Third Precautions Against the Flesh.)

The Word, the Flesh, and the Devil: The First, Second and Third Precautions Against the Flesh

(Here is the Introduction to the whole series. Here are The First Precaution Against the World and The Second and Third Precautions Against the World. Here are Part 1 of the Introduction to Precautions Against the Flesh and Part 2 of the Introduction to Precautions Against the Flesh.)

Now we turn again to Saint John of the Cross. In the autumn, I mentioned that he had written a short work on our theme for a new Carmelite convent. So he is writing to women who would presumably already be committed to a program of celibate chastity, regular and difficult fasting, and other typical deprivations associated with religious life. But I also believe that what he has to say will be very much of use to persons in the world.

In his first precaution against the flesh, John asserts that every one of my religious brothers and sisters was sent by God to fashion me, as a sculptor fashions a sculpture by blows. Unkind actions, words and gestures cause me pain, but if I see this as purposed by God, I can remain submissive under these treatments. He believes that we will not make headway against sensuality if we are not able to bear these difficulties with patience.

To translate this into the secular state, I think that we can say that, in any line of work that we have undertaken to serve God, our first presumption should be that the difficulties caused by others in that line of work can be borne for just this purpose. We can to learn to bear with irritation, annoyance, pain and the like. Granted, these areas of work do not come with the same guarantee that religious vows are meant to safeguard. Still, bearing the weakness of body and character of those whom God gives us in our walks of life will go a long way to purifying us of self-regard and a lazy selfishness.

John’s second precaution is that, if a work is in the service of God, we should not give it up when it ceases to bring us satisfaction or pleasure. The liturgy, keeping the accounts, cooking, whatever it is. We should learn to do these things apart from whatever pleasure we might expect from them.

This, again, will happen in any line of work. There will come a time when it no longer pleases. The world today urges us to move on rather than accepting the possible benefits of tedium and self-conquest. Again, I am not saying that there will never come a time when the problems associated with your work will not be a good reason to look for another job. But we can first use that boredom and nuisance for spiritual gain.

What derives from this is his last precaution, that we should no longer hope for pleasant feelings in lectio divina, in the liturgy, in any prayer or spiritual exercise that we undertake. Indeed, when they bring bitterness, we should embrace the difficulty, what Benedict would call the dura et aspera.

John’s suggestions seem timely in our world today. The world is geared toward maximizing choice, which usually means maximizing pleasure and comfort, avoiding anything we find inconvenient or annoying. We are frequently told that authenticity requires giving in to any and all desires and curiosities, regardless of whether the kind of instability this invites does real damage to our character. It is a sign of the loss of a larger Christian worldview, centered on the Cross and the hard work of redemption. This season is an opportunity to re-engage in recapturing the world for Christ beginning with our own hearts.

Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Easter

Every human being that ever lived was created for eternity with the God of infinite love. This is part of the Good News that Christians need to share with the world. And that’s because without the Gospel, this infinite longing that we have is easily converted into infinite suffering. Why is this? Because we seek to satisfy this longing with finite things. These can bring us a certain amount of joy, temporary satisfaction and comfort, but soon we begin longing again. As finite creatures ourselves, we cannot obtain the infinite on our own. As Cistercian Father Michael Casey has put it, seeking transcendence sounds great until you realize that it leaves you perpetually out of your own depth.

There are several common secular solutions to this human dilemma, our desire for transcendence and our utter inability to achieve it. There is the tragic option, to recognize the longing as real, and our intimations of transcendence are real. This is the Stoic or philosophical solution. The Stoic purifies his mind and heart and may even rejoice at the beauty of truth. But he knows that eventually it all comes to an end and he must surrender himself to death. His is a life without hope.

To such persons, Jesus says, “I am the Way. Be baptized into my Body, and I will carry you to heaven, to the eternal dwelling with My Father. For there are indeed many dwelling places there, and there is one for you. You cannot reach it on your own, but I have been sent by the Father to be the bridge, the Mediator. No one can come to the Father except through Me, and here I am, and I offer myself to you in the Bread of eternal salvation.”

This is the Way of Hope.

There is a second solution, that of transhumanism, as we call it today. Transhumanists want to use human intelligence and creativity to crack the code of human morality, to rewrite our genetics to reverse aging, to live forever in this world with no need of God. There is something desperate about this approach, and oddly, something anti-human, since to be human simply is to be a finite creature. Nor will it truly address the desire for transcendence, for the transhumanist will only extend biological life, remaining very much a human being, and therefore mortal, prone to accidents and the like.

