Category Archives: Redemption

Are We Alone in the Universe?

Angels, End Times, Redemption, Science, , , ,

There was a time, not too long ago, when mentioning Area 51 or aliens, invited ridicule as a conspiracy theorist.  But the difference between a conspiracy theory and reality is currently measuring about four years so that many Americans (2/3 according to a 2021 Pew Research study) now believe that extra-terrestrial intelligence (ETI) exists.  Interestingly enough, American Catholics believe at a slightly higher rate than Americans as a whole.  One can only speculate why that might be, but the Church has not spoken definitively on the subject leaving Catholics somewhat free to follow the evidence.  It is the qualifier “somewhat” that I would like to use as the launching pad for a discussion of ETI given that Divine Revelation gives us some guardrails for investigation as to both the possibility and the likelihood.

It is worth mentioning at least at the outset that we already have proof that we are not alone in the universe.  Angels and their fallen counterparts are constantly acting within material creation, even in visible ways.  It is certainly possible that the UFO sightings and even the discovery of “non-human biologics” are simply diabolical manifestations.  But it is contemptuous to insist upon this as the only possible explanation.

Setting Up the Guardrails

The temptation when dealing with the question is to leave it to “science” to determine the possibility and likelihood of intelligent life.  This approach neglects the fact that theology is also a science.  Because its first principles come from God Who can neither deceive nor be deceived, it is the highest of the sciences. 

By looking to theology, we are able to eliminate some possibilities.  The ETI must be of a completely different race from mankind in that they have a different line of descent.  The Church has condemned polygenism and so there must be more than mere accidental differences between human and the other race of ETIs.  They must be a different substance altogether.  In other words, they would have to be biologically distinct humanoids with a rational soul.  Scripture and the Magisterium both describe the “human race” as descended from Adam so that it at least seems possible (an argument from silence) that there could be another race or races in the universe.

Once we allow at least for the possibility, then we must examine the ETIs relationship to Christ.  For everything that exists, exists in relationship to Christ Who “is the center of the universe and of history” (Pope St. John Paul II,Redemptoris Hominis, 1 ).  St Paul tells the Colossians that “in Him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things were created through Him and for Him” (Col 1:16-20).  This point is vital not only in considering ETI, but in understanding reality as a whole.  Everything that exists, does so for His sake (not only for His sake but primarily).  Fig trees were created for Him to curse, trees for crosses and water for baptism.  Most importantly, human nature exists for His sake so that He might take on human flesh.

The fact that Christ took on human flesh gives to the human race a special dignity such that “all material creatures[exist] for the good of the human race” (CCC 353).  This would include ETI who, even if rational beings existing for their own sake, would exist in a similar manner to the angels, acting in service to the race of Adam.  This might be an argument against the existence of ETI in that we appear not to have received any benefit from them.  This is likely an argument St Thomas would have made in light of his contention that to speak of a universe in any meaningful way is to assume that the elements must form an ordered an interactive whole.  If there were no communication among the citizens, then the civil good could not be perfected (c.f ST I q.47, a.3).  Communication could still come later, but it is hard to imagine why it would be so delayed.

Building on the principle that the ETI must be related to Christ, then we can examine the relation of the race itself.  First, we would posit that they were, like the angels and mankind, created in a probationary state of grace.  As St. Thomas says, “It pertains to divine freedom to infuse grace into all who are capable of grace, unless something resisting is found in them, much more than he gives natural form to any disposed matter” (Commentary Sentences, 4, q.1 art.3).  The question would then be what the outcome of their testing was.

Fallen or Unfallen?

One thing that becomes immediately clear in reading the New Testament is that in the act of redemption, God willed a correspondence between the fallen and the Redeemer “since the children share the same blood and flesh, he too shared equally in it, so that by his death he could…set free those who had been held in slavery all their lives by fear of death” (Heb. 2:14).  This means that if the ETI were fallen, they would need a separate incarnation.  A second incarnation however would be incompatible with the Faith according to an infallible teaching found in Dominus Iesus: “Therefore, the theory which would attribute, after the incarnation as well, a salvific activity to the Logos as such in his divinity, exercised ‘in addition to’‌ or ‘beyond’‌ the humanity of Christ, is not compatible with the Catholic faith” (DI, 10).  The Son’s sole redemptive act is through His human nature.  Therefore, there can be no other fallen race in existence.

This leaves open only one possibility; that there is a heretofore unknown, unfallen race of intelligent creatures in the universe.  Like the Angels, Christ would be their Lord and Head, but not their Redeemer.  In His human nature Christ is “the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil 2:12-13).

St Thomas says that if Adam had not fallen then he would immediately attain “that happy state of seeing God in His Essence, he would have become spiritual in soul and body; and his animal life would have ceased, wherein alone there is generation” (ST I q.100, a.2).  Likewise, because they would have passed their probationary period, the ETI would have spiritual bodies (which might help to explain the manner in which UFOs seem to move) and would not reproduce.  Of course one could also ask why, if they have passed their probationary period, they don’t immediately receive their reward in the beatific vision. 

According to Paul Thigpen in his book Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the Catholic Faith, St Padre Pio once told a reporter that “The Lord certainly did not limit his glory to this small Earth. On other planets other beings exist who did not sin and fall as we did.”  Despite this saintly endorsement, I think another saint provides the logic for why they do not exist.  When speaking of how Providence guides even our sins, St Thomas says that because the angels contain a higher perfection than men, a far fewer number of them fell as compared to mankind (Sentences I D.39 q.2 A.2).  It would seem that if there were a race of men that did not fall, this test of proportionality would fail and the ladder of perfection of the universe upended.  It is for this reason that I ultimately find the existence of ETI very unlikely. 

Before closing, I want to mention another resource that I found very helpful in addressing the existence of ETI; Marie George’s Christianity and Extraterrestrials.  Part of the challenge in thinking theologically about this issue is being able to formulate the questions correctly and frame it from the perspective of Divine Providence.  She does both.  I might weigh her conclusions differently than she did, but her framing of the issue is invaluable for anyone who wants to approach the issue from a Catholic perspective.

Opening Our Hearts

Redemption, ,

It is somewhat apropos that the leading cause of death in the United States is heart disease.  Not just because of our collective lifestyles but because of the fact that it symbolizes the much larger heart disease that afflicts even the physically healthiest among us.  We are, as CS Lewis once put it, “men without chests.”  Our hearts are dying from neglect and we are greatly in need of transplants so that we can live truly human lives.

Transplant seems like a bit of an exaggeration, until we ponder the number of times Sacred Scripture speaks of getting a new heart.  Psalm 51 “create in me a clean heart O God” and Ezekiel 36:26 “And I will give you a new heart” among others could be brought to mind.  The point is that what we are about to discuss is no mere self-improvement project but a complete rebuild by the Master Builder Himself.  Why we must be in a receptive position will become clear in a second, but we must belabor the point so as to grasp what God is offering to us in Christ. 

Redeeming the Emotions

St. Gregory Nazianzen said, “what has not been assumed has not been healed.”  His point is that Christ assumed a true human nature and lived a truly human life in order to redeem ours.  Our Lord came not just to redeem us, but to heal us.  Just as that redemption starts now, so too does the healing.  More to the point, Christ He was effective in redeeming our affectivity.  He lived the perfect affective human life so that we could be healed.  He didn’t just want us to love our neighbor in some dry volitional way, He wanted us to feel the love too. 

Christ didn’t just heal our emotions from afar, but He wept in the face of sadness.  He commanded His disciples to “rejoice because your names are written in heaven” (Lk 10:20), but then showed them how to “rejoice at that very moment” (Lk 10:21).  One of the most beautiful parts of The Chosen series is the way in which they depict the sheer delight that Our Lord felt and expressed when He performed a miracle. 

Christ gave us new hearts in order to love the right things in the right way, but until we grasp that this love includes the affective dimension, our love will always be mediocre.  I might love my neighbor because I want to help him, but that love will always be cold unless I feel compassion in the face of his need.  In order to be truly effective my compassion must be affective.    

This does not mean I let the perfect become the enemy of the good and only do something good if I can feel it, but that Christ’s redemptive act includes my feelings.  I should expect that I would feel it and if I don’t I should ask Him to further heal my feelings.  I should not just ask for sorrow for my sins, but sorrow that is felt.  There is no such thing as peace or joy that is not in some way felt in our hearts.  Even if we are suspicious of our affective dimension, we should never allow that suspicion to turn into hatred.

Encountering the Beautiful

What these new hearts will enable us to do is to encounter the beautiful.  It is not surprising that a culture that moves away from God is also no longer able to encounter beauty.  Beauty is what fuels the heart.  It is beauty deprivation in our culture that has caused the endemic heart disease. suffering from beauty deprivation.  Reality is marked by three transcendentals, three categories of being that all being share and that we were given natural radar for.  Our intellects are built to truth.  Our wills are built to goodness.  Our hearts are built to beauty.  We know what truth and goodness are, but we struggle with beauty.  Even St. Thomas’ definition of beauty as “that when seen pleases” is rather elusive unless our hearts are alive.  The beautiful is the thing that once we see it, see not just with our eyes but with the “eye of the mind”, we are moved, but not in order to possess it but to take delight in its existence. 

Our affections are moved because of this encounter with the beautiful.  But the moment we turn our focus away from the object that moved us and towards the pleasure it causes inside of us, we lose both the pleasure and the beauty.  In short, we begin to neglect our hearts and slowly they begin to die.  The problem is not the pleasure—that is what keeps the heart pumping—but the love of the pleasure.  To love the pleasure is selfish, but to love the object that stirred us in the first place is true love.  The pleasure then is felt love.

It is perhaps easiest to see when it comes to married love.  A wife will often tell her husband who insists on her beauty, that he is blinded by love.  But it is actually love that opens his eyes to the beauty.  He is fixated on the object of his affections and not the affections themselves.  The man who does this will never stop feeling those affections and in fact they will only get deeper as his love deepens.  She “has his heart.”  But if he can only focus on the pleasure her smile brings and not on the beauty of the smile itself, his love will die and his heart atrophy.

God made our hearts this way because He wants us to “taste and see the goodness of the Lord.”  He wants us to feel the gift of reality by contemplating the beauty of created things.  In contemplating and not trying to manipulate them to maximize pleasure, they become signs of His Goodness and Love.

Suffering and Reparation

Church, Divine Mercy, Redemption, Suffering, , , ,

In his 1928 Encyclical, Miserentissimus Redemptor, Pope Pius XI exhorted Catholics to consider their obligation to offer reparation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus for the many sins of mankind and to practice it fastidiously.  By in large his call was ignored then and has long since been forgotten.  With the Protestantization that has occurred within the Church in the last half century the notion that a Christian is obligated to offer reparation seems quite foreign, even bordering on blasphemous.  Our Proto-Catholic reasons that if Christ’s once for all sacrifice has been accepted, then there is no reason why a Christian would need to perform acts of reparation.  Nevertheless, the obligation remains so that now is the time to make this a regular practice for all Christians.

Any discussion of reparation will necessarily need to begin by conquering the already-mentioned objection, namely that Christ already offered all that was needed for sin.  The problem with this view is that it contains only a half-truth in that misunderstands what it means to say that Christ has redeemed us.  Most simply view Redemption as simply “getting to go to heaven”, but that is way to general.  Redemption truthfully means that Christ, through the infinite merits of His Divine Personality, came to repair His work that sin has ruined.  In short, Christ came to make reparation.  This work could have been done alone, but He instead willed to have accomplices in His work of reparation. 

