Fr. Tony's Bridge Builders

Today’s gospel (Lk 15:1-3, 11-32) again treats us to that truly remarkable, in my mind the most remarkable of all Jesus’ parables, the story of the prodigal son, sometimes called the story of the Merciful Father.What makes it truly spectacular is that it vividly paints for us the very heart of the Father of Jesus Christ.What a truly worthy Lenten practice it would be for anyone to go from here to Easter reading each day just this gospel, bathing it in the pray:“Father, dear Father, show me your heart!Truly show me your heart!”

St. Paul’s words to the Corinthians, found in today’s second reading (2 Cor 5:17-21), reveal a truly amazing dimension that simply must be placed along side that gospel parable.He says that Christ has “given us the ministry of reconciliation” (v. 18).Now certainly, this ministry of reconciliation is a special grace of the Apostle, and through Holy Orders the bishops.They truly, and priests collaborating with them, are entrusted with the message of reconciliation (v. 19).And yet, “whoever is in Christ” (v. 17) and therefore having been reconciled to God, shares in this ministry of reconciliation.In the Body of Christ, the Church, indeed “God is reconciling the world to himself” (19).

As I said, today’s gospel parable simply must be viewed along side this call to be ambassadors of Christ’s reconciliation.It must, because the heart of the Father revealed in the gospel is the very heart that is poured out upon us in baptism.The heart of the Father, the Holy Spirit, is given us that the world might discover the Father in us.The Father’s heart which is visually depicted in the father running out to greet his son who was lost and now found, dead and now alive, with kisses and feasting, is the heart of a true disciple of Christ!

In other words, the heart of a disciple of Jesus must be marked above all by enthusiasm for reconciliation.Reconciliation is nothing other then the willingness to acknowledge personal sin and offense done to the other;the willingness to forgive whatever sin or offense done to us.

This calls for a spirituality that is deeply marked by the Passover of our Lord Jesus Christ (cf. Joshua 5:9a, 10-12).We simply must be a people capable of ‘passing over’ our personal egos and pride, capable of ‘passing over’ the offenses and sins encountered, ‘passing over’ the hurt, resentment, and anger, ‘passing over’ into an eager desire to forgive, let go, and even delight in a new relationship with the one we have been set at odds with.

Here we touch on the importance again of the Eucharistic Sunday Assembly.Those who gather for Mass each Sunday are not, necessarily, our friends, not those we might choose to ‘hang out with,’ some may be truly unlikable people.Somehow, each and every week, we must pass over any feelings of dislike, hurt, jealousy, and judgment to encounter these persons with the authentic love of God the Father.

The heart of the Father encountered in that gospel parable is meant to become my own heart.“Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.”“Be compassionate as your heavenly Father is compassionate.”It demands a true ‘passing over’ from natural sentiments so often held toward the other to the disposition of God toward the other.

This sort of passing over, make no mistake about, always means death.Death to myself, my natural inclinations.But yes, it always too means new life.Life in the reckless, boundless, enthusiastic embrace of a Father who loves us and delights in our being with him!

If I am not mistaken, it was Abraham Herschel who said something like, “The Bible is not so much a theology for man as it is an anthropology for God.”Well, of course, it is both.The Bible is a theology (gives us a knowledge of God) and an anthropology (gives us knowledge about the human person).

I have already said a number of times that faith is a way of knowing or a way of seeing reality.It is an ability to see the truth about God (theology) and it is a way of seeing the truth about created reality (anthropology plus).

The gospel today (Lk 18:9-14) offers us a parable in which Jesus addresses this ‘anthropological seeing’.Most succinctly, the parable simply calls us to see ourselves rightly (righteousness) before God.

Think for a moment of all the time we spend in a day ‘putting on a face.’From all the activities in the morning to ‘make ourselves presentable’, the cloths we choose to wear, the smile (authentic or not) we wear for those we encounter, how we present ourselves to neighbors and, especially, on the job, etc.Now, of course, this is all a normal part of human interaction.

