Working for Justice

“Peter began to say to Jesus, ‘We have given up everything and followed you.’” The disciple’s words in today’s gospel (Mark 10,18-21) follow the story we read yesterday about the rich young man who turns away from following Jesus because he has many possessions. Jesus comments afterwards how difficult it will be for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.

To be a disciple, Mark’s gospel teaches, is to be concerned with your neighbor and the society in which you live. In the society in which Jesus lived, the gap between the rich and the poor was great. The inequalities were enormous. His disciples were not to aim at getting rich, he taught, but rather they should work for a just world where all can share in its riches.

The picture of the Christian community after Pentecost having all things in common and sharing everything is a reminder of his teaching.

The rich young man turns away from that challenge. Peter, representing the disciples, accepts it, and as Jesus promises, he and those who do seek a just world will receive rewards in this world and in the next.

Yet it will bring “persecutions” too, Jesus says. There are costs to discipleship in all its forms. If you are going to work for social justice, you may not be popular or admired. Your voice often wont be heard. Sometimes, as we see in the story of Bishop Oscar Romero, it can lead to your death.

Working for justice always means entering into the mystery of the cross.

The Homelessness of Faith

“When Paul had finished speaking he knelt down and prayed with them all. They were all weeping loudly as they threw their arms around Paul and kissed him, for they were deeply distressed that he had said that they would never see his face again. Then they escorted him to the ship.”

As the gospel spread to all nations, we seldom see scenes in the scriptures like Paul’s farewell to the presbyters at Ephesus, described in our reading for today, but there must have been others like it. Peter biding farewell to his family at Capernaum; James and John parting from the mother who wanted so much for them; others who left the places and people they knew for the sake of the gospel. Goodbyes are hard, even when they happen for noble purposes.

There’s a homelessness in every human life. The Carmelite poet, Jessica Powers describes it so well in one of her poems:

“It is the homelessness of the soul in the body sown

it is the loneliness of mystery;

of seeing oneself a leaf, inexplicable and unknown

cast from an unimaginable tree;

of knowing one’s life to be a brief wind blown

down a fissure of time in the rock of eternity.”

This is the homelessness that touches us all, even as we believe.

The elders of Ephesus would miss Paul who had been with them for three years and become part of their life, and he would miss them. The disciples of Jesus at the Last Supper must have been touched as he told them he was going away. They had to feel loss.

Only the promise of a spiritual union and a homecoming tempered their sense of loss. Only the promise of reunion of another day.

Praying in Jesus Christ

“I pray for them,” Jesus says in Tuesday’s gospel as he looks to his disciples in the supper room and also to us who are his own today.

We who are so conscious of how poorly we pray need to remember Jesus praying for us and in us.  Is it possible to speak to God, we ask ourselves? We’re so easily distracted, so weak in faith, so bound to life as it is. How can we to go to God in prayer?

“Let the Son who lives in our hearts, be also on our lips,” St. Cyprian says in his commentary on the Our Father. Jesus joins our weak and stumbling prayers to his own. He prays in and for us and gives us the assurance we will be welcomed and heard.

“I pray for them,” Jesus said in the supper room. Then, he prayed for his disciples when they left the supper room and entered the Garden of Gethsemani. They fell asleep, forgetful of everything. A stone’s throw away, Jesus prayed and his prayer was not only for himself but to strengthen them as well.

“I pray for them,’ Jesus says in our liturgical prayers. We speak to God the Father “through Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, One God, forever and ever. Amen.”

Whenever we pray, whether with others in public prayer or praying alone, he enters our prayer. “Let us pray with confidence to the Father in the words our Savior gave us,” we say as we begin the Our Father at Mass.

Our confidence in prayer comes, not from our own wisdom, or holiness or faith, but from Jesus who says “I pray for them.”

The Voice of the Faithful

The mention of Apollos in Saturday’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles reminds us that Peter and Paul and the other apostles were not the only teachers in the early church. Others brought the message of Christ to the cities and towns of the Roman Empire. Apollos was one of them.

He’s described as an eloquent, learned teacher who came to Ephesus from Alexandria, one of the great centers of Jewish and Christian learning, and drew a following by preaching about Jesus.

But Apollos doesn’t know everything, so an ordinary Jewish couple, Priscilla and Acquila, “took him aside and explained to him the Way of God more accurately.”

They were disciples of Paul who supported  him by giving him some work in their tent business. They traveled with Paul and certainly listened to his teaching, but I don’t think they were ever considered teachers as he and Apollos were. They were considered “hearers of the word,” more likely. Well informed, for sure, but still among those we would call today “the faithful.”

Yet, let’s not forget what important teachers “the faithful” are, as Priscilla and Aquila remind us.

I remember a story a priest I knew, a brilliant teacher, told me long ago about a baptism he was conducting for an infant born to a member of his family. His father was the baby’s sponsor and according to the rite then was expected to recite the Creed.

“Can you say the Creed, Dad?” the priest said to his father.

“Who the hell taught it to you?,” the father sharply replied.

Faith can’t survive in this world without the ordinary Priscillas and Aquilas explaining it and  passing it on.