Becoming Accomplices of Christ

Those accomplices are not just His Mother or the Apostles, but every Christian.  Every Christian is grafted onto Christ, not as individuals but as members of His Mystical Body, the same Body of which He is the Head.  What happens to the Head then likewise happens to the body.  If the Head performed acts of reparation, so too then must the body, for They are the Whole Christ.  This intimate union of Head and Body means that the members continue His acts of reparation.

This helps us to understand what is often viewed as a confusing statement by St. Paul, namely that he is “adding to what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Col 1:24).  The lack is not in Christ as Head, but in His Mystical Body.  The Body must too be afflicted by participating in the acts of reparation of the Head.  Only then can the Head and Body be truly one.

We see then that reparation is obligatory because it creates a unity between Christ and Christians.  This obligation extends not just to Reparation itself, but also to the way it is made—by suffering.  It is the will of God that Reparation occur through suffering because Christ chose that as the proper means.  A true Christian, while he may fear suffering, must see it for what it truly is, Divine currency.  Christ’s suffering is the gold standard that gives value to the currency of suffering, but we must nevertheless spend it, or more accurately be spent by it, ourselves.  He has raised Christians to such an immense dignity that they become other Christ’s, not by being nice to other people, but by suffering with Him.  If we suffer with Him, then we shall reign with Him (2 Tim 2:12).  Suffering is the glue that holds the Mystical Body together.

What happens when this obligation is ignored or forgotten?  The answer is much unnecessary suffering, or, to put it more accurately, useless suffering.  Because suffering is the currency by which the obligation of Reparation is purchased, it is an inevitability.  But not just any suffering will do.  It is only suffering that is willingly accepted can buy Reparation.  This is why living in the unique time that we find ourselves, we must put all of this suffering to good use, namely Reparation.

When Christians fail to offer Reparation then things like the Coronavirus happen.  God never will give up on uniting us with His Son so that we can share in His glory.  He will even allow things like plagues to grip the world so that Christians might recapture their roles as Reparators.  That is why all of us should be focused on making acts of Reparation right now.  Everyone is going to be called on to make sacrifices in the coming weeks, but only those who submit to the Provident designs of God will make Reparation.  It does not require us to understand the whole plan, only to say “Thy will be done” each time we are called upon to suffer.  No one knows how long this will all last, but we can say that it will be shorter when Christians embrace the obligation of Reparation.

Limbo and the Fate of Unbaptized Infants

Abortion, Church Fathers, Faith and Reason, Heaven, Mercy, Purgatory, Redemption, Relativism, Sacraments, , , , , ,

In an age of exaggerated mercy there is perhaps no doctrine that is more reprehensible than that of Limbo.  Developed early on in the Church’s history, it is the belief that children who die without receiving baptism go to a place of natural bliss in which they do not share in the Beatific Vision given to the Blessed in Heaven.  Treated as a theological pariah, this belief is summarily dismissed as harsh and medieval but no alternative is given to tackle the difficult question of the everlasting destiny of these children.  When millions of children are lost every year because of abortion it would seem that it should be treated with some theological urgency so that the Church might find a true means of salvation to these children.

Original Sin and Hell

Properly framing the problem helps us first to see why it is a problem of particular urgency.  All of humanity at the moment of conception is plagued with Original Sin.  This condition is not one of actual guilt per se, but of deprivation.  A child is conceived and remains devoid of sanctifying grace until they are reborn in the waters of Baptism (c.f. John 3:5).  Why this matters is because without sanctifying grace, a soul cannot enter into the Vision of God.  This is not because God is a stickler for rules but because Heaven is not natural for human beings such that in order to enter into the presence of the Consuming Fire that is God, a man must be properly clothed (c.f. Mt 22:11) with the “spiritual fire suit” that makes him capable of partaking of the Divine nature (c.f. 2Pt 1:4).

The fact that Heaven is not the natural destiny of mankind is also important for understanding Limbo.  Because no one sees the face of God and lives (c.f. Ex. 33:20), that is by nature man cannot stand before the face of God, it is a supernatural gift that God bestows upon men.  It is a free gift offered to all men, but only those who have been given the gift and maintained it, can actually receive it.  That it is a gift means that to be deprived of the gift is not exactly the same thing as having been punished.

We see an example of this among the righteous men of the Old Testament.  Prior to Christ’s descent into hell, which is understood not as the hell of the damned but as the limbus of Abraham’s Bosom, these men and women were in a state of natural bliss.  They enjoyed God, not face to face and as He really is, but according to their natural knowledge of Him that was illuminated by their faith in His revelation up to that point.  This was a temporary state so that once they saw the Messiah God had promised they were immediately given the Beatific Vision. 

This example is illustrative because it offers us glimpse of what a permanent state of the Limbus Infantium would be like.  Although laboring under the constraints of Original Sin, the children have no actual sin and thus do not deserve to be punished.  That is, they avoid the two punishments of hell: the pain of sense and the pain of loss.  Even though they are deprived of the Beatific Vision (usually considered to be the pain of loss in adults), they have no supernatural knowledge of glory and thus do not know what they are missing.  Because they do not have the natural capacity to achieve it, they do not grieve its loss.  No man grieves the loss of his inability to fly because it is not within his natural capacity to do so.  Instead they experience a natural joy in that they achieve a natural end—contemplation of God by natural means.  As St. Alphonsus puts it:

“children will not only not grieve for the loss of eternal happiness, but will, moreover, have pleasure in their natural gifts; and will even in some way enjoy God, so far as is implied in natural knowledge, and in natural love: ‘Rather will they rejoice in this, that they will participate much in the divine goodness, and in natural perfections.’( St. Thomas Aquinas, De Malo, q.5, a.3)  And he immediately adds, that although they will be separated from God, as regards the union of glory, nevertheless ‘they will be united with him by participation of natural gifts; and so will even be able to rejoice in him with a natural knowledge and love.’”

The Great Means of Salvation and Perfection

“A Possible Theological Opinion”

Despite falling into theological disfavor, the theory of Limbo remains a “possible theological opinion” according to the International Theological Commission in their 2007 document Hope of Salvation of Infants Who Die without Baptism.  It remains possible because it offers a very reasonable solution to the problem.  It remains possible because it is also very hopeful in that it does not condemn otherwise innocent children to the hell of the damned.  It remains possible because it is really only a reasonable solution to the problem of which Revelation never treats directly and any solution would require us to piece together many different doctrines.  But the point is that we should also not be so quick to dismiss it because it is the best solution we have right now because it fits many, if not all, of the pieces together.  It is the best solution because it is the one that has the backing of numerous doctors of the Church, two of whom we have already mentioned—St. Thomas and St. Alphonsus. 

Nevertheless, the Holy Innocents teach us that there are extra-sacramental ways in which children can be saved, especially via a baptism of blood.  Cajetan thought that children could be saved also through a vicarious baptism of desire or others have posited that the children are given the use of their reason just prior to death in order to choose. 

That we don’t know however should spur us to do two things.   First is never to delay baptism.  Baptism remains the ordinary means of salvation and the only sure way we know by which children can be saved.  We should not delay their baptism any longer than is absolutely necessary regardless of a fear of germs or familial convenience.  Second is that the Church has a whole needs to be praying for these children, especially those in the womb who are in danger of death. 

Healing Our Speech Impediment

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If our sole criterion for judging the seriousness of particular sins is the number of times it is mentioned in Sacred Scripture, then most certainly sins of the tongue are among the most dangerous.  St. James describes the danger in rather stark terms: “The tongue is also a fire. It exists among our members as a world of malice, defiling the whole body and setting the entire course of our lives on fire, itself set on fire by Gehenna” (James 3:6).  Of course, he is reiterating what God gave to Moses in the Eighth Commandment which calls out our post-edenic speech impediment. But in our own age, because of a marked preference for verbosity over veracity, we ought to re-examine his warning lest the gravity of the tongue drag us into Gehenna.

Man has always struggled with simply following rules—not in the sense that he doesn’t follow them, but that he chooses how he is going to follow them.  This is both the gift and burden of freedom.  We can use these rules as boundaries or we can use them runways for freedom.  We can find out how to stay within the strict letter of the law or we can learn how to use them to truly thrive.  The choice is up to us, but the Church always leans towards the side of freedom.  She gives us not just rules, but also reasons.  She teaches ethics so that we can develop ethos. 

On Telling the Truth

This is especially true when it comes to truth telling.  Moralists have argued for centuries as to what constitutes a lie.  Even the Catechism has had to change its definition since it was first released in 1992.  The point is not that rules are unnecessary—there can be no gray without black and white—but that unless you understand why telling the truth is so important, you will always be trapped in a casuistic web.  Truth telling matters because the truth matters.  The truth matters because it is God Who through His Provident care has set reality as it really is.  It is He Who has willed, directly or permissively, things to be the way they are.  To distort that is to usurp God as God and to alter reality such that it is the way I want it to be.  There is no color coding of lies, white or otherwise, because lying is first and foremost an offense against God’s Fatherhood.

Most people know a lie when they tell one, but sins of the tongue encompass so much more than just lying.  It is the gray areas that often and unwittingly cause the most problems.  There is gossiping, excuse making, calumny, slander, flattery, and detraction; all of which are just as, if not more, common than just straight up lying.  This is because there seems to be no clear rules governing them.  But once we look at the telos, or purpose, of our capacity for speech, we find a set of guiding principles emerging.

Among all the visible creatures, speech is the most distinctively human powers.  Other animals may speak, but none can truly communicate.  Our speech allows us to make visible what is otherwise invisible.  Speech allows us to communicate not just facts or theories but our interior.  It gives us the power to tell others exactly is going on inside of us.  So important is this fact, that Our Lord also mentions it in a discussion with the Pharisees.  “From within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts…” (Mk 7:21).

Truth and Communion

But speech is not just for us to download our thoughts, but it is given to us for communion.  Made in the image of God, the Triune God that is in perfect communion through the Word, our speech is meant to be a power in which we give what is most intimate, our thoughts.  But falsehood cannot bear the weight of communion, so that true communion can only happen when there is communication in truth.  It is this last statement that animates the two guiding principles for the use of our tongue: truth and communion.

Truth is paramount for the reasons already mentioned, but not every situation calls for truth telling.  Some situations call for truth withholding.  Truth withholding is really about truth protecting, that is, protecting the truth from those who do not need to know it (detraction) or those who will exploit it for evil.  Even in those cases it is never permissible to lie, even if you must exercise a mental reservation or suffer for remaining silent.   But we often struggle with deciding whether someone needs to know and for this we can rely on the principle of communion.  Will what I am about to tell lead to a communion of persons or destroy it?  If I were to tell my neighbor that their babysitter is a drunk then that would be protective of the common good.  If I were to tell the babysitter that my neighbor wears a pink tutu then it would not.

Before closing there is one further point that need to be made related to speech and rash judgment.  Earlier I compared speech to downloading our thoughts.  Speech can also be a means by which we govern our thoughts.  When we speak it has the effect of solidifying our thoughts because there is now someone else who knows what I know.  But when we keep the thoughts to ourselves, it has the effect of causing us to examine them more carefully and gives us time to offer a corrective.  Speaking our thoughts sets them in stone.  Silence leads to true thoughts. 

Herein lies the promise of freedom when we learn to not just avoid lying, but use our speech well.  It leads us out of the captivity of our minds and into the glorious freedom of seeing and loving the truth.