Still, and I think this is something Jesus would want us dead clear about, we simply must be aware of who we truly are when we stand before God.Even more, we need to be clear that there is simply no hiding the truth of who we are before God.God knows us!He knows the inclinations of our hearts.And, now this is good news, he can deal with it.He can and does ‘deal with it’ because he loves us and has it within himself to transform all the darkness into light.

And yet, what he will not deal with, is false-heartedness.He will not deal with all the little games we play—self-righteousness—to mask who we are before him.God demands, in other words, authenticity before him.

Ah, but here lies a real problem.How do we know we are being authentic before God?In the first reading today (Hosea 6:1-6), it even appears that God is confused by who we are.“What can I do with you, Ephraim?What can I do with you, Judah?” (v 4).

Indeed, perhaps Abraham Herschel was really on to something, maybe God does need a book to tell him about human beings.

Well, of course, God does not.Yet, the frustration placed in the month of God serves to remind us just how tangled the human heart can be.

Maybe this is a good reminder of the traditional place given by Christians to the daily Examination of Conscience.I had a friend, who has since died, who every night, just after she put the light out, would pray:“Father, is there anything today that I have done that has offended you?Is there anything I have done or failed to do that has set me against you or any of my neighbors?”Then, she shared with me, she would lay in the silence and listen to the movement of her conscience.Most often, for she was a truly faithful person, there was silence.Occasionally, she would be sat up in her bed, shown an act or failure from the day that was truly harmful to herself, her loved ones, her relationship with God.And then, she would repent of it.

A key here is that my friend trusted God to know her heart, indeed he needs no anthropology, and could show her.She trusted, too, that what she discovered could be dealt with in the mercy and transforming love of God the Father.Indeed, she had no need to hide from God, she could stand before him in authenticity.

Reflecting yesterday on the tenacity of our hard-heatedness and the opaqueness of our minds and encountering today’s feast of St. Joseph, husband of Mary, has me thinking of the much neglected gift of the Holy Spirit, piety.Piety, I would say, has come on hard times mainly because we so often take its secondary meanings for its primary meaning.When we hear, at least most of us, the word piety or pious we think of devotional practices, holy cards, saints with halos, and pale-looking persons on their knees in prayer.This, however, is not to be confused with the gift of the Holy Spirit called piety.

Piety is what might be described as an affection of the heart for the things of God.Or better, an affection for God himself.Notice, the word is ‘affection’ not ‘feeling’ because it is more profound, deeper still then simply a feeling.It is an inclination with a certain amount of energy beneath it that moves us—yes, in our ‘feelings’, our ‘emotions’, but also in our intellect and, indeed, our very being—toward God.

St. Paul is speaking precisely about piety when he speaks of “the Spirit itself bear[ing] witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom 8:16) which moves us to cry out “Abba, Father!” (15).Again, piety creates within us a space for a relationship of trust, affection, devotion, and inclination toward God as our dear Father.This piety stirs us to want to please God our Father, to spend time with him, to hear his voice and to speak with him, it opens us to the delight that is living in a relationship of obedience and faithfulness to God our Father as his dear children.

I am mindful of this, as I said, because of this feast today in honor of St. Joseph.Joseph, if anything, was a pious man.A man inclined to the heart of God.Such pity, as we witness in Joseph, inclines us also to truly want to do the honorable, merciful thing in all our relationship.

When Joseph discovers that Mary is pregnant, knowing the child not to be his own, there is confusion.Still, he was unwilling to expose Mary to the harsh precepts of the law and set his heart on dealing with the situation “quietly” so as to protect Mary’s honor (Mt 1:19).And yet, this was no hard-hearted man!His heart remained disposed, receptive (and this is characteristic of a pious person) to whatever it was that God would say to him.Because he was authentically disposed, God did speak to him, directing him to take Mary as his wife.And Joseph “did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took his wife into his home” (Mt 1:20-24).That is piety.An inclination toward God that moves one to act willingly on God’s word!

