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Daily Scripture

+ 33rd Week in Ordinary Time

Keep hope alive!

Readings: Revelation 5:1-10 Psalm 149:1-6, 9 Luke 19:41-44

_As Jesus drew near Jerusalem, he saw the city and wept over it, saying, “if this day you only knew what makes for peace – but now it is hidden from your eyes.” [Luke 19:41]

In Christian liturgy and literature, he Church has often been referred to as “the new Jerusalem” and heaven as “the new and eternal Jerusalem.” I think it’s a good simile. If you have ever been to the old section of Jerusalem, you surely would have noted the appropriateness of this comparison. Ancient Jerusalem is still very much in evidence if not literally, surely in its ambiance. A walk from the site of the ancient praetorium to Calvary – now well within the city limits – will surely give you a sense of what it may have been like when Jesus made that last fateful journey.

Today Jerusalem is truly an international city and bears within its womb and walls, the extremes of every race and religion. Jews still narrate the story of the great exodus and Christians break the bread of Eucharist while Islamic temples broadcast their ancient chants from minarets that echo through the streets in the wee hours of the morning.

This is the city over which Jesus wept not because it did not make him king but because it did not recognize its day of visitation, that is to say, its moment of opportunity. In reading a passage such as this, we need to put away preconceived notions about our understanding of Jesus’ messianic role in the light of its Christological evolution in Christian teaching today. Jesus was not about establishing new religious structures but about announcing the universality of God’s love – for Jews and gentiles, male and female, of every race and nation.

Would it be accurate to state that Jesus is weeping not just over Jerusalem but over our war torn world? And yet one cannot fail to see signs of hope on the horizon. Bernard Lonergan, Carol Rahner and Carl Jung support this very Christian notion that it is in our moments of deepest despair that a new wisdom emerges leading to a common vision of a new world in which love and respect overcome evil and injustice. Is it possible that in the midst of the turmoil in which our world seems enmeshed people of good can bring that vision to reality not through confrontation but through collaboration?

Christmas Day 2007

Monday December 24, 2007

Close to the Moment

As a young student many years ago, I had an opportunity to be in the Holy Land just prior to Christmas. It was a memorable trip not because it fulfilled my expectations of what I had hoped to find but because of what I didn’t find. One of the shrines I had most looked forward to visiting was the place of the birth of Jesus. The road to Bethlehem hasn’t changed much through the centuries. It winds through barren hills accented with olive trees and small clay houses. Our first visit to the town of Bethlehem was early in the morning but we tried to remember what it might have been like 2000 years ago when shepherds “watched their flocks by night.”

I knew of course that the place of Jesus’ birth could not be documented with scientific certitude and surely didn’t expect to find a stable or a manger. I’m not sure I had a clear notion or vague image of anything other than a simple icon or creche much like we display in our churches at Christmas time.

We arrived at the Church of the Nativity. It looked more like two churches constructed over the remnant of a third. We entered through a small door and made our way through a circuitous route down a narrow circular stairway into a small crowded basement. The odor of burning oil from the lamps and the scent of eastern spices was very different from the smell of sheep, goats and hay and most certainly unlike the fragrance of a Douglas Fur. The room was filled with altars of varying sizes and degrees of ornamentation, each belonging to a church that claims Jesus as its founder.
The sound of people praying in different languages was strange to my ears and resembled the basement of a department store on Fourteenth Street in lower Manhattan back in the forties.

His ‘birthplace’ was marked by a small circular hole surrounded by a silver star.

People had gathered from all parts of the world, I wanted to believe, not so much to find the spot where Jesus was born or to see a replica of a manger but to get as close as possible in mind, heart and soul to the moment in which God joined humanity in this great act of divine generosity beyond imagining.

The experience changed my perspective and affected my understanding of the feast. It caused me to think about all those people, young and old, crowded into that small cave-like basement all sharing the same world but each one holding a unique and special world within; each with a different history and a personal story about life and its strange mix of dreams fulfilled and dreams broken.

