Author: Daniel Scofield, MTS

For Christians, the Easter holiday is about recapturing the surprise, excitement, and strangeness that the Resurrection brought to Jesus’ first followers. Bishop Robert Barron writes that he has always been drawn to the tombs of famous people. When I was a student many years ago in Washington, D.C., I loved visiting the Kennedy brothers’ graves on that lovely hillside in front of the Custis-Lee Mansion. In Paris, I frequently toured Père Lachaise Cemetery, the resting place of, among many others, Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Abelard, and Jim Morrison. When on retreat at St. Meinrad Monastery in southern Indiana, I would often take a morning to visit the nearby Lincoln Boyhood Memorial, on the grounds of which is the simple grave of Nancy Hanks, Abraham Lincoln’s mother, who died in 1818. I always found it profoundly moving to see the resting place of this backwoods woman, who died uncelebrated at the age of 35, covered in pennies adorned with the image of her famous son. Cemeteries are places to ponder, muse, give thanks, perhaps smile ruefully, and ultimately, places of rest and finality. The last thing one would realistically expect at a grave is novelty and surprise. Then, there is the tomb featured in the story of Easter. We are told in the Bible that three women, friends and followers of Jesus, came to the tomb of their Master early on the Sunday morning following his crucifixion to anoint his body. Undoubtedly, they anticipated that, while performing this task, they would wistfully recall what their friend had said and done. Perhaps they would express their frustration at those who had brought him to this point, betraying, denying, and running from him in his hour of need. Certainly, they expected to weep in their grief. But when they arrived, they found, to their surprise, that the heavy stone had been rolled away from the tomb’s entrance. Had a grave robber been at work? Their astonishment only intensified when they spied inside the grave, not the body of Jesus, but a young man clothed in white, blithely announcing, “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him.” Unlike any of the other great religious founders, Jesus consistently spoke and acted in the very person of God. Declaring a man’s sins forgiven, referring to himself as greater than the Temple, claiming lordship over the Sabbath and authority over the Torah, insisting that his followers love him more than their mothers and fathers, more than their very lives, Jesus assumed a divine prerogative. And it was precisely this apparently blasphemous pretension that led so many of his contemporaries to oppose him. After his awful death on an instrument of torture, even his closest followers became convinced that he must have been delusional and misguided. The Resurrection of Jesus from the dead showed that this spiritual resistance was not in vain. When he appeared to his disciples, the New Testament tells us, the risen Lord typically did two things: He showed his wounds and spoke the word Shalom, peace. On the one hand, Christians should not forget the depth of human depravity, the sin that contributed to the death of the Son of God. We know that God’s love, his offer of Shalom, is greater than our possible sin. Christians understood this precisely because human beings killed God, and God returned in forgiving love. In achingly beautiful poetry, St. Paul expressed this amazing grace: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

When the Romans designed crucifixion as their means of capital punishment, they had more in mind than simply putting someone to death. They wanted to accomplish something else, too, namely, to make this death a spectacle to serve as the ultimate deterrent so that anyone seeing it would think twice about committing the offense for which the person was being crucified. Perhaps most cruel of all, crucifixion was designed to utterly humiliate the body of the person being executed. So, the person was stripped naked, his private parts unprotected, and when his body went into spasms, as surely it eventually would, his bowels would release, all in public view. Is there a humiliation worse than this? Fr. Rolheiser writes that there are, in his view, human sufferings that approximate or equal that. There are daily instances of violence in our world – domestic violence, sexual violence, torture, heartless bullying, and the like – which mirror the humiliation of the cross. As well you sometimes see this kind of humiliation of the body in death by cancer and other such debilitating diseases. The person here doesn’t just die; she dies in pain, her body humiliated, its dignity compromised, that immodesty exposed, as it was for Jesus when dying on the cross. Nothing, absolutely nothing, pushes us to a depth of heart and soul, as does humiliation. Drinking the cup of humiliation, accepting the cross, is, according to Jesus and according to what’s most honest in our own experience, what can bring us genuine glory, namely, depth of heart, depth of soul, and depth of understanding and compassion. Humiliation will make us deep, but it might not make us deep in the right way. It can also have the opposite effect. Like Jesus, we will all suffer humiliation in life; we will all drink the cup, and it will make us deep, but then we have a critical choice: Will this humiliation make us deep in compassion and understanding, or will it make us deep in anger and bitterness? That is, in fact, the ultimate moral choice we face in life – not just at the hour of death but countless times in our lives. Good Friday and what it asks of us confront us daily.

