The phrase presented itself to me, and I could have swept my mind for an age and not know where it came from or how it got there. The words felt older than lifetimes and as new as today. They seemed to tell an epic history, hint at deep loss, and foreshadow a restoration: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained. Or Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso.
"... on the turning away ..."
We live half-asleep, half-aware, half-full. Insensitive, inert. Full of holes, full of dirt, like cavities. Yet Someone, Something, is putting something there all the time. Mostly things seep out of us like waterdrops from a poorly tightened faucet. Sometimes something stays, bonding in the awful empty spaces.
" ... on the turning away ..."
I could not account for their presence, but they belonged there, firmly. It felt right for them to be there. My intuition told me they were an admonition. Reaching for the edge of my consciousness, I searched for the phrase. (God bless the Internet for externalizing our collective consciousness.)
This is what I found:
On the turning away
From the pale and downtrodden
And the words they say
Which we won't understand
Don't accept that what's happening
Is just a case of others suffering
Or you'll find that youre joining in
The turning away
It's a sin that somehow
Light is changing to shadow
And casting its shroud
Over all we have known
Unaware how the ranks have grown
Driven on by a heart of stone
We could find that we're all alone
In the dream of the proud
I found a song. No, the song found me. It has a haunting melody with well-matched words. It could have been sung four hundred years ago, born under gray skies in the distant green hills. I can hear it being sung today and many tomorrows from now, stirring streets and soaring in sanctuaries. With this song, I can pray.
On the wings of the night
As the daytime is stirring
Where the speechless unite
In a silent accord
Using words you will find are strange
And mesmerized as they light the flame
Feel the new wind of change
On the wings of the night
No more turning away
From the weak and the weary
No more turning away
From the coldness inside
Just a world that we all must share
It's not enough just to stand and stare
Is it only a dream that there'll be
No more turning away?
David Gilmour and Anthony Moore
***
Scholars whom I trust say Paul was not "converted" but "called" to life in Christ. That's true enough; Paul had always believed in the one God of Israel. And through his experience of Jesus, Paul believed only that he had come more fully and more perfectly to live in the light of the Lord. But he did not always believe in others, in the "nations" or Gentiles. Before Paul experienced Jesus, the people beyond his own people were to be turned away if they could not be made to believe and live like his own people.
After Jesus, for Paul there was no more turning away. Only a radical turning toward.
So there is fundamentally a call, but the call is heard through a million little whispers, soft breezes that collect and turn your direction while you walk. The call is heard through numerous little conversions, increments of turning toward. It is not a negative motion; it is always a positive movement.
Conversion comes through the call. Turning away from sin, turning toward God and humanity. Paul was called to God's life in Christ. But he was converted, too: away from alienation, toward all peoples.
" ... on the turning away ..."
I was half-awake, half-thinking of conversion, when this phrase surfaced. Now I ponder with wider eyes. To what, to whom must I turn my face? Who have I turned away? To what, to whom does God bid me turn?
Can I do it, God? Will I do it? Can you make me feel the breezes? Will I go where you will? Even now, despite my desire to know you and serve all, have I turned very far away from you and all your loved ones?
I will turn again to you. Show me the pale and downtrodden, the weak and the weary. Show me the ones I will love. Show me just one, if one is all I can love.
Thank you, God, for calling me.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Irresistible Love
"The cost of such a radical response to Jesus is already in view when Mark prefaces the call of the first disciples with the notice that John has been arrested. But like impulsive lovers who commit themselves to one another while still wrapped in their initial mutual infatuation, a compelling love causes disciples to follow Jesus instantly. Just as a couple grows into love, and learns the costly self-surrender it takes to make that love continue to flourish, so too disciples learn the deeper conversion demanded as they grow in their radical love affair with the Holy One. It is then not so much the threat of destruction that moves us to convert our ways, but an irresistible love that turns our hearts."
Sr. Barbara E. Reid, O.P., America magazine, Jan. 19-26, 2009
Give me, oh God, irresistible love.
Seduce me, yes, let loose a heedless flush of the skin;
Make my hairs stand on their end from within,
Heating up and slowing down my breath
With every breath you blow upon my skin.
Make haste to make me less chaste.
Let me love you all the time.
Let me love you like there was no time to lose.
Let me love you like I had to lie about it.
The truth, come from my eyes, will never let them doubt it.
We won't have to fantasize or tantalize.
We'll grow down and get up with it.
Let us give the gossips a scandal to handle,
As you give me a bath and I loosen your thong
We will prove it is right when they say it is wrong,
How I warm you and need you and drink you -- feed from you,
As through me you think and you drink and you feed,
Together we'll take all the world to the top
As we bless and we bare and we bleed,
And complete in our death the way that we lived.
