Category Archives: Passion of Christ

A More Perfect World?

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One of the go-to arguments against the existence of God is the presence of evil in the world.  The atheistic interlocutor looks at the world, sees evil and concludes that there is no God.  Such a conclusion rests upon a primary assumption, namely that he can conceive of a more perfect world, a world without suffering.  Therefore either God is a cold-blooded tyrant or He does not exist.  Given how often such an argument is given, we must be prepared to meet it, but not in the usual way.  Too often theists respond to the conclusions rather than the assumption.  In this essay we will challenge the notion that God could have made a more perfect world.  Can we really conceive of a world in which there is no evil and, if so, then would that world be more perfect than this one? 

To conceive of a world with no evil, at least on the surface seems relatively simple.  But we must be prepared to admit that the world would be vastly different than our own.  Not just in that it lacked evil, but that its physical properties (if it could have any at all) would be vastly different than are own. 

The Argument of the Head

Evil, properly conceived, is a lack of a good that should otherwise be there.  In a physical world of many physical beings the avoidance of at least some physical evils is an impossibility.  This topic is treated more fully in another essay, but the gist of the issue is that material things are by definition limited things and this limitation combined with a desire for self-preservation means that there will always be a lack in some creatures.  There is a single piece of bread and two people.  At least one of them (or possibly both if they split it) will experience the evil of hunger.  It is pointless to argue that the world could have an unlimited amount of bread because that will result in the evil of something else being lacking.  A physical world will always experience some lack and therefore some evil.

In a material world, one being’s good can be another being’s evil.  Not all relationships can be symbiotic.  The man who is hungry will experience the evil of thorn pricks from the bush that grows them in order to protect its berries from being plucked.  The virus that causes the flu will embed itself in a host and replicate for its own good but the host will experience sickness.

Usually the objection to the evil in the world is related to moral evils, that is, the evils we bring upon ourselves and inflict upon others.  The man who overeats will experience the evil of heart disease and the man who, in protecting his family from an intruder, will experience the evil of being stabbed.  These moral evils may results from the free will responses to physical evils (looters who raid stores after a storm for example) or strictly out of malice.  Either way, they are the result of the free will of someone.

A good God may give the power to use free will, which is good.  But the creatures that have the power may come in conflict with each other in how they use it.  God gave the power and is in a certain sense the cause of power in the action, but He is not the cause of the action itself.  A man who sells a gun to another is responsible for the man having the gun, but this does not mean He is responsible for how it is used.

While we cannot imagine a material world with no physical evils, we might imagine one in which there are no moral evils.  But this would result ultimately in the loss of free will.  A world in which all the goods are limited always carries with it the possibility of misapprehending and misusing those goods.  God could intervene each time someone tried to do something evil, but this would make free will conditioned and thus not totally free.

Our interlocutor would now be hard pressed to imagine a physical world that includes beings with free will in it that does not also include the presence of some evil.  Even if he can come up with one, he cannot prove it that it is more perfect than our own because perfect implies some knowledge of purpose.  Just as you cannot speak of a more perfect pair of shoes until you know what shoes are for, so you cannot speak of a world that is more perfect than our own until you know what the world’s purpose is.  In fact when we begin to examine the world’s purpose, we find that it is perfectly fitting that it contains evil

To say that the world has a purpose is really to say that the world is not an end but a means.  A perfect world would be one in which it prepares its inhabitants for the Real World that is to follow.  It must be a world that mirrors the goodness of the Real World just enough to invoke desire in its inhabitants, but not so much that they feel completely at home in it.  The Real World is one of an eternal communion of self-giving love.  This world must be a training ground that makes that self-giving love possible.  The limited nature of the physical world such as it is makes it possible for this self-giving love, but not without a willingness to suffer some lack for the sake of the beloved.   This willingness must mean that there are actual evils present in the world, even if not all love leads to also suffering from those evils.

The Argument of the Heart

What has been offered to this point is an argument of the head.  A mere “theistic” response is not adequate and only a Christian explanation will do.  God desired to make an “argument of the heart” in order to drive this point home.  This “argument of the heart” is the Passion and Death of Our Lord.  To show the path to the Real World, God Himself stepped into ours in order to show us the way.  He experience evil firsthand and used that suffering illuminating a path through this world marked by suffering.  

With the Passion and death of Christ suffering becomes a necessary component of the escape plan into the Real World.  In our suffering, we, in both a metaphorical and real sense, share in Christ’s suffering.  His suffering was entirely voluntary so that when we suffer, even involuntarily, it signals to us the depth of the love He has for us.  Without suffering we would not know what it was like for Him and would never grasp His great love.  Not only that, but He Who is the one in which all times are present, is really suffering with us.  The Passion is not just a past event but a current event for Him so that He (re)lives it in our very suffering.  He is the Lamb in the Real World that still walks about as though slain (c.f. Rev 5:6). 

The only acceptable answer to the problem of Evil for a Christian is Christ.  The impassible and unchanging God in exercising His omnipotence and omnibenevolence came into our world and suffered with and for us.  He spoke not just to our heads but to our hearts telling us the depth of His desire to share His life with His creatures.  This argument of the heart is at the very core of what it means to live Lent intentionally.  It is the time of reflecting on Christ’s Passion and coming to a greater knowledge of the truth of the nature of the Real World.

Praying with Christ

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At various points along the Christian journey, believers must confront questions related to the true identity of Jesus Christ.  Those who persevere and grow, learn to plow through them one by one and in so doing, more deeply discover the personality of the Incarnate Son of God.  Among these questions there is one that is particularly illuminating, especially because it deals with something that has very practical implications for our own spiritual life.  Articulated in various forms, the question goes something like this: “If Jesus was God, then why did He pray?”

The question of the identity of Jesus is not just something that plagues the neophyte, but it was also a question that the Early Church had to face head on.  Although worked out over centuries, we can summarize their findings by articulating a single principle—the distinction between person and nature. 

The Person/Nature Distinction

In his encounter with individual objects in the world, man is confronted with a powerful question: “what is this?”  The answer as to the thing’s what-ness is its nature.  But a nature determines not just what a thing is, but what a thing can do.  A bird can fly because it has a bird nature, an elephant, because it has an elephant nature cannot.  Man can pray because he has a human nature, but a mantis’ nature limits him to merely posturing. 

When the object of one’s inquiry is also a subject, this innate tendency gives rise to a second question: “who is this?”  No longer concerned with the fact that the object has a human nature, the interlocutor turns their gaze to the person himself.  The human nature may determine what the person can do, but it is always the person who performs the action.  The nature, in a very real sense, limits what the person can do.

When we extend the person/nature distinction to the Incarnation, it is especially helpful in addressing our initial question.  The Divine Son, the Word Incarnate is a Person, but He is a Person Who has two natures or two modes of operation.  At any given time we can observe Him using one of those two natures.  He can change bread and wine into His Body and Blood using His Divine Nature, but He can pray using His human nature.  But in either case, it is always the same Divine Person who performs the action.  He simply has two modes of operation.  This is theologically referred to a the Hypostatic Union.

Christ then prayed using His human nature and not His divine.  He prayed as Man and not as God.  And Christ’s prayer, because it is the prayer of a Divine Person, is one of the means that He Providentially determined would be the cause of certain graces to flow into the world.  And in that way His prayer was always effective.  Two examples from His Passion are particularly instructive in this regard.

Two Dominical Examples

The first example of Christ praying shows us something that we naturally intuit.  If Christ prays as man and nevertheless it is God Himself who utters the words, then we should expect His prayer to do something.   During the Last Supper He tells Peter that “Satan has demanded to sift you like wheat.  But I have prayed for you that your faith will not fail so that when you have turned back you will strengthen your brothers” (Lk 22:32).  It is Our Lord’s prayer, expressed in an absolute manner, that is the cause of Peter’s repentance. 

The second Example shows us something deeper that if we are not diligent we might miss.  In the Garden of Gethsemane we find Christ, again in His human nature, praying that the cup be removed from Him only if it be in accord with the Divine will.  In so doing, Christ is praying in a conditional manner as far as the direct outcome is concerned.  But His prayer is always effective so that it accomplishes something, namely that those who are united to Him through faith and charity be awarded the graces for us to pray boldly and to endure those moments when prayer is not answered according to our will but the will of the Father. 

What this shows us is not just that Christ’s prayer was infallibly effective, but that our prayer is really just a participation in His prayer.  Every grace that we are given through our prayer was first merited by Christ in His.  Because He is God, He saw every instance of our prayer, all of our intentions, spoken and not, when He prayed.  It was in His moments of prayer that He won the necessary graces for us.  It remains for us to simply enter into His prayer with Him and receive what He intended to give us when He invited us in to begin with.

St. Cyril once said, “that which was not assumed, was not redeemed.” What he meant by this is that Christ took to Himself a true human nature with all its needs and redeemed every aspect of our nature. This includes our prayer. Christ prayed so that our prayer was efficacious. This union of Christ’s prayer with our own helps us to understand exactly what we mean when we pray “through Christ Our Lord.”  Our prayer insofar as it is genuine is always through His prayer.  He lives forever to intercede for us because time and eternity have met in the Incarnation.

Most of us are moved deeply by the Gospel accounts of Christ praying even if we are not able to articulate why.  If we merely see it as an example, which of course it is, then we will miss the invitation.  Christ’s prayer is an invitation for all of us to come and pray with Him.  He may have gone off alone to pray, but each one of us was there with Him. 

The Divine Quadrilemma

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The greatest heresy in the history of the Church was the Arian heresy.  At one point during the Fifth Century, nearly 3/4 of the world’s bishops were Arian.  Arius posited that Jesus was not truly God but instead the greatest of God’s creatures.  The popularity of this heresy was due to the fact that it would enable Christianity to be palatable to both Pagans and Gnostics alike.  By denying the equality of the Father and the Son, Christianity would take a decidedly Pagan turn.  This is what made this particular heresy such a threat—it made Christianity more palatable to Pagans and could be a source of unity throughout the recently Christianized Roman Empire.  This blending of Christianity was, of course, rejected by the Council of Nicaea with St. Athanasius leading the charge.  It took a long time for the Nicene effect to be felt throughout the Church, but eventually the Arian Heresy was squashed.  Unfortunately, heresies never wholly die, but are reincarnated in different forms such that we have seen a revival of the errors of Arius in our own day.  This time it comes in the form of a religious eclecticism that attempts to blend all religions together.

In our day there are any number of people who say, “there are many paths up the mountain, but the view is the same at the top of the mountain.”  They present the metaphor usually as a defense of blending religions or choosing a religion that best suits them (as opposed to one that is true).  This religious indifferentism is really a substitution of spirituality for religion.  Spirituality is about self-fulfillment whereas religion is about a relationship with God.  But it is problematic for a more fundamental reason, one that is easily uncovered once we drop the metaphor and actually compare religions. 

To insist that they lead up the same mountain while simultaneously contradicting each other makes this hard to believe.  One says Jesus is God, another that He was a prophet, another that He is the brother of Lucifer, another that we are all gods, and another that says everything is God.  While it may be convenient to use the “same mountain” metaphor, the truth is that there is no way that Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Pantheism can be reconciled.  Depending on which you believe you will end up with vastly different conclusions.  They are not different paths on the same mountain, but different mountains all together.  

