Tag Archives: Ephesians

Ascending in a Cloud

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The Ascension is often thought of as a matter of Jesus going away from us. After rising from the dead, he spends fifty days with the disciples before going off in the setting sun, leaving us on our own to do the best we can. At least there’s Christmas to look forward to.

This suggests that the Ascension is a non-event. We expect more from Jesus, so let’s try again. Before ascending, Jesus promises that He will send the Holy Spirit to them. He won’t leave them orphans. We don’t have to wait until Christmas for a special treat after all; a special treat is coming in just a few days: ten days in Luke’s time scheme.

Then, what about the cloud that whisks Jesus away? Doesn’t that mean he’s gone? The German Bible scholar Gerhard Lohfink reminds us that a cloud covered the tabernacle while leading the Israelites through the desert. When it was time for the Israelites to move on, the cloud moved. When God wanted the Israelites to stay put, the cloud stayed put. All this is to say that the cloud was a sign of God’s presence. The cloud preserves the mystery. Nobody can see God. But the cloud makes it clear that God is very near to the Israelites, especially when they need God the most. (Lohfink: Between heaven and Earth, p. 162) And then there’s the cloud that filled the temple when Solomon dedicated it. Maybe God was as invisible as ever, but God sure was present. More recently for the disciples, a cloud covered them during the Transfiguration. Again, profound mystery in the midst of God’s amazingly close presence. So the cloud here means Jesus isn’t leaving after all.

Thinking Jesus is leaving them, the disciples are looking up at the rising cloud while two men in white ask them why they are doing that, suggesting they are looking in the wrong direction. The men in white tell them that Jesus will come in the same way they saw him go. (Acts 1: 11) That is, the men in white are redirecting the disciples back to the earth where, as Jesus had said, they will be his witnesses in Judea, Samaria , and the ends of the earth when the Holy Spirit comes. Not up in the sky, but on the earth, where Jesus will be more closely present than ever while they are doing that witnessing. At the end of Luke’s Gospel, Jesus specifies that their witnessing is about repentance and the forgiveness of sins. (Lk. 24: 47) This goes to say that if we look up at the sky looking for Jesus, we will find Jesus directing his attention—and ours—back to the earth.

In Ephesians, Paul prays that his readers will come to know the riches of the glorious inheritance of the saints that they will receive, riches of witnessing and forgiving. Paul goes on to wax eloquently about God’s power in raising Jesus to God’s right hand “in the heavenly places” from which Christ rules everything on the earth. (Eph. 1: 20) That is, Christ’s rising to the heights brings his forgiving love right back to the earth where he exercises his forgiving love among us, closer to us than we are to ourselves. When Paul writes of heavenly riches and of Christ, a crucified human who was raised from the dead and who now rules among us from such heights, his words sound like a dense cloud. It is hard to picture all this and that is the point. Paul’s words are a cloud like the cloud that covered the tabernacle in the desert and filled the temple. This cloud of words is a sign that the God whom we cannot see or comprehend is very close to us with unfathomable forgiving love. The cloud is all around us all the time. We just need to be alert to this guiding presence we can never understand. This is what the collect for this feast means when it says that Christ ascended so that he might fill all things.

It Was Necessary that Jesus Ascend

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With the celebrations of Christmas and Easter and, to some extent, Pentecost, the celebration of Ascension seems to get lost in the shuffle, something of an afterthought if it is thought about at all. Part of the trouble is that it isn’t all that easy to get an idea of what the Ascension is all about, so we wonder: What ‘s the big deal? We celebrated Jesus’s birth at Christmas and his rising from the dead at Easter. What more do we need? Isn’t the Resurrection enough? According to Luke and John the answer is: No.

Another part of the trouble is that the Ascension is a downer with Jesus leaving his disciples. The first aria in J.S. Bach’s Ascension Oratorio is a long lament over Jesus’ departure. Hardly a cause for celebration. If Jesus loves us enough to come to earth and spend time with us, why would Jesus leave us?

Distance as well as closeness, however, typifies our relationship with God. It is put succinctly in the Psalm verse: “For though the Lord is high, he regards the lowly.” (Ps. 138: 6) In theological terms, God is radically transcendent, but also radically imminent. God’s immediate presence wouldn’t be all that awesome if God were not transcendent as well, and a god who remains aloof from humans doesn’t exactly catch the heart of humans. Moreover, God’s distance gives humans space to live by decisions humans make while God’s closeness offers guidance to those who are open to it.