But we are here today not to travel back to Bethlehem or to depict in graphic words the biological birth of Jesus as if to explain the inexplicable or to prove to cynics that it happened. We are here to ponder a mystery that repeats itself over and over again within the hearts of sincere believers of every race and religion.

In Christ God has become powerless so that we might recognize our powerlessness in the face of selfish interests and the pursuit of what is good for me rather than what is for the common good of humanity.

This feast is the fulfillment of a promise but it also a plea for human acceptance one for another. The God who loved us into being is the same God who continues to intervene not to smite or to wound but to build what the nations destroy and heal the wounds inflicted by human hostility or indifference.

Then where are you, God, in the midst of human suffering? Can it be that the God who is always engaged in our transformation stands aloof as the heavy hands of foe strike at one another for the sake of justice and peace as if might makes right or brute force can ever change the course of human history for good?

People who study the origins of human violence tells us that in order to kill another human being we have to make them ‘other’—other race, other ethnic group, other nationality, other religion, other culture, other class—different. It is the result of linear thinking.

Christmas is not a linear feast for Christians only. It is a celebration of diversity.

The question this raises is not whether or not God is on our side but whether or not we are on the side of God. The feast is not only a invitation that we accept God into our hearts but yet another reminder that we are in the heart of God.

I think we have heard enough from those who define God as male or female; as judge or general who think God is ‘on their side.’ Such talk makes enemies of kindred spirits.

The greatest challenge of Bethlehem – House of Bread – is not to be found in a manger but on the cross. Jesus was destined to become the bread of life ‘broken’ for all humanity, destined for death not by God but by the vanity of humanity. But those of sincere belief who eat this bread become the bread that we eat and together we become the ‘house’ of God, house of blessing for all humanity.

Just as Jesus’ love was inclusive, so must our love be inclusive. Just as Jesus crossed the borders and boundaries of hatred, so must we cross borders and boundaries of hatred for Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.

We celebrate this feast not so much a moment of past history as of an ongoing event: God taking on a human form over and over again in the hearts of all who believe in the impossible-in the mystery of God incarnate who came to us once in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who comes to us today, tomorrow and every time we speak or act in his name.

Amelia Herlihy stated it well in her meditative verse entitled, “Experiencing God:”

When I was younger, I held in my head
the way Michaelangelo presented ‘him’—a bearded old man in the clouds, afloat,
pointing a finger down
to create an “image and likeness” of himself.
And I used to think, he looks grumpy and haughty
_and I don’t want to be like him; not his likeness, please_…
and then I would scruple myself
about the sinfulness of blasphemy,
and resort to the safety of formal prayer:
God nicely boxed in a mysterious trinity.
Unassailable, remote.

But God wouldn’t stay there.
As life drop-kicked me about, highs and lows,
grief and pain chewing away at my toes,
God just wouldn’t stay put in the box.
I felt the spirit surround me,
warm and comforting, absorbing the worst of the blows,
Always there, soft, touching, protective
like that gel that surrounds a canned ham.
Filling in the gouges eaten away by time,
soothing the scalding wounds of change.
Making the goings-on somehow tolerable, somehow mine,
A more reflective me now, a more sesoned view
getting used to the shape I’m in.
More able to accept myself as I am.

And now I think about the day the canned ham
will be opened.
(_Hearing the gasp as the key turns on the vacuum-packed tin_.)
Then I hope to see the bright light of God,
not as a remote being, not some stranger afloat in the clouds,
but rather that same surrounding Spirit now in full beam,
the same Old Friend who got me there,
saw me through it all, helped me together,
contoured me into a likeness made for heaven.
Then, I dream (oh, yes, I dream);
I become a soaring “image and likeness”
of that Spirited Friend.
Freed from the restraints of time and space, (and gender)
able to rejoin old friends and old loves,
radiant, uninhibited, savoring, “foreverness”
within the loving cosmos,
of this our Spirit-God.

[National Catholic Reporter, Dec 14, 2001]

Welcome the Christ however and wherever he appears.