To these persons, Jesus says, “I am the Truth. Before my Incarnation, you desired to be like God, but because you did not know the truth about yourselves, you attempted to grasp at divinity by eating of the forbidden fruit. In my Body, see the Truth of humanity, that your nature is compatible with the divine. This Truth unlocks every other truth, explains the universe, even the invisible world of spirits. The Truth is that you are my most precious creature. If only you would trust in me, you would have more than you even know how to desire.”

This is Truth that is sought by Faith.

There is a third attempt to deal with the aspiration for transcendence. I will call this strategy the aesthetic. This one appealed to me when I was younger because I was a musician. Several times in performance, I had the sense of being lifted up into some different realm of experience. Time slowed down. Interestingly, after those performances, I discovered that my fellow musicians had a similar experience, expressed in similar ways. There was a sense that we lived for those experiences, an experience of tranquility amidst change, a sensation of harmony with not only the other musicians, but with the audience and with nature itself. It was a feeling of being unusually alive.

But inevitably, the music ended. We would pack up our instruments and go home, rejuvenated for a while. We could perform the same piece a few days later with no particular effect. The poet and the prophet see the beyond and report it to the rest of us. If only we had the strength and acuity to reach it!

To these Jesus says, “I am the Life. Receive Me and receive true life, a spring of water welling up to eternal life. You have seen traces of Me in all things beautiful in all things harmonious, but I have come to give you Myself, the Life that can never be taken away, that never grows weary or dull.”

This is the Life of Love.

Whatever causes us restlessness is a sign of our thirst for God. Let us then take to heart what Christ is teaching us today: to know Him as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Jesus, in rising from the dead and ascending to the Father has opened up a Way for us to cross over to our true homeland. Not only that, but in sending us the Holy Spirit, He has opened the eyes of our minds and hearts to see the Truth of all things, a Truth that had been obscured by human sin. And this Spirit is also the Giver of Life, Who desires to be the spark and inspiration of all that we do, that the True Transcendent Life of Christ may shine through our words and actions and bring many others to the rest that only God can give.

Silence (and Noise) in the City

As the weather warms up, we tend to keep our windows open, as we only have air conditioning in a few areas of the Monastery. This lets in more of the typical noise of the city. This time of year, more people are outdoors, so there’s more sound to start with. Sometimes I’ve been asked whether the noise causes problems for prayer. This question isn’t as easy to answer as it appears. Many “problems” in life are so only because we don’t have the insight to handle them properly. Perhaps if I were fully a man of prayer the noise wouldn’t be an obstacle at all.

As a general rule, I don’t find the noise to be distracting. Chicagoans are famous for being able to stop mid-sentence when the El trains pass by, then pick up where they left off. Noise is the baseline background to everything one does in the city. But more than that, noise is a sign of life. It happens because people are in motion, engaged in activity (admittedly not all of it edifying). We monks are here to serve just these people by our prayer and our witness to the joy of the Gospel. In a quiet way, literally, we offer an alternative vision of community and invite those around us to see the difference that Christ makes. The fact that our habits are radically different from the world around us is exactly what draws attention.

Easter Homily: Beyond the Frontier of Death

As we gather this morning, four astronauts are sailing toward the moon. Right now they are over 200,000 miles away from earth. The Artemis II mission is scheduled to circle around the moon tomorrow and begin the long return home.  NASA has a real-time mission tracker website, where you can look at video feeds from four cameras attached to the solar array wings. There is also a computerized diagram of the flight of the Orion spacecraft that allows you view the path to and from the moon from different angles, seeing the relative positions of earth, moon, and sun.

I thought of this last night at the Easter Vigil when we heard about God, at the beginning of creation bringing forth dry land from chaos and creating the two great lights. I came of age in the wake of the first lunar missions and and when I was around ten years old an uncle of mine gave me Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, a classic of science fiction, which I read and re-read. My father and I watched reruns of the original Star Trek series. I was enchanted by the mysterious music of the opening, with the famous monologue that begins, “Space: the final frontier.”

These were words that would have resonated with Americans, for whom, in the 1960s, the frontier still meant the wild west. The show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, wrote scripts for Westerns before conceiving Star Trek, and he modeled the show after the great naval exploratory novels of C.S. Forester.