Give me, oh God, irresistible love.
Sr. Barbara E. Reid, O.P., America magazine, Jan. 19-26, 2009
Give me, oh God, irresistible love.
Seduce me, yes, let loose a heedless flush of the skin;
Make my hairs stand on their end from within,
Heating up and slowing down my breath
With every breath you blow upon my skin.
Make haste to make me less chaste.
Let me love you all the time.
Let me love you like there was no time to lose.
Let me love you like I had to lie about it.
The truth, come from my eyes, will never let them doubt it.
We won't have to fantasize or tantalize.
We'll grow down and get up with it.
Let us give the gossips a scandal to handle,
As you give me a bath and I loosen your thong
We will prove it is right when they say it is wrong,
How I warm you and need you and drink you -- feed from you,
As through me you think and you drink and you feed,
Together we'll take all the world to the top
As we bless and we bare and we bleed,
And complete in our death the way that we lived.
Give me, oh God, irresistible love.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Affirmations
(by Robert Fripp, a guitarist)
Affirmation One
The benevolence of the creative impulse is inexpressible.
We cannot know this benevolence, while accepting that Benevolence knows us better than we know ourselves.
Affirmation Two
Love cannot bear that even one soul be denied its place in paradise.
Affirmation Three
In desperate times, a reasonable person might despair;
but hope is unreasonable, and love is greater even than this.
Affirmation Four
Music is our friend, if only we might listen; if only we can listen.
Affirmation Five
The poverty of our nature is no limit to our aspiration.
Affirmation Six
Although I stumble and fall, each time I will rise again.
Affirmation Seven
Not even death can end the process of our becoming.
***
We cannot know this benevolence, while accepting that Benevolence knows us better than we know ourselves. In such words I hear this and this. Goodness finds us, and then we find ourselves. The benevolence of the creative impulse is inexpressible. But it is perceivable. Our moments of self-discovery are indispensable to the continuation of creation.
Love cannot bear that even one soul be denied its place in paradise. How unfortunate, then, that we conspire individually and collectively to deny souls, and whole hosts of souls, their place in paradise, building nightmarish republics of invisible men, women, and children.
We do this, most curiously enough, in the name of justice. Is that justice? Is that what justice warrants?
Those who shrink the circle must beware lest they fall outside the circle themselves.
Must we persist in opposing, fruitlessly, the rights of truth to the rights of persons? One may concede that error has no rights, but to undo persons in order to undo error is the greatest error.
In desperate times, a reasonable person might despair; but hope is unreasonable, and love is greater even than this. In this, perhaps, shades of Kierkegaard, and his meditations on the sacrifice of Isaac. And a touch of Paul.
The poverty of our nature is no limit to our aspiration. We are, to borrow a pregnant phrase, beggars on a beach of gold. We are finite creatures who have the capacity to imagine the infinite. This capacity is the source of our great misery but also the means by which we glimpse and touch glory.
Although I stumble and fall, each time I will rise again. A theology professor of mine once said that she believes there are many resurrections, and they happen all the time. Were this not true, I could not believe in the Resurrection.
Not even death can end the process of our becoming. Amen.
Affirmation One
The benevolence of the creative impulse is inexpressible.
We cannot know this benevolence, while accepting that Benevolence knows us better than we know ourselves.
Affirmation Two
Love cannot bear that even one soul be denied its place in paradise.
Affirmation Three
In desperate times, a reasonable person might despair;
but hope is unreasonable, and love is greater even than this.
Affirmation Four
Music is our friend, if only we might listen; if only we can listen.
Affirmation Five
The poverty of our nature is no limit to our aspiration.
Affirmation Six
Although I stumble and fall, each time I will rise again.
Affirmation Seven
Not even death can end the process of our becoming.
***
We cannot know this benevolence, while accepting that Benevolence knows us better than we know ourselves. In such words I hear this and this. Goodness finds us, and then we find ourselves. The benevolence of the creative impulse is inexpressible. But it is perceivable. Our moments of self-discovery are indispensable to the continuation of creation.
Love cannot bear that even one soul be denied its place in paradise. How unfortunate, then, that we conspire individually and collectively to deny souls, and whole hosts of souls, their place in paradise, building nightmarish republics of invisible men, women, and children.
We do this, most curiously enough, in the name of justice. Is that justice? Is that what justice warrants?
Those who shrink the circle must beware lest they fall outside the circle themselves.
Must we persist in opposing, fruitlessly, the rights of truth to the rights of persons? One may concede that error has no rights, but to undo persons in order to undo error is the greatest error.
