Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles under Scripture

Homily: God’s Ways and Our Ways

God’s thoughts are high above our thoughts. Perhaps it would be a good idea to take a look at our thoughts regarding the characters in today’s gospel.

What kind of people are these men who are hired at 5:00 in the evening? How do we honestly feel about them?

Given the number of men the master is hiring, it’s clearly the height of the harvest. Lots of help is needed. Where we these men at the beginning of the day? At the middle of the day? Sleeping in after a night of partying? Procrastinating because they didn’t really feel like working that day?

Or what if they had been sick, or their wife or a child had been sick? Perhaps the foreman doing the hiring were trying to hire the fewest amount of men needed to save on labor expenses, and so a few unlucky guys got ignored. There are all kinds of reasons, some legitimate, why a someone seeking employment might not be available at the beginning of the day.

Jesus surely invites us to think about the economic implications of this parable by choosing the images He does, so let’s reflect on that for just a bit. The Catholic Church teaches that in a healthy world, in healthy communities, employers pay employees a just wage.

What makes a wage just is that it is enough to support the worker and his dependents, meaning, mainly his family. This is a very challenging teaching, so let me say a bit more by way of explanation. Let’s avoid, first of all, thinking of the just wage doctrine as a moral command for all employers regardless of context. Let’s think more broadly about that context. If we want to live in a healthy world and in healthy communities, each of will see that my flourishing is bound up with the flourishing of everyone in the community. Employers are community leaders, since they help to organize labor that benefits everyone. They give meaningful work and wages to laborers, and the laborers’ work produces goods that everyone can use. As organizers, employers are de facto leaders within communities.

I’ve kept this explanation fairly abstract because the very concept of flourishing communities is one that is almost impossible to grasp in our current moment. For example, globalization often puts a lot of pressure on both employers and workers, who must compete with goods produced in faraway communities that don’t necessarily share Christian values. Even in a place like Chicago, this kind of community awareness is very difficult to sustain. We used to be a city of neighborhoods, where local businesses were more often operated by local businessmen and employed local men and women. In a very real way, they profited the neighborhood.

Today, increased mobility and individualism mutually reinforce each other and cause breakdowns in the community fabric. Our awareness of the mutual obligations that arise between neighbors is blunted. Another way of putting this is that we struggle to understand and put into practice the idea of a common good.

This is all to say that we will probably have to stretch our imaginations to understand today’s parable. What the master did for the men who were hired later in the day was to pay them a just wage. They went home with enough money to sustain their families, even if they technically hadn’t worked for it. The master’s generosity meant that they wouldn’t be reduced to poverty, at least not for today. And that’s good for everyone connected to them.

Now the reason Jesus tells the parable is not primarily to give us an economics lesson. He is saying that this is like the Kingdom of Heaven. And today’s first reading gives us some idea of how to interpret it. God is generous in forgiving, and is calling all scoundrels and the wicked to turn away from their ways and receiving His mercy. God goes on to say, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways.” In other words, this offer of mercy seems too good to be true. We know how this is. A person caught up in all kinds of bad behavior, living at a distance from God, finds it almost impossible to believe that God could simply and generously wipe away all that wrongdoing and welcome the sinner back. I think that we are also aware today, maybe in a manner different from Christians in other eras, of how poor life choices often are simply manifestations of larger systemic problems in community life, family life, the educational system, and so on. In other words, these scoundrels might have something in common with those workers who couldn’t find anyone to hire them early in the day.

But they have something else in common, which is that they did return. Jesus says elsewhere in the gospel that tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of those who count themselves as friends of God. Tax collectors and prostitutes, outcasts because of their behavior, have been turning to Jesus. What have they to lose? The choice of the eleventh-hour workers in the parable is similar. Why not work at least one hour for whatever the master will pay, since it’s better than nothing.

And in both cases, they receive far more than they hoped for. The worker gets enough money to sustain his family, and the tax collector and prostitute find reconciliation with God. So high are God’s ways above our ways.

Jesus doesn’t end there. He concludes the gospel saying, “The last will be first, and the first will be last.” The workers all got the same amount, but those hired first are grumbling against the master’s generosity rather than rejoicing in the good fortune of the workers hired last.

