14 June 2020 - bread from heaven

Today's Readings

(Audio)

He therefore let you be afflicted with hunger,
and then fed you with manna,
a food unknown to you and your fathers,
in order to show you that not by bread alone does one live,
but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of the LORD.

He gave bread to show the Israelites that bread was not enough. They were given the manna to teach them how to rely on God, even in the desert. Jesus himself showed that he knew how to rely on his Father for this bread when he said "I have food to eat that you do not know about" (see John 4:32). Jesus could not be tricked by the temptation to make earthly bread an absolute. When tempted, he responded "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (see Matthew 4:4).

The world is not so wise. It can easily by bought for bread. Bread has a limited ability to give life, to prevent starvation. What we fail to realize is that this cycle has limits and that eventually no bread will be enough. We are ready to make a king of anyone who promises to eliminate hunger even if they care nothing for our destiny as embodied spiritual creatures. It was this temptation that made the abuses of communism possible. In religion the temptation is present too. The world rushes to make this Jesus king, the Jesus that is only interested in the satisfying the natural needs and desires of our flesh.

Jesus knows our desires. He knows that we want bread, that it is right that we want bread, but that we want it with a disordered affection. And so he chooses to address himself to this desire of ours. He makes of himself a gift that calls us by our natural desire but which fills us with a supernatural fullness.

"I am the living bread that came down from heaven;
whoever eats this bread will live forever;
and the bread that I will give
is my flesh for the life of the world."

The giving of himself in the Eucharist was something even more humble than the incarnation. For in the incarnation there was at least still the parallel of the intellect and will that humans possess, still that analogy that revealed God through the human form of Jesus. But in the Eucharist Jesus became  present under the form of bread and wine in a way that was not at all immediately obvious as an analogy for a divine person. He took such a risk in concealing his glory out of love for us. Our primal desire to eat and to stay alive became detached from God as the source of that life. Jesus wanted to reconnect that desire to God in a new and supernatural way.

Just as the living Father sent me
and I have life because of the Father,
so also the one who feeds on me
will have life because of me.

The manna will eventually run out. Eventually no bread will sustain us when sickness or old age claims us. But if the source of our life is rooted in Jesus himself then nothing and no one can take that life from us.

Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood
has eternal life,
and I will raise him on the last day.

What we need is not merely material to be broken down and made part of our bodies in a losing battle against entropy. What we need is a union with a life over which death has no claim, an indestructible life (see Hebrews 7:16). Jesus himself wants to be the food out of which our lives are built. Every meal, especially every sacrificial meal, in all the histories of all the cultures of the world hinted, however vaguely, at the communion that was here intended. The fellowship at table revealed the deeper way in which we are meant to be a part of Jesus, and him a part of us, by our sharing in the one substance of his flesh.

The cup of blessing that we bless,
is it not a participation in the blood of Christ?
The bread that we break,
is it not a participation in the body of Christ?
Because the loaf of bread is one,
we, though many, are one body,
for we all partake of the one loaf.

Let us not just give only lip service to the primacy of the reality that the Eucharist is meant to have in our lives. Let us instead build our lives around it as the the fundamental element, without which we do not have life. Our natural hunger leads us astray at times, but by becoming bread for us, by this appeal to our desire, by his immense humility, he invites us back.

He has granted peace in your borders;
with the best of wheat he fills you.

13 June 2020 - solemnly swear

Today's Readings

(Audio)

Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No’ mean ‘No.’
Anything more is from the Evil One.”

We desire to speak with more certainty than our station as creatures makes possible. We seek to give more power to our words than our words truly have.  We act as though, through our effort with words, we can control the future or the opinions of others. We almost use them as if they had magical powers.

But I say to you, do not swear at all;
not by heaven, for it is God’s throne;
nor by the earth, for it is his footstool;
nor by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King.

Our misplaced oaths crash against the rocks of a reality that is beyond our control. Because of an oath Herod had to behead John the Baptist (see Matthew 14:7) even though he liked to listen to him speak. Because Peter so wanted to convince he accusers that he had nothing to do with Jesus he did not simply speak against him but even took an oath (see Matthew 26:72) that he did not know him.

God is concerned with the truth, because he himself is the truth (see John 14:6). But we take the truth lightly. We can recognize that we are doing this because we don't really want to involve God as a witness at such times. We make the source of our certainty some created things, heaven, earth, Jerusalem, or our own heads. But created things can't provide the certainty we ask of them. We would be afraid to involve God at such times because we know that our words might come back to haunt us and, if so, God would be a witness against us. 