Luke describes a forty day period during which Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God and the forgiveness of sins. Most importantly, Jesus opens up the scriptures to the disciples by explaining why it was “necessary” that he suffer and rise from the dead. (As Luke and the other Gospel writers make clear, the “necessity” is human, not divine.) All of these are good thing, such good things that it is puzzling why Jesus would leave rather than continue with them. So what was the problem?

On the road to Emmaus, Cleopas and his companion told Jesus (while not recognizing him) that they had hoped he would “redeem Israel.” (Lk. 24: 21) In opening the scriptures to these two companions, Jesus shifted their lost hope to the need for Jesus to die and rise again. But after opening the scriptures for another forty days, Jesus was still asked: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1: 6) At this point, it was clear that, as long as Jesus was with the disciples, they would be distracted from his opening the scriptures to them. The temptation to triangle Jesus into their human agenda seems to have been irresistible as long as Jesus was physically present. Only if Jesus left them would they have the space to let the scriptures be opened to them so that they could understand the need for Jesus to have died and risen again. Jesus’ leaving also left the disciples as vulnerable to other humans as Jesus himself was while on earth, putting them, and us, in the position of suffering at their hands.

A second reason for the need for Jesus to ascend after a relatively brief time after his Resurrection builds on the first reason but also reinstates the dialectic of transcendence and imminence that had been temporarily compromised by Jesus’ Incarnate presence on earth. In John, Jesus says that only if he goes away can he send the Paraclete to guide them in all truth. In Luke, Jesus promises the disciples that the Holy Spirit will soon come if they wait in Jerusalem. Sure enough, ten days later, the Holy Spirit comes in tongues of fire, giving the disciples the gift of tongues so that they can communicate with other peoples. More importantly, the Holy Spirit guides the disciples into understanding the scriptures that Jesus had opened up for them so that not only did they finally understand that Jesus had to die and rise again, they were inspired to preach this truth along with proclaiming the forgiveness of sins.

In Ephesians, Paul proclaims the reality of the crucified, risen, and ascended Lord, seated at God’s right hand “in the heavenly places.” (Eph. 1: 20) Jesus may be exalted, with “all things under his feet,” but this exalted Jesus remains the crucified Lord who had to die before being so highly exalted. That is, we are not under the rule of a powerful deity, we are under the rule of the crucified one who rose with total forgiveness of those who tortured and killed him. It is this crucified, risen and ascended Lord who appeared to Stephen when he was being stoned for preaching what the Holy Spirit had inspired him to preach, and it was the exalted Jesus who filled Stephen with the same forgiveness of his persecutors. The ascended Lord may be infinitely up on high, but this same Lord sends the Holy Spirit deep into our hearts with the same apostolic message of forgiveness he gave to the disciples.

God’s Eternal Choice

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During the Christmas season, we celebrate the Incarnation: the mystery of God becoming a human being. For such a thing to happen, there must be an intersection of time and Eternity. Understanding time is easy, Or is it? I think we can all sympathize with St. Augustine of Hippo when he said he understood time until you asked him to explain it. Maybe we can’t explain time but it has familiarity in that we live in it the way a fish lives in the water. Eternity is something else. We don’t live in it and we really can’t conceive of living in it. We might be tempted to say that Eternity is the opposite of time, but that isn’t right. My theology professor said that Eternity has nothing to do with time. That means Eternity can’t even be the opposite of time as that would be to relate the two and that is what can’t be done. We could say that Eternity is for God and time is for us and leave it at that. But once Jesus was born, time is for God as well as for us. Does this mean that Eternity will be for us some day? But if Eternity should be a future possibility, it would be connected with time after all. Does that mean Eternity won’t be Eternity any more? Maybe we just haven’t begun to grasp what Eternity is all about.

God’s being eternal is one of the reasons that God is usually thought to be unchanging and unchangeable. But to consider the notion of God changing, or not changing, relates God to time yet again. More to the point, there is the Biblical record of God’s interacting with time bound creatures such as we. So whatever it might mean for God to be unchanging, it doesn’t mean that God is some cosmic blob that never does anything. The first chapter of Ephesians offers us a powerful vision of what an unchanging but dynamic God is like. The “God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ” has “blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.” (Eph. 1: 3) Moreover, we have been chosen “before the foundation of the world” and destined for adoption as God’s children “according to the good pleasure of his will.” (Eph. 1: 4-5) A God who blesses and chooses us from the foundation of the world is infinitely active rather than infinitely motionless. But Paul is also telling us that this will of blessing and choosing is constant. It may be active, infinitely active, but it is steady, unchanging.