Artemis II countdown

But Roddenberry was also and atheist, and I believe that he spoke too conclusively about space being the final frontier. He was right about something in the human spirit that craves discovery, that is impelled to “boldly go where no man has gone before.” But is space all there is?

When I got older, I fell in love with music, and this, for me, was also a kind of exploration, but of the mind and heart and community rather than of the physical cosmos. The world of art and music seemed to have truly endless possibilities, being unbound by time or space. But as you can see, I pursued neither the life of an astronaut nor of a musician. And that’s because, in the end, the final frontier for all of us is death.

In the words of Hamlet, the afterlife is the “undiscovered country,” though Hamlet, like Roddenberry, surely spoke a bit too hastily. That’s because we do have reports from beyond the grave.

We celebrate that first reconnaissance today, the day that Jesus rose from the dead after descending into hell, preaching to the captives in prison and liberating those who had been held captive to death. Not only has the undiscovered country been scouted out, it has been conquered, and we are free to move in and explore.

The Harrowing of Hell

For those of you who heard my homily on Good Friday, I hope that you mind me excavating a bit more a theme I introduced then. If this new world of the afterlife is now open for colonization as it were, how exactly do we get there? Do we just simply wait until we die? No; again, not in the physical sense. Rather, the entryway is baptism.

We were baptized into Christ’s death, Saint Paul says, so that “as Christ was raised from the dead…we too might walk in newness of life.” Right now, in the present tense, we are invited by God to live no longer by the flesh but by the Holy Spirit. This is the fulfillment of the distinctive human yearning for the beyond, the urge that impels us to venture into space and to plumb the depths of the heart. What we have been searching for all along is Jesus Christ, the Risen Christ, the God of love and infinite creativity.

So where do we go to explore this new country? In today’s second reading, Saint Paul says, “Seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.” Indeed, the very fact of the empty tomb is an invitation to seek Christ, but to do so spiritually, not physically.

The new world opened up for us by Jesus Christ is the spiritual life. And I don’t mean this in the sense of a boutique “spirituality,” where we choose a spiritual lifestyle that suits us. The spiritual life is the life of the unique Holy Spirit, God’s gift to us in baptism, the Spirit of Truth who will lead us into all truth. A personal “spirituality” limits us to what is comfortable. The Spirit of God makes us true explorers of what is real, what is given by God. And we discover this previously undiscovered country first of all in our own hearts.

Saint Macarius of Egypt said this of the human heart: “The heart itself is only a small vessel, yet dragons are there, and lions, there are poisonous beasts, and all the treasures of evil, there are rough and uneven roads, there are precipices; but there too is God and the angels, life is there, and the Kingdom, there too is light, and there the apostles and heavenly cities, and treasures of grace. All things lie within that little space.”

Do you see that he is, like Saint Paul, urging us to seek what is above? God and angels, the apostles and heavenly cities and treasures. Yes, we must take up arms against the dragons and lions and poisonous beasts, that is our sins and vices, but victory is absolutely assured if only we cling to the Lord with all the love of our hearts and fight unwearied at His side.

He is risen indeed, and in His unsurpassed love for you, his sisters and brothers, He has invited us where truly no one had gone before, but now where await all the saints and angels at the eternal heavenly banquet.

Homily for Good Friday

We have no king but Caesar.

The Gospel of John is full of irony. Sometimes the irony is amusing; sometimes it’s profound; sometimes it’s depressing. One of the more depressing ironies is the cry of the chief priests when Pilate presents them with Jesus after finding Him not guilty. They say, “We have no king but Caesar.”

To grasp the depth of the irony, it is helpful to return to the Book of Judges and the First Book of Samuel, which form one narrative together, giving us the story of Israel a thousand years before Christ. The Book of Judges ends with this statement: “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.”

This is not a celebration of political freedom.

The people of Israel had reeled from one crisis to another, with God regularly intervening to save her. At the opening of the First Book of Samuel, the dangerous Philistines are becoming powerful. The people of Israel are growing increasingly fearful of this new political threat, and they demand that God give them a king, a strongman to fight their wars for them. The prophet Samuel warns the people that they will lose their freedom were they to submit to a king. A king would levy burdensome taxes, conscript their sons, build up a huge government bureaucracy. Perennial human problems!