There are things we can swear. In those cases we swear by God and we do not swear lightly. We, like the martyrs, can give testimony that we do believe in Jesus Christ. The Sacraments are covenant oaths where Jesus guarantees what we ourselves could not promise. We can swear to tell the truth in court and rely on God for assistance in doing so. We can swear ourselves to our vocation, to marriage, or the priesthood, or consecrated or religious life, and rely on God to help us fulfill the duties of our chosen station in life.

Perhaps the difference between valid oaths and those against which Jesus is warning is still unclear. The oaths which we must not swear are those where we ourselves are trying to make up for the lack of certainty in the facts of the matter, or in our persuasiveness. The oaths which are not condemned are those situations that are serious enough where we must be sincere, but can only do so by relying on God as our help. He is the guarantor who signs those checks.

Our own lives are meant to be marked by such sincerity that simple our simply 'Yes' and 'No' are enough, that we never need to go above and beyond that precisely because of the integrity which marks all of our speech. In our personal lives we ought not need a higher level for times when we 'really mean it.' When society does require oaths of us we exercise the caution and holy fear that is appropriate.

Elisha is permitted to go and say goodbye to his father and mother before following Elijah. Jesus demands something more of us (See Luke 9:59-60). He insists that once we meet him our entire lives must be so different that the old priorities no longer have precedence. Of course we are still called to honor our parents, but we can do this better precisely by following Jesus. This is the integrity, the unity of purpose, that allows us to be sincere in speech, to take oaths unless sparingly, and with utmost conviction.

I say to the LORD, “My Lord are you.”
O LORD, my allotted portion and my cup,
you it is who hold fast my lot.

12 June 2020 - zealously zealous

Today's Readings

(Audio)

But I say to you,
everyone who looks at a woman with lust
has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

Jesus calls us what has been called custody of the eyes. He is not criticizing thoughts which arise without our consent. But he is challenging not just the thoughts to which we do give consent, which we encourage on which we willingly dwell. Those can indeed be sinful. But he is even challenging our readiness to put ourselves in circumstances where such thoughts are likely. He is calling us to avoid what the tradition calls near occasions of sin.

Kind though he is, and though he knows our weaknesses, Jesus doesn't not moderate the teaching on adultery. He intensifies it. He does not do so merely to keep us from pleasure. It is not simply a negation. It is rather because marriage is meant to be so good that all false substitutes must be rejected. It is because our purity of heart is meant to allow us to behold and to love God and neighbor that we must not allow that vision to be dulled. We can either keep our attention and awareness as a sacred space where we can encounter and love the other or we can allow it to turn inward until it becomes blind to other. The union of marriage is meant to open beyond itself to love of other and of the children that are lovingly welcomed. If the pleasure that is meant for that union is sought for its own sake our whole ability to love other as other is compromised. Because marriage is an icon of the even more profound relationship between God and his people the risk is not just to relationships with others, but also to our relationship with God.

"Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh."  This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church (See Ephesians 5:31-32)

We must keep our attention as a sacred space which is not so crowded with the noise of pleasure that we are unable to respond to others. The risk is that we experience wind, earthquakes, and fire, and assume that God is in those things simply becomes of how pressing and dominating they seem to be to our attention. And this is certainly how we experience temptation. There is a violence in the way it seeks to monopolize our attention. If we give in to it we will dull ourselves to the still small voice where we are meant to find him.

After the fire there was a tiny whispering sound.
When he heard this,
Elijah hid his face in his cloak
and went and stood at the entrance of the cave.

Jesus calls us to be zealous for Kingdom, to prefer nothing to the love of Christ (see RB 72) just as Elijah is "zealously zealous" (see this translation) for the LORD, the God of hosts. It is the same zeal. And the end is meant to be the same, to be the vision of God himself, and to be immersed in his love for us.

Thou hast said, “Seek ye my face.”
My heart says to thee,
“Thy face, Lord, do I seek.”
Hide not thy face from me.

11 June 2020 - one foundation

Today's Readings

(Audio)

When he arrived and saw the grace of God,
he rejoiced and encouraged them all
to remain faithful to the Lord in firmness of heart,
for he was a good man, filled with the Holy Spirit and faith.

It is likely that, in Antioch Barnabas found that there was work that still needed to be done, areas where the peoples' faith needed more clarity, and places in their lives where sin and lies still needed to be overcome and replaced with truth and charity. All communities have such issues, especially new ones. But Barnabas didn't start with a diatribe against those things. His move wasn't first to decry the negative. Rather, he rejoiced and encouraged them in what they were getting right, and what was good, so that they could displace the negative by doubling down on faithfulness to the Lord in firmness of heart.

For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ (see First Corinthians 3:11).

The foundation of Christ had been laid. Barnabas knew that the main thing was to build on this foundation. His encouragement and his joy drew the awareness of the Church in Antioch to this central reality that made all of the difference. Any building apart from that foundation was on shifting sands. Any project that neglected this truth wouldn't survive the winds and storms. Encouragement done well allowed people to let all that was not built on that foundation simply collapse on its own as the attention of the people focused on letting themselves be built up on solid ground.