We have a powerful example of the effect of God’s active, steady blessing and choosing in the 31st chapter of Jeremiah. Israel’s experience in time has been nothing short of catastrophic. Babylon invaded Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, and deported the more important people to Babylon, leaving Jerusalem in ruins. Jeremiah himself proclaimed Yahweh’s presence in the midst of this disaster because of the sins and apostasy of the people. But in the 31st chapter, Jeremiah is prophesying the return from the Babylonian exile: “See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north, and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth, among them the blind and the lame, those with child and those in labor, together; a great company, they shall return here.” (Jer. 31: 8) With God interacting in time, a great new thing is about to happen, but what, in time, is great and new, and unheard of, is a result of a steady act of blessing and choosing on the part of God. This steady and unchanging will shows itself both in bringing Israel to repentance and restoring Israel to its homeland.

On Christmas Day, we celebrated the birth of Jesus. The Logos who was with God in the beginning, became a human baby as vulnerable as any other baby. (Jn. 1: 1) On this second Sunday after Christmas, we see Jesus at the age of twelve, talking with the elders in the temple and asking them questions. That is, we are seeing a child asking questions about life and seeking answers as children are apt to do as soon as they are old enough to think about such things. This brings us into the paradox of an unchanging God developing in time as a human being. That God would do such a thing tells us that for us, living in time as we do, developing over time by asking questions is a good thing to do. We are also alerted to the significance, in the context of Eternity, of every little thing we do now in time. Here, we are at the beginning of Jesus’ life, but over the next few months, we’ll follow him to the end and beyond. Indeed, Paul says that it is through Jesus Christ that we are adopted as God’s children in God’s unwavering will and choice. That is, Paul is presupposing both the Cross and the Resurrection when he proclaims the destiny chosen for us by God. It is good for us that God’s will is not changeable, but what about us who are changeable? Insofar as our will isn’t so good, it is a good thing that it is changeable with a chance of a change for the better. This is what Israel needed when the consequences of their apostasy brought about the Babylonian Exile. Asking questions and listening to the answers as Jesus did can help bring us to abiding in God’s will that will not change in relation to any one of us or in relation with anybody else.

See also As Jesus Grew

Hungering and Thirsting for God

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When Jesus says “I am the bread of life,” (Jn. 6: 48) he taps deeply into a basic human need. The obvious metaphor unmistakably raises the question of whether we need God as much as we need food. Am I as hungry for God as I am hungry for food?

We naturally desire food. Many thinkers, among them St. Thomas Aquinas, also think that we desire God just as naturally. For what it is worth, that is my experience. Both desires are implanted in us by virtue of creation. Since God gives us these needs, God also provides for them. God provides food for the body, sometimes miraculously, as God did for Elijah in the wilderness or at the feeding of the multitude in the wilderness, but normally, God feeds us as God feeds the birds of the air. (Mt. 6: 26) The natural longing for God is God’s provision for fulfilling the deeper need it creates. To some extent, this longing is itself God’s provision of God’s presence, but it is also a foretaste of what is to come.

In the case of food, a lack of appetite is a sign that something is wrong and we seek medical help. If that doesn’t solve the problem, we try psychiatry or pastoral counseling for matters of the heart. Sometimes, people lose their appetites because table fellowship breaks down, in which case there is need to repair the social fabric. But what if we don’t desire God, or think we don’t? Is that a sign of bad spiritual health? If it is true that we all have a natural longing for God, and it stands for reason that it is so if we are created by God, than the answer is Yes. However, it isn’t our business to worry about whether other people are properly hungering and thirsting for God. We should attend rather to our own appetites

With physical health, there are several factors that are considered as indications as to whether a person is healthy or not. The same is true for spiritual health. The fourth chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians is a good checklist. Not stealing and earning an honest living is a start. Not letting evil talk come out of our mouths is a stronger indication, while speaking evil of others suggests lack of health. “Bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice” all need to be put away. (Eph. 4: 31) Such is junk food that is most unhealthy. On the other hand, being tender-hearted and forgiving in imitation of Christ is healthy food indicating spiritual health. People who show this kind of health are longing for God whether they know it or not. As Jesus said that doing the will of the one who sent him was his food and drink, (Jn. 4: 34) the good dispositions and actions listed in Ephesians should be our food and drink. Unfortunately, God’s provision does not keep us from spurning what God provides. Like petulant children who won’t eat their vegetables, we complain about the manna in the desert, especially if the spiritual journey feels like a desert. When such petulance on our part leads to hateful speech and insensitive treatment of others, it can dampen other peoples’ appetite for God and the things of God. So we have a responsibility to feed others with food that is healthy and nourishing. We must keep before us these questions: Do we long to taste the love and good works that Jesus embodied? Do we taste and see that the Lord is good? (Ps. 34: 8) These are questions to ask ourselves when we receive the Body and Blood of Jesus in the bread and wine.