Our world at the moment seems to be waking up to God again. Many are returning to the Church. Can we see in this return a sign of the generosity of God, and take joy in the reconciliation of others, welcoming them as brothers and sisters in the Lord? There is always risk involved. The one-hour worker might try to make a habit of getting more than he strictly deserves, and the convert might grow self-important from the mercy lavished upon him. Welcoming those whom God has welcomed will always stretch us. But if God’s ways are high as the heavens above us, it is good to have some stretching to do.

Homily for the Monastery’s Foundation Day

The Christian faith has had detractors from the very beginning. This makes some sense, since its founder, Jesus Christ, united all the powers of the world against Him. Thus He came to the end of His earthly life as a victim of capital punishment. This very fact was proof enough for the earliest opponents of the Christian Way. How is it possible that the One, True God could consent to take the form of a criminal, and the worst sort of criminal at that?

In the intervening centuries, the Church that Christ founded by the opening of His side on the Cross has spread over the whole world, and the Cross itself has become so commonplace a symbol that its scandal has been largely neutralized. Also of note is that the detractors of Christianity are often today atheists or agnostics rather than polytheists as was the case in the ancient world. There is some irony to this, inasmuch as Christians were frequently accused by the Romans of being atheists because they refused to recognize the divinity of the many gods of the Roman pantheon and worshipped a God who could not be represented in images.

In any case, today’s detractors are more likely to be scandalized by a different aspect of the Incarnation. They point to its arbitrariness. Why was Jesus born a Jew and not a Persian? Or Chinese? Or Inca? Why did He speak Aramaic? Why was He born at that specific time? And finally, why make such a big deal out of the Cross? It’s just one form of capital punishment among countless horrendous tortures cooked up by the infernal ingenuity of the world’s rulers. I’ve heard it asked: “If Jesus had died in an electric chair, would Christians would wear stylized electric chairs on chains around their necks?”

Even though this objection to Christianity sounds new, the Fathers of the Church had, in some ways, anticipated it. To them, the brute fact of the Cross was not arbitrary at all. From the time that Adam and Eve sinned by eating the forbidden fruit of the tree in the Garden, there was an almost inevitable movement toward a new tree that would undo that sin. In this light, perhaps the specific punishment of the Cross is not arbitrary at all. Somehow it represents the inner logic of the cosmic drama of sin and its healing, as suggested by this morning’s first reading (about the healing effects of the bronze serpent) and Jesus’s interpretation of it in the gospel.

The Romans may not have invented crucifixion, but they refined it into a kind of diabolical art. As I already mentioned, this was the punishment for the worst sorts of criminals, meaning for slaves and others who had no worldly power at all. It was intended to be a strong deterrent against any lowlifes who might get it into their heads to challenge the powers that be. And the Romans were not only the greatest empire to have existed at that point, but they have remained the epitome of imperial success. And their success was underwritten by the more or less constant threat of brutality against those who tried to stand up against them.

But why did they fix on crucifixion as the most concentrated form of this threat? If we can understand this, we can understand more deeply God’s complete inversion of worldly power, since the Son of God would then be going right to the root of its poisonous growth. First of all, crucifixion needed to be public. Everyone had to see exactly what criminals had coming. The shape of the Cross is a kind of mockery of the human form, humans being the one truly upright-walking animal, with a head that can search out the heavens and arms that can embrace all things. That dignity needed to be subverted and ridiculed. Furthermore, it is a mockery of life itself, being a parody of fruit-bearing trees, the message being that the state itself gives life and takes it away.

Jesus walks right into this display of pompous human arrogance, takes the Cross, its symbol, and by His Resurrection, carries it off in triumph. In Christ’s Crucifixion, we see the climax of a epochal struggle between God and His spiritual enemies. God had been patiently training His chosen people, while the worldly powers of Babylon, Macedonia and Rome repeatedly subjugated them. And when the ungodly powers unleashed all of their fury on God’s greatest and most Beloved ambassador, Jesus demonstrated God’s serene sovereignty by uniting Himself to all that is lowly by human estimation, all that represents our sad exile from paradise, embracing all our disgrace, humiliation, and shame in the form of the Cross. By this obedience, Christ shows us that salvation is never far for those who learn to trust God, no matter how utterly hopeless the situation might appear from a worldly perspective. The lowly—those excluded from the advantages that the world purports to hold for those who embrace its logic of violence—more instinctively see in the Cross a vindication of their dignity before God. In celebration of Christ’s triumph on the Cross, let us strive to be among those poor in spirit who experience His salvation.

