Author: Daniel Scofield, MTS

Today’s reflection verse brings back thoughts of how we view the Ten Commandments. Artistic representations of the Ten Commandments often depict two stone tablets with two tables of inscriptions. This portrayal follows from a classical division of the commandments in which there are two specific categories: those that order humanity’s relationship with God and those that order human relationships with one another. Bishop Barron writes that if we consider the Bible as a totality, it becomes apparent that the Scriptures prioritize the first table, those commands dealing with God. The Ten Commandments begin with an insistence that the Lord alone is God and there are to be no other gods besides him. This is not just a principle meant to order humanity’s expressions of ritualized worship but a statement about the ethos of the entire moral and spiritual order. Whatever it is that humanity worships — be it the gods of the ancients or the allures of wealth, power, pleasure, and honors — will, by necessity, give rise to our perceptions and practices concerning moral life. The God or gods in whom we place our ultimate concern will direct our lives and determine our choices. St. Paul said that the body of each Christian is “a temple of the Holy Spirit.” He means a place where the one true God is honored and worshipped. Paul provides us with an image of the Christian life as one in which a person finds happiness and integration in the measure that she becomes, personally, a place where God is first. What does this mean? How much of your life is given over to materialism, commercialism, or the accumulation of things? What rivals to the one true God have you allowed to invade the sacred space of your soul? The temple-cleansing Christ is a memorable image with enduring power. We shouldn’t relegate that image or the Lord himself to merely a statement about our impatience with the corruptions of religious institutions and miss the point that strikes closer to home: Christ comes to each of us to rid the temple of our own body of the idols to which we have foolishly given power and pride of place.

Bishop Robert Barron, writing in his book, “This Is My Body,” notes that the very earliest theology of the Eucharist is found in St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, penned probably in the early fifties of the first century, and it clearly brings forth this organic, participative quality. Paul speaks of the intense identification that is effected between Jesus and his Church precisely through the Eucharist: “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?” (1 Cor. 10:16). The evocative Greek term behind “sharing” is koinonia, meaning communion or mystical participation. Is this a hard doctrine? At the conclusion of the Eucharistic discourse, delivered at the synagogue in Capernaum, Jesus practically lost his entire Church: “When many of his disciples heard it, they said, ‘This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?’” (John 6:60). Again, if he were speaking only at the symbolic level, why would this theology be hard to accept? No one left him when he observed that he was the vine or the good shepherd or the light of the world, for those were clearly only metaphorical remarks and posed, accordingly, no great intellectual challenge. The very resistance of his disciples to the bread of life discourse implies that they understood Jesus only too well and grasped that he was making a qualitatively different kind of assertion. Unable to take in the Eucharistic teaching, “many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him” (John 6:66). Jesus then turned to his inner circle, the Twelve, and asked, bluntly enough: “Do you also wish to go away?” (John 6:67). There is something terrible and telling in that question, as though Jesus were posing it not only to the little band gathered around him at Capernaum, but to all of his prospective disciples up and down the ages. One senses that we are poised here on a fulcrum, that a standing or falling point has been reached, that somehow being a disciple of Jesus is intimately tied up with how one stands in regard to the Eucharist. In response to Jesus’ question, Peter, as is often the case in the Gospels, spoke for the group: “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God” (John 6:68–69). As in the synoptic Gospels, so here in John, it is a Petrine confession that grounds and guarantees the survival of the Church. In the Johannine context, this explicit confession of Jesus as the Holy One of God is bound up with the implicit confession of faith in the Eucharist as truly the Body and Blood of the Lord. When the two declarations are made in tandem, John is telling us, the Church perdures. In light of this scene, it is indeed fascinating to remark how often the Church has divided precisely over this question of the Real Presence.