In desperate times, a reasonable person might despair; but hope is unreasonable, and love is greater even than this. In this, perhaps, shades of Kierkegaard, and his meditations on the sacrifice of Isaac. And a touch of Paul.
The poverty of our nature is no limit to our aspiration. We are, to borrow a pregnant phrase, beggars on a beach of gold. We are finite creatures who have the capacity to imagine the infinite. This capacity is the source of our great misery but also the means by which we glimpse and touch glory.
Although I stumble and fall, each time I will rise again. A theology professor of mine once said that she believes there are many resurrections, and they happen all the time. Were this not true, I could not believe in the Resurrection.
Not even death can end the process of our becoming. Amen.
Monday, January 19, 2009
While Waiting
Waiting: meanwhile, in the waiting,
Seeking to live.
When does waiting to live
Become ceasing to live?
Fear of death makes us ask.
We do not need to die in order to live.
We have already died.
We need to see how we have died
In order to live.
Fear of death makes us ask if we have ceased to live.
If we answer honestly,
We will put fear to death,
And then God will put our death to death.
Seeking to live.
When does waiting to live
Become ceasing to live?
Fear of death makes us ask.
We do not need to die in order to live.
We have already died.
We need to see how we have died
In order to live.
Fear of death makes us ask if we have ceased to live.
If we answer honestly,
We will put fear to death,
And then God will put our death to death.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Musing
A proof of God: When I feel rejected, when no one can be my companion, when the most dearly sought affections are denied and no one can fill the void because they all have made the void -- then I am most mercifully embraced, then I am enveloped by warmth, then someone breathes into all my pores and heat courses through my body, throbbing at every extremity; and I am loved: at that moment of crushing absence, God appears and I am loved.
And with this love I can love.
The single person and the celibate, perhaps, know this love better than any contented couple, and maybe better, too, than the discontented couple. The love that appears when all others have gone -- or never arrived; the love that appears when life has gone, or never came to be; the love that appears when love is gone. This is the eternal love, the indivisible love, the love within which existing loves run their course, the love that grounds these loves, the love from which they spring forth and return.
There are two kinds of people: those who have a call to love this world to life, and those who have a call to love this world into the world to come. Each of us is a little of both kinds of people, but we are mainly one or the other person. Let no one diminish incarnational love, the love that shows us who we are, the love that shows the goodness of who we are: the love seen in life partners and friends. But some of us are destined mainly to model eschatological love, the love that shows us who we are becoming, the love that shows the absolute horizon of our destiny.
Love is both figure and ground. Incarnational and eschatological. In this world and not of this world.
God loves us, and God teaches us to love. God gives us the experiences of love by which we come to love in our distinctive and different ways.
Human nature is less fixed then we imagine. Sexual vocations may not be permanent. But I think married couples best model incarnational love, while the single person and the celibate best model eschatological love.
There is some doubt in my mind about this, but I believe I am called chiefly to model eschatological love. If that is so, then let me be a loner in a world of absent lovers.
***
I have learned from the homeless men and women of Boston. I have learned how to be at home without a house, how to discover my sense of place without claiming property. They have "house-broken" me. They have undomesticated me.
But I still need a personal, even a private, sacred space. Communal, or communitarian, space is of course personal, but a person needs an individual space, an intimate space for one's true becoming-self.
I don't know what that space is like. I've forgotten, if indeed I have ever known it. I've known houses of creaturely comfort and felt suffocated and numbed in them. I've known houses of hospitality and still felt lost in the city.
I feel at home without a home of my own. But my spirit knows that if all space is personal, then nothing is personal. And then my soul hazards hubris, daring to claim all space as sacred space when it actually condescends toward domesticity and the practices of consecrating the very places where it rests.
***
Religious liberty is a convenient cover for spiritual apathy.
***
Posing for photography makes my soul feel vulnerable. This feeling has nothing to do with superstition and everything to do with the diversion of energies. If I'm at a social function I'd rather not pause my activity or conversation to look at a camera. And I dislike putting on appearances even for the sake of helping others to preserve benign memories. (Trust your memory more!) So do not ask me to smile for the sightless lens. Better to catch me unaware, smiling at someone. But I won't smile for the camera. For the person behind the camera, maybe, and only rarely. My advice to the photographer is to kiss the joy as it flies.
***
Remember to pray for peace and for all good things. Remember to pray as your parents and elders taught you, as your friends in faith would have you pray.
Remember to pray for all the correct things for which we should pray. Even remember the formulas you have been given, for they are helpful when the words fail you.
But remember also to pray for Eleanor Rigby, and the Brothers Karamazov. Pray for the sun and moon, the earth and the water. Pray for the saints and the prophets. And for the love of God, pray for yourself.
And with this love I can love.
The single person and the celibate, perhaps, know this love better than any contented couple, and maybe better, too, than the discontented couple. The love that appears when all others have gone -- or never arrived; the love that appears when life has gone, or never came to be; the love that appears when love is gone. This is the eternal love, the indivisible love, the love within which existing loves run their course, the love that grounds these loves, the love from which they spring forth and return.
There are two kinds of people: those who have a call to love this world to life, and those who have a call to love this world into the world to come. Each of us is a little of both kinds of people, but we are mainly one or the other person. Let no one diminish incarnational love, the love that shows us who we are, the love that shows the goodness of who we are: the love seen in life partners and friends. But some of us are destined mainly to model eschatological love, the love that shows us who we are becoming, the love that shows the absolute horizon of our destiny.
Love is both figure and ground. Incarnational and eschatological. In this world and not of this world.
God loves us, and God teaches us to love. God gives us the experiences of love by which we come to love in our distinctive and different ways.
Human nature is less fixed then we imagine. Sexual vocations may not be permanent. But I think married couples best model incarnational love, while the single person and the celibate best model eschatological love.
There is some doubt in my mind about this, but I believe I am called chiefly to model eschatological love. If that is so, then let me be a loner in a world of absent lovers.
***
I have learned from the homeless men and women of Boston. I have learned how to be at home without a house, how to discover my sense of place without claiming property. They have "house-broken" me. They have undomesticated me.
But I still need a personal, even a private, sacred space. Communal, or communitarian, space is of course personal, but a person needs an individual space, an intimate space for one's true becoming-self.
I don't know what that space is like. I've forgotten, if indeed I have ever known it. I've known houses of creaturely comfort and felt suffocated and numbed in them. I've known houses of hospitality and still felt lost in the city.
I feel at home without a home of my own. But my spirit knows that if all space is personal, then nothing is personal. And then my soul hazards hubris, daring to claim all space as sacred space when it actually condescends toward domesticity and the practices of consecrating the very places where it rests.
***
Religious liberty is a convenient cover for spiritual apathy.
***
Posing for photography makes my soul feel vulnerable. This feeling has nothing to do with superstition and everything to do with the diversion of energies. If I'm at a social function I'd rather not pause my activity or conversation to look at a camera. And I dislike putting on appearances even for the sake of helping others to preserve benign memories. (Trust your memory more!) So do not ask me to smile for the sightless lens. Better to catch me unaware, smiling at someone. But I won't smile for the camera. For the person behind the camera, maybe, and only rarely. My advice to the photographer is to kiss the joy as it flies.
***
Remember to pray for peace and for all good things. Remember to pray as your parents and elders taught you, as your friends in faith would have you pray.
Remember to pray for all the correct things for which we should pray. Even remember the formulas you have been given, for they are helpful when the words fail you.
But remember also to pray for Eleanor Rigby, and the Brothers Karamazov. Pray for the sun and moon, the earth and the water. Pray for the saints and the prophets. And for the love of God, pray for yourself.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
After the Transfiguration
Why don't I look into your gentle eyes?
I'd climb the mount to see the sun arise
Before us all, but that is not my call.
A man, but not a hero, longs with you.
I'm flinching, for the work I need to do
To see a face attends me in the place
I live or leave. There's nothing to be "found."
Do we forget that love is all around
And sin upon the Spirit long since come?
I need the spirit of a Blake or Beat,
The hip and punk, for all my sight to meet
The cuckoo clouds that shield the poor from proud
Right now. A mystery, a vision? Please!
When I can greet my neighbors, enemies
And demons with a kneel, it will reveal.
A humbler man than I would be less vexed,
Give smile for smile and laugh for laugh,
Then rest in peace because his sorrows find surcease.
Our ends have been foretold. To hear it once
Should strip us free of envy of the ones
So God-gone lucky, Peter, James, and John.
But what do you do when nothing's going on?
***
This is a poem I wrote on Aug. 8, 2002, three days before leaving New York for Baltimore, to begin a year of volunteer service with other young adults under the supervision of the Capuchin Franciscan friars. This poem, despite its flaws, remains a song of myself. It is, in uncanny ways, still a sharp statement of my personal identity, my religious aspiration, and my spiritual desire.
I'd climb the mount to see the sun arise
Before us all, but that is not my call.
A man, but not a hero, longs with you.
I'm flinching, for the work I need to do
To see a face attends me in the place
I live or leave. There's nothing to be "found."
Do we forget that love is all around
And sin upon the Spirit long since come?
I need the spirit of a Blake or Beat,
The hip and punk, for all my sight to meet
The cuckoo clouds that shield the poor from proud
Right now. A mystery, a vision? Please!
When I can greet my neighbors, enemies
And demons with a kneel, it will reveal.
A humbler man than I would be less vexed,
Give smile for smile and laugh for laugh,
Then rest in peace because his sorrows find surcease.
Our ends have been foretold. To hear it once
Should strip us free of envy of the ones
So God-gone lucky, Peter, James, and John.
But what do you do when nothing's going on?
***
This is a poem I wrote on Aug. 8, 2002, three days before leaving New York for Baltimore, to begin a year of volunteer service with other young adults under the supervision of the Capuchin Franciscan friars. This poem, despite its flaws, remains a song of myself. It is, in uncanny ways, still a sharp statement of my personal identity, my religious aspiration, and my spiritual desire.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Seek Ye First
The following is a sermon delivered in Muelder Chapel, Boston University School of Theology, on Tuesday, Feb. 12, 2008. This sermon was prepared for the weekly interdenominational celebration of Eucharist. The reading was Matthew 4:1-11, the lectionary Gospel reading for the First Sunday of Lent.
There is a song we sing every Sunday at Common Cathedral, the outdoor church for homeless persons, and it goes like this:
Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and God’s righteousness
And all these things will be added unto you
Allelu, Alleluia
I know that it is Lent, and as a good Catholic I know that, technically, we are not supposed to sing any alleluias during Lent, though I just did. You see what attending a progressive Methodist seminary has done to me … it’s made me a liturgical maverick. Anyway, I’ll leave it to Professor Westerfield Tucker to decide whether the inclusion or omission of alleluias is more theologically appropriate, and I will seek absolution for my liturgical transgression in a Catholic confessional at the earliest possible occasion. In the meantime,
Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and God’s righteousness
And all these things will be added unto you
Allelu, Alleluia
This, to me, is the moral of today’s Scripture reading. These words come from Matthew 6:33, deep in the heart of the Sermon on the Mount. Wise words from a brilliant teacher. How do they sound to you? Coming from my tongue, surely not as astounding or as profound as they must have sounded coming from Jesus, the one who taught with authority. How do you suppose the great crowds of people who followed Jesus from Galilee to Judea knew he spoke with such authority? How do you think they could tell? What did they feel? I don’t think it was by the healings alone that they were convinced of his authority. Rather, they believed what he taught because they saw Jesus embodying this holy wisdom in his own struggle to be faithful to God. And his struggle was just like theirs. There is a freshness and immediacy to the wisdom of the Sermon on the Mount that I believe comes right out of Jesus’ experience of testing, from the beginning of his ministry and throughout his ministry, up to the cross.
I want to focus on the beginning of his ministry, and this brings me to Matthew’s account of Jesus’ temptation. The narrative comes to us in the form of a haggadic tale and resembles the challenges given to Jesus by the scribes and Jewish leaders later in this Gospel. All of these stories were crafted in such a way as to demonstrate the continuity of Jesus’ ministry with the ministry of Moses and the prophetic tradition of the Israelites. While Matthew has an axe to grind against the Jewish authorities, especially Pharisees, it should be kept in mind that the evangelist was positively emphasizing the Jewish roots of Jesus. His quotation of Deuteronomy in the dialogue with Satan is in keeping with Matthew’s desire to prove Jesus’ saving fidelity to Yahweh’s covenant with us. And this covenant faithfulness is exactly what is at stake in the temptation narrative. Would Jesus, proclaimed at his baptism God’s own Son, who had passed through the waters of his own Exodus, rely on God and God wholly and completely? Where generations of Israelites before him failed to hold fast to the providence of the Lord, could he endure courageously, faithfully in the wilderness of sin and doubt? Would he seek first the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness?
Jesus is led by the Spirit into the desert to be tested by God and tempted by the devil. Now let me be clear: I don’t think this is another case of divine child abuse. The plain sense of the text tells me that Jesus let himself be led by the Spirit of God. But this does not mean the Spirit of God tempted Jesus or was pleased to see Jesus suffer. He was tested by God, and to this testing he consented, but the temptation was not of God. God leads us always back to God, even if the journey leads us into tests and trials, but God does not lead us into temptation. God does not seduce or deceive us with the world God created to be good. Only we can do that; we let our natural desires be distorted into mindless passions, and we become acquainted with the demons. So testing and tempting are different things. God led Jesus into a confrontation with temptation, and Jesus found himself face to face, as do we all, with the devil’s seductions.
Now, why are the devil’s seductions temptations? Relieving hunger is a good thing. Self-sacrifice, when undertaken to realize a virtue or ideal, can be a good thing. Putting power in the hands of people whose hearts burn for justice is a good thing. But listen to Wendy Farley, who writes, “You see how tricky the demons can be. Wanting to be good, trying to be good—these are also temptations. There is a sense in which wanting and trying to be good can be good things, just as morality, self-sacrifice, and love can be good things. But all of these things are ways the demons try to get us to accept their bargain.” Farley is saying that in our insatiable desire for the good, we are blinded to the source of goodness, and we end up grasping at fragments of goodness, fragments of the divine mystery, and then we lose ourselves. Satan dares Jesus to seek fragments of God—God’s power, God’s protection, and God’s glory—for himself, not for God’s sake, or even for the sake of others. First, the devil provokes Jesus to turn stones into loaves of bread only to satisfy his own aching craving. Some commentators propose that the devil tempts Jesus to transform the stones in order to feed others, but this would only confirm Farley’s point that we are tempted by the good. Later, Jesus performs a miracle just as wonderful, multiplying a few loaves and fishes to feed the thousands, but there is a difference. There, he does so to satisfy the people’s hungry hearts, not only their hungry stomachs, and he does it to bring the masses closer to God. Neither Jesus’ appetite nor his desire for God and for others would have been satisfied had Jesus changed the stones in the desert, and Jesus would have lost sight of his Lord. Thwarted once, the devil then tempts Jesus to throw himself down from the Temple in order to be saved. Another temptation to the good—don’t we long to see some sign that God is powerfully protecting us, watching over and within us, supervising creation, gently but surely guiding us, rejoicing and mourning with us, deeply present with us in the face of suffering great and small? Wouldn’t a miracle rescue of the Son of God by the angels be just the awesome display of might that the Judeans needed, and wouldn’t that strike the hearts of the Roman occupiers with terror? Jesus would not give in to the devil’s delusions. This kind of self-sacrifice would be vanity and vexation of the Spirit, and it would be in vain: acts of faith can never be used to extort favor from God. Later, upon the cross, Jesus refused once again to give in to this temptation. In being raised upon the cross, Jesus let himself truly be thrown down, but not to save himself or Israel or even to prove he was the Son of God, but because he loved others, and by his pierced, crushed hands he would support others just as the angels supported him in the wilderness after being tested and found worthy. Finally, the devil offers Jesus the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. Jesus answers, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” He knew that to accept this offer would mean trading the genuine glory of God’s rule for the ungodly grandeur of empire. Instead of accepting the world for himself, Jesus Christ in his glory finally bestows the nations upon his disciples, fulfilling his own proclamation: blessed are those the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, the reign of God; blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. He will give the world to the disciples so that all things may be given to their God. Jesus does not claim anything for himself except as granted to him by God whom he called his Father, and he offers even these things back to the Father in bestowing them to the disciples.
Satan insinuates that Jesus is being less than the Son of God if he does not demonstrate or lay claim to his divine power. “If you are the Son of God,” the devil begins twice, knowing full well who Jesus is and what Jesus can do. Farley says we are deceived into thinking we are worthless if we do not give ourselves over to the good we think we should be doing. In fact, we sell ourselves short, because we are denying the precious and beautiful persons we have already been created to be. And this is the basic temptation to which we always yield. That is one of the morals of the story of the Fall in Genesis. The man and woman, presented with the tantalizing possibility of being like the gods, of grasping the divine power, were in fact denying the spirit of God that was already within them. They could not delight in the gifts with which they had already been graced. They counted them of little worth, and as a result they suffered a wounding of their personhood and a separation from the divine Spirit.
But Jesus remembered. He remembered the covenant. He trusted in the Lord. He trusted in his own sacred worth and infinite dignity. He rejected the temptation to reject the reign of God within him and the justice of God around him. And his victory is our hope. God has drawn near to us in Jesus’ confrontation with sin, suffering, and doubt, and we can draw power from the person who we confess is the Son of God. Moreover, Jesus’ fully human struggle, in obedience to God and rebellion against the world, is not a distant cosmic ideal but our immediate flesh-and-blood model. So let us not seek the stony bread of security but the sweet bread and roses of solidarity; let us not seek terrifying and terrorizing displays of monolithic force but the constructive and healing exercise of communal power; let us not seek the consolidation of social, economic, political, cultural, and religious empires but the creation of the beloved community.