Brought Near by the Blood of Christ

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In the second chapter of Ephesians, Paul presents a powerful vision of human unity and reconciliation: a household of God with Jesus the cornerstone. What beautiful words for sore ears, ears sore from the discord and violence breaking out in the world even as we celebrate the Holy Mysteries of the altar. This fact of discord and violence makes it clear that we have not reached this vision. Moreover, there is more than a hint of violence in the fact that the reconciliation has been brought by the blood of Christ. (Eph. 2: 13) The blood of Christ is often skimmed over as a formula to set up something more pleasant, but it refers to a death by torture on a cross of a man who spent a life trying to offer healing and reconciliation.

The French thinker René Girard suggested that from the dawn of history, human society has had a tendency to resolve social tensions through focusing on one person who is blamed for the social tensions. When the person is put to death, things are more peaceful—for a time. The root problem, the entanglement of human desires that leads to violence when it is believed that the objects of desire cannot be shared, does not change, so the cycle starts all over again until, once again, the shared desire reaches concord through focusing the blame on one person, or a group of persons. Girard called it “unanimity minus one.”

This is precisely the story that the Gospels tell: the story of a society ripped apart by many tensions until, suddenly, miraculously, all of the parties that are at each others’ throats suddenly come to an agreement that Jesus must die. But the Gospels proclaim this victim to be innocent, not the one who tore society apart, but the one who tried to bring reconciliation. Indeed, the tensions in Jesus’ time were not resolved with the result that Jerusalem was destroyed in A.D. 70. That this was so was not by chance. The cycle of collective violence only “worked” because the truth was covered up and denied. The Gospels blew the cover, making sure that it will never “work” again, no matter how hard we try.

And yet Paul proclaims a cosmic reconciliation as a result of this violent death. Why? Because Jesus was raised from the dead as the forgiving victim. Paul himself experienced Christ’s forgiveness in a powerful way on the road to Damascus. Jesus did not just preach about forgiving one’s enemies; Jesus practiced it as the risen victim. In so doing, Jesus inaugurated what Paul calls a new creation, a new humanity, a chance for humanity to start over and get it right this time. But when we look at the discord and violence, it is clear we haven’t gotten it right yet. There is some good news inspired by the Good News that is the Gospel, however, namely the massive amounts of charitable work done around the globe to build up dignity for people who are ground down by the discord and violence.

In Mark, we see Jesus having compassion on the people “because they were like sheep without a shepherd.” (Mk. 6: 34) Jeremiah castigated the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep. (Jer. 23: 1) When there is no shepherding or bad shepherding, humanity falls into the cycle of violence that resolves on a victim, the scapegoat. Jeremiah conveyed God’s promise of real shepherds who will care for them. (Jer. 23: 4) Paul insists that Christ is this shepherd, but not a shepherd who nags and scolds but one who shepherds through forgiveness. As the Gentiles and Jews had united in putting Christ to death, Paul says that Christ unites Jews and Gentiles through forgiveness as the risen victim. So Jesus has reconciled Jew and Gentile “to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it.” (Eph. 2: 16)

Throughout his preaching, Paul proclaimed this reconciliation of Jew and Gentile, hoping and believing it could happen soon and be the consummation of creation. Yet, that did not happen. Jewish persecution of Christians embittered the early church and anti-Jewish attitudes wrecked havoc on the Church, culminating in the Nazi Holocaust.

Although Gentile-Jewish relations continues to be a burning issue, in the U.S., relations between white and black people is front and center. Black people have been victimized beginning with the slave trade, but it is important to realize that committing such atrocities destroys the humanity of those of us who perpetrate it just as the persecution of Jews destroyed not only Jews but persecutors. Julia Robinson Moore, a black historian and theologian who uses Girard’s thought, has found evidence that the enslavement and suppression of blacks correlates with increased tensions between white people. So it is that blacks become collective victims of social problems among whites. As the Afro-American theologian James Cone said, Jesus is most present on the lynching tree.