The Bread of Life and the Resurrection

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Each Easter season, the Liturgy carries us through the Bread of Life Discourse found in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel.  We are all familiar with the setting, but this familiarity carries with it a danger of missing the point of  why the Church chooses these passages as part of her Easter celebration.  Of course, in a very real way, because the Eucharist is the “source and summit” of our faith, it is always in season.  But it is the connection between the Eucharist and the Resurrection that the Church wishes to highlight. Our Lord repeatedly issues the command to eat His body and drink His blood and for apologetical reasons that can grab our attention.  But each time He does, He attaches it to the promise of the future resurrection.  This creates an intrinsic link between the Eucharist and the resurrection of the dead that is worth further examination.

To grasp why this is so, we can turn to St. Augustine.  In the Confessions, Augustine recounts the time that he heard the voice of Christ saying “I am the food of strong men; grow and you shall feed on me; nor shall you change me, like the food of your flesh into yourself, but you shall be changed into my likeness” (Book VII, Ch. X).  St. Thomas interprets this passage as referring to the spiritual nature of the food that is the Eucharist.  Bodily food is changed into the substance of the person nourished and supports life as such.  Spiritual food changes the man into Itself and supports the spiritual life as such.

The Sacrament of the Passion

The Eucharist as both the Sacrament of the Passion and “true food indeed” transforms us into Christ  according to which “a man is made perfect in union with Christ Who suffered” (ST III, q.73, art.3, ad. 3).  It is Christ Who is really present in the Eucharist and it is Him Whom we receive, but we receive Him with particular reference to His Passion.  This reception allows us to not just “spiritually” unite ourselves to Him in His Passion, but so that we truly participate in it.  And it is from this that its fruits are truly available to us; or we should say one fruit in particular—a share in the bodily resurrection.  In short the Eucharist conforms us to Christ in His Passion so that we might share in His resurrection.  The Eucharist is then ordered towards the Resurrection, but only by sacramentally passing through the Passion of Christ.

By highlighting the end of the Eucharist, it helps us to understand two further aspects of this “hard teaching”.  First, when Our Lord says that it is the spirit that gives life and not the flesh He does not mean that we should take what He says symbolically and unite to Him spiritually.  Instead He means that it was, as St. Thomas says, “the Cross [that] made His flesh adapted for eating” (ST III, q.3, art.3, ad.1).  It is His resurrected, impassible body that gives life, not the passible, mortal body that they see.  In other words, the Eucharist, because it is the Sacrament of the Passion, would not have achieved its full meaning until “Christ our Passover had been sacrificed.”  This is why Pope Innocent III said the disciples at the Last Supper “received His body such as it was ” (De Sacr. Alt. Myst. iv), that is, mortal and passible. It was not until after the Resurrection that they would have received His immortal and impassible body.

Why It is Necessary

The second point has to do with Christ’s insistence that, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, you shall not have life in you” (Jn 6:54).  It is difficult not to read this as imposing some sort of necessity that links the Eucharist to salvation.  But this is an often-misunderstood teaching because it requires a bit of explanation.  In fact, this is one of the doctrines that the Calvinists attacked when they broke away from the Church, saying that the Eucharist was not necessary for salvation.

The Council of Trent made a series of distinctions to help throw this teaching into relief.  First, as Scripture testifies, Baptism is absolutely necessary for salvation (c.f. Mk 16:16).  The necessity of the Eucharist is of a different kind—what the Church calls the necessity of precept.  This is a teaching that “is hard” but must be accepted, meaning that the believer must do as Our Lord commanded.  This is why the Church withholds it until one reaches the age of reason.  It is also why there is no absolute necessity like Baptism.  Young children do not need the Eucharist in order to be saved.

This distinction arises because Baptism, the Sacrament by which we are made to be “in Christ” and incorporated into His Mystical Body, deputizes the believer for divine worship, which means the offering of sacrifice to God.    This includes the offering of the Church’s sacrifice of the Eucharist.  So Baptism, like all the Sacraments, is ordered toward the Eucharist.  It essentially completes Baptism.

The moral necessity of receiving the Eucharist then is abundantly clear, but it is not clear how often one should do so.  In order to fulfill the precept, the Church obliges the faithful to receive it at least once a year during the Easter season (Canon 920).  But it is doubtful that one who only receives once a year will be able to preserve himself in a state of grace for very long.  The Eucharist is meant to provide supernatural nourishment for the soul so that when it is deliberately avoided for a long period of time, the person will almost necessarily begin to fill up on the junk food that the world has to offer.

This moral necessity absolves young children prior to reaching the age of reason from receiving the Eucharist.  It also absolves those who are so mentally handicapped that they cannot make a simple act of faith in the Real Presence.  But what about non-Catholic Christians?  Are they all pretty much like the disciples who walked away from Jesus over this hard saying?

Recall that we are bound by necessity of precept.  That implies that we are aware of the precept and understand it.  The person must not be culpably ignorant, although what that actually looks like is up to God.  What we can say for sure is that it will be a miracle if someone is saved without receiving the Eucharist regularly.  The natural means by which God grants the supernatural gift of perseverance is through the Eucharist.  God can circumvent those natural means via a miracle, but how often or even if that happens we cannot know.  That is why the man who does not regularly receive the Bread of Life but knows that He should is, in essence, testing God by demanding a miracle.

The Word of God Made Flesh rarely repeated Himself.  The Bread of Life Discourse is a notable exception as He commanded His disciples four times to eat His body and drink His blood.  This repetition wasn’t directed towards those disciples who “returned to their former way of life,” (Jn 6:66) but to those who continued to follow Him.  We should be constantly aware of just how dependent we are upon the Bread of Life and approach Him as such.

Can God Suffer?

Defending the Faith, God's Love, Paganism, Passion of Christ, Pope Francis, Redemption, Suffering, The Life of Jesus, Theology, , , ,

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.

Nothing New Under the Sun

Bible, Church, Ecumenism, Magisterium, Redemption, Scripture, , , , ,

A mega-church pastor in Atlanta named Andy Stanley has written an article in Relevant magazine asking why Christians persist in protecting monuments to the Ten Commandments when, in truth, they no longer apply to us.  Although keeping up with the ramblings of various mega-church pastors could be a full-time job, this particular article merits attention because it is demonstrative of heresies in general and how they seem to persist, especially when believers are cut off from the preservative protection of the Catholic Church.

A native of Sinope in modern day Turkey, Marcion was a shipbuilder who rejected the Old Testament.  He desired to strip Christianity of anything Jewish and any connection to the Old Testament.  In his view, Christ came to undo the work of the Creator.  He even went so far as to produce his own set of Scriptures, removing the Old Testament along with any references to the Old Testament in the New Testament and any suggestions that we would be judged by God.  Within the plan of Divine Providence, Marcion of course moved the Church along by encouraging her to make explicit the role of the Old Testament in the life of the Church.

The Law and Historical Christianity

Pastor Stanley and the second century ship builder are, in a very real sense, kindred spirits.  For truly, there is “nothing new under the sun” when it comes to heresies.  They are simply recycled throughout the ages.  That is why Blessed John Henry Newman’s maxim rings true—“to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.”  Pastor Stanley’s error is not just theological but historical.  He claims that “the blended model began as early as the second century when church leaders essentially kidnapped the Jewish Scriptures and claimed them as their own.”  This is simply rehashing what Marcion said and he interprets the Church’s clarification as “kidnapping” the Jewish Scriptures.  In other words, he is saying that Marcion was right. 

Interestingly enough, many German Lutherans became Marcions under the Nazi regime for obvious reasons.  To be clear, Pastor Stanley is not suggesting anything like this (he does in fact condemn it).  But his doctrine necessarily leads to that no matter how unwittingly he proposes it.  This is the nature of heresies, they always lead to a dead, and sometimes even deadly, end.  Given enough time, what is implicit will always be made explicit.

The Law and the New Covenant

That is why it is instructive to cut off his error at its roots, especially because it is a common one.  In essence, his thesis comes at the end of his essay—“While Jesus was foreshadowed in the old covenant, he did not come to extend it. He came to fulfill it, put a bow on it, and establish something entirely new.”  The error really comes in equating the Old Covenant with the Law.  There was not a single “Old Covenant” but instead God made a series of covenants with man, beginning with Adam and ending with David, all of which culminated in the New Covenant that is sealed in Christ’s blood.  Nowhere in Scripture does it suggest that Jesus was “establishing something entirely new.”  The new wine and new wineskins are like the old wine and wineskins, even if they are new. 

The question, and it was one that the early Church had to wrestle with (c.f. Acts 10-20), was what role the Jewish law would play in this New Covenant.  That it was to play a role was clear when Our Lord said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For I tell you truly, until heaven and earth pass away, not a single jot, not a stroke of a pen, will disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished” (Matthew 5:17-18).  For Pastor Stanley and many like him Jesus came precisely to destroy the Law.

St. Augustine in his famous treatise on the Sermon on the Mount said that to “not abolish the law but to fulfill it” can be taken in two ways, both of which are applicable to Christ’s words.  First to fulfill means to add what is lacking.  Augustine says, “he who adds what is lacking does not surely destroy what he finds, but rather confirms it by perfecting it.”  For Pastor Stanley, addition comes by way of subtraction.  You need only one commandment—“love one another as I have love you”— but he would have this commandment demolish the foundation of the Law rather than building on it.  No wonder he calls out Chick-fil-A for closing in observance of the Sabbath.  His one commandment says nothing of loving God, a commandment that surely requires more than keeping the Sabbath sacred but most certainly not its exclusion.

Christ also fulfilled the Law by doing everything that was in it.  He did this not just to show it was possible, but to make it possible for us as well.  In Christ, the impossible becomes possible.  Ethics becomes ethos as the Divine Stonemason moves the law from the stone of Sinai to the stone of our hearts.  The Ten Commandments cease mere laws, but prophesies.  Christians “shall keep the Sabbath” and “shall not kill, lie or steal.”

As further proof that Christ does not want to abolish the law, He devotes much of His Sermon on the Mount to how it will be fulfilled.  He does this by precisely using the Ten Commandments as the model.  “Moses said, but I say to you…”  So clearly He has no intention of abolishing the Ten Commandments.  But what about all the other Old Testament precepts?  Some of them, particularly the ceremonial aspects will find their fulfillment in the rites of the New Covenant.  Other precepts, especially some of the moral ones will remain in place.  Still, if we examine the issue honestly, there is still not enough guidance.  This reveals the larger error that Pastor Stanley makes and, unfortunately, many other Christians with him .

The aforementioned quote of Newman is really an indictment that Protestantism is not the Christianity of history.  Sola Scriptura necessitates that view because they are rejected a historical explication of Christian dogma in favor of one based solely on the Bible.  The problem with this however is that it is a dead Christianity because much of the Bible only makes Revelation implicit.  Which aspects of the Mosaic Law are binding and which are not is never explicitly told to the Biblical reader.  Instead what is implicit in Christ’s words must be made explicit.  This explication must happen under the guidance of the Church, led by the Holy Spirit “who guides us to all truth” through the Church.  Once a Protestant turns to the Church Fathers and sees the unbroken line of belief to what the Apostles taught, errors such as Pastor Stanley’s are never made.  Christ did not make something entirely new, he added the necessary ingredients to Judaism to make it Catholic.  But if you reject the Catholic Church outright then you necessarily will think He must have started something new.

Being closing we would be remiss in neglecting Pastor Stanley’s fundamental question as to why Christians should insist on the presence of monuments of the Ten Commandments instead of the Sermon on the Mount.  Perhaps Pastor Stanley’s suggestion is a little self-serving in that he is looking for a place to actually read and study it.  But in theory there is no particular reason why we could not use the Sermon on the Mount instead, although it is, admittedly, a little long.  But the Ten Commandments, especially in a post-Christian culture can be very effective for the same reason that God gave them first.  The law was given so that the people became aware of their inability to keep it and would cry out to God for redemption.  Sometimes the bad news is just as effective as the good news.