Fr. Ron Rolheiser in his book, “Our One Great Act of Fidelity,” writes that the Eucharist is the ultimate sacrament of reconciliation. It is the ancient water of cleansing, now turned into the new wine of reconciliation, that purifies us so that we can enter the house and celebrate. When John describes Jesus as taking off his outer garment, he means more than just the stripping off of some physical clothing, some outer sash that might have gotten in the way of his stooping down and washing someone’s feet. To let go of the pride that blocks all human beings from stooping down to wash the feet of someone different from oneself, Jesus had to strip off a lot of outer things – pride, moral judgments, superiority, ideology, and personal dignity –  so as to only wear his inner garment. What was his inner garment? It was his knowledge that he had come from God and was going back to God. Therefore, all things were possible for him, including his washing the feet of someone whom he already knew had betrayed him.

Psalm 69 is “A Cry of Anguish in Great Distress,” which speaks to what our Lord Jesus Christ bore in the sufferings described within the psalm uniquely. This accounts for the fact that, after Psalm 22, this is the psalm most quoted in the New Testament to show that it was fulfilled in Jesus Christ and to exhort us to find in its text, as in all Scripture, the consolation that helps to keep our hope alive. Today, our reflection verse from Psalm 69 speaks of communication with God. This communication is traditionally characterized as prayer. Why do you pray? What do we seek from God? Oblate Fr. Robert Michel asks: What exactly does it mean to pray affectively? His response might be summarized this way: “You must try to pray so that, in your prayer, you open yourself in such a way that sometime – perhaps not today, but sometime – you are able to hear God say to you: `I love you!’ These words, addressed to you by God, are the most important words you will ever hear because, before you hear them, nothing is ever completely right with you, but after you hear them, something will be right in your life at a very deep level.” Oblate Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that Fr. Michel’s words are simple, but they capture what we ultimately try to do when we “lift mind and heart to God” in prayer. In the end, prayer’s essence, mission statement, and deep raison d’etre are simply this: We need to open ourselves to God so that we are capable of hearing God say to us individually, “I love you!” Part of affective prayer is also that we, one- to-one, with affection, occasionally at least, say the same thing to God: “I love you!” In all long-term, affectionate relationships, the partners must occasionally prompt each other to hear expressions of affection and reassurance. It’s not good enough to tell a marriage partner or a friend just once, “I love you!”. It needs to be said regularly. The relationship of prayer is no different. Prayer, it is said, is not meant to change God but us. True. And nothing changes us as much for the good as to hear someone say that he or she loves us, especially if that someone is God.

Soren Kierkegard, in his spiritual writings, writes that Christ consistently used the expression “follower.” He never asked for admirers, worshippers, or adherents. No, he calls disciples. It is not adherents of a teaching but followers of a life Christ is looking for. Christ came into the world with the purpose of saving, not instructing it. At the same time, as is implied in his saving work, he came to be the pattern, to leave footprints for the person who would join him, who would become a follower. This is why Christ was born and lived and died in lowliness. There is absolutely nothing to admire in Jesus unless you want to admire poverty, misery, and contempt. What, then, is the difference between an admirer and a follower? A follower is or strives to be what he admires. An admirer, however, keeps themselves personally detached. They fail to see that what is admired involves a claim upon them, and thus, they fail to be or strive to be what they admire. To want to admire instead of follow Christ is not necessarily an invention by bad people. No, it is more an invention by those who keep themselves detached, who keep themselves at a safe distance. Admirers are related to the admired only through the excitement of the imagination. The difference between an admirer and a follower remains, no matter where you are. The admirer never makes any true sacrifices. They always play it safe. Though in words, phrases, and songs, they are inexhaustible about how highly they prize Christ; they renounce nothing, give up nothing, will not reconstruct their life, will not be what they admire, and will not let their life express what it is they supposedly admire. Not so for the follower. No, no. The follower aspires with all their strength, with all their will, to be what they admire.