In many ways it is frustrating to have Paul’s great vision of reconciliation when the reality of the present time hits us in the face. But it is important to be profoundly grateful for the vision. Proclaiming peace to those who are far off and those who are near is a guiding star, a way for us to be oriented. This vision gives us something to aim for, to hope for. Among other things, this vision gives us a means to test the shepherds who would lead us. Who is more apt to gather and build up? Who is more apt to scatter and destroy? Jesus became such a shepherd by getting all the people to sit together and eat together with what seemed very few loaves of bread and fishes. Such a vision challenges us to want it, really want it. Since this vision means that all of us will be changed, even changed radically, it can be frightening enough for us to hold back. All the more reason to pray to want to want this vision of reconciliation.

This vision can also point to both big and small ways to live it out. Julia Robinson Moore leads a reclamation project for the graves of enslaved persons. She takes students on field trips to spruce up the slave graveyards and she bring the descendants of slaves and enslavers together when they are ready for that move, giving all a chance to affirm the full humanity of the other and to seek mutual healing.

For an introduction to the thought of René Girard see: Living Stones in the House of the Forgiving Victim and Living Together with our Shared Desires.

The World God Loves

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John 3: 16: “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son” seems to be almost everybody’s favorite Bible verse. I don’t mind being a non-conformist when called to be and I have been known to get a conceited pleasure out of being one, but this is among my favorite verses too. However, the very popularity and familiarity of the verse can perhaps dull us to its power to impact our lives.

I will work with what seems an innocuous question: What is the world that God loved enough to send the Son into it? The word kosmos in normal usage had a neutral connotation, meaning the world in general, the world that happens to be. This corresponds to normal usage in English. In John’s Gospel, however, the word has a highly negative connotation, closer to the negative connotations of “worldly,” only much stronger than that. Most New Testament scholars interpret the word as John uses it as “the world-against-God, the world in rebellion against God,” as I learned it in seminary. Curiously, much preaching on this particular verse, including my own, seems to make it an exception; thinking of the world in a neutral way. But what if this isn’t an exception? What does this verse look like then? What does the world hostile to God look like, and what kind of deity would want to get messed up with it?

The reading from Numbers gives us a snapshot of the world against God. One would think that their deliverance from Egypt would earn some gratitude on the part of the Israelites, but all they do is grumble angrily about the hardships in the wilderness. (Num. 21: 5) When attacked by poisonous snakes that image their poisonous behavior, they repent. That’s something, but they Israelites show a pattern of turning against God time and time again when things get tough. The snake Moses puts on a pole saves the people. This smacks of sympathetic magic but surely God is telling us something here. What we have is poison driving out poison. Many medicines operate on the same principle; the Greek word pharmakon from which we get the word “pharmacy” means both medicine and poison. Somehow, God uses the poison of rebellion to cure the rebellion, perhaps because the plague reveals the truth of the poison of their rebellion. Paul writes that to the Ephesians that they “followed the ways of the world”—using “world” in much the way John does—following the desires and thoughts of “the flesh.” (Eph. 2: 2–3) One could say they were deserving of wrath because they embodied it.

In the John’s Gospel, we see much of “the world” in the sense of the rebellious world. The debates between Jesus and the enemies John calls “The Jews” are very intense. Their accusations that Jesus is possessed of a demon when he offers them freedom from sin make them look demon-possessed themselves. (Jn. 8: 48) These debates make painful reading on account of their ferocious character. In contrast to the frenzied emotive outburst of rebellion in these debates, John also shows us the cold calculating style of rebellion. When Lazarus is raised from the dead, they react to the resurrected life with a plot to kill Lazarus as well as Jesus since people are following Jesus because of this resurrection. And then there is the cold calculation of Caiaphas who says that it is better that one man die for the people than that the whole people perish. (Jn. 11: 50) John seems to have no love for these enemies of Jesus. Surely God can have no love for them. John’s dramatic portrayal of their enmity tends to reinforce our own rejection of these enemies. But these enemies are the kosmos. They are the kosmos God loved deeply enough to send his beloved son into it.