There is a story of a young child who had to deal with wetting their bed. Their childhood friends would tease them with a rhyme that connected to the word “pee.” This poor child was helpless to protect themself. They were exposed and ashamed. You could also see that they were angry, not so much at the other kids and their teasing as at themselves, at their weakness and inability not to do that for which they were being taunted. Sometimes, kids are powerless to stop wetting their beds long after they’ve matured enough to experience great shame in doing it. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that children such as these belong to the kingdom of God. Jesus had just such a child in mind when he made that statement. But generally, we need to understand why the kingdom belongs to children. We tend to idealize the innocence of children, and childlike innocence is a beautiful quality. However, that is not what Jesus idealizes in a child. The quality that makes children so apt to receive the kingdom is not so much their innocence as their helplessness, their powerlessness to not wet their beds, among other things. Very young children cannot feed themselves, let alone provide for themselves. And certainly, they cannot protect themselves, especially against their own weaknesses. There is a congenital ineptness inside us, and try as we might, we cannot always or often protect ourselves against our weaknesses. That’s basic biblical anthropology. But there is something even more important theologically here. Physically, our life’s bloom is short-lived, and long before we are ready for it, our bodies begin again to betray us. Wrinkles, fat, and the humiliating sags of mid-life appear in ways that cannot be hidden. Our friends don’t tease and taunt us about these weaknesses, as very young kids do. They don’t need to; we are painfully aware of our inadequacies. That is true for us emotionally and morally, too. But this is the point: in the face of our inadequacies, we must begin to see ourselves as God sees us, a child who cannot yet be fully responsible for their life. Then, our shame can give way to tender compassion. We are all bed-wetters and live in that humiliation. But, as Jesus assures us, to such as these belongs the kingdom of heaven.

Sometimes in our fear of being tainted in our orthodoxy we forget that many of the great theologians in Christian tradition were unafraid to pick up pagan thinkers, mine their insights for truth, and then blend these with their faith. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that St. Augustine did this with Platonism. Thomas Aquinas, in the face of considerable ecclesial criticism, did the same thing with Aristotle. Ironically, centuries later, we now take many of their intellectual categories, which they originally took from pagan thought, as our very criteria for orthodoxy. Dare one say that Jesus did the same thing? He picked up parables and stories that were current in his culture and tailored them to further his own religious and moral teachings. Moreover, he taught, and with precious little equivocation, that we are to honor truth wherever we see it, irrespective of who’s carrying it. If one picks up truths from diverse pagan and secular sources and harmonizes them with one’s Christian faith, how does one avoid the accusation of being syncretistic? Syncretism is combining insights gleaned from everywhere in a way that is uncritical of internal contradiction. But we must not confuse tension with contradiction. Tension is not necessarily a sign of contradiction; it’s often the opposite: True faith is humble enough to accept truth, wherever it sees it, irrespective of the tension it causes and irrespective of the religion or ideology of whoever is speaking it. Big mind and big hearts are large enough to contain and carry large ambiguities and great tensions. And, true worshippers of God accept God’s goodness and truth wherever these are manifest, no matter how religiously or morally inconvenient that manifestation might be. God is the author of all that is good and all that is true! Hence, since no one religion, one church, one culture, one philosophy, or one ideology contains all of the truth, we must be open to perceive and receive goodness and truth in many, many different places – and we must be open to the tensions and ambiguity this brings into our lives.

In Luke’s Gospel for the Assumption, Mary sings of God’s mercy and his special care for those whom the world would cast aside. God has “lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things,” the young Mary says to her older cousin Elizabeth. The Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary was not defined as a dogma until 1950 but has roots as far back as the fifth century. God’s taking up into heaven of the physical body of Mary is in keeping with what we teach about both the importance of Mary and the importance of our bodies as human creatures. Mary, in her body, goes ahead of us to heaven. Mary, who experienced all the precarity and danger of being a religious minority in an occupied country, who had to flee with her family across a border to save the life of her young child, and who watched a brutal government torture and kill that child as an adult, would come to know the Magnificat in a completely different way over the course of her life. The Magnificat is Mary’s famous song of praise to God. It shakes the complacency of the powerful and reminds them of God’s strength: “He has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones.” Mary’s song and her Assumption could not be more relevant. On August 12, Bishop Vasquez of Austin, Texas, Chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Migration, issued a statement urging protection of migrant families. He declared that a new government rule, which would severely limit asylum eligibility, “jeopardizes the safety of vulnerable individuals and families fleeing persecution and threatens family unity.” The Assumption reminds us of our call to care for all who are experiencing danger, hunger, homelessness, statelessness, or are treated as outcasts. It reminds us that God cares for the least and the lowly, and so must we.