It may be possible to blend some religions together, but Christianity does not lend itself to any blending whatsoever.  This is because Jesus, in His infinite wisdom, has forced us all to take a stand.  Unlike any other religion, He made the claim to be God Incarnate.  That means that you must either accept that claim as true and relate to Him as absolute Lord or you must treat Him as a crazy, lying cult leader and dismiss everything He said.  If it is the latter, then to say that you like His teachings, that is to label Him as merely a human teacher, is not really an option.

The Quadrilemma

Those familiar with CS Lewis’ Christological trilemma will recognize this as a version of it.  Lewis said that you must treat Jesus as either lunatic, liar or Lord.  Those are the only three options.  You cannot treat Him as a merely human teacher however.  You either submit wholly to Him or you run as far away from His teachings as possible, even if some of them are actually helpful.  Lewis’ trilemma however is not impenetrable because, thanks to “biblical scholars” in our own time, there is now a fourth option that many people are choosing.  They claim that Jesus never actually said He was God.  And in this way, we see how the Arian heresy is coming back into play.

When we focus on whether Jesus actually said He was God (as opposed to whether or not that is true) we move from the realm of faith to that of history.  In other words, this is an attack on the historical reliability of the Gospels.  As an internal witness, the Bible is quite clear that Jesus made Divine claims.  But in order to grasp this, we must first take a necessary tangent in order to examine how He might say it.

The Internal Evidence

If the Incarnation were to have happened in our day and age you might expect Him to say (in English) “I am God.”  But if we look at the translations of the gospels we have today, we do not find such a direct statement, nor should we expect to.  We should expect that Jesus would say it the way a first Century Jew might.  Our Lord’s moments of self-revelation always invoke the Old Testament name for God, the same name He gave Moses and that the Jews treated as unutterable (YHWH).

In Greek, the language of the gospels, the Name is translated as egō eimi or “I am”.  This phrase is used in a number of places, but any time it is used in an absolute sense without any predicate, it refers to the Divine name.   The most obvious examples occur within John’s Gospel where we find he uttering things like: “unless you come to believe that I AM, you will surely die in your sins” (Jn 8:24).  Likewise, when the soldiers come to arrest Jesus in the Garden and announce it is Jesus they are seeking, He answers egō eimi.   In the ordinary sense it simply means “I am he” letting them know they have found who they were looking for.  However, those who hear this response fall to the ground suggesting that they are party to a theophany.

John’s Gospel, written later in the first Century, has a distinctive emphasis on the divinity of Christ because it was, according to Irenaeus, meant to counter some of the early Christological heresies that had arisen (Against Heresies, Book 3, Ch11).  But he is most certainly not the only one who uses this Jewish formulation for identifying Jesus as divine.  These references are found throughout the Synoptic Gospels as well.  First, there is the fact that only one reason is given for His crucifixion—blasphemy.  When on trial before the Sanhedrin, the High Priest asked Him:

“Are you the Messiah, the son of the Blessed One?”  Then Jesus answered, “I AM”; and “you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power and coming with the clouds of heaven.”  At that the high priest tore his garments and said, “What further need have we of witnesses?  You have heard the blasphemy. What do you think?” They all condemned him as deserving to die.”

(Mk 14:55-64, c.f. Mt 26:59-66, Lk 22:66-71)

Notice that Jesus invokes the Divine Name and equates Himself with God by prophesying that He will sit at God’s right hand.  Likewise, He is also accused of blasphemy for setting Himself equal to God when He forgives sins (c.f. Mk 2:6-7, Mt 9:3).

Perhaps His clearest revelation comes in the form of a question to the Pharisees about whose son the Messiah will be.  They tell Him David, which He does not deny but He shakes their limited understanding by quoting from Psalm 110: “The Lord said to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I place your enemies under your feet’? If David calls him ‘lord,’ how can he be his son?” (Mt 22:44-45, c.f. Mk 12:35–37; Lk 20:41–44)    By referring to the Messiah as both pre-existing David and David’s LORD, He is admitting to being God Incarnate.

The External Evidence

Those who challenge that Jesus said that He was God often overlook the fact that we have external evidence as well.  They try to attack the timing and historical accuracy of the Bible but forget that we have writings of the Apostolic Fathers that confirm what has been said has been received as such.  These writings show that Christ’s divinity was not something added later on but was understood to be true directly out of the hands of the Apostles.  There are numerous quotations that could be shared, but a few should suffice to show that the gospels are historically reliable.  First there is Ignatius of Antioch, a disciple of John who was likely ordained by Peter who said, “For our God, Jesus Christ, was conceived by Mary in accord with God’s plan: of the seed of David, it is true, but also of the Holy Spirit” (St. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Ephesians 18:2).  There is also the aforementioned St. Irenaeus, the disciple of St. Polycarp who was a disciple of John who said “…He indicates in clear terms that He is God, and that His advent was in Bethlehem…” (AH, Book 3, Chapter 20). Finally we have Pliny the Younger, a Roman Governor, describing Christians as “singing hymns to Christ as to a god” in a letter to the Emperor Trajan.

Given both the internal and external evidence, we must conclude that Jesus did make the claim that He was God.  This, of course, doesn’t prove that He was, but it does render our potential quadrilemma as a trilemma.  Christianity cannot be mixed with other religions because of the unique demands Jesus makes upon His followers.  He is either Lord or Liar, but you must choose one or the other.

Co-Redemptrix?

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On the Feast of the Annunciation in 1945, a secretary from Amsterdam, Holland named Ida Peerdeman was visited with an apparition from heaven.  The visits from a woman who would identify herself as Our Lady of All Nations would continue for the next fifteen years for a total of 57 times.  It took nearly 50 years, but the apparition was deemed to be “of a supernatural origin” by Bishop Jozef Marianus Punt of Haarlem in 2002.  Although still awaiting official Vatican approval, the apparition of Our Lady of All Nations is remarkable for the content of its messages, one of which had a very specific request.   On July 2, 1951, the visionary was told “Now, look and listen. What I am going to say is an explanation of the new dogma. … From my Lord and Master, the Redeemer received his divinity. In this way the Lady became Co-Redemptrix by the will of the Father. It was necessary to begin with the dogma of the Assumption. Then the last and greatest would follow. … Tell that to your theologians. I do not come to bring any new doctrine. The doctrine already exists. Say this to your theologians: ‘Already, from the beginning, she was Co-Redemptrix.’”  The apparition had requested that the Church declare a fifth Marian dogma, Mary the Co-Redemptrix. 

Whether the apparition receives formal approval or not is still to be seen.  But it cannot be doubted that it remains controversial because of the request for the formal definition of what has become a highly controverted dogma.  At first glance it seems that declaring Mary as the co-Redemptrix takes Marian devotion too far.  There is only one Redeemer and it is Christ Himself.  His Mother may have assisted in this, but to give her such a lofty title verges on heresy.  Admittedly the title, especially in English, does suffer from a linguistical defect.  The prefix “co” in its common usage connotes an equality in the parties.  But it is meant to be a translation of the Latin term cum which means “with”.  So, when we speak of Mary as co-Redemptrix, it is meant to indicate that she is “with the Redeemer” playing an indispensable role in His salvific office.  It should not be viewed as competitive but cooperative.  Jesus Christ is the sole Redeemer of mankind.  If the doctrine of Co-Redemptrix is true, then it must be based on a more nuanced understanding.

Scripture and Co-Redemption

From the outset we must admit that in a certain sense that there are other “co-redeemers” found in Sacred Scripture.  God Himself speaks of Abraham as a co-Redeemer when, through his obedient “yes”, God promises to “bless all the nations of the earth” (Gn 22:17-18, c.f. Romans 4:16-25 where the promise is guaranteed to all who share the faith of Abraham).  Likewise, St. Paul speaks of laboring so that he might “save some by any means” (1 Cor 9:22).  We could cite other examples, but the point is that Scripture is replete with examples of men and women who freely cooperate with God in being instruments of redemption.  This cooperation is always a participation in God’s act of redemption.  It does not diminish the power of God’s redemptive work, but instead magnifies it.  It is one thing to do an activity by your own power, it is quite another, and more praiseworthy, to elevate others to work with you.

Turning to Mary herself, we see her serving as a co-Redemptrix to John the Baptist.  It is the presence of the embryonic Christ child, coupled with the sound of His Mother’s voice that sanctifies St. John the Baptist (c.f. Lk 1:39-45) within his mother’s womb.   This might lead one to think that she is just like Abraham and St. Paul, except for the promise of Genesis 3:15.  When God promises a Redeemer to Adam and Eve, He also promises the “woman” who would be instrumental in crushing the head of the Serpent.  The Woman and her seed would be linked in a single mission.  The seed would be the New Adam, Christ, and the Woman, would be the New Eve, “a helpmate fitting for Him”, Mary.  Summarizing, Pius IX in his Apostolic Constitution declaring the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, said that “God, by one and the same decree, had established the origin of Mary and the Incarnation of Divine Wisdom.”  Mary is, as the Second Vatican Council said, “inseparably linked to her Son’s saving work.”

If Abraham and St. Paul are co-redeemers through participation, then likewise is Mary.  But with Mary her participation is not just a difference in degree, but in kind.  She did not just co-operate with the Redeemer but cooperated in a necessary way.  She does not participate in the work of redemption in some remote way, but directly.  When God set in motion His plan of redemption He made it so that it depended upon her.  She is the only “necessary” co-operator because the body He was to offer, was given to Him by her.  Not only at the Annunciation and the Visitation, but throughout the whole course of His redemptive work, He made it depend upon her.  It was she who offered Him to the Father in the Presentation where His suffering was linked to hers, but also on Calvary.  As Pius XII put it in Mystici Coroporis Christi, “[I]t was she, the second Eve, who, free from all sin, original or personal, and always more intimately united with her Son, offered Him on Golgotha to the Eternal Father for all the children of Adam, sin-stained by his unhappy fall, and her mother’s rights and her mother’s love were included in the holocaust.”

To summarize we would say that the title Mary, co-Redemptrix, is meant to acknowledge that it is through Mary’s continual “yes” that Christ redeemed the world.  She did not redeem the world, but participated in an entirely unique and essential manner in Christ redeeming the world.  That being said, why does it matter whether we define a fifth Marian dogma or not? 

Why it Matters

First, it is a matter of justice, specifically justice towards God in the virtue of religion that we offer fitting honor and praise for the works of God.  If God really did elevate a creature to share in such an intimate way in His redemptive work, then we owe it to Him to acknowledge and glorify Him in this work.  So too with Our Lady.  If she really did play an indispensable role in each of our salvation then the debt of gratitude can be repaid by invoking her under that title.

There is a second, more practical reason as well.  This has been pointed out by many others, including theologian Josef Seifert, but it bears repeating here as well.  The weeds of Protestantism often creep into the Garden of the Church.  Specifically, the Protestant belief in salvation by grace is often professed by many Catholics.  We are saved by grace, but not without our cooperation and the cooperation of other members of the Mystical Body.  “God will not save us, without us” as Augustine said.  We are not saved by our own actions, but those actions initiated in us by grace.  We must still cooperate with them.  This free cooperation in salvation has as its greatest example in Mary, co-Redemptrix.  To define this as dogma would serve to reassert was has become a forgotten belief within the Church.