Homily: The Church and the Papacy

In May of last year, Wikipedia set a new record for visitors to its site. At one point, the online encyclopedia was handling 800,000 hits per second, more than six times the normal amount. What was driving this mad scramble for information?

The election of Pope Leo XIV. The website “Streamcharts.com” reported that nearly six million people watched the announcement of his election online. Internet viewers logged over sixteen million hours watching the conclave as a whole, making it one of the biggest news items of the year. Anyone who thinks that the Catholic Church and the papacy are irrelevant in the modern world are clearly out of step.

Yet we also know that the modern world harbors a distinct hostility toward the Catholic Church and the pope. When I say “the modern world”, I mean something like the conglomeration of persons whose financial interests and ideologies coincide with a near-monopoly on communications, the banking industry and much of the political scene worldwide. It doesn’t matter, for the purposes of this homily, whether these person form a coordinated Deep State conspiracy or if the actions and ideologies of this overlordship was destined to arise when we crossed a certain threshold of technology. What matters is that one of the most important institutions, if not the most important institutions standing athwart their ambitions, is the Catholic Church.

Since, as I mentioned, they tend to control many communications outlets and write many of the algorithms that drive the internet, we know of their hostility toward the Church by the ways in which they try to induce Catholics toward suspicion of the papacy and the bishops, toward polarization and a general sense of doom. Anyone who has studied social media can tell you that few things drive mouse clicks more than anxiety and outrage. We even have a name for this compulsive behavior: “Doom scrolling.” But what it means is that every time we follow one more suggested article or video, we are not only potential undermining our faith in Christ’s Mystical Body, but we are also funneling money to the very people who benefit from the weakness in the Catholic Church.

What is it about the Church that the overlord class hates? There are many things. The Church opposes the pet ideologies of the modern world, for starters. But so does Islam. In some ways, Islam is even more medieval than the Catholic Church. So what separates us? I think the answer is obvious. The Catholic Church speaks in a unified way with authority, and she does so because she has one top vicar on earth, representing the authority of Christ, the One mediator between humanity and the One God. The Catholic Church has a pope.

One of the ways that the modern world tries to undermine the pope’s authority is through the language of political ideology. Every one of the pope’s actions is read through the materialistic lens of left versus right. So it behooves us this morning to revisit the nature of the papacy and the gift of authority in the Church, as exercised through the pope and the ordinary Magisterium, and to do so from a deep, theological point of view.

In today’s gospel, Jesus recognizes a special gift to Simon Peter from the Father. This gift is insight into the identity of Jesus. Not only is He the Messiah, the Christ. This is Peter’s confession in the gospels of Mark and Luke. But, peculiar to Matthew’s gospel, Peter adds that the Son of Man, Jesus, is also the Son of the Living God. Jesus tells us that Peter did not deduce this from any human reasoning. The insight is a gift from God the Father, the very Person Who sent the Son on His mission of reconciliation. And so Jesus confirms this gift and deepens its meaning by bestowing on Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Like the other Apostles, he is given genuine authority on earth—the authority of a steward, but still real authority. Since at least the time of Saints Clement and Ignatius of Antioch—in other words, since the generation after the Apostles—the Church has understood that Peter, the Rock upon which the Church is founded, has a special ministry of unity. This ministry has passed down through 2000 years to Pope Leo XIV, the 264th successor of Peter.

The Church built upon the rock of Peter’s confession is a type of a sacrament of salvation for the whole world. By nature, the Church is both human and divine. When people speak of the Church today, we often mean either the men and women who happen to be living upon earth and who belong to the Catholic Church, or, in some cases, and even more incorrectly, the bishops and priests. In other words, we reduce it to something merely human, forgetting the divine nature of the Church. This is what modernists would like us to do. They might not be fully conscious of this desire; since they don’t acknowledge a divine nature to the Church, they may simply understand the Church as just any other human institution. But we should be very wary not to make this mistake.