Right before John declares this love on God’s part, Jesus alludes to the serpent in the desert: “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.” (Jn. 3: 14–15) Jesus has turned this unsettling and cryptic gesture into a prophecy. The poison of rebellion on the part of Jesus’ enemies leads to Jesus being raised on a cross and the poison of this rebellion becomes the cure for the very same rebellion. In Ephesians, Paul, who himself had been a rebellious enemy of Jesus, experiences this very same love that motivated God to give God’s only begotten Son to make him, and us, who were dead in transgressions, alive in Christ. Not only alive, but raised up with Christ and seated with him in the heavenly realms. (Eph. 2: 4–6)

All of this sounds great–and it is beyond great–but John warns us of the judgment that the Light came into the world and we preferred darkness to light. (Jn. 3: 19 ) As the kosmos works to protect its rebellion to this blinding light, it falls into blinding darkness. How? If we slip into the default neutral understanding of “world” in the great verse proclaiming God’s love, we think this “world” is us—the good guys, and the world in rebellion is some other world—the bad guys who rebelled against Jesus. Paul had no illusions of this sort after his Damascus experience. But do we see the truth of our own grumbling in the deserts in life? Do we see ourselves as part of the kosmos Jesus loves in spite of our rebellion? Asking ourselves these questions as honestly as we can is a fundamental Lenten practice. Further on in Ephesians, Paul stresses that Christ’s raising us to His life has destroyed the barrier that had polarized Jew and Gentile–the ultimate embodiment of an us vs. them spirituality in Paul’s day. If we think this love is intended for us and not for them, we have fallen deeply into the darkness, preferring it to the Light that came into the world. Being among those who believe and have eternal life, then, is not a mental act of thinking something is true; it is about opening our eyes to the light, letting that light blind us, and then stumbling in the light instead of in the dark. It is this bumbling and stumbling that leads into the quality of life that is eternal life where there are many rooms in the Father’s house. (Jn. 14: 2)

Triumphant Loser

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The Ascension is a feast of triumph where Jesus rises to Heaven to take his seat at the right hand of his heavenly Abba. There is much rejoicing in our celebration of this feast but it’s hard to pin down what the celebration is all about. Towards the beginning of his great Epistle to the Ephesians, Paul celebrates this triumph of Jesus which has brought him “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.” (Eph. 1: 21) That’s pretty high up, about as high as anyone, even God Incarnate, can go. However, before this outburst of triumph, Paul prays that our hearts may be enlightened to perceive the hope to which we are called and “what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints.” (Eph. 1: 18) So what is this hope and what are the riches that Paul would have us understand and embrace?

With combativeness programmed into us before we’re old enough to know it’s happened, our first instinct is to see the triumph of Christ along the lines of the underdog winning against the stronger team, or an amazing come-from-behind victory. But such victories, satisfying as they are for the victors (and correspondingly humiliating for the losers) are still variations on the same old same old, that is, combats with winners and losers.

What we have a hard time seeing is that Jesus, for all the triumph, is still the loser. Yes, Jesus is above every authority and power, but it is as the vanquished one, the loser, that Jesus holds this high position. It isn’t that Jesus defeated Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate in the end; Jesus lost to them. If he had won, it would have been the same old same old, which would have made losers of us all. Rather, Jesus put himself at the mercy of all that he created with his heavenly Abba and the Holy Spirit. But if any of us should jump to claim the victory over the Divine Victim, what have we really gained? Perhaps something like a stone instead of bread.

We will soon see, at Pentecost, that the Holy Spirit gives the disciples power to witness to the truth of Jesus’ death and resurrected life. The truth of Jesus’ death that they proclaim is that, although innocent, Jesus was put to death by the Roman authorities under pressure from the Jewish leaders. But Jesus’ heavenly Abba raised Jesus from the dead with the offer of forgiveness and salvation to his persecutors. The triumph of Jesus is a triumph of innocent weakness, not a triumph of might and strength in the world’s understanding of strength. Jesus accepted loss so that all of us might win in the end.

We see this triumph through losing in the stoning of Stephen in Acts 7. Stephen berates the Jewish leaders for always persecuting the just ones such as Moses and the prophets. There is no sense of the forgiveness in his harangue that fills the other apostles’ proclamation of the truth of Jesus’ death. But then Stephen sees the heavens open to reveal the Son of Man at the right hand of God. Suddenly, Stephen is no longer an accuser but one who forgives before he dies, just like the risen victim he sees in glory. That is the victory of Christ that becomes the victory of Stephen. Forgiveness even unto death is the victory celebrated in the Ascension of Christ. This is the victory that earns life-giving bread instead of a stone. There is nothing higher than that!

