Archive for April, 2012|Monthly archive page
THE FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER – April 29, 2012
The Acts of the Apostles 4:8-12
The Holy Gospel according to John 10:11-18
The only sound in the church was the burbling of the water in the baptismal font. In the late afternoon, the sun, deep in the western sky turned the stained-glass windows vivid as the penetrating rays dappled the church in reds and blues. As I was wont to do, I sat near the font for vespers, the evening prayer to end the day. Light played on the water’s surface as the tower bells tolled the Angelus. These waters are your tomb and your mother. One of the early Fathers of the Church coined that phrase that has fascinated me from the first time I heard it.
Some may say that the phrase is an oxymoron, a combination of contradictory terms that the mind struggles to wrap around and to reconcile. Some, failing to do that would dismiss one part of the phrase or the other. My choice is to ponder and plumb the depths for meaning. Sometimes that can be a scary course that surfaces implications difficult and demanding, often implications with which I would rather not have to deal. The tomb part, the dying, isn’t so bad; the possibility of dying to sin and everything that would separate us from the love of God comforts a troubled spirit. One can rest there. It is the birthing part that troubles. Entering the tomb to die is essentially passive, a letting go. The community baptized me. It was done to me. Maybe being born is passive, too; but the implications are phenomenal, the ensuing responsibilities, tremendous.
In the early Church, when adults were baptized, in the course of the Easter Vigil, the elect came to the font’s edge and shed their clothes, ridding themselves of everything that was of their former lives, and naked, they entered the waters to be immersed in them. Drowning is an apt image. So is dying. But then they rose from the depths and crossed over to the other side, emerging there to be clothed in a white, alb-like garment. You have put on Christ. In him you have been baptized. That is the birth that goes deeper than putting on as one would a shirt or a pair of trousers. The new birth results in identification with Christ. The new life lived is Christ’s own. The love bond that results is tremendous and will never be broken.
John spells out the implications in bold relief. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. Christ is the Word made flesh. Christ is the only Son of God, the Father’s beloved one. The baptized are born into that relationship and assume the mantle of God’s beloved. Perhaps there can be passivity in accepting this new identity; we cannot be passive in living out what that identity means. The baptized are called to do what Jesus does, called to act in, with, and through Christ, to do all in his name. What power resides there! That is what Peter declares as he reminds the leaders of the people that the healing of the crippled man that now incriminates him was done by his power by was done in the name of the Risen One whom they condemned. Peter says this not to denounce the leaders but to invite them to repent and embrace the Name.
Hear the words of the gospel today. Jesus speaks of his role as shepherd, the Good Shepherd who knows his sheep just as the sheep know him. The language speaks of intimacy of relationship, reflective of Jesus’ relationship with the Father. I know mine and mine know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. Be vulnerable to those words. Let them penetrate to the core of your being. Then hear the conclusion to the declaration: I will lay down my life for the sheep.
Again, not to belabor the issue, we might be comforted to know we are sheep. Not the brightest of God’s creatures, sheep cannot possibly have much of a burden of conscience or responsibility. They simply follow. Not so here. Being identified with Christ means taking on the responsibility of shepherding and knowing the sheep, at once being both sheep and shepherds.
The language begins to limp. So let’s speak in clearer terms. What is your experience of Church? What is your experience of parish? What role do you play? The call to membership is not to embrace passivity. The Church, the parish is a communal reality; all members have shared responsibility. The faith resides in them. Members must know each other just as the Father knows Jesus and Jesus knows the Father. The caring for each other must reflect the depth of that knowing. The members come together to celebrate the sacraments. It is the community that baptizes. The members of the community are co-celebrants of Eucharist and not mere passive spectators. They are called to full, active, and conscious participation. Passive attendance won’t cut it, if you will. When you gather with your parish community is the love so strong that you know the others would lay down their lives for you just as you would for them?
Sometimes the evening news doubles as powerful catechist. The image was of a car in flames. A fallen motorcycle lay in front of the car. A group of people, most of them strangers to each other at this point, realizes that there is a young man, the cycle rider, under the car. No one hesitates. They move in on the burning car and together they lift it as one of their number stoops down and pulls the man from beneath it, saving his life. Later, to a person, when their deed was praised, they refused to be called heroes. They just did what anyone would have done in those circumstances. Would that were so!
There’s more. Jesus says: I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. Jesus’ call is universal. His desire is that there be one human family, that all believe they are sisters and brothers in the human experience. Our sense of responsibility must be universal, too. No one is outside the pale. Kenyans and Ugandans are our brothers and sisters. So, too, are Israelis and Iraqis. So are those of every family and tribe on the face of the earth. That’s not easy to deal with, but it is the truth and is our responsibility if we have put on Christ. That’s what it means to live in Christ and for Christ to live in us.
The gospel concludes with Jesus’ being confident as he moves toward the crucifixion. Notice that he is the actor and not the passive recipient of the impending execution. I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down on my own. No wonder the cross, that horrid instrument of torment, has become for us a symbol of hope and life. Jesus suffered these things and so entered into glory. So will we if we do the same.