On Hurricanes and Divine Judgment

God's Will, Mercy, Purgatory, Redemption, Suffering, , ,

Preparations are under way throughout much of the East Coast of the United States for the arrival of Hurricane Florence.  Houses are being boarded up, supplies are being purchased and evacuation plans are being executed.  Meanwhile “fire and brimstone” preachers throughout the country are preparing their sermons about Florence bringing with her the strong winds of Divine Wrath.  These foreboding missives usually greatly miss their mark and bring with them not fear, but mirth, as both the world and Christians alike laugh at them.  Hilarity, that is, until they realize that these prophets of gloom might actually have a point, even if they have failed typesetting their message in its proper context.

We cannot be too quick to dismiss these preachers of peril.  Be it earthquakes (c.f. Ps 17:8, Is 13:13), droughts (c.f. Jer 3:2), floods or calamities in general (c.f. Is 24:5), Scripture is unambiguous in its account of God using natural calamities in order to punish sinners.  Plus, we find a similar echo among the preaching of the saints.  St. Basil said, that “No one troubles himself about inquiring why drought, lightning, hail, are sent down upon us; they are sent us on account of our sins and because we preserve an impenitent heart.”  St. Anselm meanwhile suggested that “By offending God we not only excite His anger but the anger of all creation.”  We could multiply the examples, but the point is that there is an important truth that needs to be heard.

Setting the Proper Context

The problem then is not that what they are saying is untrue, it is that it lacks the proper context.  At the heart of the Christian message is a point that is so foundational that we can easily overlook it.  Death, although considered an evil in itself, is not the worst thing that can happen to you.  The worst thing that can happen to you is that you end up in hell.   But there is, of course, the flip side of that coin.  The best thing that could possibly happen to you is to enter into Eternal Life with God.  What this means for the question at hand is that there really can be no meaningful discussion about “innocent children” who are killed.  They will get their reward.  A reward that, when they look back on their suffering and untimely death, will make those things seem so disproportionately small compared to the bliss they are enjoying.  They will even be grateful it happened because it was the doorway into their present state.  No sane person would ever complain that their liberator was too rough in granting them free from captivity.

Likewise those who die in unrepentance also receive what they deserve.  But even their death is a mercy.  God knows that they will continue to go on sinning only increasing their sufferings in hell.  So, in His abundant mercy, He puts an end to it so that they do no further harm to themselves.  He also puts an end to not only their offense against Him, but their offense against their neighbors whom they invite into sin with them.  Both justice and mercy at all times.  But we must also look to the survivors, both “innocent” and guilty alike.  How can we reconcile this aspect of punishment with the tremendous sufferings that they will have to endure?

Just as our imaginary interlocutor makes the distinction between the dead and the survivors, so too must we mark the difference between the living and the dead.  For those that die, their punishment or lack thereof is eternal.  But temporal punishments are wholly different.  God issues those for the express purpose of leading to the individual to conversion.  As the Doctor of the Church St. Alphonsus Liguori put it,  “my brethren, let us convince ourselves of what I have undertaken to show you today, namely, that God does not afflict us in this life for our injury but for our good, in order that we may cease from sin, and by recovering His grace escape eternal punishment.”   As the tolerant and loving Messiah once told us: the path to destruction is wide so that He must at times give a foretaste of this destruction in order that people will rebuild on the narrow path (c.f Mt 7:13).  Comfort in this fallen world rarely leads to comfort in the next.

The Good News and the Bad News

Denial of what has been said so far amounts to a denial of another foundational element of the Christian message—the Good News is really that includes the bad news.  Sufferings are inevitable in this world, but Christ liberated us from, not suffering, but useless suffering.  But it is only useful when it is accepted in a spirit of penance.  Otherwise it does have an air of cruelty about it, but only in our steady refusal of reality.  United with Christ however it carries with it the fragrance of freedom.

This is why the objection that these natural disasters seem rather indiscriminant won’t do.  They are part and parcel to God’s Providence.  Contained within the chaos of the calamity, are personal invitations to penance.  Penance that comes from the hands of God not only pays a debt to Divine justice, but heals the effects of the sin within each individual person.  The sufferings are only to the degree that they are needed for this purpose and no more.  There is both justice and mercy, neither of which can exist without the other.

For those outside the path of the hurricane, I close with a quote from gentle Jesus.  When His disciples asked him about the fate of a group of calamitous Galileans, He warned them “unless you do penance, you will likewise perish” (Lk 13:3).  The circumstances are different, but the invitation remains the same—do penance so that you can enter into eternal life.  The Hound of Heaven will not cease to hunt you until you are safely within the room of His Father’s house.

The Worker

Anthropology, Economics, Redemption, The Life of Jesus, Theology, Virtue, Work, , ,

Was man made to work or was work made for man?  The modern answer, enlightened of course by the strange amalgam of Marxism and liberalism is that made was made for work.  The Christian, and therefore the true answer, is that work was made for man.  In the beginning God made man and placed him in an earthly paradise.  Despite declaring creation “good, very good” (Gn 1:31), God left it completely incomplete and commanded man to finish it, to “cultivate and care for it” (Gn 2:15), because man himself was completely incomplete.  God commands only what is for our own good so that it is natural for man to work because work is a means of perfecting him.  With the Fall, man became incompletely incomplete so that work, while still essential to his fulfillment, lost its sweetness and became labor (c.f. Gn 3:17-19).  The effects of this curse are still felt today—especially today—when man is plagued by compartmentalization leaving him alienated from himself.  Given the key role that work plays in the integrated life then we must strive to see it in its proper context.

If we are to be honest, absent the Christian message as a whole, the secular response is the best we can come up with.  Even the pre-Christian pagans thought that all men were made to work, or, at least some men were made for servile work so that others didn’t have to.  That is because all they can see is the bad news—the curse of the Fall.  But the Redeemer of Mankind came spending most of His earthly life as a manual laborer redeeming work itself.  He came preaching, as St. John Paul II reminded us, “the Gospel of Work.”  And just as His mother Mary received the first fruits of His redemptive act, it is His earthly father Joseph, the man who worked beside Him those many years, that first reaped the fruits of the redemptive gift of work.  It is for this reason that the Church puts forth St. Joseph as “The Worker.”  If we are to see work in its proper context then we should look to St. Joseph as the model.

First a word about the seeming necessity of compartmentalization.  Most of us spend more time at work than anywhere else.  It becomes a compartment because it seems to only be related to the material.  Man applies his labor and ingenuity on creation in order to produce something that he can use.  The emphasis really seems to be on the finished product so that we can stockpile just enough to take a break (even if indefinitely) and do the really meaningful things including the compartment of “religion and God.”  While we may hear niceties about “praying while you work,” avoiding compartmentalization seems a practical impossibility.

The Finished Product

But this is where the emphasis on work as made for man is important.  The finished product of him work is not just the material thing produced, it is himself.  Good work is that which makes us good men.  Work ought to be judged first and foremost on what it turns us into.  Work that helps us grow in virtue is good work regardless of the actual task.  Seeing work in this subjective sense, the person produced, rather than solely in the exterior production can free us from compartmentalization because it is a means of forming the whole person.  The interior fruits of our labor are carried throughout the rest of our life.

Still man is confronted with the challenge of integrating work with his relationship to God.  There is always a gravity of work that pulls man towards creation, even if it is towards his own virtue, and away from God.  And this is why we need St. Joseph as our intercessor and model.  He, quite literally, worked for and with God.

Working For and With God

All of the work that St. Joseph did was, even if indirectly, for Jesus.  The “righteous man” sought always to serve God especially through his work.  What this means for us is that we can redeem our work by setting our intention.  At the beginning of any of our work we should make of it an offering to God.  Then all that we accomplish becomes a gift to Jesus.  We can also willingly accept, like St. Joseph did, the toilsome-ness of work.  Because work became labor through mankind’s sin, our acceptance of the burdens is an offering for our sins.  It was in this way that St. Joseph shared in Christ’s redemptive act and so can we.

Work also helps us to pay the debt of gratitude to God for the gifts, especially the special skills, He has given us.  Gratitude, properly speaking, carries with it not just the obligation to say “thank you” but also the obligation to repay the benefactor.  The fruit of our labor then becomes a means by which we repay to God this great debt.

There also needs to be a paradigm shift in order to see our work as working with God.  We should see it as a means of not only completely creation, but also as distributing it to all of mankind.  Just because you are getting paid to work doesn’t mean it isn’t also an exercise of charity towards our neighbor.  All workplaces can be charities when we take upon ourselves the spirit of St. Joseph.  This desire not only to give someone what they have paid for but also to go “above and beyond” by making manifest the love of God can sanctify the most secular of work environments.

When Pope Pius XII instituted the feast of Saint Joseph the Worker in 1955 it was in response to the dehumanizing effects of Communism; offering an alternative to their May Day celebrations for workers. In the subsequent sixty-three years we have seen work became a source of further disintegration in the lives of mankind.  By seeing work through the eyes of the Church and the illumination offered by St. Joseph the Worker we can restore work to its rightful place in the lives of all of us.

St. Joseph the Worker, pray for us!

The Darkness of Gethsemane

Passion of Christ, Redemption, Suffering, The Life of Jesus, , ,

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.

 

Spreading Hope

Heaven, Prayer, Purgatory, Redemption, Resurrection, Saints, Suffering,

 

During a September series between the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers in Dodger Stadium, Giants’ rightfielder Hunter Pence wore a necklace that contained the cremains of a devoted Dodgers’ fan, after the Dodgers refused the request to have the man’s daughter spread his ashes on the field.  The plea was one of many that the Dodgers and the rest of the MLB teams receive and routinely refuse yearly.  There is an ongoing campaign to develop a compromise of sorts in that the teams could allow on certain days a small amount of a person’s ashes to be spread on the field.  Setting aside the pragmatic reasoning, this decision ultimately represents an act of charity toward the dead and their loved ones.

The Book of Tobit reveals God’s pleasure in Tobit’s dogged persistence in burying the dead (Tobit 14:14) and it has long been considered a corporal work of mercy in the Christian tradition.  Understanding why God looks favorably upon this act however can help us to see the reason the Church insists that cremated remains not be scattered.

Spreading Faith

Christians have long seen death not as annihilation nor as the releasing of the soul from its incarceration in the body, but as having a fundamental positive meaning.  By being united to Christ’s death and resurrection in Baptism, the believer sees his own death in Christ as the pathway to a share in His glorious resurrection.  Like the resurrection of the Lord, the Christian’s is a bodily resurrection.  Our temporal bodies become as a seed of the body that will rise in glory (c.f. 1Cor 15:42-44).

This motivation helps to reveal the meaning of Christian burial.  If we really believe that our resurrected bodies are found in seed form in our earthly bodies, then our actions ought to reveal this.  Seeds must be buried and die so that new life may spring forth.   Christian burial is a sign of this; a sacrament that point to this reality.

Historically, pagans practiced funeral rites that included cremation, reflecting the widespread belief that there was no resurrection of the body.  Even when the pagans did practice burial (based on the belief that only when their bodies were buried could the soul rest), the Christians still buried their separately from the pagans because of the great difference in their understanding of the future resurrection.  It was this connection between paganism (and later certain secret societies and cults) and cremation that led the Church to remove it as an option for the faithful.