Traditionally, the Church’s membership has been divided into three parts: the Church militant, expectant, and triumphant. The Church militant is the part that we can see on earth at the moment, the part that we often confuse with being the Church as a whole. But it is not nearly the entire Church. There is also the Church expectant, the souls that have passed on to the next world, but are not yet fully purified, and are working their way through Purgatory, with the great help of our prayers. Finally, we have the Church triumphant, those souls that already enjoy something of the vision of God. But they are ontologically connected to each of us in the Body of Christ. By virtue of our baptisms, we share the same divine life with them. They are close to us. They are our bulwark against every temptation against fidelity. For they know the Truth and are living in it. The pope is not simply a man, from this perspective. In some way, he speaks in communion with all of the popes who went before, who all exercise the keys as Saint Peter in the current context. We can have confidence that the Holy Spirit will protect us from the banes of apostasy and heresy precisely because we are in union with the entire Church, the communion of saints.

I end with a quick note on the gates of hell. Literally, these are the gates of Hades. We hear about these very gates in the works of Homer. Whereas Peter has the keys of God’s kingdom, and determines who goes in and out, the gates of Hades have been definitely breached by Jesus when He descended there after His crucifixion. No one is manning those gates anymore.

We often misconstrue this imagery, seeing the Church as under attack by these gates, and hearing our Lord’s assurance that Hades or hell cannot invade the Church. There is truth to this, but I fear that this interpretation puts us on the defensive, which is not the import of the image. Rather, with the power of the grace flowing through the Church’s sacraments, we have the mission of rescuing all who have been taken captive by the power of death and setting them free. This begins with each of us descending, with Christ, into those areas within ourselves where hell’s power still lurks: those places where we have been hurt, where we harbor resentment or hopelessness, loneliness, fear and anxiety. The power of the keys unlocks everything within us that is captive and sets it free by the power of Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God. To Him be power and glory forever. Amen.

Mary Magdalene, Model for Monks

Mary Magdalene, whose feast day we celebrated yesterday, might not seem like a model for contemplative monks. When we look at the liturgy of her feast, however, we discover many relevant themes. After all, she was the person chosen by God to see Christ first after His Resurrection. Saint Gregory the Great pointed out that she received this privilege because she did not give up seeking Christ, whereas the Apostles, upon seeing the empty tomb, went away. She persevered in her quest.

What was the source of her resolution? Surely, the Church tells us, it was because of her great love and devotion to Jesus. Her life at this point was completely focused on Him. As Jesus had purified her of seven demons, her heart was further purified by her love and devotion. Blessed are the pure of heart! For they shall see God. This Beatitude summarizes the monastic life. After the pattern of Mary Magdalene, the monk seeks purification by repentance, and by constant prayer and devotion to God. Even when God seems distant, the monk perseveres. His hope is to encounter the risen Christ, and then, after the pattern of Mary Magdalene, to announce to the world, “He is truly risen!” with the conviction of one who has truly seen Him.

Homily: Improving the Soil of the Heart

About twenty-five years ago, our community, looking to expand our property, purchased a lot just south of the monastery, upon which sat an old house. The house, alas, was not salvageable, for reasons that would take too long to explain. In any case, the decision was made to have the house demolished and to convert the lot into a garden.

If only removing a house were as easy as picking it up and dropping it somewhere else. In fact, demolition, as you can imagine, is an untidy business. Making the conversion to a garden took many years, as we continually, gradually removed all the broken concrete, glass, pieces of metal and the like. Today, we have a pretty well-functioning garden with decent soil and generally good yields, especially in chard, green beans, and berries.

The lesson here is that soil can be improved, which is good news for us as Christians.

That’s because Jesus today tells us that our hearts are like soil, some of it rich, some of it poor. What grows in our hearts is not literally weeds and wheat, but their spiritual counterparts, the Word of God and the habits of mind that are contrary to the flowering of God’s Word. Our Lord gives us several helpful images for understanding the work that we need to do if God’s Word is to take root in our hearts and bear abundant fruit.