Now that we are clear on just what piety is it might be important to say something about pious actions, the secondary meaning of the word ‘piety.’Acts of piety fan into flame the gift of piety.Those actions, then, that incline our hearts to an affection for God are pious acts.

What are those acts, those spiritual exercises that dispose me to God?Personally, I experienced this only recently, something that is for me a true ‘pious act’ is the reading of theological books.I know that sounds unusual and it would not be a pious act for everyone.Still, let me share, if it is not too presumptuous of me, how it works.The other day I was reading this book on the Trinity in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas.As I sat in my chair reading, I noticed a real longing, a real sense of openness within me.I really desired to somehow touch, reach out to, be embraced by God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.It is like that more then just occasionally when I read theology.Reading, for me, is a pious act.

How about you?What are those acts that dispose your heart to God?Praying the rosary, sitting with the crucifix in your hands, walking out in nature, reading Sacred Scripture, kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament?Whatever, the point, the end of all such ‘acts’ are to fan into flame the gift of the Holy Spirit, piety.They are meant to incline our hearts toward God and make the doing of God’s will a desire of our whole selves.

Maybe it is good for us to resituate ourselves in this Lenten Season.The whole move of the season is, of course, toward the great celebration of the Paschal Mystery of our Lord Jesus Christ.It is, then, moving with Jesus’ own going up to Jerusalem, the celebration of the Paschal Feast with his apostles, the agony and suffering, his death and rising from the dead three days later.This is the direction we are moving

More proximately, we are moving toward the celebration of the Sacrament of Baptism at the Easter Vigil, when the catechumens are reborn in that sacrament and the rest of us renew our baptismal vows.

Sacraments are the intersection of the past event with our living present.Sacraments certainly are no mere ceremonies, but events and encounters—happenings, you might say—in which the mystery of God’s saving plan in made present and active for us in the moment of their celebration.Baptism is then our being taken into, submerged is better, the movement of Christ’s passing from death to life with the Father, resurrection!

From the earliest days of this new movement called Christianity, baptism has been referred to as an enlightenment.Baptism is the place of enlightenment because it is the place where faith is given to us.Faith is, as we have already said, the gift of new vision, a new mind, a new ‘take on life.’

And make no mistake about it, this comes as grace; that is, it comes as complete and unmerited gift.It comes to us as something we simply can not create for ourselves.I am simply not capable on my own of ‘looking at things more positively.’ This is at least hinted at in the readings for today’s liturgy.In the first (Jeremiah 7:23-28), God says through the prophet that there really is only one thing he has asked of his people, that is to listen to his voice.And yet, as the rest of the reading makes so clear, their minds are so dark, their hearts so hard, they simply are not capable of it.The gospel (Lk 11:14-23) shows the crowd to be so obstinate toward Christ that they see only the work of Beelzebul in the work of liberty and new life communicated by him.In other words, they see death where there is life.In the first reading, the people are incapable of hearing the voice of God.In the gospel, they are unable to see the presence of God in their midst.

Baptism opens to us a way to hear God’s voice and to see his action alive in our midst.

Yet, again, as the readings make so clear, this is a work from the inside out.The incapacity to hear, to see is inside—hard hearts and evil thoughts.Because this is so shows precisely why we do not simply mark Ash Wednesday and then the following Sunday celebrate the feast of Easter.We simply need the journey.We need the time, space, and action of prayer, fasting and almsgiving in order to ‘walk with Christ’ on the way ‘up to Jerusalem.’The journey ‘up to Jerusalem’, made with those three Lenten practices, serve to soften our hearts and attune our ears to perceive the Father acting in his Son for love of us drawing us to life.

It might be good at this stage of Lent to ask how it is going.Have I lost a bit of steam?Have I let the hardness of my own heart, the opaqueness of my mind discourage me to give up on the journey?