Stepping up to do Good

For the last few weeks I have been helping out at http://www.thepassionists.org  –the web site for our Passionist province– getting its project of daily homilies started. It seems to me that many Catholics are using the daily readings from the Mass for daily reflection and prayer. That’s an important trend we should try to support.

For the past few weeks I have been trying to line up writers for the homilies; then I may get back to this blog more regularly. You might want to put http://www.thepassionists.org in your favorites.

Here’s my homily on the Feast of Matthias, the Apostle, which we celebrated the other day:

We celebrate the feast of the Apostle Matthias  after Easter because he was chosen to succeed the betrayer Judas around this time. We know nothing about what he did afterwards, which is true of many of the other apostles as well. They went out to all the world as Jesus told them to do, but where most of them went and what they did, we don’t know.

Matthias is closely associated with Judas, however. Peter declares that  “it is necessary that one of the men who accompanied us the whole time the Lord Jesus came and went among us,beginning from the baptism of John until the day on which he was taken up from us, become with us a witness to his resurrection.”

He took Judas’ place as a witness to Jesus.

The failure of Judas was a mystery that must have puzzled the members of the early church. How could someone so close to the Son of God, a companion who knew him day by day, who heard him speak and saw what he did–how could he betray him? The same question arises in our minds today as we see people who have received grace after grace turn away from Goodness itself.

Why are there bad people in the world? Why are bad people in the church? It may make you question the power of God.

It is not just to fulfill a quota of 12 apostles that Matthias is chosen. He reminds us of an important lesson– wherever there is evil, good must step forward. Evil is always a call for goodness to act.

We can easily become cynical  when evil appears in our world, in our country, in our church, in places where we live. We can continually bemoan its presence and become fixed on it. But giving evil too much attention also gives it acceptance and empowers it to stand in the world as if it belonged and ruled there.

The best way to deal with evil is to do good and support the good people around you. Like Matthias, we have to step forward and stand in its place.

Silent Clay

Silent Clay

The daily Mass readings for Eastertime, from the Acts of the Apostles and the Gospel of John, are so different in tone. As its title suggests, the Acts of the Apostles is a fast-moving account of a developing church spreading rapidly through the world because of people like Paul of Tarsus and his companions. If they were living today, they would be prime targets for frequent flyer programs and travel sites on the internet. They’re out blazing new trails and visiting new places.  Always on the go.

Our selections from the supper-room discourse of Jesus in the Gospel of John, on the other hand,  seem to move slowly, repeating, lingering over the words of Jesus to his disciples. They tell us to listen and be quiet, sit still. Don’t go anywhere at all.

St. Paul of the Cross, the founder of the Passionists, was inspired by St. Paul, the Apostle, to take on a constant work of preaching and teaching. Many of his letters end telling his reader that he has to go, he’s off to preach the gospel somewhere. He was a “frequent flyer.”

But the Gospel of John also inspired him; it was the basis for his teaching on prayer. Keep in God’s presence, in pure faith, he often said. Enter that inner room and remain there. Don’t go anywhere else.

“It’s not important for you to feel the Divine Presence, but very important to continue in pure faith, without comfort, loving God who satisfies our longings. Remain like a child resting on the bosom of God in faithful silence and holy love. Remain there in the higher part of your soul paying no attention to the noise of the enemy outside. Stay in that room with your Divine Spouse…Be what Saint John Chrysostom says to be: silent clay offered to the potter. Give yourself to your Maker. What a beautiful saying! What the clay gives to the potter, give to your Creator. The clay is silent; the potter does with it what he wills. If he breaks it or throws away, it is silent and content, because it knows it’s in the king’s royal gallery.”  (Letter 1515)

Is Christianity Dying?

Looking at the past sometimes helps us face life today.  Our first reading in the Mass today describes emissaries of the church of Jerusalem arriving at Antioch in Syria, the place where followers of Jesus were first called “Christians.” The emissaries represent Jerusalem, the center of Christian power after Jesus died and rose from the dead and the place where the Holy Spirit came upon crowds of people in tongues of fire.

In one sense, the Jerusalem church offered its blessing to a new church, which in turn brought the faith to others through apostles like Paul and Barnabas.

Yet, could any that day have predicted what would happen to their own powerful churches and cities in the years to come? Jerusalem would be destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. Antioch continued to be a flourishing Christian stronghold for a few hundred years until Moslem invaders in the 7th century gradually turned it into a Moslem city.

Visit the ancient city of Antioch today, which is now part of modern Turkey, and you may be struck by the absence of signs of its Christian past. Paul and Barnabas once walked its streets; St. John Chrysostom and teachers like him were honored by other Christian churches  throughout the world. Now, only scattered Christian relics remain, largely in the city’s museums, and they give little indication of what this city was like in New Testament and early Christian times.

As Christian churches and other religious institutions close in our part of the world now, as religious communities decline, we wonder: Are we Jerusalem and Antioch today?

The church shares the mystery of Jesus Christ, it dies and rises again. When the messengers arrived at Antioch from Jerusalem long ago, the church they belonged to was a church on the rise. What did Christians who followed them think when they watched Jerusalem fall and the city of Antioch became a Moslem stronghold?

Did the mystery of the Lord’s death help them understand what was happening to them then? Will it help us embrace the mystery of our time too?