The first obstacle to the Word taking root is a lack of understanding. This is likened to seed that falls on a footpath, where lots of people trample upon it. It’s important to connect this image with Jesus’s explanation. He says that the seed that falls on the path is akin to the Word falling upon a heart that fails to understand it, so the Word fails to take root.

So understanding is an important thing to seek. It’s not enough to hear the Word. Sometimes we need to take the time to puzzle over it, even to listen to homilies about it.

What Jesus implies here, however, is that the lack of understanding does not come from a lack of intellectual capacity. The point of the footpath is that the seed doesn’t ever settle into the soil because it’s being trampled upon by many people walking by. Surely this must be related to distraction in our minds and hearts, a failure to distinguish between what is truly important and what simply attracts our attention at the moment.

And we have a lot to distract us. We have access to more information than any previous generation. More than that, by means of tools like the internet, it is information clamoring for our attention. We now even have terms like “The Attention Economy” or “Attention Capitalism.” In a paper last year, Georgetown law professor Rai Hasen Massoud warned that, “The attention economy erodes core democratic values, undermining the cognitive autonomy, reflective reasoning, and informed citizenship necessary for healthy democratic societies.”

I’m less interested in the connection with democracy, and more concerned about the idea that all of these entities trying to capture our attention erode reflective reasoning, which seems to be the good soil that we are trying to cultivate. We can’t allow ourselves to fall into a situation where God’s Word is just one more voice clamoring for our attention. We need to take time deliberately, as you are at this moment, to sit with God’s Word and assimilate ourselves to it.

But more of that when we get to the good soil. We still have two examples of poor soil to examine. The second example is the seed that falls on rocky ground. This is the person who does understand the Word, at least in a superficial way. The roots don’t go very deep. Gardeners will know that the weeds that have little root are a cinch to pull up, whereas the ones that have deep roots can be almost impossible to eradicate. God’s Word will drive roots deeper and deeper into our hearts to the extent that we shape our actions in conformity with it.

We will need to go beyond having a grasp of the principles of revelation. The goal is consciously to take on God’s values and desire what He desires, as Jesus always did. Then God’s Word will be very difficult to uproot in us.

This also does require regular work. Routine can be a potential enemy here: we have to find ways each day to choose what God wants because God wants it, and not simply because it is painless or convenient for us at the moment.

Now on to the third example, the seed sown among thorns. Our Lord again has a specific idea in mind: that the thorns, the problematic thoughts growing up alongside the Word of God, are thoughts about worldly anxiety and the lure of riches. In the limited time we have, let’s focus on worldly anxiety. This is the temptation that Jesus teaches us to combat by saying “Give us this day our daily bread,” in the Lord’s Prayer.

God has given us all work to do to provide for ourselves and others, but He ultimately is the one who provides for us, who makes the work fruitful. Anxiety about procuring what we need can lead us to a place, where, rather than pray and listen to God’s Word, we need to get just one more thing done. I’ll pray and worry about my interior when I get everything in order, when I have all of my work done, and that work is determined not by God’s gracious generosity, but by my fear of failing to provide for myself. Work is good, but it is intended to be subordinate, in some way, to our relationship with God, who can easily provide what we need, and knows better than we do what we truly do need.

And so we arrive at the good soil. Let us notice that a thirtyfold yield in the ancient world was considered true abundance. And though a hundredfold yield was not impossible, it was spectacular. This is the kind of good that Jesus promises to those who truly take the time to interiorize His message, the message of love, forgiveness, and eternal life that Jesus came to earth to bring.

So let’s take a little extra time this week and see whether we can’t make some improvement in the soil of our hearts.

Homily for the Nativity of John the Baptist

Typically, we celebrate the feast days of the saints on the date of their death, their entrance into their heavenly reward. However, there are three people whose birth we celebrate. And, as it happens, we can see these three persons above the altar: Our Lord Jesus Christ, Blessed Mary, the Mother of God, and John the Baptist.

Clearly, John is an important man in the Church’s understanding of salvation history, though I think that we often overlook him. Yet Jesus Himself testified that, of those born of woman, no one was greater than John the Baptist.

So what is it about this man that is so important, and what does his feast day mean to us?