Today, Monday of Holy Week, we are given a Gospel text, the Anointing at Bethany. The anointing of Jesus at Bethany is an event that is narrated in the accounts of the four evangelists, something which is relatively rare. The details differ slightly from evangelist to evangelist. Matthew and Mark have the woman who carries out the anointing anoint Jesus on the head, and Luke and John have her anoint his feet. It was customary for a woman on her wedding day to bind her hair, and for a married woman to loosen her hair in public was a sign of grave immodesty. Mary was oblivious to all around her except for Jesus. She took no thought for what others would think. In humility, she stooped to anoint Jesus’ feet and dry them with her hair. In this holy week, we can ask ourselves, how do we anoint the Lord’s feet and show him our love and gratitude? Her deed of love shows the extravagance of love, a love that we cannot outmatch. The Lord Jesus showed us the extravagance of his love by giving us the best he had by pouring out his own blood for our sake and by anointing us with his Holy Spirit. Joy is an infallible indication of God’s presence, just as the cross is an infallible indication of Christian discipleship. What a paradox! And Fr. Rolheiser writes that Jesus is the reason. We see, for example, in John’s Gospel account of Mary anointing Jesus’ feet at the banquet. All that lavishness, extravagance, and raw human affection is understandably unsettling for almost everyone in the room except for Jesus. He’s drinking it in, unapologetically, without dis-ease, without any guilt or neurosis: Leave her alone, he says, she has just anointed me for my impending death. In essence, Jesus is saying: When I come to die, I will be more ready because tonight, in receiving this lavish affection, I’m truly alive and hence more ready to die. In essence, this is the lesson for us: Don’t feel guilty about enjoying life’s pleasures. The best way to thank a gift-giver is to enjoy the gift thoroughly. Genuine enjoyment, as Jesus taught and embodied, is integrally tied to renunciation and self-sacrifice. And so, it’s only when we can give our lives away in self-renunciation that we can thoroughly enjoy the pleasures of this life, just as it is only when we can genuinely enjoy the legitimate pleasures of this life that we can give our lives away in self-sacrifice.

When Jesus entered Jerusalem for the last time in his life, it must have been difficult for him to be hailed as king with hosannas and palm branches when he knew that he was a marked man who would soon face a crowd clamoring for his crucifixion. Yet, as Jennifer Halling writes, he obediently fulfilled the words of the prophet Zechariah, “Say to daughter Zion, ‘Behold, your king comes to you, meek and riding on an ass, and on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden.’” In doing so, he both affirmed that he was God’s anointed one and demonstrated that, in God’s kingdom, the Messiah is not a warlike conqueror but a humble servant of the people. He chose to enter Jerusalem in this way to fulfill the Scriptures, thus reinforcing the faith of his disciples after his death and resurrection, and also to teach us something we humans desperately need to learn: that true power lies not in conquering our enemies and gaining status and wealth, but in aligning ourselves with the wisdom of God, which lies in humility, forgiveness, mercy, and self-emptying. As we enter Holy Week, we are all invited to gaze upon Jesus on Palm Sunday as he enters Jerusalem to great acclaim, on Holy Thursday as he washes the feet of his disciples, and on Good Friday as he enters into his passion and death on the cross. In the events of this week, as Maureen Conroy observes, “Jesus’ life and actions reveal the true nature of God’s power: not the love of power but the power to love is what matters. Jesus chooses utter defenselessness because of the outrageous love of God — to help us realize the depth of God’s love, to see, to open the locked doors of our hardened hearts. In Jesus, God’s heart empties completely and becomes powerless, vulnerable, and broken. In turn, our hearts must be hollowed out to receive the fullness of God’s vulnerable love.” What we will not see when we gaze at Jesus in the coming week, as Fr. Ronald Rolheiser notes, is any “bitterness, vengeance, loss of patience, or lack of graciousness. When the veil inside the temple is torn, when the side of Jesus is pierced, what we see, what flows out, is only forgiveness, patience, gentleness, understanding, and warm invitation.” Jesus offers his life, suffering, and resurrection to us in the coming week so that we might know the depth of God’s tremendous love as he knew it. As we gaze upon him, may we find the courage to follow his example by giving away our lives so that our hearts, too, will overflow with the inexpressible delight of God’s love as we live in trust and anticipate our own resurrection.

Since the Passover was the most solemn Jewish feast, the people used to arrive in Jerusalem some days in advance to prepare for it by washings, fasts, and offerings—practices established not by the Mosaic law but by popular piety; the rites of the Passover itself, with the sacrificing of the lamb, were a rite of purification and expiation for sins. The Passover of the Jews was a figure of the Christian Pasch or Easter, and as Saint Paul the Apostle teaches us, our paschal lamb is Christ who offered himself once and for all to the eternal Father to reconcile the world with the Father. As we approach Palm Sunday, Saint Peter Damian has a beautiful prayer that foreshadows the hope for a nation of believers in what our savior will endure for us. “When your soul goes forth from your body, may the radiant company of angles come to meet you, and may your judge, the senate of the apostles, release you; may Christ, who suffered for you, rescue you from punishment; may Christ who was crucified for your sake, free you from excruciating pain; may Christ, who humbled himself to die for you, free you from death; may Christ, the Son of the living God, set you in the evergreen loveliness of his paradise, and may he, the true Shepherd, recognize you as one of his own flock. may he free you from all your sins and assign you a place at his right hand in the company of his elect. May you see your Redeemer face to face, and standing in his presence forever, may you behold with blessed eyes Truth revealed in all its fullness. And so, having taken your place in the ranks of the saints, may you enjoy the sweetness of divine contemplation forever and ever. Amen.”

We often struggle with the immediacy of life. We are not trained to wait, to be patient. In fact, in this 24×7 world, we are often warned that by not being on top of everything and taking action quickly, we risk losing out on what life has to offer us. But what exactly is life offering you? How does whatever you feel life is handing out meet with what God has promised? Fr. Rolheiser writes that all of this rushing around in life impacts our ability to listen quietly for that “still small voice” of God. Inside each of us, there is a deep, congenital restlessness. We are not restful beings who sometimes get restless but restless beings who occasionally experience rest. We can distract ourselves for a while, be titillated by flashy toys, be soothed and lulled by sympathetic voices, and momentarily even be content in the absence of our real mother. But we begin to miss, in the very depths of our souls, the one voice and one presence that can ultimately bring us rest. We reach a point in life when there is an ache and a sadness inside us that no one can still and comfort other than the one who ultimately brought us to birth. Like the baby frustrated with its babysitter, we, too, need to hear our mother lovingly pronounce our names. What are we ultimately searching for? We will soon be reading about Mary Magdala and her meeting with the risen Lord. He approaches her and asks: “What are you searching for?” She explains that she is searching for the body of Jesus. He says just one word to her in response: “Mary.” He calls her by name, and she not only recognizes him but also hears precisely what a disconsolate baby cannot hear in the voice of her babysitter, the voice of the mother, lovingly pronouncing her name. What do we ache for? Ultimately, all our aching is for one thing: to hear God, lovingly and individually, call us by name. There comes a moment in the night for each of us when nothing will console us other than this: hearing our names pronounced by the mouth of God.

Throughout the Bible, God’s patience with His people is evident. Despite repeated disobedience, rebellion, and faithlessness, God continues to extend His grace and mercy. His patience is portrayed as a testament to His love for humanity and His desire for reconciliation rather than judgment. However, God’s patience should not be misunderstood as indifference towards sin. There are consequences for disobedience, as seen in various narratives throughout the Bible. Yet, even in moments of judgment, there is often a pathway for repentance and restoration, highlighting God’s enduring patience and desire for a relationship with His people. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes about the Italian spiritual writer Carlo Carretto, who, after spending more than 20 years in solitude as a monk in the Sahara desert, was asked what single thing he felt that he heard God most say to him inside of the long, deep silence. What, he was asked, do you hear God saying to the world? His answer: God is asking us to wait, to be patient! Why the need for such great patience?  Does God want to test us? Does God want to see if we indeed have a faith that is worthy of a great reward? No. God has no need to play such a game, and neither do we. It’s not that God wants to test our patience. The need for patience arises out of the rhythms innate within life itself and within love itself. They need to unfold, as do flowers and pregnancies, according to their own innate rhythms and within their own good time. They cannot be rushed, no matter how great our impatience or how great our discomfort. And neither can God be rushed because it is God’s timetable that protects us from perpetually stunting life and love by drawing them through the birth canal prematurely. Ultimately, the story of God’s covenants and His patience with His people is one of redemption and hope. It underscores the belief that God is faithful to His promises and steadfast in His love, inviting humanity into a deeper relationship with Him through faith and obedience.