So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the holy ones and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the capstone (see Ephesians 2:19-20).

"A large number of people was added to the Lord." How did that happen? It wasn't because they saw people excoriated for sinfulness. It was rather the emphasis on what Jesus had already done and how they could remain even more faithful to that grace in the future. Being thus faithful would mean turning from sin, but could not be imagined properly apart from the grace of Christ as the foundation.

Jesus commanded the people to be reconciled with their brothers, to avoid anger and harsh words, not merely as an avoidance of a negative reality, but as the protection of the unity his people are meant to have in him. He himself came to tear down the dividing wall between Gentile and Jew, slave and free, woman and man (see Galatians 3:28). Life built on him was to be synonymous with life in the Holy Spirit. And the Spirit is a Spirit of unity.

Indeed, the spirits of prophets are under the prophets’ control,
since he is not the God of disorder but of peace (see First Corinthians 14:32-33).

The commandments of Jesus are actually positive, and only negative to the degree that they show us how to protect the positive good he has in view. The good here in view is reconciliation with our brother. Nothing more superficial can be allowed to take precedence over this in our communities. Giving gifts is great, but can mask hearts closed to more dynamic workings of grace. Our relationships with one another reveal the foundations we're coming from, solid or otherwise. 

Like Barnabas, may the LORD make us sons and daughters of encouragement so that we can build more and more on the foundation of our unity in Christ.

For he is our peace, he who made both one and broke down the dividing wall of enmity, through his flesh (see Ephesians 2:11).

10 June 2020 - you are my inheritence

Today's Readings

(Audio)

Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments
and teaches others to do so
will be called least in the Kingdom of heaven.

It is not that we earn greatness in the Kingdom of heaven as a reward for our efforts at being virtuous. It is rather than greatness in the Kingdom of heaven is synonymous with our capacity to be filled with and transparent to love. Outside of the Kingdom, the commandments don't help with this. Without grace they condemn us.

Is the law then opposed to the promises [of God]? Of course not! For if a law had been given that could bring life, then righteousness would in reality come from the law. But scripture confined all things under the power of sin, that through faith in Jesus Christ the promise might be given to those who believe. (see Galatians 3:21-22).

By grace we receive the obedience that comes from faith (see Romans 1:5). We receive the Spirit who gives life and the letter is transformed into something genuinely life-giving (see Second Corinthians 3:6). We learned without grace that we could not fulfill the law. But now grace is given "in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit" (see Romans 8:4).

If this is all a gift, so that no one may boast (see Ephesians 2:9) then what does it have to do with greatness or status in the Kingdom? Is this the sort of greatness that made the sons of Zebedee desire to sit on the right and the left of Jesus (see Mark 10:37)? No, Jesus wants us to desire a different sort of greatness.

But whoever would be great among you must be your servant,and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many (see Mark 10:43-44).

It is precisely because the commandments are not arbitrary that we can't simply fulfill them in a merely exterior and superficial fashion. It is very nature of the law to reflect what a heart open to love should look like. It can't bring this heart into existence but it can be a map and even a target to keep us on track.

But whoever keeps his word, the love of God is truly perfected in him (see First John 2:5).

Jesus is inviting us to realize that there is no path to fulfillment that doesn't involve service, love, and obedience. It is through these that are hearts are widened and made more able to drink in the very divine life which we are promised to behold forever and be made partakers of in heaven. He isn't mentioning the law just to make us grit our teeth and work harder. He is inviting us to let his grace do its work in us.

“How long will you straddle the issue?
If the LORD is God, follow him; if Baal, follow him.”

All of the alternatives to God, all of the other options for greatness, and anything else besides him we might desire, don't have the capacity to give us the fullness of life for which we were made. They are gods that sleep and do not answer when we need them.

If we have been paying too much attention to the prophets of Baal and the easier options they propose then perhaps it is time to put our own sacrifices on the altar of the LORD and to ask him to call down fire. No matter how watered down our efforts seem the flames of the Holy Spirit are what matter.

The LORD’s fire came down
and consumed the burnt offering, wood, stones, and dust,
and it lapped up the water in the trench.
Seeing this, all the people fell prostrate and said,
“The LORD is God! The LORD is God!”

Let's turn aside from Baal. Let us say to the LORD, "my allotted portion and cup" and actually, by the Spirit, mean it.

Songs In His Presence - You Are My Inheritence

9 June 2020 - Christian light, not lite.

Today's Readings

(Audio)

You are the light of the world.
A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden.