Jesus teaches us a simple but hard-won wisdom. Seek ye first the kingdom, the kindom, the reign of God, the peace of God. Don’t seek the power, the prestige, and the glory for its own sake. Don’t mistake the glimpse of God for some unfiltered beatific vision, for we see only in part, and what we grasp is but a filament in the strong web of interdependent being. And check yourself before you conclude that you are all right just because you believe you are seeking, glimpsing, and grasping these things for others. Don’t be tempted by false altruism; don’t be tempted the good. Seek ye first the kingdom of God. God will give us the power, the glory, and the miracles of love and justice we desire and for which this hurting world yearns when first we seek after the source of all good things. And this seeking is not so much a grasping for godliness as much as it is a growing into oneself and a growing into relationship with our God. Amen.
There is a song we sing every Sunday at Common Cathedral, the outdoor church for homeless persons, and it goes like this:
Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and God’s righteousness
And all these things will be added unto you
Allelu, Alleluia
I know that it is Lent, and as a good Catholic I know that, technically, we are not supposed to sing any alleluias during Lent, though I just did. You see what attending a progressive Methodist seminary has done to me … it’s made me a liturgical maverick. Anyway, I’ll leave it to Professor Westerfield Tucker to decide whether the inclusion or omission of alleluias is more theologically appropriate, and I will seek absolution for my liturgical transgression in a Catholic confessional at the earliest possible occasion. In the meantime,
Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and God’s righteousness
And all these things will be added unto you
Allelu, Alleluia
This, to me, is the moral of today’s Scripture reading. These words come from Matthew 6:33, deep in the heart of the Sermon on the Mount. Wise words from a brilliant teacher. How do they sound to you? Coming from my tongue, surely not as astounding or as profound as they must have sounded coming from Jesus, the one who taught with authority. How do you suppose the great crowds of people who followed Jesus from Galilee to Judea knew he spoke with such authority? How do you think they could tell? What did they feel? I don’t think it was by the healings alone that they were convinced of his authority. Rather, they believed what he taught because they saw Jesus embodying this holy wisdom in his own struggle to be faithful to God. And his struggle was just like theirs. There is a freshness and immediacy to the wisdom of the Sermon on the Mount that I believe comes right out of Jesus’ experience of testing, from the beginning of his ministry and throughout his ministry, up to the cross.
I want to focus on the beginning of his ministry, and this brings me to Matthew’s account of Jesus’ temptation. The narrative comes to us in the form of a haggadic tale and resembles the challenges given to Jesus by the scribes and Jewish leaders later in this Gospel. All of these stories were crafted in such a way as to demonstrate the continuity of Jesus’ ministry with the ministry of Moses and the prophetic tradition of the Israelites. While Matthew has an axe to grind against the Jewish authorities, especially Pharisees, it should be kept in mind that the evangelist was positively emphasizing the Jewish roots of Jesus. His quotation of Deuteronomy in the dialogue with Satan is in keeping with Matthew’s desire to prove Jesus’ saving fidelity to Yahweh’s covenant with us. And this covenant faithfulness is exactly what is at stake in the temptation narrative. Would Jesus, proclaimed at his baptism God’s own Son, who had passed through the waters of his own Exodus, rely on God and God wholly and completely? Where generations of Israelites before him failed to hold fast to the providence of the Lord, could he endure courageously, faithfully in the wilderness of sin and doubt? Would he seek first the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness?
Jesus is led by the Spirit into the desert to be tested by God and tempted by the devil. Now let me be clear: I don’t think this is another case of divine child abuse. The plain sense of the text tells me that Jesus let himself be led by the Spirit of God. But this does not mean the Spirit of God tempted Jesus or was pleased to see Jesus suffer. He was tested by God, and to this testing he consented, but the temptation was not of God. God leads us always back to God, even if the journey leads us into tests and trials, but God does not lead us into temptation. God does not seduce or deceive us with the world God created to be good. Only we can do that; we let our natural desires be distorted into mindless passions, and we become acquainted with the demons. So testing and tempting are different things. God led Jesus into a confrontation with temptation, and Jesus found himself face to face, as do we all, with the devil’s seductions.
Now, why are the devil’s seductions temptations? Relieving hunger is a good thing. Self-sacrifice, when undertaken to realize a virtue or ideal, can be a good thing. Putting power in the hands of people whose hearts burn for justice is a good thing. But listen to Wendy Farley, who writes, “You see how tricky the demons can be. Wanting to be good, trying to be good—these are also temptations. There is a sense in which wanting and trying to be good can be good things, just as morality, self-sacrifice, and love can be good things. But all of these things are ways the demons try to get us to accept their bargain.” Farley is saying that in our insatiable desire for the good, we are blinded to the source of goodness, and we end up grasping at fragments of goodness, fragments of the divine mystery, and then we lose ourselves. Satan dares Jesus to seek fragments of God—God’s power, God’s protection, and God’s glory—for himself, not for God’s sake, or even for the sake of others. First, the devil provokes Jesus to turn stones into loaves of bread only to satisfy his own aching craving. Some commentators propose that the devil tempts Jesus to transform the stones in order to feed others, but this would only confirm Farley’s point that we are tempted by the good. Later, Jesus performs a miracle just as wonderful, multiplying a few loaves and fishes to feed the thousands, but there is a difference. There, he does so to satisfy the people’s hungry hearts, not only their hungry stomachs, and he does it to bring the masses closer to God. Neither Jesus’ appetite nor his desire for God and for others would have been satisfied had Jesus changed the stones in the desert, and Jesus would have lost sight of his Lord. Thwarted once, the devil then tempts Jesus to throw himself down from the Temple in order to be saved. Another temptation to the good—don’t we long to see some sign that God is powerfully protecting us, watching over and within us, supervising creation, gently but surely guiding us, rejoicing and mourning with us, deeply present with us in the face of suffering great and small? Wouldn’t a miracle rescue of the Son of God by the angels be just the awesome display of might that the Judeans needed, and wouldn’t that strike the hearts of the Roman occupiers with terror? Jesus would not give in to the devil’s delusions. This kind of self-sacrifice would be vanity and vexation of the Spirit, and it would be in vain: acts of faith can never be used to extort favor from God. Later, upon the cross, Jesus refused once again to give in to this temptation. In being raised upon the cross, Jesus let himself truly be thrown down, but not to save himself or Israel or even to prove he was the Son of God, but because he loved others, and by his pierced, crushed hands he would support others just as the angels supported him in the wilderness after being tested and found worthy. Finally, the devil offers Jesus the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. Jesus answers, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” He knew that to accept this offer would mean trading the genuine glory of God’s rule for the ungodly grandeur of empire. Instead of accepting the world for himself, Jesus Christ in his glory finally bestows the nations upon his disciples, fulfilling his own proclamation: blessed are those the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, the reign of God; blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. He will give the world to the disciples so that all things may be given to their God. Jesus does not claim anything for himself except as granted to him by God whom he called his Father, and he offers even these things back to the Father in bestowing them to the disciples.
Satan insinuates that Jesus is being less than the Son of God if he does not demonstrate or lay claim to his divine power. “If you are the Son of God,” the devil begins twice, knowing full well who Jesus is and what Jesus can do. Farley says we are deceived into thinking we are worthless if we do not give ourselves over to the good we think we should be doing. In fact, we sell ourselves short, because we are denying the precious and beautiful persons we have already been created to be. And this is the basic temptation to which we always yield. That is one of the morals of the story of the Fall in Genesis. The man and woman, presented with the tantalizing possibility of being like the gods, of grasping the divine power, were in fact denying the spirit of God that was already within them. They could not delight in the gifts with which they had already been graced. They counted them of little worth, and as a result they suffered a wounding of their personhood and a separation from the divine Spirit.
But Jesus remembered. He remembered the covenant. He trusted in the Lord. He trusted in his own sacred worth and infinite dignity. He rejected the temptation to reject the reign of God within him and the justice of God around him. And his victory is our hope. God has drawn near to us in Jesus’ confrontation with sin, suffering, and doubt, and we can draw power from the person who we confess is the Son of God. Moreover, Jesus’ fully human struggle, in obedience to God and rebellion against the world, is not a distant cosmic ideal but our immediate flesh-and-blood model. So let us not seek the stony bread of security but the sweet bread and roses of solidarity; let us not seek terrifying and terrorizing displays of monolithic force but the constructive and healing exercise of communal power; let us not seek the consolidation of social, economic, political, cultural, and religious empires but the creation of the beloved community.
Jesus teaches us a simple but hard-won wisdom. Seek ye first the kingdom, the kindom, the reign of God, the peace of God. Don’t seek the power, the prestige, and the glory for its own sake. Don’t mistake the glimpse of God for some unfiltered beatific vision, for we see only in part, and what we grasp is but a filament in the strong web of interdependent being. And check yourself before you conclude that you are all right just because you believe you are seeking, glimpsing, and grasping these things for others. Don’t be tempted by false altruism; don’t be tempted the good. Seek ye first the kingdom of God. God will give us the power, the glory, and the miracles of love and justice we desire and for which this hurting world yearns when first we seek after the source of all good things. And this seeking is not so much a grasping for godliness as much as it is a growing into oneself and a growing into relationship with our God. Amen.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