Today, we celebrate the Memorial of Saint Maximilian Kolbe. Regis Armstrong writes that Fr. Kolbe is known for giving his life to the Nazis at the Horror Camp Auschwitz in place of another on August 14, 1941. What led to this was a camp count on July 29, 1941, revealing that three prisoners were missing from Block 11 and the Camp’s Sub-Commander ordering that ten men suffer reprisal. Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritsch instructed all the men of Block 11 to form a line, which he walked selecting their life or their slow death by starvation, “This one. That one.” Amongst them was Franciszek Gajowniczek, a married family man. Before the group of 10 was marched to Block 13, the starvation bunker, Prisoner Number 16670, Maximilian Kolbe, broke rank and said: “I am a Catholic priest. I wish to die for that man. I am old, and he has a wife and children.” Maximilian and the other nine men went to a slow death of torture and starvation in the notorious Block 13. After three weeks, only four remained alive; among them was Maximilian. On August 14th, the commandant decided the bunker was needed and ordered the prisoners to be injected with carbolic acid. Still conscious, Maximilian looked at the doctor and offered his arm. The body of Prisoner 16670 was removed to the crematorium, and without dignity or ceremony was disposed of, like the hundreds of thousands who had gone before him, and hundreds of thousands more who would follow.” Survivor Jozef Stemler recalled, “In that desert of hatred, he had sown love. There was nothing artificial in his behavior; he was serious but happy and had the smile of a youth. These qualities attracted many people to him. I was coming back from the evening roll call, half-dead from work and hungry, when an SS Guard ordered me to carry two dead bodies to the crematorium. The sight of the body of a young man almost made me faint when I realized it was Father Kolbe.”

We all like to think of ourselves as big-hearted, having wide compassion and loving as Jesus did, but too much within our attitudes and actions belies this. Our love, truth, and worship are often unconsciously predicated on making ourselves right by making others wrong. Too often, we have an unconscious mantra that says: I can only be good if someone else is bad. I can only be right if someone else is wrong. My dogma can only be true if someone else’s is false. My religion can only be right if someone else’s is wrong. My Eucharist can only be valid if someone else’s is invalid. And I can only be in heaven if someone else is in hell. Fr. Ron Rolheiser wrote the above as he spoke about how we view heaven and the kingdom of God. Yet, as Fr. Rolheiser writes, the scripture verse today tells us God’s salvific will is universal and that God’s deep, constant, passionate longing is that everyone, absolutely everyone, regardless of their attitude and actions, is somehow brought into the house. It seems God does not want to rest until everyone is home, eating at the same table. We see in the Gospel of Luke how Jesus weaves together three stories to make this point: The shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep to search for the one stray; the woman who has ten coins, loses one, and cannot rest until she has found her lost coin; and the father who loses two sons, one to weakness and one to anger, and will not rest until he has both back in the house. Our heaven, too, must be a wide one. Like the woman who lost a coin, like a shepherd who has lost a sheep, and like the father of the prodigal son and older brother, we too shouldn’t rest easy when others are separated from us. The family is only happy when everyone is home. What ultimately characterizes a genuine faith and a big heart is not how pure our churches, doctrines, and morals might be, but how wide the embrace of our hearts is.