Considering some of the practical difficulties of burial in modern times (mostly exorbitant costs and decreasing space) the Church relaxed some of her restrictions on cremation when the new code of Canon Law was released in 1983.  Burial because of its nature as a sign remains the preferred method, but unless it is chosen for reasons contrary to Christian beliefs (i.e. a lack of belief in the resurrection of the body) then it is permitted when necessary (Canon 1176.3).  Cremation can testify to the omnipotence of God in raising up the deceased body to new life and therefore “in and of itself, objectively negates neither the Christian doctrine of the soul’s immortality nor that of the resurrection of the body” (Piam et constantem, 5 July 1963).

The cremated remains of the person should always “be laid to rest in a sacred place, that is, in a cemetery, or, in certain cases, in a church or an area which has been set aside for this purpose…” (Instruction Regarding the Burial of the Deceased and the Conservation of Ashes in the Case of Cremation, CDF, 2016).  This means that the ashes should never be scattered or preserved as mementos or pieces of jewelry.   To do any of these things would be testimony of pantheism, naturalism, or nihilism.

Based on what has been said so far, one might be willing to concede that the prohibition on scattering ashes should be binding on Christians, but what about non-Christians?  In other words, what if the man whose remains Hunter Pence wore didn’t believe in the resurrection of the body?  How is insisting on his burial an act of charity to both he and his family?

Of particular mention as well is that whether or not someone believes in the resurrection of the body has no bearing on whether it is true.  It may be an article of faith but it is an article of true faith, and so we as Christians have an obligation to do all that we can to bear witness to this truth.  Burial or interment also constitutes an act of charity to the dead as well.  For the dead it creates a “monument” that serves as a reminder to the living to pray for the deceased.  It assures that they will not be forgotten.  One whose ashes have been scattered will soon be forgotten, perhaps not by their immediate loved ones, but to subsequent generations they will be as one blotted out.  By not spreading ashes, we are spreading hope.

Spreading Charity

This highlights the intrinsic connection between the corporal work of mercy, burying the dead, and the spiritual work of mercy of praying for the dead.  This is perhaps the “easiest” of all works of mercy but also the most often neglected.  To pray for the dead is a great act of charity especially considering that only Catholics do it.  Very likely that man whose remains were worn by the Giants’ outfielder and many others like him have no one to pray for him.  We may have no way of knowing how the person has been judged, but we always trust that God’s mercy is more powerful than any man’s sins.  And so we pray and by praying, ironically enough, repair the harm done by our own sins, reducing our own time in Purgatory.  Charity covers a multitude of sins (1 Peter 4:8).

Many of the souls in Purgatory spend more time there than they should for want of having someone to pray for them.  Therefore the Church Militant devotes a whole month of special focus to relieving their suffering and offers a plenary indulgence for the Holy Souls during the week of Nov 2-Nov 8 each year.  By way of reminder, one can obtain a plenary indulgence (one per day), when in a state of grace and with a complete detachment from sin, receive Holy Communion, pray for the intentions of the Pope and go to Confession within 20 days before or after the act (one Confession can cover all 7 days, but the other acts must be done daily).  One can gain this particular indulgence by, in addition to the above conditions, devoutly visiting a cemetery and praying for the departed, even if the prayer is only mental.

A partial indulgence for the Souls in Purgatory can be obtained when the Requiem aeternam is prayed. This can be prayed all year, but should be especially prayed during the month of November:

Eternal rest grant to them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

 

 

Making Supermen

Ecumenism, Evangelization, Redemption, Sacraments, , ,

A friend of mine often wears what he calls his “favorite conversation starter” t-shirt.  It features a bunch of Marvel and DC superheroes sitting on top of a building listening to Jesus regale “and that is how I saved the world.”  This clever t-shirt is a conversation starter indeed, but not for the reason that you might think.  For most people, Christian and non-Christian alike, know the story of how Jesus saved mankind.  What they do not understand is how Jesus saves individual men.  It is this distinction between the universal and the particular, between all men and each man, that has both evangelical and ecumenical implications.  It is towards this distinction that we need to turn our gaze, not only to grasp it intellectually, but to embrace it more fully with our hearts.

The logic of the Word pitching His tent among us is twofold: atonement and redemption.  He came to return to the Father all the external glory that was lost through mankind’s offense.  But He did not just leave mankind in travail, but also redeemed us.  This is how He saved the world.  But not all members of the human race are redeemed so that simply being a member of the human race is not sufficient.  There is still the question as to how you and I enter into the orbit of the redeemed.  In Protestant parlance, the question is how does Jesus become my personal Lord and Savior?

How You and I Are Saved

The obvious, and somewhat simple answer, is faith.  Although the answer is simple, all too often we equivocate on the word faith and do not truly grasp what it means.  Faith, in the broadest sense, means to believe.  According to St. Augustine believing means to give assent to something one is still considering because one does not have a finished vision of the truth.  That is, rational inquiry into the object is not yet complete and therefore the person’s assent is not in the reason but in the will.  One trusts the Source and therefore proceeds as if the object has been sufficiently proven.

Faith is not complete until it has an object.  It is not enough to say “I believe” but one must say what he believes in.  To say that one has faith in Christ, he must believe that “there is no other name under heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).  That is the man trusts that all Christ did and said was true and that his act of redemption was sufficient to overcome his slavery to sin and power of death to hold him.

So far, the Catholic and non-Catholic Christian would agree.  Faith is necessary for salvation but it may not be sufficient.  Faith in Christ could exist prior to His appearance.  This is the faith of the father of the Old Testament, “the faith of Abraham which was credited to him as righteousness” (Romans 4:22).  Faith by itself is not tied to the historical appearance of the Son of Man per se.  In other words, faith’s object remains blurred until it is bound to the Passion of Christ.

To bring the power that flows from the Passion of Christ, that is our personal possession of His act of redemption, into focus requires something further.  As Aquinas puts it, “the power of Christ’s Passion is united to us by faith and the sacraments, but in different ways; because the link that comes from faith is produced by an act of the soul whereas the link that comes from the sacraments, is produced by making use of exterior things” (ST III, q.62 a.6).  The sacramental system is joined to faith so that there is not just a psychic connection between the believer and Christ but also a physical one.

Just as the physical encounter that St. Thomas the Apostle (and all the witnesses to His resurrection) had with the risen Christ that strengthened his faith, so too with the physical encounter with the Risen Lord in the Sacraments strengthens our own.  That is the Sacraments do not diminish our faith but greatly supplement it.  Aquinas says that the Sacraments are indispensable to a full life of faith for three reasons.  First is because of our nature as spirit/matter composite.  Faith, as an act of the soul, is strengthened by acts of the body.  Second, our slavery to material things can only be remedied by a material thing that contains spiritual power to heal.  Finally, because man finds in them a true bodily exercise that works for salvation (ST III q.61, a 1).

The Sacraments and the Link to the Incarnation

These same three reasons can also be given for why God should appear before men.  As the “image of the invisible God” Our Lord comes only because of our needs.  The Sacramental system is seen most properly as an extension of the Incarnation.  Those who reject it, tend towards Gnosticism, that is, seeing themselves saved based on some secret knowledge they have been given.  They reject the notion that material objects can be instrumental causes of grace just as the Gnostics rejected the Incarnation, thinking that the human body of Christ could not be an instrumental cause of saving grace.   A sacramental system free view of salvation is an over-spiritualized salvation—one that is both theologically and practically unlivable.

This is why my friend’s t-shirt is so compelling—not because Christ is the greatest superhero but because it leads to a deeper truth.  Christ does not merely offer us redemption nor make us super-spirits like angels, but into supermen.  Faith unites us to Him, the Sacraments incorporate us into His life making us into something wholly other (or holy) than we are.

 

Our Lady of Fatima and the First Saturday Devotion

End Times, Mary, Redemption, , ,

In the popular devotion of the Church, Saturday has long been a day set aside to honor the Blessed Mother.  It was the 8th Century Benedictine monk and Carolingian liturgical reformer, St. Alcuin, who first composed Votive Masses to honor Our Lady on Saturday.  These masses were so popular among the faithful, that they eventually became accepted into the Missal as the Common of the Virgin Mary.

It was no accident however that Alcuin chose Saturday, for there are deep theological reasons for doing so.  The Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy  explains that Saturday is set chosen as a memorial of the Blessed Virgin as “a remembrance of the maternal example and discipleship of the Blessed Virgin Mary who, strengthened by faith and hope, on that great Saturday on which Our Lord lay in the tomb, was the only one of the disciples to hold vigil in expectation of the Lord’s resurrection; it is a prelude and introduction to the celebration of Sunday, the weekly memorial of the Resurrection of Christ; it is a sign that the ‘Virgin Mary is continuously present and operative in the life of the Church.’”

This devotion to Our Lady has been sorely tried in recent centuries, beginning with the Protestant Revolution.  Rather than being met with indifference, she was treated with contempt.  It was within this setting that a practice of receiving Communion in reparation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary arose.  This devotion spread, catching the attention of Pope St. Pius X who attached an indulgence to the practice in 1904.  This practice was expanded when on June 13,1912 he offered additional indulgences for “All the Faithful who, on the first Saturday or first Sunday of twelve consecutive months, devote some time to vocal or mental prayer in honor of the Immaculate Virgin in Her conception gain, on each of these days, a plenary indulgence. Conditions: Confession, Communion, and prayers for the intentions of the Sovereign Pontiff.”

Fatima

Five years to the day, Our Lady appeared to the Fatima visionaries, showing them the Immaculate Heart surrounded with thorns.  Sr. Lucia would later say that she understood that the vision was “was the Immaculate Heart of Mary, outraged by the sins of humanity, which demanded Reparation.” It was also during this appearance that Our Lady told the children that Jesus wished to “establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart.” Our Lady promised Lucia that she would return to explain the practice of the first five Saturdays.

Fast forward eight years and Lucia is now a postulant in a convent in Pontevedra, Spain.  Our Lady appeared to her and said “Look, my daughter. My Heart is surrounded with thorns that ungrateful men pierce unceasingly with their blasphemies and ingratitude. You, at least, try to console me and announce that for all those, who for five consecutive first Saturdays, confess, receive Holy Communion, pray the Holy Rosary and accompany me for15 minutes by meditating the mysteries of the Holy Rosary with the intention to do reparation, I promise to assist them at the hour of death with the graces needed for salvation.”

About a year later, she was taking out the trash when she encounters a little child.  She told the child to pray a Hail Mary which He refused to do.  So, she tells him to go to the Church and ask the Heavenly Mother for the Child Jesus.  When the child returns, she asks him if he did what she said to which He replied “And have you spread through the world what the heavenly Mother requested of you?”  She replied, knowing it was Our Lord, that she had met many difficulties in spreading the devotion.  He told her to rely on His grace and to “have compassion for your Mother’s Heart. It is surrounded with thorns that ungrateful men pierce at each moment, and there is no one who does acts of reparation to remove them.”

Our Blessed Lord appeared once again to now Sister Lucia on May 29, 1930. He explained that the devotion involved five consecutive first Saturday because it was five kinds of offenses and blasphemies against the Immaculate Heart of Mary that required reparation, namely: blasphemies against her Immaculate Conception, against her perpetual virginity, against the divine and spiritual maternity of Mary, blasphemies involving the rejection and dishonoring of her images, and the neglect of implanting in the hearts of children a knowledge and love of this Immaculate Mother.  Mary had asked Jesus for this to forgive those who “had the misfortune of offending her.”

Why does it Matter?