Storms and Feedings

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eucharist1For Proper 11 in Year B, the year of Mark, the Gospel has only two snippets. The first has Jesus taking his disciples to a deserted place only to be followed by crowds of people. Jesus has compassion on them “because they were like sheep without a shepherd.” (Mk. 6: 34) This reference to shepherding echoes the reading from Jeremiah where the prophet rails against the shepherds who destroy and scatter God’s sheep. (Jer. 23: 1) The other snippet comes at the end of chapter 6 where Jesus heals many people who are being brought to him.

Passed over are the Feeding of the Five Thousand and the stormy crossing of the Sea of Galilee where Jesus walks on the water and calms the storm. I can understand why the lectionary compilers made these cuts. There are six narratives of Jesus feeding a multitude in the wilderness in the four Gospels and many stormy crossings of the Sea of Galilee. These repetitions give us a sense of been there done that and there is only so much a preacher can say about them. I’m not going to say all that much about these stories, either. Rather, I’m going to use this week’s scattered Gospel as an opportunity to look a bit at the bigger picture in Mark’s narration.

In his pioneering study of the literary patterns in Mark, the great English theologian Austin Ferrer noted many doublets among other patterns in the Gospel. In Mark 6, we have the first feeding in the wilderness and the second stormy crossing. A second feeding of a crowd in the wilderness takes place at the beginning of chapter 8. Why these doublets? Ferrer notes that the first mass feeding takes place in Jewish territory and the second in Gentile territory. That is, Mark is foreshadowing the union of Jew and Gentile in the Christian missions that take place after Jesus’ death. Given this appearance of peaceful unity, I was startled that Robert Hamerton-Kelly said that these doublets are a multiplication of mimetic doubles that move towards the crucifixion of Jesus. Hamerton-Kelly is applying Girard’s thought to the Gospel where mimetic rivals become mirror images of each other. But when I thought further on the matter, it made sense to me. First, the two feedings happen separately. Jews and Gentiles have not yet been brought together. Second, preceding the first mass feeding is the first stormy crossing of the Sea towards Gentile territory. The second stormy crossing in the same direction occurs before the second mass feeding. The intertwining of stormy crossings with the two feedings suggest that uniting Jew and Gentile does not come easily. The episode with the Syro-Phoenician woman who Jesus curtly tried to dismiss precedes the second feeding, suggesting that Jesus may have had his own struggles in the matter. The disciples, of course, don’t understand the feedings at all.

In Ephesians, Paul writes about the union of Jew and Gentile as a done deal. He writes to the Ephesians that they are “no longer strangers and aliens” but are “members of the household of God.” (Eph, 2: 19) This union sounds easy and peaceful until we note that Jew and Gentile have “been brought near by the blood of Christ.” (Eph. 2: 13) That is, the storm of Jesus’ crucifixion brings the two peoples together. In Mark, along with the other Gospels, we see that the act of crucifying Jesus banded the Jews and Gentiles together for the first time. In Acts, Jews and Gentiles are again brought together through repentance and forgiveness. All this time, Jesus has been gently shepherding two separate flocks into one flock.

What may have looked like a pedantic look at literary structure in Mark actually leads us deeply into the midst of the storms that keep us humans apart from other humans. We live in these tensions as we seek to let the Good Shepherd lead us from far away to near at hand where we will feed each other in one great multitude.

On Being a Blessing for All

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BenedictChurchStatue1Abraham’s call to leave his country and kindred has been a monastic trope ever since there was a monastic presence in Christianity. Entering the monastic life does entail leaving behind the life one had been leading up to that time. It is also a venture into the unknown. Reading books on monasticism or even visiting monasteries do not fully prepare one for life after actually entering. The author of Hebrews said that Abraham did not know where he was going and lived “as in a foreign land.” (Heb. 11: 9) The author of Hebrews was not writing for monastics but for a Christian community under pressure. For this author, all Christians have “no lasting city. (Heb. 13: 14) Abraham did not simply turn his back on his family and his culture. God told him that he would “be a blessing” and through whom all families would be blest. (Gen. 12: 3) This would include being a blessing for the family he had left behind. Monks, for that matter remain involved with their families of origin and offer help when it is needed. Benedict himself had left the Roman culture of his time in which we was well-placed socially to enter a new life in which he became a pioneer for many sons and daughters in the millennium and a half since his life.