In spite of Samuel’s warnings, God Himself agrees to appoint a king, eventually settling on David. Samuel’s predictions, however, quickly come true. On the whole, the kings of Israel found it impossible to avoid compromising entanglements with the gods of other nations. Israel was never the most powerful nation, and the world powers of the time dominated them, even exiling them. After God brought them back from exile, they became client states of the Persians, Greeks, and then the Romans, which is the background situation for the life and death of Jesus, Son of David.

The kingship in Judea had been suppressed for five hundred years at this point. But there were prophecies about a return of the King, the anointed one, who would free God’s people from domination by the Gentiles. And just last Sunday, Jesus allowed Himself to be identified as this Messiah, by riding into Jerusalem, the capital city founded by David himself, on a donkey, according to a prophecy of Zechariah the prophet.

And in fact, this is the closing of the circle.

When God agreed to appoint a king, He told Samuel that the people “have rejected me from being king over them.” In Jesus, we not only have a legitimate descendant of David, and therefore a legitimate heir to the throne, but we have God Himself, ready to take up His rightful place as the King of the people whom He had, time and again, delivered from her enemies.

Will they reject Him as king again?

The emotional background to this drama is fear. The chief priests fear the Romans. They also fear the mob and the consequences of a riot. Pilate is afraid of divine nemesis of some kind, which accounts for his reaction on hearing that Jesus claims to be the Son of God. He also fears the Emperor if things get out of hand. The disciples fear getting captured and punished by one authority or another, and so they run away.

When we are afraid, we are easily manipulated. This, by the way, is one reason the news is always negative. It serves a political purpose to keep large portions of the population anxious.

The choice that we all face at some point is here before Pilate, the authorities, and the mob. When we find ourselves anxious, will we choose God? Or will we demand a powerful man or ideology or movement to attack whatever is making us anxious? And what does it look like, exactly, to choose God?

Let’s admit that this can be a challenge. Because what God looks like on Good Friday is a condemned criminal humiliated by the powers of the world. Serving this God might not be quote-unquote “safe” in the normal sense of that term. But this is to limit ourselves to too narrow a field of vision. Jesus suggests this to Pilate when He says, “My kingdom is not of this world.”

Turning to God will not necessarily give us things that world deems desirable: fame, prosperity, power, comfort, safety. Still, trusting God will give us something much, much greater: victory over death itself. Fame, prosperity, and power will not deliver anyone from death, nor can any worldly power achieve it.

In conclusion, let’s close another circle.

For the chief priests to say, publicly, before Pilate, “We have no king but Caesar” is willingly to adopt the position of a slave—or at best a client serving the interests of a pagan power. My purpose here is not to assign blame, but to present frankly the temptation that we all face in this life.

I said that God will deliver us from death. What does this look like? Is this something that we wait around for, trying to build up credits with God in the time we have left? Where is this kingdom of God, and how do we get there to avoid slavery to the world?

Well, first of all, we have our Lord’s assurance that His kingdom is among us and within us. It is not far at all. On the Cross, He is showing us how to get there. He is opening the path through death to the Kingdom.

We follow, first of all, by being conformed to His death in baptism, by taking up our Crosses daily and following Him through death to life. This requires the eyes of faith, but it has palpable results. It gives us the freedom to live without fear, to accept whatever sufferings come our way, with peace and indeed joy, for they conform us to Christ and lead to His Kingdom.

As we celebrate the mysteries of Jesus’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection, let us ask God to open the eyes of our spirits to see anew the great love Jesus showed in becoming man for us and suffering for us. May it free us to let go of fear and find true joy in the Lord.

A Joyful Mystery in Lent

Today’s feast of the Annunciation can seem, at first glance, to be incongruous, falling as it does in the last weeks of Lent. While we are meditating on Jesus’ Passion, does it make sense joyfully to celebrate the Incarnation?

In fact, there are good reasons why this celebration falls precisely around the time of Holy Week each year. First of all, we might notice that in the Creed, the words “[He] became man,” are followed immediately by these words: “For our sake, He was crucified under Pontius Pilate. He suffered death and was buried.” Nothing is said about his teaching or healing ministry. We go directly from His birth to His death.

Medieval Christians had a lively sense that the purpose of the Incarnation was precisely that it allowed Christ to suffer for the forgiveness of our sins. And indeed, historians of the liturgy believe that March 25 was chosen as the date of the Annunciation because it was also believed to be the date of Good Friday. This followed a belief in the early Church that Jesus’s conception and crucifixion happened on the same date, nicely demonstrating their interrelation.

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