Why do all these details matter?  Because we are now closing in on the 100th anniversary of Our Lady’s appearance to the visionaries in Fatima.  The world has changed in ways the Fatima visionaries could hardly have conceived.  But many of the advances that have been made have left us less human.  Our Lady appeared in order to warn us of this and offered us a remedy to protect us from ourselves—“Penance, penance, penance.”  Many within the Church has chosen to focus on the consecration of Russia as the primary message, but it seems to me that any debate on whether that has actually been accomplished (Sr. Lucia herself said it had) misses the point when we fail to implement the simple call to do Penance.

Our Lady’s instructions are a reminder to all the Faithful of the communal dimension of sin and our obligation to make reparation. Christ came for no other reason than to make reparation.  A Christian is meant to continue His work throughout time and space.  Sure, He could have done the work Himself had He so willed, but He did not will.  Sure, His participation and ours differ immeasurably but He asked for our participation in it when He called upon us to take up our Cross.  We cannot be Christians while at the same time striving to live a comfortable life.  Christians must act redemptively by consciously making acts of reparation, not just for our sins but for the sins of others.  Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more, provided we are willing to act like other Christs.  Our Lady’s very specific instructions to Sr. Lucia offers us a concrete means to make this happen.  She is ever the spiritual mother teaching us.  Can we not give to her Son, the First Five Saturdays in honor of His holy Mother?

Why Many Could be Lost

Heaven, Redemption

In his encyclical on evangelization, Redemptoris Missio, St. John Paul II remarked that the number of those who do not belong to the Church had nearly doubled since the close of the Second Vatican Council.  While this presents a tremendous opportunity for bringing souls to Christ, the Church has been somewhat hamstrung in making wide-scale evangelization a reality.  This is because actions follow from beliefs.  Since the close of the Council, many people in the Church have come to believe in Universalism; that is the belief that all men will be saved.  A traditional motivation for preaching the Gospel has always been that there are men whose salvation is in jeopardy.  Once this motivation is taking away the urgency of missionary activity dies with it.

In addressing the falsehood of Universalism, it is important to understand what the Church means (and also doesn’t) mean when she says that “outside the Church there is no salvation.”  This affirmation comes from the fact that the Church is by its very nature as His Body linked with Christ Himself.  The Council makes this link clear in the unequivocal words that there is “‘one mediator between God and men, Himself a man, Jesus Christ, who gave Himself as a ransom for all’ (1 Tim. 2:45), ‘neither is there salvation in any other’(Acts 4:12). Therefore, all must be converted to Him…”(Ad Gentes, 7).

In a world that is drinking from a relativistic fountain, this is often thought to be very intolerant so we need to be clear in what is being said.  First, this is not saying that a person necessarily has to be a member of the Church to be saved, only that it is because of the merits of Christ that He deposited in the Church that they will be saved.  Second, there is the level of personal knowledge and culpability.  Certainly “they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it” (CCC 846).  This also means that “Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience.   Nor does Divine Providence deny the helps necessary for salvation to those who, without blame on their part, have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God and with His grace strive to live a good life. Whatever good or truth is found amongst them is looked upon by the Church as a preparation for the Gospel” (Lumen Gentium, 16).

It is a verbal sleight of hand associated with this paragraph that has allowed Universalism to creep in.  Many have read into the possibility that one might achieve eternal salvation to mean that it is probable or even definite.  But the true “spirit” of the Council seems to agree with St. Thomas’ assessment that the majority of non-Christians are lost when she proclaims that:

“…often men, deceived by the Evil One, have become vain in their reasonings and have exchanged the truth of God for a lie, serving the creature rather than the Creator.  Or some there are who, living and dying in this world without God, are exposed to final despair.” (LG 16, emphasis added).

Returning back to the first part of Paragraph 16, we find that the Council gave four conditions for the non-Christian to possibly be saved.  First, there must be no culpability for their ignorance.  Second they should be seeking God with a sincere heart.  Third, they must be “moved by grace” to live in accordance with God’s will as they know it.  Finally, they must receive whatever “good or truth” that is contained in their religion.

All Dogs in Heaven

When confronted with this, the usual response is a question—“what about the person on some deserted island who never even heard of Christ?”  St. Thomas addressed this question of invincible ignorance (i.e. ignorance that could not be overcome) by an appeal to Divine Providence based on the revealed truth that “God wills all men to be saved” (1Tim 2:4).  He says that,

“it pertains to divine providence to furnish everyone with what is necessary for salvation, provided that on his part there is no hindrance. Thus, if someone so brought up followed the direction of natural reason in seeking good and avoiding evil, we must most certainly hold that God would either reveal to him through internal inspiration what had to be believed, or would send some preacher of the faith to him as he sent Peter to Cornelius (Acts 10:20).”

As a necessary tangent, it seems we need to somehow reconcile the fact that St. Paul tells Timothy that “God wills all men to be saved” and yet Scripture also tells us of at least two people who are lost (while the Church has never engaged in negative canonizations declaring a particular person in hell, Scriptures tells us that the false prophet of Rev 20:10 ends up in hell and seems to suggest that Judas is reprobated.  Matthew26:24 and John 6:70, 17:2 could hardly be true were he among the blessed.).  St. Thomas makes the distinction between God’s antecedent and consequent will to make this understandable.  Antecedent will is what He wills for a thing in isolation by considering only the individual parts of His plan (a single person) and not the entire plan (all people).  In order to achieve the good, there must also be consideration of the circumstances.  This is the consequent will.  To make this clear, St. Thomas gives the example of a just judge who antecedently wills all men to live but consequently wills the murderer to be executed.  The judge not only evaluates the murderer as an individual absolutely but looks to the good of the whole of which all share.  So then, in His antecedent will, God wills to save all men, but in his consequent will He wills to save only some while permitting others to be damned.

The interlocutor seems to be asking about the deserted man’s salvation, but we should not despair of his salvation, but our own for not preaching the Gospel to him.  This is because all too often we do not believe that the Gospel is really Good News.  Those who hear it and conform their lives to it are better off not just in the next world, but even now.  Eternal life doesn’t begin at death, but now.  Christ is the answer to man’s deepest longings and aspirations and true disciples know that a life without Christ is a life that is incomplete.  So it is a supreme act of charity and a sacred duty to go out and meet the desires of all men with the liberating truth of the Gospel in its fullness.  By depriving others of the truth of Christ’s enduring presence in the Church, we are depriving them of the graces (through Baptism and Confession) that are necessary for salvation.  Men are not damned for Original Sin, but for those sins by which they are culpable.  There is only one place where those sins can infallibly forgiven and eternal life given and restored—the Church.  To the extent that we believe this, we will be missionaries.  In this way we can see that in the Church’s history missionary drive has always been a sign of the vitality of the faith of the members of the Church.

What’s in a Name?

Redemption

One of the biggest challenges for parents to be is selecting a name for their child.  A whole library has been written on selecting the perfect name with advice ranging from selecting the name you would want to represent you if you were starting out your life today to naming them after your favorite city.  Choosing a name is mostly about what the parents happen to like.  A name ends up being a mere convention that distinguishes one person from another.  This is in direct contrast to the ancient world, where the name was believed to shape the destiny of the person.  Judging by the fact that among the Top Ten names for boys and girls born in 2014 included names like Mason (which means “one who works with stone”) and Mia (“rebellious”), one would assume that this is no longer the case.  But unless we reacquaint ourselves with this idea, we may not grasp that “everyone’s name is sacred” because it is found on the “lips” of God when He calls each of us by name (see CCC 2158).  To help see this more clearly, it is helpful to look at the great importance Sacred Scripture places on names.

The Catechism says that the name is an “icon of the person” (CCC 2158).  What this means is that knowing a person’s name gives you access to the person and opens the door to a personal relationship with them.  Knowing a person’s name carries the power of the person with it.  In essence it gives you a power over the other person because you can invoke their power.

The best example of this principle is found when Jacob wrestled with the angel (Gn 32:22-31).  After “grappling with God” Jacob receives a new name (Israel) and asks the angel for his name.  The angel refuses to give Israel his name but instead blesses him.    This is because Jacob could have no power over the angel, including invoking him at another time.

In general, mankind cannot have power over the angelic world and so we should learn the lesson of Jacob and not seek the name of angels.  Adam was given the power to know the name of all material creatures (see Gen 2:20) but not the angels.  While Sacred Scripture reveals the names of three Archangels—Michael, Gabriel and Raphael—we should never give our Guardian Angels names.  Instead the Church tells us in a 1984 CDF document, bearing the signature of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, that we should only invoke them by their title (i.e. Guardian Angel).  In response to those that encourage us to ask our guardian angel for his name, the future Pontiff says the names of our guardian angels are unknowable and we should never invoke them under a specific name because of the danger it poses.  He says it is dangerous because one can never know whether it is a good angel or a bad angel that is responding to you.  In fact, because a blessed angel would never disobey God’s dictates through the Church of which they are members, you can guarantee that the name you received either came from your imagination or from a demon.  By invoking that “revealed” name, you may be inviting the demonic.  This is also what makes the social media hyped “Charlie-Charlie Challenge” so dangerous.

This notion of a name giving power over another is still recognized today.  This is why people in the “service” industry wear name tags.  It allows the customer to call upon the person to supply them with what they need.  It is also why many people naturally recoil having a name tag on in a social setting.  It assumes a relationship with everyone else who sees it that does not yet exist.  It is also why some people are constantly “name-dropping”—it is meant to somehow reveal that they share in the power or celebrity of the person they are naming (whether they actually do or not).

Scripture also shows how a name reveals the person in its treatment of those whose names it records and those it obliterates.  Notice how at the beginning of the Book of Exodus (which has the Hebrew title “The Book of Names”) it lists the names of the Patriarchs of Israel and mentions how Pharaoh did not know Joseph.  Given Joseph’s role in preserving Egypt during the famine it is not likely that Pharaoh did not know about him.  Instead it shows a refusal to recognize him and attempts to blot out his name from history.  It is actually the opposite that happens.  While the book tells the names of the midwives responsible for saving the children of Israel, it never mentions Pharaoh’s name as a form of judgment against him.  It is meant to show that his name is blotted out from the book of life (see Exodus 32:33).  It also explains why John never mentions the name of the anti-Christ in the Book of Revelation even though he clearly had his name revealed to him (Rev 13:18).  He too shall be blotted out of the Book of Life.

With this in mind, we begin to see why the Commandment was given not to take the Lord’s name in vain.  In revealing His name to Moses, God not only revealed Himself personally, but also gave the speaker a share in His power.  Moses is the first man in Salvation History to perform miracles because He was able to invoke the name of God.  To call upon the name of the Lord is to somehow make Him present.

hebrew ten commandments

I am convinced that this it is the Second Commandment that is the one that is most often broken.  Certainly this occurs when the name of God is used as part of a curse, but more commonly when we “say” our prayers without reflecting on what we have done by calling upon Him.  He has given us the power to call upon Him anywhere, anytime and He will come.  Unfortunately we are often too dull of heart to realize how awesome a gift this is—Almighty God comes to me sitting down to pray simply by calling His name.

To use God’s name in vain is to say it and then essentially ignore Him.  If we are driven by love then we ought to take this Commandment seriously and stay away from movies and music that use His name in vain.  Likewise when we encounter someone who regularly says OMG and GD we should not idly stand by.  We may not always be in a position to fraternally correct them but we can certainly make sure that He is not called upon in vain by adding “Blessed be His Name.”