Christianity teaches us that our world is holy and that everything is a matter for the sacrament. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that in this view, the universe manifests God’s glory, and humanity is made in God’s image. Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, our food is sacramental, and in our work and sexual embrace, we are co-creators with God. When we watch the news at night, our world doesn’t look like the glory of God; what we do with our bodies at times makes us wonder whether these really are temples of the Holy Spirit, the heartless and thankless way that we consume food and drink leaves little impression of sacramentality, and the symbols and language with which we surround our work and sex speak precious little of co-creation with God. We have lost the sense that the world is holy and that our eating, working, and making love are sacramental, and we’ve lost it because we no longer have the right kind of prayer and ritual in our lives. We no longer connect ourselves, our world, our eating, and our making love to their sacred origins. In not making this connection, our prayer and ritual fall short. Among the Osage Indians, there is a custom that when a child is born before it is allowed to drink from its mother’s breast, a holy person is summoned, and someone “who has talked to the gods” is brought into the room. This person recites to the newborn infant the story of the creation of the world and of terrestrial animals. Not until this has been done is the baby given the mother’s breast. An older generation, that of my parents, had their own pious way of doing this ritual. They blessed their fields and workbenches and bedrooms, they prayed grace before and after every meal, and some of them went to finalize their engagement for marriage in a church. That was their way of telling the story of the sacred origins of water before drinking it. By and large, we have rejected the mythological way of the Osage Indians and the pious way of my parent’s generation. We live, eat, work, and make love under a lower symbolic hedge. Most of our eating isn’t sacramental because we don’t connect the food we eat to its sacred origins—and, for the most part, we don’t really pray before and after meals. We must find a way to connect our eating, drinking, working, and making love to their sacred origins.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, in Summa Theologica, writing in response to the gospel reading today for John on the “bread of life,” says that sin is the spiritual death of the soul. Hence, man is preserved from future sin in the same way as the body is preserved from future death of the body: and this happens in two ways. First of all, man’s nature is strengthened inwardly against inner decay, and so by means of food and medicine, he is preserved from death. Secondly, he is guarded against outward assaults, and thus, he is protected by the means of arms by which he defends his body. Now, the Eucharist preserves man from sin in both of these ways. For, first of all, by uniting man with Christ through grace, it strengthens his spiritual life, as spiritual food and spiritual medicine, “That bread strengthens strengthen man’s heart (Ps. 103:5).” Augustine likewise says, “Approach without fear. It is bread, not poison.” Secondly, because it is a sign of Christ’s Passion, whereby the devils are conquered, it repels all the assaults of demons. Hence, Chrysostom says, “Like lions breathing forth fire, thus do we depart from that table, being made terrible to the devil.” Indeed, it is also true that many, after receiving this sacrament, worthily fall again into sin, but it is due to the changeableness of free will that man sins after possessing charity, for his free will can easily be fixed on good or evil. Hence, although this sacrament itself has the power to preserve us from sin, it does not take away from man the possibility of sinning. And the same must be said of charity. For charity in itself preserves man from sin, but because of the weakness of free will, it happens that one sins after possessing charity just as one does after receiving this sacrament. Although this sacrament is ordained directly to lessen the inclination to sin, it does lessen it as a consequence, inasmuch as it increases charity because, as Augustine says, “the increase of charity is the lessening of concupiscence.” But it directly strengthens man’s heart in good, whereby he is also preserved from sin.

In Matthew’s gospel, chapter 25, Jesus speaks to the judgment of the nations, “When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.” By what measure does he separate the sheep and goats? His answer follows his opening statement, “Did you feed the hungry? Give drink to the thirsty? Invite in the stranger? Clothe the naked? Visit the sick and imprisoned? Because when you do these things to the hungry, to the thirsty, to strangers, to the sick, and to the imprisoned, you do them to God.” Fr. Rolheiser writes that this is when we see both groups in the story befuddled. “Both those who did what was asked and those who didn’t were equally befuddled and lodged the same protest: “When? When did we see you hungry? When did we see you thirsty?” Both are caught off guard and both ask seemingly the same question, but their protests are in fact very different: The first group, those who had measured up, are pleasantly surprised. What they say to Jesus is essentially this: “We didn’t know it was you! We were just doing what was right!” And Jesus answers: “It doesn’t matter! In serving them, you were meeting me!” The second group, those who hadn’t measured up, is rudely shocked. Their protest, in effect, is this: “If we had only known! If we had known that it was you inside the poor we would have responded. We just didn’t know!” And Jesus answers: “It doesn’t matter! In not serving them, you were avoiding me!” In this gospel story, neither those who served God in the poor nor those who didn’t serve God in poor knew what they were doing. The first group, who did respond, did so simply because it was the right thing to do. They didn’t know that God was hidden inside the poor. The second group, who didn’t respond, didn’t reach out because they didn’t realize that God was inside the poor. Neither knew that God was there and that is the lesson. A mature disciple doesn’t calculate or make distinctions as to whether God is inside of a certain situation or not, whether a person seems worth it or not, whether a person is a Christian or not, or whether a person appears to be a good person or not, before reaching out in service. A mature disciple serves whoever is in need, independent of those considerations. Jesus would add that doing the right thing is reason enough.