Where will all this take us? God only knows. But if we believe that God loves us with the same love God has for Christ, what does it matter? Hear again what John says in the second reading. Listen and remember. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. That will happen even if the worst befalls us. That is the promise.
So it is that often I paused by the font and remembered. Remembering gives the courage to go on.
Sincerely,
Didymus
OUR VULNERABLE GOD
Dear Jesus,
Was that you I saw the other night as I made my way home through the storm? You were seated on the sidewalk and leaning against a building. Two little boys were with you, one on either side. You had sleeping bags with you and parcels of something. It looked as if you were preparing to spend the night sleeping on the vent in that entrance.
I got out of my car to see if there was something that I could do to help. But by the time I was close enough to speak to you a van with a church emblem on the side pulled up and two people got out and asked if you would like to sleep out of the storm and in a warm and dry place. You got up and the three of you entered the van. It drove off into the night before I could say or do anything. I stood there and watched as the van taxied down the avenue for several blocks before turning and going out of my sight.
Was I watching you on the evening news as the reporter walked through the lines of mothers and their starving children, refugees in Kenya from the famine in Somalia? I had to look away from the pictures of listless little ones too weak and malnourished even to brush away the flies that crawled on their faces. The reporter said that one child, held in his mother’s arms, was four years old. Anyone looking at him saw one that looked more like a listless one-year-old. Were you in that helicopter in Afghanistan that was shot down, killing over 30 young soldiers inside? I wondered if you were the elderly woman that died in her stifling house because a thief stole the AC unit from the window of her home.
This morning during my prayer period, I couldn’t get those images out of my head so that I could experience inner silence and be able to pray. For some reason I began to think about the infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke’s Gospels. So, I got out my Bible and read both accounts clear through. I was struck anew by how each Evangelist presents you in all your vulnerability. The human child is the most helpless of creatures, totally, completely dependent on others for survival.
It is at the hands of others that a child learns to bond through the experience of human touch, sucking in nourishment from the mother’s breast, being held, fondled, cherished. In the first weeks of life the baby learns to imitate sounds so that in due time the fundamentals of language can be learned. I know that a child deprived of these basics at the very beginning may never learn to trust and to bond with other human beings. Deprived of sounds of speech from the beginning, a child may learn to speak later, but never as naturally as others who, as infants, are exposed to those sounds can do.
I come to see that that is how dependent God became in order to show the compassionate depth of love that God has for us and that we should have for each other. The human condition is God’s condition. That’s what God achieved in you, isn’t it?
Is it true that many, even some in the Church, banish the image of vulnerability when they think about your nativity. How could an infant, fully human and fully divine, possibly be susceptible to the dangers that those who are merely fully human can experience? Christmas pageants and greeting cards would make one think that what you experienced in those first few months was only a masquerade, a pretending.
Certainly you are fully God, but a vulnerable God. Those astrologers, those seekers from the East, came because they watched for signs and then interpreted them. They weren’t called “kings” in the Gospel, nor were their number three. They were wise. They were astrologers. They came to Bethlehem because they habitually watched for signs and then interpreted them and followed out the implications of those omens. Outsiders, foreigners saw more clearly than did members of the household. Sometimes I would like to think that they had some extraordinary helps so that they could get beyond the mewling infant and recognize the Wonder unfolding, the promise being fulfilled, hope’s dawning. But all they saw was a baby and a mother and father. What they saw became a sign for them and they adored as one does God alone.
All of this brings me back to my initial question about recognizing you in today’s victims. If I say that I believe in the Christmas and Epiphany events, that through you, God has entered definitely into the human condition, then I have to search you out and serve you wherever you are found. It was you being rescued by that van as I approached the other night, wasn’t it? And it was you, so fragile and weak, that you could not raise your hand to swat the fly away.
All this searching in the night that threatens to envelope us today, in the midst of these calls to war and attempts to be a dominant presence in other lands make me wonder if we don’t live in an age of idolaters. The state is not our reason to hope. It is not our salvation. If the light is to shine, you have to be the source. We have to read the signs of the times, search the heavens, ponder and pray if we are to hear your cry and come and adore.
Perhaps that is why I am outraged when I hear some of our political leaders decry the thought of taxation of the wealthy and say that the government has minimal responsibility for the poor and the aged. The private arena has that obligation, they say. Is profit the only goal and motivation of manufacturers in these difficult financial times? Shouldn’t there be a problem with outsourcing to foreign lands by so many of the corporations the jobs that used to provide employment for many of our laborers. From a faith perspective, I wonder about our value system. As the chasm separating the wealthy from the poor continues to grow and imitate that in other nations where revolutions now rage, I wonder what might lie in store for us, if we don’t recognize the implications of the Good News perceived in our vulnerable God.
Is that the Gospel message? Or, am I getting it wrong? Correct me, please, if I am missing the point. I want to know your peace.
Sincerely,
Didymus