St. Paul’s prayer that we “may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth” (Eph. 3: 18) is fitting for the monastic quest as we seek to know God deeply through prayer in the Divine Office, in the Eucharist, and in our hearts. It is significant that this deep prayer, even when done individually, is communal as Paul is praying that the whole Ephesian congregation will seek this depth in prayer. Benedict wanted his monastics to prefer nothing to the Work of God. He also wanted his monastics to “run on the path of God’s commandments, our hearts overflowing with the inexpressible delight of love.”

The closeness to God gained in prayer is imaged in the vine and the branches in John 15. As a branch clings to the vine, so should we cling to Jesus, keep the Abba’s commandments, and “abide in his love.” (Jn. 15: 10) This image of the vine and the branches is communal as the vine connects us deeply to each of the branches. Indeed, Jesus goes on to admonish us to love each other as we have been loved by Jesus and His heavenly Abba. It is through this love and not from intellectual study, that everything made known to Jesus by his Abba is also made known to us. The comprehending of the breadth and length and height and depth of God is a comprehension, partial to be sure, that comes from the same love that would lead us to lay down our lives for our friends if that should be required of us. In his Rule, Benedict would have his monastics serve one another. This applies to serving at tables, serving the sick, and in general tending to the needs of others.

Although we may be pilgrims and wanderers we, like Abraham, remain rooted in the hope for the city “whose architect and builder is God” (Heb. 11: 10) even as, like St. Benedict, we tend to the community we are called to serve in this life so that we may be blessings for all people.

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My reflections on the Rule of St. Benedict are available in my books Tools for Peace

 

Sharing God’s Riches

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creche1-copyLike every culture, the Jews had to face fundamental decisions as to how open or closed they would be to others. The default mechanism tends to be flight or fight. In discussing remaining social groups living close to the level of what he calls “traditional” societies, Jared Diamond observed this phenomenon. A stranger wandering into the territory of a different tribe had better come up with a common ancestor or the encounter could prove fatal.

The type of encounters with other nations has an effect on such decisions. In the case of the Jews, most encounters were bad. Slavery in Egypt was followed by both cultural and military threats from the Canaanites who tempted the Jews to forsake the God who had delivered them from Egypt. Encounters with the Assyrians and Babylonians were catastrophic. But then the Persians destroyed the Babylonian Empire and invited the Jews to return to their homeland and revive their cultural and religious traditions. It is surely no accident that the return from Babylonian exile and resettlement back in their homeland coincided with the first expressions of openness to other cultures on the part of the Jews such as we have when Isaiah proclaims: “Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.” (Is. 60:3) With Isaiah, we have the breakthrough insight that the God who brought them out of Egypt and then delivered them from Babylon was the God for all people and not just them. Although Adam Smith took the title of his famous book The Wealth of Nations from Isaiah 60:5: “the wealth of the nations shall come to you,” the prophet encourages a much more profound exchange than that of capital: an exchange of the riches of the Jews’ religious tradition for the riches other nations can bring to that same tradition. Unfortunately, retrenchment followed, climaxed by the expulsion of all foreign wives at about the time of the building of the second temple.

At the time of Jesus’ birth, the relationship between the Jews and the Gentiles, the other nations, was complex and tense. Their religious traditions were mostly tolerated but at times menaced by the Romans. Although some individual Gentiles became God-fearers, practicers of Jewish piety such as the Centurion who built the synagogue at Capernaum, (Lk. 7: 4-5) there were few friendly relations between Jews and Gentiles. And yet in the face of this tension, Matthew sees in the visit of the Magi to the infant Jesus a fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy of the exchange of wealth between the two peoples.

It was for St. Paul to return the gifts to the Magi. After his dramatic conversion, he was called to preach the Good News of Jesus, a Jew, to the Gentiles. To the surprise of many Jews who followed Jesus, “the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.” (Eph. 3: 6) That is, Jesus dissolved the fundamental division between Jew and Gentile when he was crucified by a collaboration between the two peoples who had suddenly come together for that brief moment. But when Jesus was raised from the dead as the forgiving victim, he bridged the gap between nations with one comprehensive act of forgiveness.

Ever since Paul’s commission, the Church has been tempted to retrench herself as the Jews did after building the second temple. This is to fall back into the default hostility to the stranger that Jared Diamond saw as part of “traditional” humanity. What the feast of Epiphany celebrates is the generosity of God who shares God’s riches with all so that all people can share this same richness with all others, not least with strangers who can then soon cease to be strangers.