The reverence that Israel had for the name of God was what ultimately led to the charge of blasphemy against Our Lord.  To use His name not only invoked His presence but because of the nature of His name made the speaker equivalent to Him.  Because God’s name contains the first person singular (“I AM” or “I AM WHO AM”) to even say His name was to say you are Him.  That is why there should never be any confusion as to whether Jesus knew He was God.  No faithful Jew would have said that name otherwise.

Names are also associated with a change in mission.  When God gives Abram a mission, He gives Him the name Abraham to identify him with his mission (“father of many”).  When Simon identifies Jesus as God, he is called Cephas to identify him as the rock upon which the new Israel will be built (as compared to the pillar of stone where Jacob received his new mission and name—Gn 35:10).  In this way names are viewed as sacraments—tangible signs of the mission of the person.

This sacramental quality of names is most obvious in the case of Jesus.  The Catechism captures this well in the section on Prayer sayin, “…The divine name may not be spoken by human lips, but by assuming our humanity The Word of God hands it over to us and we can invoke it: ‘Jesus,’ ‘YHWH saves.’  The name ‘Jesus’ contains all: God and man and the whole economy of creation and salvation. To pray ‘Jesus’ is to invoke him and to call him within us. His name is the only one that contains the presence it signifies…”( CCC 2666).

Let us call upon the name of the Lord and be saved!

Living Between the Ascension and Pentecost

Redemption, Scripture

One of the great gifts that the Church gives us is the Liturgical Calendar. Its purpose is not only to remind us of the marvelous plan of salvation, but also for us to be present in each of the saving mysteries of Christ.  With this in mind, the Church is inviting us during this time to go to the Upper Room with Our Lady and the Apostles and to await the Gift of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost.  During the Church’s first Novena from the Ascension to Pentecost, the Apostles must have found themselves reflecting deeply on the mystery of Our Lord’s Ascension and why it was  necessary for Him to go so that He could send the Holy Spirit (John 16:7).  While we join them in prayer, it is expedient that we too meditate on this necessity.

To begin, it is helpful to point out that when Our Lord says it is of necessity He does not mean that both He and the Holy Spirit could not both be present on the earth at the same time.  It is not as if it would create some rift in the space-time continuum to have two Persons of the Blessed Trinity present on earth–especially since They have a single Divine nature.  This means that when one of the Persons of the Trinity acts outside the Trinity, it is all three that act.  It is necessary in the sense that it was a means by which Christ could more fully reveal the Godhead and our relationship with God in Heaven.

To see how this is so, we should recall that the Torah (see Leviticus 1-7) required five main types of sacrifices—the cereal offering, the peace offering, the sin offering, the guilt offering, and the burnt offering.  It was the last one—the burnt offering that was meant to be a sign of Christ’s offering on the Cross.  In the holocaust or ascending sacrifice (see Lev 1:3-7, 6:8-13) the animal was drained of its blood and the pieces of the carcass were laid upon the altar hearth from which it ascended to God in the form of smoke.  Unlike any of the other sacrifices, no part of it was given to the worshipper.  Instead it was considered a total gift to the Lord and was fully consumed in the fire.  Its effect was atonement for sin.

ascension

Christ’s ascension then is the completion of His sacrifice on Calvary in which He was both Priest and Victim.  This helps to explain why Christ does not allow Mary to touch Him when she meets Him on the day of the Resurrection because He had “not yet ascended” (Jn 20:17).  His offering for sin was not yet complete.  A first Century Jew reading John’s Gospel would have recognized in Jesus’ saying that He considered Himself as a holocaust offering for atonement.

But saying that Christ had to ascend because He was completing the ritual of the Burnt Offering is like putting the cart before the horse.  The Burnt Offering described in the Torah required the whole sacrifice to rise in smoke because Christ was to ascend into Heaven, not the other way around.  Instead there was a deeper reason.

To understand this deeper reason, it is necessary to grasp a basic understanding of Trinitarian theology.  When we speak of a “personal” God we mean specifically that God has (more accurately, He is) a rational nature.  This means that He has both an intellect and a will.  Because He is a pure Spirit both of these powers of intellect and will must be operative at all times.  This means from all eternity He is knowing and loving.  What is it that God knows?  He knows Himself perfectly.

One of the perfections is existence.  So in order to have perfect knowledge of a person that person must actually exist.  This becomes clear if we look at an analogy.  You may have knowledge of your dream lover, but if that lover is not a real flesh and blood person then they are not perfect.  They must actually exist as real person.  So in order for God’s knowledge of Himself to be perfect, He must exist as a distinct Person.  This Person is the Son or Word.

Likewise with the divine Will whose object is love.  The measure of love is to be fruitful and the perfect love between the Father and the Son bears the Fruit of the Holy Spirit.

Why does this deep theology matter?  Isn’t it all just speculation of what is otherwise a mystery?  In a way, yes, there is some speculation involved in any explanation of the mystery of the Trinity.  But it is this life that we are being invited into when St. Peter says we are to become “partakers of the divine life” (2Peter 1:4).  The blessed in heaven will spend their time not merely looking at God, but actually participating in the life of God.  Heaven is not “resting in peace” in the way we tend to think of it, but is extremely active living in the life of God.  But this is not just reserved to heaven.  Those who have sanctifying grace in their souls participate in the life of God now.  That is what sanctifying grace is—a participation in the life of God.  This understanding of the life of the Trinity has effect on our life in the here and now.  Eternal life begins at Baptism and those who persevere to the end merely have the veil removed.

How is it that we participate in the life of God?  We enter into the life of God by “putting on Christ” (Romans 13:14).  In essence, we participate in Christ’s “place” in His communion with the Father.  This is what it means when St. Paul says we are “in Christ” (c.f. Gal 3:27).

Now the link between the Ascension and Pentecost becomes clearer.  The Son, in keeping His human nature for all eternity, has brought human nature directly into the life of the Trinity.  By ascending to the Father, Jesus reveals that mankind now has the capacity to share in the divine Nature.  This is how He lives forever to make intercession for us (Hebrews 7:25).

What happens when mankind has a direct communion with the Father?  The fruit of this communion leads to the Holy Spirit.  It is of the very nature of God from all eternity that the union between the Father and the Son yields the Holy Spirit.  If mankind is caught up in this through the Son’s human nature, then the Holy Spirit comes to mankind.  Without this communion, the Holy Spirit cannot come (John 16:7).  Pentecost is a direct result of the Ascension.

To conclude I want to return to the difficult verse regarding Our Lord’s admonition to Mary Magdalene not to touch Him because it helps to bring to light a necessary distinction.  Our Lord tells her that He is “going to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (John 20:17).  The point is that while we participate in the life of the Trinity, we do not become God.  It is not as if we are substituted for the Son.  There remains a distinction between His relationship with the Father (“my Father”) and ours (“your Father).  He “participates” in God by Nature, we only participate by grace.  As long as we maintain this distinction, we are able to pull back the veil ever so slightly.  Certainly it enables us to better understand Our Lord’s words and the causal relationship between the Ascension and Pentecost.

Knowing the Enemy

Angels, Devils, Redemption

One of the more glaring omissions of the Passion accounts in the Gospels is that no attempt to explore the motives behind Judas’ betrayal is made.  This has led to much speculation throughout the years imputing to him various motives such as greed, envy or even impatience that Our Lord was not acting quickly enough in claiming his Messianic throne.  The danger of trying to impute a motive is that we will actually miss the reason why the Evangelists only refer to him as the “betrayer” (Luke 22:3).  St. John captures the reason explicitly when he says that “After he took the morsel, Satan entered him” (John 13:27). The Sacred Writers want us to realize that it was not Judas nor the Sanhedrin nor even the Romans that ultimately hatched the plan to kill Jesus—it was Satan and his minions. Our Lord recognized this and pointed it out when He tells the Jews that they “belong to your father the devil and you willingly carry out your father’s desires” (John 8:44). As the Church prepares to enter into Our Lord’s most intense battle against our Enemy we are reminded that in order to fight we must know about him and his tendencies. As Sun Tzu says in the Art of War, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Examining his history, we can better understand his motives.  Just how did Lucifer become the Satan?  For many it seems that the angels were created in “heaven” with God and therefore it would have been impossible for them to sin.  This is an example of how important it is that we properly define our terms, especially given the propensity in English to reduce the number of terms when they only refer to subtle differences (the word love is a classic example).  Properly speaking, the angels, although pure spirits, are not by nature heavenly creatures.  Instead we should refer to them as naturally “Celestial” creatures.  By making this distinction, we are able to reserve the word “heavenly” for those creatures who have the vision of God and see Him as He is (1 John 3:2) rather than in His reflections in creation.  No creature naturally has this vision, it can only be granted to those who have sanctifying grace.  Communion can only happen between two equals so that in order to have communion with God (i.e. heaven or as Augustine refers to it in the Confessions “The Heaven of heavens”), He must infuse His life in us.  Only angels and men (who are made in God’s image) have the capacity to receive this divine life, but they must receive it and freely persevere in it.

Like the first man and woman, the angels were also created endowed with sanctifying grace so that they might have the capacity to be saved.  And like Adam and Eve they also were required to undergo a period of probation to test whether they could persevere in that grace.  This period of probation included some test in which they could freely choose between good and evil.  Although they did not yet have the Beatific Vision, they lived in something like a celestial Garden of Eden.  This Garden included sanctifying grace (i.e. God walking in their Garden in the coolness of day) and an experience of being exposed to the danger of committing sin.  Those confirmed in grace were then granted the vision of God.  The rest, were cast out of the celestial Garden.

Three questions naturally arise from this.  First is what was it that actually caused “Satan to fall from heaven like lightning” (Lk 10:18)?  It was most certainly pride of some sort as the book of Isaiah testifies:

“How did you come to fall from the heavens, Daystar, son of Dawn? How did you come to be thrown to the ground, you who enslaved the nations? You who used to think to yourself, ‘I will climb up to the heavens; and higher than the stars of God I will set my throne. I will sit on the Mount of Assembly in the recesses of the north. I will climb to the top of the thunderclouds, I will rival the Most High.’ What! Now you have fallen to hell, to the very bottom of the abyss!” (Is 14:12-15).

As to the exact nature of the sin we are left only to the theological speculation of the Church Fathers.  Most say that it is directly related to the plan of the Incarnation and the angels’ service of mankind.  The Fathers apply the words which the rebellious Israel speaks to its God, “I will not serve” (Jeremiah 2:20) to the fallen angels.  Some Saints (like St. Louis de Montfort) have also speculated that their fall was related more specifically to the eventual role of Mary as Queen of Heaven.  This might also explain why Satan targets Eve, a type of Mary, directly.  So while his first sin was pride, the devil’s second sin was envy.  Once he realized he could not truly usurp God, he decided to turn his wrath on mankind so that he could gain pleasure in God’s loss.  Interestingly enough we see the same thing happen in man—Adam sins through pride and then Cain kills Abel through envy.  This is a familiar pattern in all of us—“pride comes before the fall” and then once truth sets in and we realize we are not God, we envy others for having what we do not have.

The second question is when the angels were created.  The book of Job tells us that they were created before the foundation of the world: “Where were you when I founded the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding…Into what were its pedestals sunk, and who laid its cornerstone, while the morning stars sang together and all angels shouted for joy?” (Job 38:4-7). This fits with St. Augustine’s explanation of the creation of light on the first day of as referring to the creation and testing of the angels. The light refers to the angels themselves and the separation of the light from the darkness (after judging that the light was good) refers to the casting out of the demons (Augustine’s commentary on Gn 1:4 in City of God, Bk. 11, Ch 19).  At the very least we know that the devil is already fallen when Adam and Eve encounter him in the Garden.