Before closing, there is one other aspect that merits mention.  Some object for ecumenical reasons thinking that the term co-Redemptrix is just too strong and confusing a term.  Perhaps they have a point and we need to be wedded specifically to that term (although the apparition did use that term specifically).  Provided the term reflects the entirely unique role Mary played and plays in redemption then there might be a more ecumenically sensitive term that could be used.  But this is a double-edged sword.  In Christian-Jewish relations this term would have some traction because it shows the Jews themselves, through both the Patriarchs and the Jewish girl Mary, as co-Redeemers.

The Remedy for Desolation

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The first time that God spoke from a mountain, He gave the Ten Words (Decalogue) to His people through the mouth of Moses.  The last time He spoke from a mountain, it was the Mount of Calvary seated on the pulpit of the Cross.  This time, God Incarnate spoke only seven words, each of which represent the last will and testament to His people.  Each of the seven words, spoken by the Eternal Son, has both a timelessness and a timeliness about it.  But there is one in particular, the one packed right in the middle of the seven—“My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”—that bears a special focus in our day and age.  For it is in this word that we find the summation of Christ’s Passion.

The return of pagan thought, supplemented by scientism, has born witness to a reemergence of many of the early Christological heresies.  This is, perhaps, put on display in no clearer manner than when the modern theologians try to explain point number four in Our Lord’s great Sermon.  Whether it be the neo-Docetists who say that the Son really didn’t suffer or the Calvinists who claim that Christ suffering was so intense that He yielded to despair, there is a great need of clarity if we are to pluck all of the fruit off of the true Tree of Life.  In order to have the convergence of the timeless and the timely, we must root ourselves in a proper understanding of the Incarnation.  Mysteries only remain mysteries when we are precise in our language and our thinking.  When we make room for ambiguity and imprecision, we come to explain them away like our Docetist and Calvinist compadres.

A Proper Christology

Because Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, Who took to Himself a human nature without any change to Himself, we must first admit the impossibility of Him ceasing to be God.  He is a Divine Person Who nonetheless had two modes of action or natures—human and divine.  He performed miracles using His Divine Nature.  He suffered using His human nature.  But in either case, it was He, that is the Second Person of the Trinity, that performed the miracle and suffered.  The union of the two natures in the Person, what we call the Hypostatic Union, means that from the moment of His conception, He had the vision of God.  His soul had the most intimate and unique union that a human soul can have with God and therefore His soul looked upon “the face of God and lived.”  “No man has ever seen the Father, except the One Who is from God” (c.f. John 6:46). If all of what we just said is true, then how is it possible for Him to ever experience abandonment from God?

There is, of course, the connection with Psalm 22.  But we must make sure that we do not put the cart before the horse.  Properly speaking Christ did not fulfill the prophecies of the Old Testament in the sense that He was bound to do certain things.  The prophecies were made because the Eternal Word of God did certain things.  The prophecies are “after” the events in the mind of God.  The Psalm was inspired because Christ would utter those words from the Cross and not the other way around.  In other words, we cannot simply say that Our Lord was reciting a Psalm and leave it at that.  We must address the fact that in a real sense Our Lord experienced abandonment.

There is the obvious sense in which the words are meant.  The abandonment is not so much a spiritual desolation, but the fact that He was turned over completely to His persecutors without any Divine protection or exercise of His Divine Power.  It can also mean, according to Augustine, that the Son was forsaken in the sense that His prayer in the Garden to have the chalice removed was not answered.

Clearing the Way for the Deeper Meaning

By clinging to the truth of the personal union of the Divine and human natures we are able to also posit a much deeper level of meaning as well.  We said that it was one of the laws of the nature of the Incarnation that Christ experienced the Beatific Vision in His soul.  But through a miracle, the reverse of which was described in a previous post about the Transfiguration, He was able to suspend His awareness of the Beatific Vision in His soul.  Thus, according to St. Thomas (c.f. ST III q.46, a.6 ad 4), Christ was, in His human nature, no longer aware of His union with the Father.  The union was still real but He was prevented from having any consideration of it which would have alleviated sorrow.  Instead He focused only on those things that could produce sorrow and desolation such as the malice of sin, the terrible ingratitude of mankind, and all the souls that would be lost despite His sacrifice.   

In short, this desolation, unlike the desolation we “naturally” experience in the spiritual life, was directly willed.  And like all things He did, it had a twofold purpose.  The first is as an example.  By experiencing the most intense of desolations, Our Lord left us an example to follow by not only “hanging in there” but by speaking words for us.  He has given us a prayer to say in Psalm 22 when no prayer will come.  For those who have experienced true spiritual desolation, when absolutely no words come in prayer, this is an invaluable gift.

The second purpose is that by directly willing it and experiencing it, He sanctified desolation for all of us.  Despite not feeling anything except loss, the Christian is assured that by submitting their will to God’s in desolation, they are, in truth, being sanctified by it.  And this ultimately is why having a proper understanding of what Christ did and suffered is important.  By seeing Christ’s desolation as directly willed and not as a precursor to despair, we know we have been empowered to overcome any amount of desolation and avoid despair.  For Christ redeemed every aspect of our lives including spiritual desolation.  All we have to do then is to submit to it in an act of faith and trust, knowing that is part and parcel of Redemption.

Judas and the Wages of Envy

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The first full moon in Spring brings with it two things, both of which are equally predictable.  First there is Easter, celebrated on the Sunday immediately following that first full moon.  Secondly, there is the somewhat predictable “scholar” who will bring forth some long lost “proof” that Christianity is a hoax.  Usually it is by the “rediscovery” of some “lost” gospel.  Never mind that it was lost because the Church Fathers already knew about it and deemed it a fraud.  Easter 2006 was no different in this regard.  National Geographic released an English translation of the Gospel of Judas just in time for the Pascal feast.  This “gospel” paints Jesus and Judas as somehow in cahoots.  But it also has a particular appeal because it appears to answer an age-old question of why Judas did what he did. 

We must admit that it is more than mere curiosity that places this question before us.  Even if Christ ultimately claims the victory, it does not sit well with us that Judas was the collateral damage.  Nor are we comfortable with the fact that many of the Church Fathers place Judas in hell because, as Our Lord said, “woe to him by whom the Son of Man is betrayed.  It would have been better for him to never have been born” (Mt 26:24).  Nor should it.  Even if Judas is alone in hell, the losing of a single soul is the greatest of all tragedies.  But Sacred Scripture and the Church’s liturgical calendar place the question before us this week and so we must resist the temptation, like the heretics of the first Christian centuries, to “psychologize” Judas and try to explain it away as if he was a victim caught up in the tsunami of the Redemption. 

“Watch Out Lord”

We must first admit that neither Scripture nor Tradition gives us a clear answer as to why Judas did what he did.  And the lack of clarity is for a good reason.  Any one of us can be Judas—selling Jesus for something else.  This must be lesson number one or else we cannot even begin to unpack what might be hidden away in what we have been told.  We are each presented with the temptation of the thirty pieces of silver daily, although usually we settle for a whole lot less. We all sell Christ out in small (and big) ways every day.  As St. Philip Neri said every day of his life, “watch out Lord, lest Philip betray you today.”

The point is that we must all see in Judas our capacity to do likewise.  If a man who spent three years with God in the Flesh could do it, then anyone can.  It is only grace that preserves us from the temptations we would otherwise easily succumb.  And this is why when Our Lord warned the Apostles that one of them would betray Him, each of them feared it might be him.  They knew that they didn’t really want to, but they also knew that they were capable of anything given the right set of circumstances.  This is what it means to recognize that you are a sinner—not that you have done a bunch of bad stuff, but to know that at any point you are capable of falling off the wagon.  “Therefore, let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Cor 10:12).

Judas and the Role of the Devil

Likewise, we must also understand that the Gospel narratives are calling us to go beyond Judas’ personal motivation and to see in this great betrayal the hoof marks of the great enemy of man’s soul, Satan.  This is not to absolve Judas of responsibility but to acknowledge the role he played.  St. John tells us that “the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray him” (Jn 13:2).  The devil had tempted Judas to betray Our Lord and Judas had made up his mind to do so.  As St. Thomas says in his commentary on this verse, Satan “enters into a person’s heart when one totally gives himself to following his suggestions and offers no resistance at all. Thus Satan first put the plan to deceive Christ into Judas, and then he entered into to possess him more completely and to lead him to accomplish the evil.”  In short we cannot rule out demonic possession in the carrying out of the betrayal.  Even if this is the case, Judas was a most willing participant and not merely a puppet in the hands of the devil.  Judas was willing, but may have lacked the “courage” to carry it out.  Once he consented to the devil’s suggestion, however, he ceded his personal freedom over to him.

This too can be spiritually instructive for us.  Judas shows us that we should not yield to temptations of the mind, even if we “would never actually do it.”  To consent to a temptation is to put ourselves under the power of the Evil One.  Very often we will entertain thoughts of revenge, even though we know deep down we are incapable of carrying it out.  This is very dangerous because when the source of the temptation is the devil, he is only too happy to help give us the strength to carry out our wildest fantasies.  If nothing else Judas teaches us that.

All that being said, I believe we can begin to uncover some of Judas’ personal motivation.  We must first eliminate what appears to be the obvious answer—greed.  Thirty pieces of silver was the price paid for the death of a slave and was not very much.  It would have been far less than Judas was likely making embezzling as keeper of the Apostolic money bag.  He was walking away from a pretty good racket.  That coupled with the fact that, because he inherited his father’s name, Iscariot, he was probably already wealthy, makes it unlikely that greed was the motivating factor.

Biblical Typology and the Judas/Judah Connection

Instead we can look at the Patriarch Joseph as a type of Christ.  For he too was sold for pieces of silver by his brother Judah.  And why did he do this?  For the same reason that Judas would betray Christ—envy.  Envy is the devil’s forte.  It was envy that motivated him to go after mankind when he fell.  And in his role as the Accuser, it is envy that he is constantly seeking to incite in us.  Envy always presents itself by way of accusation making it about what it’s not really about.  It is an attempt to tear down another person simply because they are stealing from your greatness.  Judas was not the thief, Christ was—”why was this not sold for 300 days wages?”.  The devil was not in Judas, it was Our Lord who was the devil. 

So, it was Judas’ envy of Our Lord in His absolute freedom, especially his freedom from a desire for riches, that led Judas ultimately to consent to turning him over.  And in this way, the story of Judas should be particularly instructive for us.  We live in a culture that has been particularly designed to incite envy.  When someone does something great, we scan their social media history to find a way to tear them down.  Supposed class/race/gender/sexual identity warfare is all about envy by demonizing the other.  Envy is the most difficult for us to see because we are living in it.  And that is why we must never forget what happened to Judas and the wages of envy.       

Can God Suffer?

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In a recent homily on the Biblical narrative of the Flood, Pope Francis challenged those gathered to have a heart like God’s, especially in the face of human suffering.  The Holy Father said that “God the Father…is able to get angry and feel rage…suffering more than we do.”  So common has this assertion that God suffers become that it is practically becoming an assumption.  But upon closer inspection we come to find that there are a number of faith altering and faith destroying consequences that follow from this false view of God.  Therefore, it merits further reflection why it is that God does not suffer.

The Need for Analogy

We must first admit that our language inevitably fails us when we attempt to speak about God.  In fact, we can say nothing positive about Him.  This is not because we are pessimists, but because we can only speak definitively about what He is not.  He is omniscient because there is nothing He doesn’t know.  He is omnipotent because there is nothing He can do, etc.  To speak of what He is, is impossible because He transcends our categories.  This linguistic limitation can be partially overcome once we allow for the use of analogy.  For example, God reveals Himself as Father because His fatherhood is something like the human fatherhood that we are all familiar with.

The problem with this approach of analogy is that we often get it backwards.  Properly speaking it is human fatherhood that is like God’s fatherhood.   Keeping the primacy of God’s fatherhood in mind keeps us from assuming that it is just like human fatherhood and making God in our image instead of us in His.  Human fatherhood is only true fatherhood to the extent that it images God’s fatherhood as St. Paul is wont to remind the Ephesians (c.f. Eph 3:15). 

More closely related to the topic of God’s suffering is the dictum that God is love.  To say that God is love is to say that God loves fully and for all eternity.  He cannot love any more than He does because it is His nature to love.  We speak of different “kinds” of love from God such as mercy, compassion, kindness, etc. but in God there is no distinction.  He loves fully.  We, however, cannot receive His love fully.  “Whatever is received,” St. Thomas says, “is received according to the mode of the receiver.”  To the sinner, God’s love is received as mercy.  To the suffering His love is received as comfort.  Yet, from God’s perspective it is a completely active and full love.     

To say that God suffers with us reverses the analogy.  The assumption is that because compassionate human love includes suffering, then Divine love must also.  But the fact that it includes suffering does not mean that it must include suffering.  It is the love that is given that makes it love, not the suffering.  In fact you could remove the suffering, the love would still be love.  In fact, it would be a purer love because there would be no need on the lover’s part to succor his own suffering.  Instead it would be a completely free love with no compulsion towards self-interest.  Rather than being somehow cold and indifferent, it is complete and free.  So God, by not be able to suffer, actually loves us more than if He could suffer.  To insist otherwise makes God love us less, the very thing that they think they are avoiding by positing that He must suffer.  As Fr. Thomas Weinandy puts it, “what human beings cry out for in their suffering is not a God who suffers but a God who loves wholly and completely, something a suffering God could not do.”  God is compassionate not because He suffers with but because He is able to fully embrace those who are suffering

Further Consequences of the Suffering God

If reversing the analogy was the worst part about this, then we might simply chalk it up as a misunderstanding.  But the fact that it represents an attack on God’s nature eventually leads us into a theological pitfall that destroys our faith in God.  God, in order to suffer must be capable of change.  But we believe in a God who is immutable.  His immutability comes about not because He can’t change, but because as the fullness of being there is nothing for Him to change into.  No change would make Him more than He is because He is already “I AM WHO AM”, pure act.  He fully alive.  To posit that He can suffer is to posit that He can change and to posit that He can change is to say that He is not the one true God.

He must also be incapable of suffering, that is, impassible for a subtler reason as well.  Suffering is caused by a lack of some good that ought to be there.  If God, in Himself is lacking some good, then He is not All Good.  If the suffering comes about because of the lack of some good in creation, then He becomes a part of creation itself and is no longer transcendent.  As part of creation He is no longer Creator.  Evil and suffering must be seen as having real existence (rather than a lack of some good) since nothing is immune to it.  Our new God is the god of pantheism or process theology and an ontological dualism becomes the result.

The suffering God hypothesis ultimately means the destruction of the Christian God.  If God is not free from suffering, then no one is.  And if no one is, then there is no possibility of redemption.  God simply becomes one being among many striving for perfection.  If He cannot save Himself from evil, then how can He save anyone else?  The Incarnation becomes totally incomprehensible.  The God-Man cannot offer redemption, nor can He sanctify suffering.  In truth, a suffering God need not stoop to our level because He is already there.  The truth that He could love fully without suffering, yet still chose to add suffering carries the assurance of His total love for each one of us.  If He could already suffer, then it looks like little more than masochism.

In short, ideas have consequences. Serious ideas have serious consequences.  The idea of divine passibility has nothing but negative consequences.  Therefore, despite its present popularity, the assertion that Divine suffering is possible must be wholly rejected in favor of the Traditional teaching of the Church so that the Faith may remain intact.

The Problem of Evil and God’s Existence

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For anyone who has read either of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summas, it is patently obvious that he took objections to the Catholic Faith seriously.  Put more precisely, he felt obligated to address serious objections fully.  So keen was his understanding that he often made his opponents’ arguments more precisely and succinctly than they can.  One can often learn more from the objections and their responses than from the substance of his response.  Christians of today could learn much from the Angelic Doctor in this regard, especially when it comes to the existence of God.  There are most certainly motives of credibility  that honest atheists must take seriously if they are genuinely interested in discovering the truth.  But these can often be overshadowed by what might be called “a motive of discredibility”, namely the problem of evil and suffering, that Christians must also take seriously.

When St. Thomas tackles the existence of God in the Summa Theologiae, he finds this to be the only real objection.  This was not to suggest that other objections don’t matter, but that they begin to fade away once this objection has received a sufficient answer.  St. Thomas articulates the objection like this: “It seems that God does not exist; because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the word ‘God’ means that He is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist” (ST I, q.2 art 3, obj. 1). 

The Dilemma of Suffering and Evil

Notice that the objector has set up what is essentially a dilemma revolving around God’s infinite goodness.  If God is omnibenevolent then evil cannot exist.  Many have added to this argument by suggesting that the problem is really a tri-lemma in that God could not be infinitely wise, good and powerful if evil exists.  Either he cannot stop the evil (omnipotence), wills the evil (omnibenevolence) or doesn’t know how to stop it (omnisapience). 

St. Thomas, in a certain sense, anticipates the expanded objection when he quotes St. Augustine who said “Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil” and adds his own comment that, “This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good” (ST I, q.2 art 3, ad. 1).

What St. Thomas doesn’t say, but that remains just beneath the surface of what he did, is that evil, once properly framed, actually presents an argument for God.  Evil in the metaphysical sense does not exist.  This does not mean it is not a reality or that it causes suffering in people, but this suffering is not a result of the evil per se, but of the deprivation of a good that should otherwise be there.  Blindness is a deprivation of the good of sight and therefore is an evil.  Moral evils like sins and vices are nothing but a lack of the moral good that should otherwise be in and flow from the human heart. 

This distinction, although well known, is important for two reasons.  First, it refutes any dualistic ontological explanations.  Second, and more closely related to our point, is the fact that when good comes from evil, it is always a creation ex nihilio.  Good that does come comes from absolutely nothing.  Only a being Who is all powerful can create out of nothing so that the problem of evil presents no difficulty to the principle of God’s omnipotence.   In fact, a God who allows evil and suffering and brings good out of it is more powerful than a God who simply erects a divine Stop Sign to stamp out any evil beforehand.

Neither does evil or suffering present a difficulty to God’s omnibenevolence.  Especially when we add the principle that God only allows evil to occur when it is the only manner in which a particular good can come about.  Certain goods such as self-sacrifice can only exist in a world in which evil and suffering are possible.  One could see that the world with evil and suffering in it actually manifests God’s goodness more than a world without it (if it didn’t He wouldn’t have allowed it that way). 

Christ Crucified and God’s Wisdom

Once we grasp the preceding two points we see that only a God Who is all-wise could navigate these waters.  And this is why it is Wisdom Incarnate Who ultimately “dwelt among us” in order to prove this point.  When Christ healed the man born blind, the disciples ask Him what the man (or his parents) did wrong to deserve this.  He tells them that his blindness and his healing was so that God’s goodness could be made manifest.  Christ did not alleviate the suffering of everyone He met.  He did not heal those who deserved it either.  He healed only those, like the man born blind, that would glorify God and be better off without it.  There were many people He didn’t heal, but that wasn’t because He didn’t have time or didn’t care.  He was consistently applying His principle.  Those who were left to suffer were glorifying God in their suffering and were better off because of it.  

Those who suffer know that the problem of evil is no mere intellectual problem.  But the Christian must proclaim that there is no mere intellectual solution.  The answer to evil and suffering is not a philosophical proof but Christ crucified.  Christ is the final answer to this problem, because in truth, only by way of participation in His Cross is God’s goodness made manifest to the individual person.  Through suffering and evil God brings the greatest Good, Himself.  Suffering becomes a treasure that never ceases to give a return on investment.  Rather than an obstacle it becomes a launching pad.  Christians who grasp this and live it out become the most effective argument against those who have yet to see it.     

Temptational Judo

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Truth be told, we really don’t like thinking about sin, let alone even talking about it.  But ignoring it is like trying to deny the existence of death.  We can pretend that it doesn’t exist for only so long before we must face the facts.  And just as a healthy spiritual life consists in regularly confronting death, so too, despite the vociferous objections of psychologically (as opposed to spiritually) trained clergy, does it include regularly pondering our sins.  Not to relive them, but to relieve the damage we do to ourselves because of them.  So rather than avoid thinking about them, I would like to suggest we spend some time thinking about our sins of thought.

That we can sin in our thoughts is something many of us unconsciously reject even though we confess publicly that “…I have greatly sinned in my thoughts.”  Our Lord too chastised the Pharisees many times for their thoughts—“why do you think evil thoughts in your hearts?” (Mt 9:4).  We tend to think of sin as something external, something that must be consummated if you will.  We absolve ourselves saying “I can’t help what I think, but I would never do it.”  But to even think it is, in a certain sense, to “do it”.  As the Book of Wisdom tells us “perverse thoughts separate us from God” (Wis 1:3).  Our will may not be fixed strongly enough to actually carry through or we may not do it because we fear the consequences or we may just lack the opportunity.  But to think it is to want to do it.

To Think It is to Want to do It

This may seem extremely old fashioned or overly rigid until we realize that the terrain over which spiritual combat with the devil is fought is our minds.  Think of the battle between Satan and Our Lord in the desert—the Tempter wanted to change Our Lord’s mind.  This is a perfect image because the ongoing battle is between which mind we will garb ourselves in—the mind of Satan or the mind of Christ.  And so, we must explicitly make known what we mean when we say “to think it is to want to do it.” 

This battle is one that is fought in fog and confusion.  Not all of our bad thoughts are equally bad nor are all of the thoughts our “own”.  This makes it hard to tell the difference.  But in order to lift the fog we must let the Son shine on our thoughts.  To help us in doing this, St. Alphonsus Liguori puts before us three moments by which to  evaluate what is going on.

First there is the suggestion.  This is where the evil thought is presented to the mind.  Where it “comes” from is not really that important.  The devil can suggest bad thoughts by manipulating our memory and imagination or it can arise “spontaneously” by following a train of thought or our memory running amok.  There is obviously no sin at this point, although it is knocking at the door.  Next there is the delectation “when the person stops,” St. Alphonsus says, “to look at the bad thought, which by its pleasing appearance causes delight.”  We are still not at the point of sin, unless we reach the third moment, consent.

Reversing the Moments

Working backwards we must admit that the exact point of consent is often difficult to decipher.  It almost has a “how far can I go” type quality to it.  That is why we should flip this around and look at evil thoughts not as a near occasion of sin, but as an opportunity for merit.  In doing so, we enter into the workings of Divine Providence in capturing the grace that God made available when he allowed the temptation to arise.  This is the mind of Christ Who practiced temptational judo in meriting for us salvation.  Ultimately, this is why we do not so much worry about the source of the temptation and see it as coming from the Providential hand of the Father.

It is a relatively short journey for the evil thought to pass from temptation to sin because it is linked by the delectation.  The bait covering the hook of sin is always some pleasure and in this regard sins of thought are no different.  There is something pleasing in the evil thought—some aspect of revenge, venereal delight, or other guilty pleasure.  That is why we cannot remain passive.  Sin ultimately is a willingness to pay the price of evil to buy the pleasure attached to it.  Therefore we can never be passive in the face of a temptation.  Once we have moved to pleasure we have already, in a certain sense gone past the point of no return. 

Vigilance then is the key.  We must, at the moment the temptation arises, reject it completely.  Call it what it is and pray for the grace of perseverance.  Go to Our Lord in the desert and capture the grace He won for you for this very moment.  Let it not be won in vain. 

And this, then, is why reflecting on our sins of thought is so much a part of a healthy spiritual life.  These temptations of thought are the building blocks of holiness.  Each time we say ‘No’ we are conformed more and more to the image of the Son in the desert.  St. Francis de Sales thought that mortifying our thoughts and imagination was one of the keys to holiness.  He thought it absolutely necessary to kill any daydreaming or useless trains of thought because it gives us the power to control our own thoughts and recognize temptations for what they truly are the moment they arise.

Preparing for Martyrdom

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Very few men have changed the world as much as Francesco di Bernadone did.  While in prayer one day in a run down chapel in Assisi, Italy, he received a Divine mandate to “rebuild my Church.”    After a false start by literally rebuilding the church he was standing in, he set out to reform the crumbling Church.  In the process, St. Francis as he is better known, became one of the most beloved saints for his radical commitment to Christ and His Church.  But the rebuilding of the Portiuncula was not his only “blunder”.  He also thought he could win the martyr’s crown once by visiting the Sultan and trying to get him to convert.  He failed on both accounts, winning the Sultan’s esteem but not his soul.  Francis may have been called to be a great saint, but not a martyr, mainly because he misunderstood martyrdom.

When pressed, most of us would say that martyrdom consists in dying for the faith.  That of course is part of it, but it is not really the primary part.  The primary part is in the literal meaning of the term martyr.  A martyr is a witness.  And not just any witness, but is a certain type of witness that may end in death, but it need not per se.  That is why we refer to Our Lady as Queen of Martyrs and her spiritual son St. John the Evangelist as martyrs even though they did not die by the sword.  They both attest to the fact that death is not the end or the goal, but a means by which the martyr witnesses to Christ.  Otherwise we would not be able to differentiate it with dying for a cause.  As noble as that might be, it is not the same thing as Christian martyrdom.

Martyrs as Witnesses to What?

The key in grasping the distinction is understanding what it is that a martyr is witnessing to.  He is witnessing to the truth of the Resurrection of Christ and his own personal share in it.  His Master too was once put to death, but by His own power He destroyed death’s hold over Him and all those who are in Him.  “O death where is your victory.  O death where is your sting” (1Cor 15:55).  The Christian martyr may fear the pain leading up to death, but has no fear of death itself.  In fact, her eyes are fixed on the prize, so much so that she is willing to undergo any amount of pain to obtain it.

The hagiography of the martyrs is full of stories of incredibly painful deaths that the martyrs suffered at the hands of their persecutors.  But hardly a single story describes the pain, only the joy.  We might be tempted to think it is merely omitted for the sake of the reader.  Tempted, that is, until we realize that the descriptions of their countenance seems to suggest the exact opposite.  They seem to feel nothing.  They don’t sweat while they are being boiled alive (St. Cecilia), their bodies are riddled with arrows and spears while they continue preaching (St. Edmond), they sing Psalms for 15 days in a starvation bunker (St. Maximilian Kolbe) and they joke while being roasted alive (St. Lawrence).  You might think they felt no pain at all based on the descriptions. 

And herein lies the important truth of martyrdom—they most probably didn’t feel pain.  Or at least, if they did, it was way out of proportion to what was actually happening.  And that is because martyrdom is a gift from God so that the merits of witnessing even to the point of death are given to the martyr.  They are witnessing not to their faith in the Resurrection, but to God’s power that was made manifest through the Resurrection.  The martyr is tried so far beyond human capacities that it becomes so blatantly obvious that it is only by the power of God that a human being could endure these things.  The martyr then is both a witness and an instrument.  Martyrdom is not really about the martyr at all but about God.  It is a very public witness to His power over death as shown by how hard it is to actually kill the martyr.  The witnesses to the martyrdom are left without a doubt that something supernatural has happened, even if they later choose to deny it.

Why St. Francis was Wrong…and Right

St. Francis wasn’t wrong in thinking that martyrdom would fulfill his vocation to rebuild the Church.  He was wrong by not seeing it as the means God had chosen for him to do it.  It was a gift that he tried to seize.  But he was absolutely right in his assessment that it would rebuild the Church.  This is why Tertullian uttered his famous dictum that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” 

God never gives up on man so that when the world goes deaf, He simply speaks in sign language using martyrs.  Trapped in paganism and hedonism, Rome was transformed by the Christian martyrs who witnessed to the power of their God over death (no other god had that) and no fear of pain and suffering.  Roman soldiers thought they were brave until they watched a young girl march to her death with a smile on her face.  After trying to kill her they knew something Divine was happening.  They saw a way out of the maze of their Godless existence.  And the Church grew at 40% per decade into the middle of the fourth century on the preaching of the martyrs.

Martyrs have been and will remain an integral part of the preaching of the Church.  In some times and places they used only words to preach and in other ages, especially those in which the world grew tone deaf to Divine invitations, the preachers were the martyrs. 

One can’t help but see the parallels between our own decadent society and the decadence of Rome that is leading to widescale deafness.  The public witness of many Catholics is falling upon deaf ears so we should expect that God will raise up a generation of martyrs soon.  Our role is to prepare ourselves and the next generation for this eventuality.  Like in all the previous persecution it will come with little warning and those who have prepared well for it will be able to respond to the gift.  Those who haven’t won’t.  But either way, we should expect that they will be coming soon.

The Mystery of the Transfiguration

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One can hardly begin to imagine the amazing things that the Apostles, especially the inner trio of Peter, John and James, saw during their time with Our Lord.  But if you were to ask which event stood out above the others, the answer might surprise you at first.  You might think for St. Peter it would have been the event of the miraculous catch or walking on water, but instead he mentions only one—the Transfiguration.  Given nearly three decades to reflect upon it, the Vicar of Christ in his second encyclical still finds it to be the most formative event in His life, describing himself as receiving honor and glory from God the Father when he was an eyewitness of the majesty of Christ on the holy mountain (c.f 2Pt 1:16-19).  It is this truly awe-inspiring event on the mount of Transfiguration that the Church invites us to celebrate today.

To set the tone, it is worth mentioning that the Transfiguration is one of the few events in the life of Christ which is found in all three Synoptic Gospels.  The Holy Spirit thought that this episode was not only formative in the life of the Apostles but ought also to be for the Christians that were to follow.  For each of the mysteries of Christ’s life are recorded within Sacred Scripture not only for our knowledge but as invitations for our participation.  The Church reminds us of this invitation by including this feast with the liturgical calendar because, as Pope Pius XII reminds us, although these historical events occurred in the past, “they still influence us because each of the mysteries brings its own special grace for our salvation” (Pope Pius XII, Mediator Dei, 165).  It is then the Church’s hope that we will lay hold of the special grace attached to the Transfiguration.

What the Transfiguration Reveals

Grasping what made this experience so monumental for St. Peter will help us to drink more fully of the mystery ourselves.  In this single event we find a compendium of Christology.  The Transfiguration reveals the fullness of the Person of Christ—true God and true man.

When asked, most Christians would say that Ss. Peter, John and James witnessed His divinity.  This is true to a certain extent, but what they saw was the glory of His sacred humanity.  A moment’s reflection on the accounts will make this clear.  First, their reaction betrays this belief.  They are clearly awed by the fact that “His face shone like the sun and His garments became white as light” (Mt 17:2), but they are not at any pains to look away.  Instead when the Divine presence is manifested in the cloud, they “fell on their faces” because they know that “man shall not see me and live” (Ex 33:20).  It is the word spoken by the Father that reveals Christ’s divinity to them—“This is My beloved Son in Whom I am well pleased.  Listen to Him” (Mt 17:6).

His divinity, according to St. Thomas, was also made known to the Apostles in His power over the living and the dead.  Elijah was(and still is) among the living.  He has never died and lives within some heavenly realm until his return to defeat the Antichrist as one of the two witnesses (c.f. Rev 11:3-12).  Christ had power to summon him.  Christ also was the Lord of the dead, able to bring forth Moses from the realm of Abraham’s bosom.  It was to preach to them of His Exodus, that is His Passion, Death and Resurrection, that He brought them forth.

One suspects that the profundity of the Transfiguration for Peter was not just because it revealed Christ’s divinity to Him, but because it also put flesh around the divinity.  It is the foundation for what has since been explained as the Hypostatic Union.  Although it would take the fullness of Christ’s mission and the gift of the Holy Spirit to realize it, the Apostles now knew that this was a man, but no mere man, that was walking around with them.

The Second Person of the Trinity, the “Beloved Son” is God.  In the fullness of time, He took to Himself a human nature without setting aside His divine personality.  He remained and remains a divine Person that used a human nature (not a human person) as His instrument for our salvation.  In the natural course of events, when a body and soul are fused together in conception, a person is formed.  But in Christ, the body and soul united to the Second Person of the Trinity so that He supplied the personality.  This is why we can accurately say that God became man and not that a man became God.

This uniting of the human nature with the Eternal Word is called the Hypostatic Union.  This union means that the body and soul of Christ enjoy special privileges.  One of those privileges was the Beatific Vision.  This is the direct vision of God that all the blessed in heaven possess; each being able to see all things in their divine relationship.  It is a source of constant joy and glory so that this beatitude overflows from the soul into the body, making it shine like the sun.  This effect, one of the four qualities of a glorified body, is called Clarity.

It is a miracle that is, a suspension of what naturally happens that the effects of the Beatific Vision did not flow into all the regions and powers of Christ’s soul allowing Him to suffer and sorrow.  Otherwise He could not be the “Man of Sorrows.”  Likewise it is a miracle that His Glory did not overflow into His body.

The Transfiguration is a result of God “suspending” this miracle so that the natural clarity of Christ’s body shines forth.  He suspends this miracle to reveal the other three qualities of the glorified humanity at other points in His public ministry.  He shows His natural agility by walking on water, His natural subtlety by passing from Mary’s womb, leaving her virginity intact and His impassibility when He was unharmed by the Jews attempts to stone Him.  But because clarity is perceptible to the human eye, the Transfiguration becomes a testimony to the full humanity of Christ.  It is the testimony of the fullness of divinity and humanity in this single event that leaves the indelible mark on St. Peter’s mind.

The Transfiguration and Us

The Hypostatic Union plays into this in a second way as well.  In Mystici Corporis Christi, Pope Pius XII says “[F]or hardly was He conceived in the womb of the Mother of God, when He began to enjoy the Beatific Vision, and in that vision all the members of His Mystical Body were continually and unceasingly present to Him, and He embraced them with His redeeming love.” (75).   It was the Beatific Vision that made each one of us present at the Transfiguration.  He performed this miracle then not just for the Apostles, but for each one of us individually.  He simply awaits our active participation in this mystery so that He can give to us the graces He has already won.

Like all of His mysteries, there are personal graces to be found for each one of us; graces we discover through personal meditation upon the mystery itself.  There are also the more “generic” graces attached to the mystery of the Transfiguration as well.  Blessed Columba Marmion articulates a three-fold grace that Christ wants to give us when we ascend the summit of Tabor.  The first is the grace of increased faith.  We can re-echo the Father’s declaration by proclaiming, “Yes Father that is Your Beloved Son.  I believe.  Help my unbelief.”  Secondly, there is the grace of hope.  The Transfiguration reveals to us our destiny.  By sharing the Sonship of Christ, we come to share in His blessed reward.  Finally, there is the grace of charity won by doing whatever He tells us.  The commands of God are always supplemented by the power to fulfill them.  And in this regard, the Transfiguration becomes a great source of salvation here and now.

Who’s Afraid of a Little Sin?

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With the smoke still rising from the second great war, Pope Pius XII surveyed the moral landscape and declared that “the greatest sin today is that men have lost the sense of sin.” This theme, a loss of the sense of sin, has been a recurring one highlighted by each of the subsequent six pontificates.  In many ways it represents one of the greatest challenges to the Christian in the modern world.  Most of us still believe in sin, but living in the midst of a culture that laughs at any mention in it, we fail to see the ugliness of even the “smallest” sin.  The thought of achieving our freedom and conquering sin is nice, but not something we truly desire.  And so we simply live a stagnant life by merely avoiding the big sins, or at least that is how we reason.  After all, how could we grasp the gravity of sin when it is all around us?  Does a fish know that it is wet?  So how could we even hope to avoid the little sins and climb the heights of holiness?

When we examine the question more deeply we realize that the problem is hardly unique, even if it is more acute in our age.  Preaching a Lenten homily 175 years ago, Blessed John Henry Newman asked pretty much the same question:

“As time goes on, and Easter draws nearer, we are called upon not only to mourn over our sins, but especially over the various sufferings which Christ our Lord and Savior underwent on account of them. Why is it, my brethren, that we have so little feeling on the matter as we commonly have? Why is it that we are used to let the season come and go just like any other season, not thinking more of Christ than at other times, or, at least, not feeling more? Am I not right in saying that this is the case? and if so, have I not cause for asking why it is the case? We are not moved when we hear of the bitter passion of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, for us. We neither bewail our sins which caused it, nor have any sympathy with it.” (Parochial and Plain Sermons, Volume 6, Sermon 4).

The Blessed convert hints at the reason in the framing of the question.  We do not recognize the seriousness of our sins because the Passion of Christ, not just the entire event, but the whipping, the scourging, the being dragged in chains, the carrying of the cross, the falling , the crown of thorns, the nails, and the suffocation, leaves no lasting impression on us.  We might as well be watching a movie.  Disturbing perhaps to think about, but quickly left aside as we move on with life.  It is not that we are uncaring, it is just way too abstract.  And why is this?  Newman again responds saying “For this one reason, my brethren, if I must express my meaning in one word, because you so little meditate. You do not meditate, and therefore you are not impressed” (ibid.).

Why Meditation on the Passion Saves Us

Newman is really reiterating something that all the saints have said.  Meditation upon the passion of Christ is necessary for both our salvation and our perseverance in the quest for it.  Echoing s similar theme, a contemporary of Newman’s, Blessed Columba Marmion said that he was “convinced that outside the Sacraments and liturgical acts, there is no practice more useful to our souls than the Way of the Cross made with devotion.  It is sovereign supernatural efficacy” (Christ and His Mysteries, p.309).

Why would Blessed Marmion make such a profound statement?  Because he realized that the Passion and Death of Christ is an eternal event and that it has lost none of its power to heal and transform us. In his words, “When we contemplate the sufferings of Jesus He grants us, according to the measure of our faith, the grace to practice the virtues He revealed during those sacred hours…When Christ lived on earth there emanated from His divine Person an all-powerful strength…Something analogous happens when we put ourselves into contact with Jesus by faith.  Christ surely bestowed special graces on those who with love, followed Him on the road to Golgotha or were present at His immolation.  He still maintains that power now.”

Faith enables us to participate in the Passion of Christ simply by bringing it before us in meditation.  It gives us the opportunity to draw directly from its specific, and very personal fruits.  At the root of discipleship is Christ’s command, “If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me”().  And only by meditating on His Passion can we know what that cross looks like or to have the power to pick it up.  “Follow me” is meant literally by walking right behind Him during His own Passion, something that can only be done by putting ourselves there.

Two Examples

Scripture offers us two contrasting visions of disciples who did and did not meditate upon the Passion of Christ that serve as a caution and a model respectively.

The three-fold denial of St. Peter is well known.  His disavowal of Christ is one of the things that make him very relatable to all of us.  Because we can easily relate to him, we can also fall prey to his blind spot.  Why, exactly, did St. Peter abandon Our Lord?  In short it was an unwillingness to meditate upon the Passion.

Throughout Our Lord’s public ministry the theme of His Passion and Death was always looming in the background, even if it was shrouded in mystery.  He announced it to the Apostles three times (no coincidence) and each time it was denied by Peter.  We should not be surprised that his unwillingness to sit with the mystery of the cross then led to his fall.  It was his willingness to relive the Passion in his mind and his own share in it that gave St. Peter the grace of final perseverance (c.f. Jn 21).

Our Lady on the other hand is the ultimate model of meditation upon the Passion.  Each of the three times it was presented to her in Sacred Scripture, rather than denying it or allowing it to become abstract, “she kept these words in her heart.”  This habit of sitting with the mystery of Christ’s Passion enabled her to assimilate that same spirit and to walk with Jesus on the road to Calvary.  It was this habit, in other words, that won for her the grace of perseverance.  It is for this reason that she can serve as both a model and a guide in our own personal meditation of the Passion of Christ.  It is also one of the ways in which she intercedes for us to obtain the grace of final perseverance.

After one of her many encounters with Mercy Incarnate, St. Faustina reflected that Jesus was pleased “best by [her] meditating on His sorrowful Passion and by such meditation much light falls upon my soul. He who wants to learn true humility should reflect upon the Passion of Jesus. I get a clear under-standing of many things that I could not comprehend before” (Diary, 267).  The habitual meditation upon Our Lord’s Passion is a constant among all the saints and will become a source of unlimited spiritual growth for the rest of us as well.  When we intimately come to know the sufferings our sins cause we will no longer find them desirable, transforming not only ourselves but everyone around us relegating the “loss of a sense of sin” to the past.

The Darkness of Gethsemane

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There is a darkness, both in the literal and in the figurative sense, which hangs over the week preceding Our Lord’s Passion.  The Church tries to make this darkness present to her children throughout the liturgies marking Holy Week.  It moves from the darkness of Judas’ human heart to the darkness of the Agony in the Garden, culminating in the darkness of the crucifixion.  There is perhaps nowhere else that the theme of darkness is made more manifest that at the end of the Holy Thursday liturgy when the faithful silently watch Our Lord’s Eucharistic presence going out into the darkness.  More than just a mere liturgical gesture, it is an invitation for us to accompany Jesus in His forsakenness and to stand by Him.  It is our moment to participate in His Agony in the Garden as He goes to an altar of repose for us to watch and pray with Him.

Darkness had fallen upon Jerusalem by the time Our Lord entered the gates of Gethsemane with His inner circle.  All four of the Evangelists provide us details of His time of anguished prayer and yet, we find that this event, perhaps more so than any other aspect of the Passion, is shrouded deeply in mystery.  It would seem that Our Lord suffered more during these three hours than all the rest of His Passion combined.  How acute must a man’s suffering be in order to sweat blood?  We could overlook His sufferings here or give them a cursory nod of understanding, but this would be like Judas who, fearful of the darkness comes carrying a torch.  Or we could, as the Church is inviting us, enter into this darkness with Our Lord and, so, comfort Him by our presence.  That a mere creature could comfort the God man is in itself a great mystery.  Nevertheless Our Lord was comforted by having his three closest companions near Him and from the presence of an angel just before His arrest.  It seems that He pre-ordained that He would not suffer this alone.  Still, in order to be most fully present to Him we must begin to grasp the source of His suffering.

Our Lord’s Emotional State

There are few places in the gospels where the Evangelists point out Our Lord’s emotional state.  When they do, it can be quite illuminating for us because it gives a glimpse into the mystery of His interior life.  We know much about what He said and did, but we know little about what He truly thought and felt.  Because Jesus had perfect integrity in His soul, what He thought and felt always had a perfect correspondence.  What this means is that His emotions perfectly followed His reason and will.  When He felt an emotion it was only because He willed to feel it.  The Eternal Son of God knew the sufferings He would endure and His hour was always before Him.  Yet it is only when His hour comes that His suffering comes.  In other words, when the Word of God says “I will to suffer,” His suffering starts and not a moment before.  This suffering is expressed through the two emotions Our Lord describes Himself as having—fear and sorrow.

Immediately upon entering the Garden with Peter, James and John we are told that Our Lord “began to feel fear and to be exceedingly troubled” (c.f. Mark 14:33).  Fear as an emotion is always future directed; towards some evil that is difficult to avoid, but in truth is not yet present.  An obvious cause of this fear is awareness of the bodily sufferings and death that He is going to endure.  This is the natural human reaction to pain and suffering and Our Lord in His human will must choose to endure it.  But to stop there is to pluck the fruit before it is ripe.  He is no ordinary man, but the God-Man and thus He is able to foresee not only His own sufferings, but the sufferings of those whom He holds most dear because of His Passion.  He is able to see the effect His Passion will have upon His Mother whom He will crown as the Queen of Sorrows.  He sees the pain endured by the Beloved Disciple, the same man who slumbers beside Peter, the same man who will suffer a martyr’s death because of His Passion.  In fact it is not just Peter but all the martyrs that He sees.  He wills to endure all of their inner turmoil so that they go to the gallows laughing and without any trace of fear.  He will even endure the mental anguish of one particular martyr, St. Thomas More, who will write about Christ’s Agony in the Garden (The Sadness of Christ) as the real source of martyrdom while he joyfully and jokingly awaits his own execution.  Christ foresees the sufferings of the Church, His Mystical Body, and lives them in His physical body.  Although it is necessary that He drinks this cup, He is well aware of all the suffering that it will cause in the future because He drank it to the dregs.

The Sadness of Christ

All of those things are future directed but there is pain in the evil of the moment as well.  We know this because Our Lord also expresses His sadness—“And He said to them “My soul is sad, even unto death” (Mk 14:35).  Sadness as an emotion is always present-directed; towards a present evil that cannot be avoided.  So acute is Christ’s sadness that it threatens to kill Him right on the spot.  What cup is Our Lord already drinking?  It is the cup of our guilt.

Guilt is, or at least should be, a profound sorrow for having done something wrong.  It is a painful way to move us to make amends for what we have done wrong.  When properly experienced the pain bears a certain proportionality to the pleasure we have stolen.  The problem is that we find all kinds of ways to avoid it because it is painful.  Now think of a man who is genuinely trying to be good and he does something gravely wrong.  For him guilt is really painful.  The more sensitive the conscience the more acutely we can feel the pain of guilt.  Now take a man Who has never done anything wrong in His life and introduce an awareness of guilt such that He experiences it as if He has done something wrong.  Because of His innocence, the pain would be quite unimaginable.  Now, take that experience and multiply it by all the sins in the history of the world and only by a miracle of grace does the soul remain in the body of this man (“sorrowful unto death’).  Hard to imagine for sure, but it is enough to bring the God-Man to His knees and cause blood to mingle with His sweat as His body desperately clings to His soul.  One might think it is His soul that is bleeding.

Now He does this for His Father, Who has been offended not just by our sins, but our seeming incapacity for sorrow.  He does it for you and me not only to save us, but to win grace to have true sorrow for sin.  When this grace is accepted and we express sorrow it somehow lightens His load.  The field of His vision spanned across the unrepentant, the lukewarm and the truly repentant.  It was the vision of the latter that brought Him comfort in His afflictions.  And this is ultimately why we must journey with Him into the darkness of Gethsemane and remain there with Him.

 

Reading the Fine Print

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Sentimentality, as was mentioned in a recent post, is a great enemy to the spiritual life.  The solution proposed was to read Scripture with an absolute literalism.  In particular, when St. Paul tells the Romans that we are God’s children now and have a right to an inheritance as sons, we should understand the magnitude of such a high calling and live accordingly.  We would, however, fail in our quest for living in the truth if we did not also realize that, while this gift is free, it is not cheap.  If we are to live like sons, then we will act like the Son.  All too often we interpret this to mean “being nice to other people,” “love your neighbor”, “defend the teachings of the Church” or any other one of a variety of (usually)comfortable outward manifestations of the Christian life.  But we should read the fine print of St. Paul’s great promise: “if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him” (Romans 8:17, emphasis added).

When reading fine print, it is always the preposition that matters.  We might be tempted to read the contingency as suffering for Christ, but St. Paul says we must suffer with Him.  That one word, with instead of for makes all the difference.  It makes all the difference because it forces us to move from the abstract to the real.  This move may feel like a gut punch from reality, but in reality, it is a liberation from fear.  Fear, as we talked about in a recent podcast, is always future- directed and thus fertile ground for anxiety or avoidance.  Suffering for Christ has an abstract quality about it in that causes our minds to wander, sometimes to the great sufferings of the martyrs or losing our jobs because of our faith or any other number of ways we might have to painfully witness to our faith.  We begin to wonder whether we will have what it takes when the moment comes or whether it is really all worth that. This causes on to hold back from God, but based only a hypothetical way, because, in truth, He isn’t asking for that thing.

Suffering with Christ has a now quality about it.  To suffer with someone implies that they are suffering currently and that what is required of me is to engage.  There may be fear of engagement, but I have come to a decision point.  There is nothing abstract about it, because it is real in the here and now.

An illustration might help make this clear.  When I consider the sufferings of someone close to me, I would do almost anything, endure almost anything, in order to participate in that suffering.  Tell me, as a parent, that I will have to suffer with my children, my mind goes everywhere.  Well not exactly, it usually goes to the “worst” thing I can possibly imagine.  In short, fear carves out its space and there is really no way to deal with it because there is always a chance that thing might happen.  It begins to affect how I act—I might be overly protective or draw back—but in order to manage the fear of the abstract, I must change my behavior.

Now tell me that my son has autism and no longer am I handcuffed by fear.  There is sorrow for sure, but once the decision is made to suffer with him the fear of suffering for him is gone.  In other words, once I am suffering with him, I am now willing to suffer for him as well.  His suffering becomes mine and I am on the constant quest to alleviate it.

Just as the both the duty and love of a father drives him to be willing to suffer with his son, St. Paul is really telling us that we must be willing to suffer with Christ in the same way.  Just as I feared suffering in the abstract for a loved one (and acted upon it), so too will I fear suffering for Christ in the abstract.  But give me a specific scenario and I will enter in.

Suffering With Christ

We should rightly question how is it that we can suffer with Christ, right here and now.  The days of His Passion are over.  He is both God and glorified man, incapable of suffering.  Sure, He can suffer in His Mystical Body, but that is to change the mode of St. Paul’s address.  He is speaking from our perspective not from Christ’s.  He is speaking about the sufferings of His Passion that we must enter into.  The key is to rightly see His Passion, not as some abstract event in the past, but as concrete and specific in the here and now.  To do this we will need to turn to the “abstract” St. Thomas Aquinas in order to lay the groundwork for this key spiritual practice.

When St. Thomas examines the sufferings of Our Lord during His Passion, he asks what at first seems to be a stupid question, that turns out to have great practical import.  He asks whether Christ endured all suffering during the Passion.  It is a relevant question because in order for Our Lord to give suffering redemptive value, He must first experience it.  And he must experience not in the abstract, but in the particular.  So how, for example, if Our Lord did not suffer burning, could burning have redemptive value?

St. Thomas points out that it would be impossible to experience all possible sufferings, especially since some are contraries.  One cannot both suffer having his ears removed and the cries of his loved ones for example.  Instead Our Lord suffered all classes of suffering.  First, He suffered at the hands of all kinds of people; men and women, rulers and commoners, His fellow Jews and seculars, His friends and His enemies.  Second, He suffered “from friends abandoning Him; in His reputation, from the blasphemies hurled at Him; in His honor and glory, from the mockeries and the insults heaped upon Him; in things, for He was despoiled of His garments; in His soul, from sadness, weariness, and fear; in His body, from wounds and scourgings.”  Finally, “ in His head He suffered from the crown of piercing thorns; in His hands and feet, from the fastening of the nails; on His face from the blows and spittle; and from the lashes over His entire body. Moreover, He suffered in all His bodily senses: in touch, by being scourged and nailed; in taste, by being given vinegar and gall to drink; in smell, by being fastened to the gibbet in a place reeking with the stench of corpses, ‘which is called Calvary’; in hearing, by being tormented with the cries of blasphemers and scorners; in sight, by beholding the tears of His Mother and of the disciple whom He loved” (ST III, q. 46, art. 5).

Why the Details Matter

This level of detail is important for two reasons.  First, because it should move us to love, realizing that Our Lord planned out His sufferings in a very specific manner.  There was no mere chance in even the slightest of His sufferings.  He knew each one of our very specific sufferings and sought to redeem them.  Secondly, and more relevant to the discussion at hand, is that by enumerating the categories we see how exactly we enter into Our Lord’s Passion right here and now.

Look at St. Thomas’ list again and think about your own personal sufferings in the past or presently.  Are there any that don’t fall into one of those categories?  This means that each of these is a personal gateway into His Passion here and now.  When we willingly embrace them as such, we are suffering with Christ.  He anticipated what you are going through and sanctified it and all that remains is to enter fully into it to receive the fruit of the Passion—sonship.  Big sufferings, little annoyances, all belong as long as we lovingly accept them as Christ did His Passion.   Where there is a will, there is the Way.

Do this enough and you know what happens?  The fear of suffering for Christ goes away.  We become like the Beloved Disciple at the foot of the Cross.  We have endured so much with Him, realized so much of the fruit of suffering that we trust His plan, grown to love Him so deeply, that we will suffer whatever comes.  He does not ask us to be masochists, but we will habitually choose those things which have more of the Cross in them because we know it brings us closer to Him.  Think of Simon of Cyrene and how close he was to Christ when he helped Him carry the cross.  That is us.

Now the wisdom of all the saints and their habit of meditating deeply on the Passion comes to light.  Each time we enter into the Passion in our prayer, we are in a very real sense anticipating our own role in it.  This Lent then let us resolve to meditate upon the Passion as one of our spiritual practices.  If the witness of the saints is any indication, then it will be a most fruitful Lent.

Praying with the Dead

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In a previous post, the supreme importance of avoiding personally canonizing those who have died was highlighted.  The “holy souls” in Purgatory depend greatly upon our prayers in order that they may be loosed from the lingering effects of their sins after their death.  Many of us grasp this and, out of charity, regularly offer prayers for the dead.  But there is a flip side to this coin—nearly every saint who has been canonized in the last two centuries was recognized because people began asking for their intercession.  In other words, rather than primarily praying for them, people began praying to them.  It seems that we must then exercise judgment as to whether the person is in Purgatory or in Heaven, the very thing I said not to do.  Stuck in a spiritual no-man’s land, we tend towards neither praying for them or to them.  The problem becomes theological rather than governed by the logic of love.  The rich relationship of the Communion of Saints becomes a sterile doctrine and our personal faith falters with it.  All of this seems unavoidable unless we can find a way around this spiritual dilemma.

A single paragraph in the Catechism, quoting an indulged prayer from Pope Leo XIII, helps part the clouds of obscurity.  The Catechism says:

“In full consciousness of this communion of the whole Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, the Church in its pilgrim members, from the very earliest days of the Christian religion, has honored with great respect the memory of the dead; and ‘because it is a holy and a wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from their sins’ she offers her suffrages for them.’ Our prayer for them is capable not only of helping them, but also of making their intercession for us effective.” (CCC 959, emphasis added).

In summary, it is our prayers for the dead that not only help them, but also make their intercession for us effective.  What this tells us is that the holy souls in Purgatory, as members of the Church, have the power to intercede for the members of the Church Militant.  But this power comes in some way through our prayers for them.  How this works is obviously a mystery, but that it works is immediately relevant to the discussion at hand.  It gives us an immediate plan of action that will enable us to do both—pray for them and pray for their intercession.

Covering Our Bases

For some of us, this still has a Russian roulette type feel to it—like we are simply trying to cover our bases.  This only serves to make it more mechanical and less personal, the very antithesis of what prayer should be.  But this stems from a certain anxiety that our prayers may actually be wasted.  After all, if the person is in heaven and you are praying for their release from Purgatory, then your prayers have been wasted.

All of our prayer draws its power from the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ.  In other words, our prayer is caught up in the Eternal Now of Our Lord’s act of redemption where time and eternity met.  This means our prayer, although uttered in time, enters into the timelessness of God.  God knows “when” you will pray and He can apply the merits of those prayers as He sees fit.  More to the point, even if the soul of our departed loved one is in heaven, it is still your prayer here and now that got them there.  They may have even received the graces you interceded for just now while they were still on the earth.  Just as there are many natural causes that God uses to guide His providential plan, prayer too is a cause.  But because of its supernatural power, it operates outside of the natural constraints of time.

The Power of Prayer Over Time

Once we grasp this hidden power of prayer, we can see that our prayer, even if the soul has left Purgatory, is never wasted.  But it is still necessary because it is a power by which they have been or will be released.  It is also empowers them to intercede for the members of the Church Militant so that we should confidently ask for their intercession in our needs as well.  So our prayers for and to the dead are no different than they were while they were still living—praying both for them and asking them to pray for us.  Because “the prayer of a righteous man has great power to prevail” (James 5:16), we should go to them with confidence for our needs.  This also carries with it a rich experience of the true nature of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ.  It is a supernatural reality that spans Heaven and Earth and in between (Purgatory).

As long as we are speaking of covering our bases, how do we explain the prayers for the dead who are actually in hell?  Aren’t these wasted?  By now the answer ought to be clear that God wastes none of our prayers.  Our prayers obviously cannot lift them out of hell, but they could be applied to the person prior to their death.  They may lead the person towards conversion prior to their death (there is a beautiful account of the conversion of a despairing soul on the door of death who receives a final grace in St. Faustina’s Dairy #1486).  Or, perhaps it “only” kept them from further sin and, in a sense, lightened their suffering in hell.  Not knowing anyone’s destiny, we should confidently pray based on the overwhelming power of God’s mercy.  By praying, we become instruments of that same mercy.

The Media and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

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“If it bleeds, it leads.”  If there is a single maxim that guides the main stream media in their reporting, then it is this.  The principle itself is based on a simple calculation: the more carnage, death and human depravity in a story, the higher it appears in the reporting hierarchy.  We, of course, are all quick to condemn the media for this.  But not so quick that we don’t watch it first.  The main stream media is a business, a big business at that, and guided by the law of supply of demand.  It is all based on ratings and with so many ways to monitor what we are watching, they know exactly how much is consumed.  In other words, they lead with the blood because we watch it.  The more we watch, the more we get.  Inundated by it, we feel powerless to keep from watching.  We watch while covering one eye.  But like all things we feel powerless to avoid, it is illuminating to ask why we do it.

Rather than strictly psychological, the answer is more theological in nature.  Its genesis is found, well, in Genesis.  Returning to “the beginning” of mankind, we find man and woman in Eden made in the image and likeness of God.  In His likeness, Adam and Eve are practically unlimited, able to eat from every tree in the Garden except one.  Unlike God, they have a single limitation; they cannot eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Their test then will be whether they are willing to accept this limitation or not.  The Serpent, the inventor of “if it bleeds, it leads,” leads with “You shall not die” and tells the story of how Adam and Eve can be like God if they will simply take from the tree and eat.

The Knowledge of Good and Evil

Even if the tree itself is symbolic, the limitation itself is real.  In order to understand our bloodlust we must first understand exactly what the tree represents.  Adam and Eve attempted to know evil without experiencing it.  That is, they tried to know it from the outside without participating in it from the inside.  This capacity of knowing evil while not experiencing it is something that only God can do.  Only God is all holy and can be unstained by it.  As Blessed John Henry Newman puts it,

“You see it is said, ‘man is become as one of Us, to know good and evil,’ because God does know evil as well as good. This is His wonderful incommunicable attribute; and man sought to share in what God was, but he could not without ceasing to be what God was also, holy and perfect. It is the incommunicable attribute of God to know evil without experiencing it. But man, when he would be as God, could only attain the shadow of a likeness which as yet he had not, by losing the substance which he had already. He shared in God’s knowledge by losing His image. God knows evil and is pure from it—man plunged into evil and so knew it.” (Parochial and Plain Sermons, Ignorance of Evil).

This is also the sin of Lot’s wife when she is turned to a pillar of salt.  Overcome by the curiosity to know the evil of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah without being touched by it, she quickly finds out that to know it, is to share in it.  But Scripture is most clear on this when we examine the accounts of Our Lord’s Agony in the Garden.  It is the God-Man and only He Who can know evil without actually participating in it.  So great is the protest of His human nature that He sweats blood.

One might rightly ask at this point how it is that merely watching “bad news” has anything to do with the knowledge of good and evil.  It is in seeing this particular aspect of it that we can begin to separate ourselves from it.  Why is simply hearing about “bad news” not enough and why do we crave the details?  Why are we unsatisfied with a report such as“13 people were killed in an attack today” but have to know how it happened (video even if it contains the “graphic material” is especially wanted), who the perpetrators were, what their motivations were, etc.?  It is because what we learned theologically is proven empirically (or else it wouldn’t be the main part of the consumer news cycle).  In short, it shows we cannot just know about evil, we want to know it like Adam knows Eve, that is experience it fully.

What the Tree Offers Us

This doesn’t mean we want to pull the trigger but just don’t have the courage.  For most of us its meaning is more subtle than that. It means we want to experience the pleasure attached to the evil even if we do not actually commit the act.  It is what the Church calls the glamor of evil, the primal curiosity that brings pleasure from evil acts.  We can call it virtual reality evil—all of the thrills with none of the bills.  It is what keeps us from looking away at bad car accidents, watching Youtube videos of accidents, going to the movies to see the latest “psychological thriller” and the reason why serial killers gain celebrity.  The Devil really is in the details.

The illicit pleasure is not the only effect or really even the worst.  This habit of dwelling on depravity is soul deadening.  It causes us to view evil through a carnage calculator that relativizes it against the last one or against the greatest acts of reported slaughter.  We slowly become immune to evil and see it solely for its entertainment value.  I once saw a lady drive into a storefront and no one went to help her even though there were 20-30 bystanders each with his phone in hand recording the accident.  Not only does it make us slow to love, but also suspicious and fearful of our neighbor.  When bad news gets significantly more play time than good news, we become masters of suspicion and avoid other people, assuming the worst of them.

Returning to man’s Retake in the Garden of Gethsemane we find the strength to overcome the ubiquity of bad news.  Our Lord was the one who “resisted sin to the point of shedding His blood” (c.f. Hebrews 12:4) not just to show us His divine power put to win for us the grace to remain pure of heart amidst so much evil.  We should become cautious and discerning viewers of the news, even sites and channels we would consider reputable.  Avoid getting drug into the details and focus only on headlines.  All too often there is nothing we can do personally to combat a particular evil and so knowing the details is simply curiosity rearing its ugly head.  Get in the habit of asking yourself why you need to know anything more and you will quickly realize that you don’t.

When St. Paul wrote the Christians in Philippi he knew they too were living in a culture where evil had been glamorized he had what is the most practical of advice, “whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable–if anything is excellent or praiseworthy–think about such things” (Phil 4:8).  We would do well to focus on these things as well, turning away from the bad news so that we can more fully embrace the Good News.

Holy Saturday and the Descent into Hell

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Among the days of the Sacred Triduum, Holy Saturday remains the least significant.  For most Christians, it is simply a placeholder—a day of waiting for Easter.  Good Friday is done and now we await the celebration of Easter.  To live this sacred season to the fullest, we need to see it for what it is liturgically—the day of the death of God.  This is especially true given the practical  experience of our age; an age when many forces in our culture have succeeded in implementing  Nietzsche’s plan; “God is dead and we have killed Him.”

This experience of God’s silence is, as Pope Benedict once said, “part of Christian revelation…Only when we have experienced Him as silence may we hope to hear his speech, too, which proceeds in silence.”  This truth is so foundational to the Christian life, that it is was presupposed by an article in the Apostles’ Creed marked by the tenet that “He descended into Hell.”  Holy Saturday, then, offers us a unique opportunity to meditate upon this article of the Creed.

Part of the Christian Myth?

This particular article of the Creed, according to Pope Benedict, has become a victim of the demythologizing of Christianity, rendering it incomprehensible to many of us.  Some of this stems from a certain amount of ambiguity attached to the word Hell.  In English, we usually associate this word with the hell of the damned, but the Catechism of the Concil of Trent makes the distinction between three different abodes called Hell.  The first is the dark prison where the damned are tormented is called Gehenna and is hell strictly speaking.  The second consists of the fires of purgatory where the just men are cleansed from temporal punishment.  The third is Sheol which is the abode into which the souls of the just before the coming of Christ the Lord were received and remained, without experiencing any sort of pain and sustained by the blessed hope of redemption, in peaceful repose.

When we speak of Christ’s Decent into Hell we are referring to the place called Sheol in  Hebrew (Greek Hades and Latin infernus).  Christ did not visit the hell of the damned, a place that by definition, God does not go.   Instead He visited the place where the souls of the just men went, commonly referred to as Abraham’s bosom.

It was first of all fitting that He did this.  As punishment for Original Sin, the souls of all the just were sent to Sheol.  Because He was like unto us in all things but sin, Christ the preeminently just man, upon the separation of His body and soul at death descended to the abode of the dead and remained there until it was reunited to His body in the Resurrection.  As St. Peter tells the crowds at Pentecost Christ was “released from the pangs of Hades; for it was impossible for Him to be held by its power” (Acts 2:24).

What did He do while He was there?  As he did on the earth, He did under the earth—“proclaimed liberty to the captives.”  Who were these captives?  The righteous men and women of the Old Covenant, who, like Abraham had faith in the fulfillment of God’s promises were the captives freed.  This faith was credited to them in righteousness as St. Paul tells the Romans.  They are among the great clouds of witnesses listed in the Book of Hebrews; the Fathers like Abel, Enoch, Noah and Abraham; Jews like Moses and David; non-Jews like Rahab; and those who passed during Jesus’ life like His precursor John the Baptist, and foremost in great joy, St. Joseph.

St. Peter, in writing of Christ’s descent, says that “He preached to the souls in prison” (1 Pt 3:19).  This was an act of proclamation that what they had believed in and waited for during their lives, had taken place.  It was not as if He told them about Himself and they could decide whether to believe or not.  These men and women already believed and died in faith and charity.  Jesus did not “convert” unbelievers during His time in Sheol.  They had their period of trial during their lives.  It is appointed that all men die once and then judgement.  There is no test after death nor is there a second chance.  However, as St. Thomas says, Christ’s descent was virtually into the Hell of the Damned because its effects were felt in order to put them to shame for their unbelief and wickedness.

Christ’s Victory Dance

Christ’s Descent into Hell is a descent of victory.  The righteous who were held within the confines of Abraham’s Bosom would have been a virtual trophy case for the devil.  Although just, they were still kept from God in death.  The devil would have looked upon the death of Christ initially as one more victory.  That is until His actual descent when He conquers death by His death.  This truth is one that is beautifully captured in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ when the devil screams with the realization that God has used his weapon, death, against him.

The Descent into Hell is no mere collection of theological facts, but are charged with meaning.  As I alluded to at the beginning, this article of the Creed is so relevant today because God is seen by many to be silent.  But just as when Christ appeared to be silenced by death, God is always at work bringing about redemption.  Just when things seem darkest, God is at work turning evil on its ear. Those who remained in Abraham’s bosom are the saints of hope and patrons for all of us.  Despite all appearances to the contrary they knew that when God does speak, He always keeps His promises.  Often all they had were His promises.  They had to wait for Him to come to save them and wait they did.  Christ’s Descent into Hell reminds us that God always keeps His promises.  Through their intercession, may we spend this Holy Saturday, waiting in joyful hope.