To understand this, we need to understand what is important about the prophets, for John was a prophet, indeed the greatest and last of the prophets. In popular understanding, a prophet predicts the future. This isn’t entirely wrong, but it’s a partial understanding.

The prophets do point to the future, but more specifically, to a future intervention by God—which is to say, toward God’s judgment. In the icons above the altar, we see Christ returning as king and judge, and see that John is pointing to Him. And this awareness of a coming judgment has immediate implications for the present.

When we call to mind that God will judge us—our culture, the rich and the poor, the great and small—our consciences are engaged. We have to ask ourselves: what does God make of my life? Am I prepared to receive God, or are there choices I’m making, duties I’m avoiding, that will make me want to avoid God? Is my culture one that celebrates God or rejects Him, and to what extent am I compromised by that culture?

We see, early in the gospels, John the Baptist pricking consciences. People come to him and ask, “What do I need to do to be prepared to welcome God?” In John’s gospel, we see that Saint Andrew, the brother of Saint Peter, was first a disciple of John the Baptist. When the Son of God appeared, John pointed to Him and said, “Behold the Lamb of God,” and Andrew left John to follow Jesus. Throughout the book of Acts, we see the apostles going out from Jerusalem and frequently encountering groups of people who were disciples of John, who were waiting to receive the news of the gospel and the baptism of fire and the Holy Spirit.

One last point about John is that he embodies the Beatitudes. He was poor in spirit inasmuch as he always points away from himself toward Jesus, the Son of God. Again, in the fourth gospel, he says that Jesus must increase and he, John, must decrease. He hungered and thirsted for justice, and was persecuted to the point of death for the sake of righteousness.

John the Baptist was also meek. He came from a family of priests, and in his day, the priests were often politically very well-connected. But he left the privileges of the priesthood aside to go and live as a poor man in the desert, praying and watching for God. And by these renunciations, his heart became pure, and he was given the grace of seeing God. That is to say, John was the one who witnessed the Holy Spirit descend upon Jesus at His baptism.

So we see that the Church’s celebration of John’s greatness is no mistake.

That leaves the question of what it all means for us. By our baptisms, we are called to become prophetic people. Like John, our mission is to point away from ourselves toward Christ. By a holy life in imitation of John, we bear witness to the fact that God will come to judge, and by this witness, to call those around us to be prepared.

To do this effectively, we may need to find ways to separate ourselves from the perks and conveniences that our culture offers us, since these conveniences often entangle us that culture’s overall mindset, which is largely oblivious of God and the things of God.

By gathering here today, we have taken a good first step: setting aside time to celebrate the gift of God that we have in John’s example, and to prepare ourselves to see and receive the Son of God in the Holy Eucharist.

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

The third precaution is to rejoice in others’ progress as if it were our own, preferring their advancement to our own. John says that we should do so especially with regard to those who are least attractive to us. In one sense, this is a corollary of the dominical teaching to love our enemies, which is the real test of charity. If there is someone we work with or otherwise encounter on a regular basis whom we find disagreeable, we may profit from doing some extra work at prayer. We can pray for this person’s well-being, perhaps his or her conversion, and take the time to think about what gifts he or she brings, even if these gifts are not immediately accessible because of some brokenness or ignorance.

This doesn’t mean lying about others’ shortcomings. It means being honest about what it’s going to take to love that person in his or her reality, rather than loving what we wish he or she would be if only our superior insight would be heeded. In my experience, this is more readily done when we know how profoundly God loves us despite our own failings, remembering that we have not earned our friendship with God. While we were God’s enemies, His Son died for us.

This brings me to an important conclusion: the necessity of meditation on the life and actions of Jesus Christ. We will notice, for example, that He did not help everyone He found. He often asked what the person needed before He helped, even though He would have known what that person needed. He could be very patient with sinners but also quite forthright with those who assumed their own righteousness or spiritual competence. He acted with authority where it was called for and, as a human being, submitted even to unjust authority. He sought out our salvation rather than His own safety and, by His humility and obedience, rescued us from death. We should ask Him frequently to fill us with His Holy Spirit, that we may know the difference between true goodness and its counterfeit. To be Him be power and glory forever. Amen.

(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 and The Second Precaution Against the Devil.)

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.

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.

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.