Garden Fall Sistine

If the devil had fallen, why did God allow him to enter the Garden to tempt Adam and Eve? Wasn’t he forever cast into hell? The Book of Hebrews gives us a clue to the answer when the Sacred Author refers to the role of angels. He says, “Are they not all ministering spirits sent forth to serve, for the sake of those who are to obtain salvation?” (Hebrews 1:14).

The role of the angels in God’s eternal plan is to minister to mankind. God’s plan is never thwarted so that even the devil and his minions still serve to aid “those who are to obtain salvation.”  For those who are in Christ, it is temptation and suffering that leads to growth in merit through which they obtain their salvation. The evil spirits merely become means by which God brings this about. Remember that mankind’s fall in the Garden, although caused by the lies of the evil one, is ultimately the cause of the Incarnation which is the source of man’s salvation. The choice for the angels, fallen and blessed, is the same choice that we have as well—do God’s will or do God’s will.

St. Michael the Archangel, pray for us!

NOTE: A number of you have emailed me with questions and I would encourage you to continue to do that. In fact this entry is the result of two people asking the same exact question yesterday. I want to encourage you all to also use the Comment section on each post as well. My vision for this web site is that it is one where there is some engagement between the readers and the readers and me. Please don’t be shy about commenting!

 

 

Putting the Horse Before the Cart

Redemption

Quick quiz:  what two characters of the Passion are named in each of the daily Gospel readings that the Church uses in the Liturgy during Holy Week?  The first is obvious—Our Lord.  The second may not be as obvious.  Each account this week chronicles the actions of Judas Iscariot.  Obviously the Church wants us to spend some time meditating upon the role that Jesus’ betrayer played in the Passion and Death of Our Lord.  What usually emerges when most of us do this is a vague feeling that somehow Judas got a raw deal.  It seems that someone had to betray Jesus to get the ball rolling and that Judas was the unlucky someone whom God chose.  After all, wasn’t it prophesied that Jesus would be betrayed by a friend for 30 pieces of silver?

When Peter withdraws his sword to fight for Jesus in the Garden, Our Lord halts him saying, “But then how would the scriptures be fulfilled which say that it must come to pass in this way?” (Mt 26:54). This seems to imply that because the Scriptures said that Jesus must be betrayed then He was somehow bound to suffer His Passion. But this view actually puts the cart before the horse. Jesus was not bound in any way by the prophecies of the Old Testament. The prophecies of the Old Testament were bound by how God chose to carry out man’s redemption. God revealed to the prophets of the Old Testament how He would suffer only because He actually suffered in those ways. The betrayal by Judas was only prophesied because Judas did freely choose to betray Jesus. God is infinite in His knowledge and knows all things that happen or could possibly happen. He is omnipotent and therefore not in any way bound by our free decisions. He uses those free will decisions as a means to carry out his intended ends just like we use natural laws like friction to stop our cars. In other words, it was a free act by Judas that led to Our Lord’s death and neither Judas nor Jesus were somehow bound because it was predicted to transpire the way that it did.

Putting the horse before the cart is perhaps one of the most under-utilized theological principles. It is at the heart of the theology of Pope St. John Paul II and it was the point of emphasis of the first words from his pen as Pope: “The Redeemer of Man, Jesus Christ, is the center of… history.” (Redemptor Hominis, 1). Everything prior to the Incarnation happened so as to ready man for the coming of Christ. Adam failed to run to the Tree of Life in the Garden when he was threatened with death because Jesus would not fail to cling to the Tree of Life which is the Cross. God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac his son only because the Son of God would be sacrificed. God asked for the Passover sacrifices of the Old Testament only because His Son would sacrifice Himself on the Cross. Even the obscure rules of the Old Testaments such as the prohibition of drinking the blood of animals was because we would drink the blood of Christ, the True Sacrifice.

Once we remove any necessity of the Passion and Death of Christ on God’s part, then we can begin to see the sheer goodness and gratuity of God. Saying “God is love” is not meant to be merely a poetic way of saying “He is a really good God.” In fact, satisfaction for sin was not even necessary. St Thomas, citing Psalm 51:6 (“Against you, you alone have I sinned; what is evil in your sight I have done”), reminds us that God could have willed to free man without any satisfaction because it was Himself alone that was offended .  Unlike a human judge who is subordinate to the common good of the community, God has no superior to which He is beholden.  Therefore, He could offer mercy without in any way offending justice.

Christ on the Cross_Dali

In addition to love and mercy, the Cross also reveals God’s wisdom.  While it was entirely up to God how He would redeem man, the Cross, according to St. Thomas, is the most suitable way to bring about man’s salvation because of what it reveals about God’s relationship with mankind.  Primarily, because by Christ’s passion man knows how much God loves him, he is thereby incited to love God in return. There is no other reason for the Cross than to reveal the depths of God’s love for man.

But there is always the temptation to apply Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross to ourselves in the abstract. We take the words of St. Paul in Col 2:20, “The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me,” and substitute the word “us” for “me.” But it is this conviction that fueled everything St. Paul did and said. Once he came to this realization on the road to Damascus, the scales fell from his eyes and he was never the same. This is what it means to have a “personal relationship” with Jesus. Once I am completely convicted that Christ did that for me personally, once I am completely convicted that God loves me and not just “us,” everything changes. This is why we as Catholics should be so adamant about having Crucifixes all around us. We are in no way denying that Christ is risen. We have crucifixes for the same reason that married people have photos of their weddings—we want to be reminded how much we are loved and how committed our Lover is. Holy Week is a most excellent time to spend gazing at the Crucifix and reminding myself how much I am loved and how committed Jesus is to me. I close with a story that I heard a number of years ago of just how powerful this exercise can be.

There was a group of boys in France who were hanging out in front of a Catholic church during the last days of Lent. They saw a bunch of going in and standing in line, waiting to enter a closet. Each person would enter, come out a few minutes later and then come out and pray. Curious about what was happening they asked and found out that confessions were going on.

They decided to have a little fun and send one of the boys into the confessional and make up a crazy story to try and fool the priest. A young Jewish boy volunteered to go in and immediately started telling his concocted story. The priest, realizing what he was doing, assigned the boy a penance for wasting the priest’s time. His penance was to go into the front of the Church, stand in front of the Crucifix, look at it and repeat these words ten times: “You did that for me and I don’t give a damn!” Figuring he would play along fully with the joke the boy did as he was told. He looked up at Crucifix and started he started to repeating the words. “You did that for me and I don’t give a damn!” After a few times however the words started coming out differently: “You did that for me? And I don’t give a damn?” Finally, he fell to his knees and his words became simply: “You did that for me?”

This boy’s name was Jean-Marie Lustiger. He was received into the Church the following Easter and eventually became Cardinal Archbishop Lustiger.

Preaching the Bad News

Redemption

CS Lewis once said that in order to preach the Gospel to modern man, “Christianity now has to preach the diagnosis– in itself very bad news– before it can win a hearing for the cure.”  His point is that the Good News of the Gospel must first be understood in its proper context.  Unless we first develop a proper understanding of the bad news we will easily miss just how amazing the Good News really is.  Therefore to gain a grasp on the fullness of the redemption we have received, we must return to the Beginning to examine the “happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer.”

In each of the two creation accounts found in Genesis, the greatness of man’s vocation is captured when God gives him dominion over all the earth (Gn 1:28-30) and when He gives to man the commandment to “till and keep” the Garden (Gn 2:16-17).  Man is made as absolute master of his domain.  This dominion is conditional on keeping the single commandment he was given.  This is in recognition that Yahweh is his Lord.  Once the devil enters the scene and tempts Adam and Eve to sin all of this changes.  It is the nature of this change that needs to be looked at more closely.  Many people miss the meaning and are left scratching their heads when confronted with the problem of evil even after Our Lord’s saving act on the Cross.

To simply say that Adam, as the head of all mankind, forfeited sanctifying grace and left man in a fallen state somewhat oversimplifies things.  The problem was not only interior for man.  Once Adam and Eve believed the lie of the devil, the Father of Lies replaced God as master.  In falling under the yoke of this new master, mankind ceded dominion over all visible creation (including their own flesh) to the Serpent and he became the “Prince of this World” (Jn 14:30).  Driven by envy (Wisdom 2:24), this newfound dominion enabled Satan to unleash his wrath on man by means of this world.  God limits his power immediately by putting the Serpent on his belly, but He does not fully reverse what was done.  Instead He reveals Himself as a deliverer by promising that by His power mankind will prevail (Gn 3:14-15).  The bad news is immediately follow by the promise of the Good News (or the Protoevangelium as the Fathers called it).  Mankind starts with one enemy (the devil), ends up with three (the devil, the flesh and the world), and is promised the seed of the woman that will enable him to conquer all three.

14172-the-brazen-serpent-michelangelo-buonarroti

 

This distinction is important because it enables us to see what God did in the Incarnation for what it truly is—a rescue mission.  This is why the central event in Jewish history is the Exodus.  It reveals God as the God Who always comes through.  And they anticipated that He would once again come through in a definitive way and many recognized this in Christ.  This is why He is so often compared to Moses—the man whom God used to rescue them from Egypt.  This is also why when Jesus meets Moses and Elijah on the Transfiguration Mount they speak to him of His Exodus (Lk 9:30).  Jesus was to lead the New Exodus.

If we do not grasp this aspect of the Incarnation then we will end up with a distorted image of God.  To say that Christ “died for my sins” is absolutely true.  But unless we see Christ’s death as “ransoming captive Israel,” we will inevitably paint God as somehow angry because He needs someone to punish.  It is not the punishment that reveals the God “who so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son” (Jn 3:16) but the fact that the “Son of man also came…to give His life as a ransom for many” (Mk 10:45).  The Greek word for ransom is Lytron which literally mean “redemption price.”   This price was paid for the release of captives by family members and it was the oldest brother as the family representative who was responsible to make the payment.  It is Jesus, “the firstborn of the dead” (Col 1:18) that pays mankind’s ransom from the devil.  He pays it with His own flesh.  But “because it was not possible for Him to be held by [death]” the new Adam became mankind’s new representative accomplishing what the Old Adam could not do.

Seeing Christ as our representative and not as our penal substitute also greatly clarifies why there is still suffering (i.e. the punishment for our sin) in this world.  If He is our representative then we must participate.  We participate most perfectly through the Mass, but also to the degree that our own crosses participate in the Cross of Christ.  This is the way that St. Paul understood his own redemption when he told the Colossians that he “rejoiced in his sufferings because they complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Col 1:24).  Christ’s representative sacrifice was perfect, what is lacking is our participation (as an aside, this idea of “vicarious representation” is a recurrent theme in the theology of Pope Benedict if you want to learn more).

This also reveals the great power and goodness of God.  He has taken the power of the devil (suffering and death) and made it the means of salvation.  The devil is still prince of this world but for those who share in Christ’s resurrected life through baptism his weapons become a source of sanctification and redemption. Only a God who is all good and all powerful can turn evil around and bring good from it.

This idea of using the weapons of the devil is also found in the Exodus story.  When the people begin to grumble, God allows the serpents to come among the people and bite them.  He commands Moses to make a bronze serpent so that all who were bitten might look upon it and live.  The serpents who were a source of death, become a source of life for the Israelites (Num 21:4-9) just as when the “Son of Man is lifted up” all those who gaze upon Him will overcome the sting of the devil.  Therefore, as Lent comes to a close, we would all benefit from meditation upon the Exodus story.  It is not merely a story that tells what happened to the Jews long ago, it is our story.  It is that same God who comes to save us and we are His people awaiting entrance into the Promised Land.