Light does not exist for the sake of itself. Light exists to shine in order to illuminate something. Our light is not meant to be self-promotion or glorification, but rather so that our heavenly Father might be glorified. But we do rightfully worry about shining for selfish reasons. We are tempted to cover ourselves with a bushel basket to avoid the risk of pride. There is an apparent tension between letting our light shine and the humility to which we are called

But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you (see Mathew 6:3-4).

We can infer that letting our light shine does not mean blowing a trumpet before us as we do good works. But neither are we supposed to cover our works with a bushel basket. If anything, the call seems to be to let ourselves be so transparent to the light that we ourselves are as hidden as possible while the heavenly Father is revealed.

Just so, your light must shine before others,
that they may see your good deeds
and glorify your heavenly Father.

Elijah was able to let the Father's light shine through him to the widow at Zarephath. No good deeds of his own could have fed her and her son so well for so long in a time of famine. He himself could do nothing about the jar of flour and the jug of oil. Had he less faith he might have tried to cover himself with a bushel basket rather than letting the LORD act through him. A misdirected humility might have obscured the work the LORD wanted to do. The temptation to fear that the LORD would not act could have kept the light he was meant to reveal hidden. Interestingly, his fidelity let the light of the LORD shine not only through him but also through the charity of the widow.

When we don't let our left hand know what our right hand is doing we train ourselves to rely on the LORD as the source of our light. When we use our hands for his works we let his light shine without concealing it. We need to do this, for we are meant to be salt of the earth. It is through Christians that the world retains the savor of meaning and truth. It is through our salt that goodness in the world is preserved from corruption that otherwise inevitably consumes it.

It may seem at times like the heavens are shut and that no rain is coming. We ourselves may be terribly thirsty. God wants to use us, like he used Elijah, to show the world where true food and true drink can be found. He wants to use us to keep such goods as are to be found in this world not only edible but delicious. He calls us to shine, not for ourselves, but for his glory, which is, after all, the glory of man fully alive.

O LORD, let the light of your countenance shine upon us!
You put gladness into my heart,
more than when grain and wine abound.

8 June 2020 - hearts like his

Today's Readings

(Audio)

Blessed are those with hearts like the heart of Jesus.

Jesus was able to rely on his Father in all things and so he did not need worldly riches. It was this poverty that revealed the Father and brought the Kingdom wherever he went. Jesus himself wept over Lazarus and over Jerusalem. He mourned for them and for all sinners. His mourning merited the comfort of the resurrection, not just for himself, but for us as well.

Jesus was meek. He could have summoned legions of angels but he kept his strength under control. He did not give into the temptation of the devil to inherit the kingdoms of the land in the wrong way.

Jesus himself was righteous precisely because he hungered for the will of the Father to such an extent that to do it was something he could call hidden food. He did hunger and thirst for righteousness in the world around him, but not in such a way as to enforce it tyrannically, or even to rely on himself for it apart from the Father. He did not create the righteousness he desired by conquering opposition to it, but rather by sustaining his hunger and thirst for it even when he was the most opposed for it, even from the cross.

After this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), “I thirst.” (see John 19:28)

The cross itself was the ultimate act of mercy, and it merited all the mercy unleashed upon the world, first to the good thief, and eventually to us. The mercy of Christ opened the floodgates of mercy for the world.

The heart of Christ is the only heart pure enough to see God as he is. But in Christ our hearts are made like his own and we are given the hope of seeing what he sees.

See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure (see First John 3:1-3).

Jesus made peace, not just when he told Peter to put away his sword, but by his cross he made peace between men and each other and especially between men and God.

He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of Christ’s blood on the cross (see Colossians 1:20).

Jesus was persecuted for the sake of righteousness. He was the very righteous one whom our sins put to death.

But you denied the Holy and Righteous One, and asked for a murderer to be granted to you (see Acts 3:14).

He was insulted and persecuted for the sake of his Father's will, because God so loved the world that he gave his Son over to this abuse for our own sakes.

Jesus did it precisely for the reward set before him, the reward that will be great in heaven for all who follow after him and let there hearts be made like his.

who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God (see Hebrews 12:2).

The beatitudes sometimes seem abstract or impractical. But when we realize the ways in which they are the ingredients of a call to become like Christ they become nourishment for us. The become the stream from which the Holy Spirit leads us to drink, and the ravens he commands to feed us. They can nourish us even in the most difficult times. Just as Elijah was able to rely on God and not circumstance, and just as Jesus was able to rely on the hidden bread of his Father, so too can we be nourished even when cut off from the earthly things we think we need. We learn to say with the psalmist that our help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. This enables us to live dynamically for the kingdom, not insisting on our comfort, but able to risk much so that the heart of Christ might be more loved in the world.

"Behold this Heart which has so loved men that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming itself, in order to testify its love."  

- Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque