Daily Virtue Scripture Readings

There can be no peace on the big stage of life when there is greed, jealousy, unwillingness to forgive, and unwillingness to compromise within our private hearts. When the outer body gets sick, it nearly always signals a breakdown in the internal immune system. Fr. Ron Rolheiser opens our reflection on waging peace in a world where someone could be pretty sure that there is not much in the way of antibodies (charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, faith, mildness, gentleness, and chastity) within the body of humanity, namely, within our private lives. When we cannot get along with each other within our marriages and families, we should not be surprised that countries do not get along with each other. There are many aspects to waging peace. The social justice literature of the past decades has given us a crucial insight that should never again be lost, namely, that private virtue and private charity, alone, are not enough. In the face of unjust systems and corrupt governments, Christians cannot get away with simply practicing private virtue and saying to their less fortunate neighbors: “I wish you well. (Stay warm and well-fed!) I’m a good and honest person, I did nothing to cause your suffering!” There are real social and political issues underlying war, poverty, oppression, and violence. Peace-making must address these. But there are real private, personal ones as well. Hence, waging peace requires more than simply confronting the powers that be. What must, ultimately, be confronted is our own greed, hurt, jealousy, inability to forgive, compromise, and respect. More than we need to convert bad systems, we need to convert ourselves. There is a story told about a Lutheran pastor, a Norwegian, who was arrested by the Gestapo during the Second World War. When he was brought into the interrogation room, the Gestapo officer placed his revolver on the table between them and said: “Father, this is just to let you know that we are serious!” The pastor, instinctually, pulled out his bible and laid it beside the revolver. The officer demanded: “Why did you do that?” The pastor replied: “You laid out your weapon – and so did I!” So, in waging peace we must keep in mind what our true weapons are and who the real enemy is. and saying to their less fortunate neighbors: “I wish you well. (Stay warm and well-fed!) I’m a good and honest person, I did nothing to cause your suffering!” There are real social and political issues underlying war, poverty, oppression, and violence. Peace-making must address these. But there are real private, personal ones as well. Hence, waging peace requires more than simply confronting the powers that be. What must, ultimately, be confronted is our own greed, hurt, jealousy, inability to forgive, compromise, and respect. More than we need to convert bad systems, we need to convert ourselves. There is a story told about a Lutheran pastor, a Norwegian, who was arrested by the Gestapo during the Second World War. When he was brought into the interrogation room, the Gestapo officer placed his revolver on the table between them and said: “Father, this is just to let you know that we are serious!” The pastor, instinctually, pulled out his bible and laid it beside the revolver. The officer demanded: “Why did you do that?” The pastor replied: “You laid out your weapon – and so did I!” So, in waging peace we must keep in mind what our true weapons are and who the real enemy is.

Dr. Catherine Kroeger, in her article titled, The Neglected History of Women in the Early Church, notes that women were the last disciples at the cross and the first at the empty tomb. She was captivated by their integral relationship to the work of the church in its early centuries. Below is an excerpt from her article.

“It is no surprise that women were active in the early church. From the very start—the birth, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus—women were significantly involved. In fact, women were the major witnesses of his crucifixion and resurrection. Matthew, Mark and Luke all record that a significant group of women had followed Jesus in his Galilean ministry, and that they were present at his execution—when the male disciples were conspicuously absent. All three describe the women’s presence at Jesus’ burial. Luke declares that the women who had followed Jesus from Galilee still followed along as Christ was carried to the tomb. Mark details the care with which Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses, brother of James the younger, noted where He was laid, while Matthew tells how they kept watch over the sepulcher after the men had left. John tells of the group immediately beneath the cross, three women and one man. John alone preserves the garden interview between Mary Magdalene and the Risen Christ. The early church considered Mary Magdalene an ‘apostle to the apostles,’ and Luke relied heavily on the testimony of women as he wrote both Luke and Acts. The involvement of women continued in the first few decades of the church, attested by both biblical and extra-biblical sources. A number of women served as leaders of the house churches that sprang up in the cities of the Roman Empire—the list includes Priscilla, Chloe, Lydia, Apphia, Nympha, the mother of John Mark, and possibly the ‘elect lady’ of John’s second epistle. The walls of the Roman catacombs bear pictures showing women standing in prayer, exercising a ministry of intercession and benediction, and dominating the scene. To this day, their steadfast faith and ministry still bless us.”

In the gospel reading from Luke, Jesus is at supper at a Pharisee’s home when a “sinful woman” washes and anoints Jesus’ feet. The Pharisee sees this display and wonders how Jesus could allow this to happen. Marylynn Herchline of Ite Missa Est writes that his self-righteous attitude prevents him from seeing this woman as anything but broken and unlovable. The Pharisee seems to illustrate our human tendency to judge others. This self-righteousness prevents us from seeing our own brokenness and need for help. Without this awareness, we are unable to be healed.  A recent homily from Bishop Robert Barron reminded me about the 12-step program. The first steps in the program require the admission of helplessness and the necessity of relying on a “higher power” to be healed.  Our spiritual healing and salvation require this same surrender. If we are unable to humbly admit our need for mercy, then in some ways, we close off the ability to receive God’s grace. The woman in today’s reading readily identifies the need for forgiveness, and her ability to be open provides her the opportunity for grace that brings healing and redemption.  Jesus tells her, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”  We need God’s grace to find peace, love, and salvation, but God does not force this on us. God patiently waits for us to say, “I need your help!” I believe that Jesus loves both the Pharisee and the woman who anoints his feet.  However, the difference in the love that the woman shows to Jesus and the Pharisee’s reception of Jesus at his home is remarkable. She is overflowing with love and gratitude because she has experienced God’s love, acceptance, and mercy. Her humility and faith opens the door for this conversion to occur. Jesus invites us to this same transformation.  Similar to the beginning of the 12-step process, we need to understand that we are unable to fix ourselves, and we must rely on the goodness of our God to provide what we need. This faith in God allows us to receive great mercy, which then opens us to the many graces of living in Christ.

God’s love, as related by Jacques Maritain in his book, Raissa’s Journal, is sweet only to those who are already saints and to those who do not know what they are talking about. Fr. Rolheiser writes that this is true not just of God’s love, but of all love. Love isn’t easy, except in our daydreams. The older we get, the more we sense what love actually demands. I wonder sometimes whether I, or almost anyone else, have much sense of what that over-used word, love, really means. When we are honest, we sense our own distance from its full meaning. We too easily read Jesus’ most important commandment: “Love one another as I have loved you!” We read this command simplistically, romantically, and in a one-sided, over-confident manner. Like the deepest part of the gospel to which it is linked, the crucifixion, it is very, very difficult to imitate. Why? It’s one thing to love someone who adores you, it’s quite another to love someone who wants you dead! But that’s the real test. Jesus’ command to love contains a critical subordinate clause, “as I have loved you!” What was unique in the way he loved us? Where Jesus stretches us beyond our natural instincts and all self-delusion is in his command to love our enemies, to be warm to those who are cold to us, to be kind to those who are cruel to us, to do good to those who hate us, to forgive those who hurt us, to forgive those who won’t forgive us, and to ultimately love and forgive those who are trying to kill us. The gospel is uncompromising: We are loving or non-loving not based on how we respond to those who love us but based on how we respond to those who hate us and are cold, hostile, and murderous toward us. That’s the hard, non-negotiable truth underlying Jesus’ command to love and, when we are honest, we must admit that we are still a long way from measuring up to that. What shatters our illusion of love is the presence in our lives of people who hate us. They’re the test. It’s here where we have to measure up: If we can love them, we’re real lovers, if we can’t, we’re still under a self-serving illusion.

Christ is a mystery that includes us, Jesus’ followers on earth, the sacraments, the Word (Scripture), and the Church. Scripture is clear: We are the Body of Christ on earth. We don’t represent Christ, replace Christ, or are some vague mystical presence of Christ. We are the Body of Christ, as too are the Eucharist and the Word (the Christian scriptures). Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that part of the wonder of the incarnation is the astonishing fact that we can do for each other what Jesus did for us. Jesus gives us that power. To be touched, loved, and forgiven by a member of the body of believers is to be touched, loved, and forgiven by Christ. Hell is possible only when someone has put himself entirely out of the range of love and forgiveness to render himself incapable of being loved and forgiven. This is not so much a question of rejecting explicit religious or moral teaching as it is of rejecting love as it is offered among the community of the sincere. In a parable, G.K. Chesterton once expressed this: “A man who was entirely careless of spiritual affairs died and went to hell. And he was much missed on earth by his old friends. His business agent went down to the gates of hell to see if there was any chance of bringing him back. But though he pleaded for the gates to be opened, the iron bars never yielded. His priest also went and argued: ‘He was not really a bad fellow; given time he would have matured. Let him out, please!’ The gate remained stubbornly shut against all their voices. Finally, his mother came; she did not beg for his release. Quietly and with a strange catch in her voice, she said to Satan: ‘Let me in.’ Immediately, the great doors swung open upon their hinges. For love goes down through the gates of hell, and there redeems the dead.” In the incarnation, God takes on human flesh: in Jesus, the Eucharist, and all who are sincere in faith. The incredible power and mercy that came into our world in Jesus is still with us, at least if we choose to activate it. We are the Body of Christ. What Jesus did for us, we can do for each other. Our love and forgiveness are the cords that connect our loved ones to God, salvation, and the community of saints, even when they are no longer walking the path of explicit faith.

What does the centurion mean when he says, “I am not worthy,” and how does that speak to how God sees that all he created was good? Fr. Mike Schmitz writes that the Church has always taught the universal goodness of the universe and human dignity. Where does “our” goodness come from? The Church teaches that all of our goodness comes from God. Not some of it, but all of it. God is the source of everything that is good in us. I cannot overemphasize this point. If we start claiming dignity or worth as our own apart from God, we wander into a very dangerous trap. When we repeat the phrase “I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof,” we are not speaking of our worth in relation to other human beings. We are talking about our worth in comparison to God himself. Because all of our goodness comes from God, human dignity is something we can scarcely imagine. But this does not make us even close to becoming equals with God. We are not talking about being worthy of just and honorable treatment by another human being, being worthy of respect and equality in the community in which we live, or being worthy of the love of the people around us. We are talking about whether we believe God “owed it to us” that we deserved that he should die for us. We are talking about whether we deserved that God “emptied himself and took the form of a slave … [and] obediently accepted … death on a cross!” We are dangerously close to asserting that we are so worthy that the Lord of the Universe ought to humble himself to the point of becoming our food. I am not worthy of that. God is so good, however, that he offers me this. Remember, pride is still the deadliest of the deadly sins. And pride that is simply dressed up as “self-worth” remains deadly. Compared with God, I am not worthy, yet his goodness desires to bridge the gap between his worthiness and our unworthiness, which is why we continue, “but only say the word, and my soul shall be healed.”

Why do we have this driven need to leave our mark on life? Why can’t we more easily embrace each other as sisters and brothers and rejoice in each other’s gifts and existence? Why the perennial feeling that the other is a rival? Why the need for masks, for pretense, to project a certain image about ourselves? Fr. Ron Rolheiser suggests the answer: We do all of these things to try to set ourselves apart because we are trying to give ourselves something that only God can provide us with – significance and immortality. Scripture tells us that “faith alone saves.” That simple line reveals the secret: Only God gives eternal life. Preciousness, meaning, significance, and immortality are free gifts from God, and we would be much more restful, peaceful, humble, grateful, happy, and less competitive if we could believe that. A humble, ordinary life, shared with billions of others, would then contain enough to give us a sense of our preciousness, meaning, and significance. Today’s reading from James speaks to another aspect of faith. A well-meaning Christian once asked the famed psychologist Fritz Perls if he was saved. He responded by saying, “I am still trying to figure out how to be spent!” St. Theresa of Avila suggests that we’re mature in following Christ if our questions and concerns no longer have a self-focus: Am I saved? Have I met Jesus Christ? Do I love Jesus enough? These questions remain valid, but they’re not meant to be our primary focus. Our real question needs to be: How can I be helpful? A non-negotiable part of meeting Jesus means being sent out and not alone on some private spiritual quest or individualized ministry. It means being called into community, into a church, and then sent out with others to walk inside of mess and failure, misunderstanding and crucifixion, confusion and tiredness, darkness, and God’s seeming silence, and wondering sometimes if you will indeed find a stone upon which to lay your head. Simply put, we show our love for God and our intimacy with Jesus by laying down our lives for our neighbor. Christian discipleship is never only about Jesus and me, even as it is always still about Jesus and me. Our life is not about us; it’s about others and God. That’s the path of agape, the path of ultimate love that Jesus showed us.

Today, in union with the whole Church, we celebrate the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. The cross is central to our faith as followers of Jesus. It is through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus that we are saved and forgiven. It is through his suffering death on the cross and his rising to new life that we are given the gift and promise of everlasting life. There is no Easter Sunday without Good Friday – there is no Resurrection without Jesus dying on the cross. Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that what the cross of Christ reveals is that when we are so paralyzed by fear and overcome by darkness that we can no longer help ourselves, when we have reached the stage where we can no longer open the door to let light and life in, God can still come through our locked doors, stand inside our fear and paralysis, and breathe out peace. The love that is revealed in Jesus’ suffering and death, a love that is so other-centered that it can fully forgive and embrace its executioners, can precisely pass through locked doors, melt frozen hearts, penetrate the walls of fear, and descend into our private hells and, there, breathe out peace. Brother Michael Moore writes that this wonderful feast is not meant to glorify or celebrate suffering or pain. When we think of the cross, our first thoughts may be uncomfortable or even negative. Over the centuries many great artists have tried to capture the reality of the crucifixion. Some of these paintings, amazing though they are, graphically show the pain that Jesus endured when he was crucified. They are not easy to look at. However, at the heart cross, we can see the fullness of life and love so profound that no darkness can overcome or defeat it. Through the cross of Jesus, God says to each of us, “I love you with an everlasting love, I call you by your name you are mine, do not be afraid”. 

Jesus took the twelve apostles to one of the northernmost places he had ever ventured, Caesarea Philippi, which was a hub for the worship of false gods. Jesus had taken His followers to the epicenter of enemy territory. Jesus asked them, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” That was easy. The disciples shared the gossip. But then, Jesus got personal: “Who do you say that I am?” Peter, by this time, had become the de facto spokesman for the apostles. Peter spoke up: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God!” Sometimes I try to imagine the gravity of that moment. Jesus had not been so pointed in His questioning of his disciples before this. Jesus was more than just a good teacher. He was, in fact, God in the flesh who had come as a man to fulfill His two-fold mission. The first part of that mission that only he would complete was to make redemption available to all people. The second part of His mission was to make disciples who would make disciples and begin a movement that would change the world. When Peter spoke those words, Jesus was confident that these twelve followers were now ready to move to the final phase of their training: following Jesus wherever he led, to the point that their lives looked like his. And that is our calling today, each in their own way, to be the light and love of Christ to a very disordered world.

In today’s reflection verse from the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells us: “The measure you measure out is the measure you will be given.” Another way of putting this is “the air you breathe out is the air you will re-inhale.” If that’s true, Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes that it would explain many things, though not necessarily to our liking. Fr. Rolheiser says we are perennially caught up in pettiness, jealousy, and a lack of forgiveness. Why are we inhaling so much bitter air? Perhaps it has to do with the air we’re breathing out. What are we breathing out? Mary Jo Leddy, in her excellent book “Radical Gratitude,” claims that one of the great principles innate within reality itself is this: “The air you breathe into the universe is the air that it will breathe back, and if your energy is right, it will renew itself even as you give it away.” We’d like, of course, to think that we’re breathing out the air of gratitude, generosity, forgiveness, honesty, blessing, self-effacement, joy, and delight. We’d also like to believe that we are breathing out the air of concern for the poor, the suffering, the unattractive, the bothersome. And, we’d like to think too that we’re big-hearted people, breathing out understanding and reconciliation. Would it be nice if that was the true reality of our lives? The real air we’re breathing out is fraught with self-interest, jealousy, competitiveness, pettiness, fear, and less-than-full honesty. And Jesus takes this even further when he adds: “To those who have much, even more, will be given; and from those who have little, even what they have will be taken away.” That sounds so unfair; the innate cruelty of nature and the survival of the fittest applied to the gospels. But Jesus is only challenging the reality of our humanness and inability to be true love, agape love to others. To the big of heart, who breathe out what’s large and honest and full of blessing, the world will return a hundredfold in kind, honesty and blessing that swells the heart even more. Conversely to the miserly of heart and dishonesty of spirit, the world will give back too in kind, pettiness, and lies that shrink the heart still further. That’s the deep mystery at the center of the universe: The air we breathe out into the world is the air we will re-inhale.