Again, seeing and hearing God comes as grace!The journey, the Lenten practices we do, are simply about putting us in the ‘place of grace.’The persistence of the darkness of mind and heart should not surprise us or prevent us from taking the journey.In fact, they are the very reason for the journey.How much I need Easter!How much I need to be caught up with Jesus in his great Passing to the Father!

Let’s get there!Let’s keep moving!We simply have to get there! Let us get to that place of grace!

Both of today’s readings (Deut. 4:1, 5-9; Mt 5:17-19) bring up the topic of law.Not, obviously, just any law but God’s law, the commandments of God.These readings, then, afford us the opportunity to look a bit into our relationship with ‘law’.I mean, it gives us the chance to reflect on how we feel and think about law.

I would bet that most of us look at law as a necessary evil.After all, there are deviants in the human community, and to somehow keep these folks from causing irreparable harm to the community, we need law.And as long as the notion of law stays there, applied the folks who somehow need to be restrained by it, we can continue to look at as just a necessary evil.

But when it comes to God’s law, the commandments, we know we can’t just keep it there.Somehow, we know, God’s commands apply to us as much as to anyone else.And this is what I think we need to really reflect on.How do I see those commands of God?What sort of ‘stance’ do I take to the laws of God?

Here again, I think many of us are rather ambivalent to God’s law.We are, for the most part, because generally within us as modern persons there exist a sort of deep seated resistance to anything imposed upon us from the outside.What most of us treasure above all, if we really reflected on it, is our autonomy.We simply like to have absolute control over our own selves, what we do and think, what we might choose to not do or not think.There is a natural wall of defense that goes up very quickly whenever we sense someone insisting that we simply ‘ought’ or ‘ought not’ do this or that.Put simply, most of us simply do not want to be told how we should live!

How different is the perspective on law that is found in Sacred Scripture.Notice what Moses says about it in that first reading.“Now, Israel, hear the statutes and decrees which I am teaching you to observe, that you may live” (v. 1).Law is the way, it is the door to life!Hear what Jesus says, “But whoever obeys and teaches these commandments will be called greatest in the Kingdom of heaven” (v. 19).To be receptive and obedient is to open oneself to true greatness!This same attitude is contained in today’s psalm.“God has proclaimed his word to Jacob, his statutes and his ordinances to Israel.He has not done thus for any other nation; his ordinances he has not made known to them” (147:19-20).The greatness of Israel is that the have the law, their true splendor rests in being a people of God’s law!Here law is looked upon as the way to true life, true greatness, true respectability.

And why not, if one shares their perspective.If God is in fact the creator of all that is—which of course is just what we claim to believe, modern autonomous person or not—then why would it not be an incredible gift to have him speak to us and tell us precisely what life is all about anyway.Ah, there it is.That is the heart of God’s law.It unveils for us the truth of our existence.The truth of what it is to be fully alive, to be fully free in our relationships.The law is not, as so often experienced, about obligation but about liberation!To know and follow the law of God is to know and live in the truth of a fully alive humanity!

In St. Thomas Aquinas’ great Summa Theologica, he deals in Book I with the truth about God in himself and then God coming to us.In Book II he describes the human person’s return to God.It is the book of virtues.By fashioning, in grace, a life of virtue, we make our return to God.The end of this return is what Thomas would describe as beatitude—absolute, unmitigated joy in the presence of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.Law and virtue are about just this beatitude.

There is an Irish Dominican (had to have some reference to the Irish on this feast of St. Patrick) who teaches here at the Angelicum in Rome.He was, one day, speaking of Thomas’ vision of the law and virtue as our human way to beatitude.At one point, just as he mentioned that for Thomas the moral life was all about beatitude, he looked up and said to us, “Ah, if only the moral theologians over the last 400 years might have mentioned the fact that morality was about happiness we would not be in the shape we are in today.”

And so, how do I feel about God’s law?Chances are there is some resistance in me to it.Chances are I need a change of mind and heart on this point.“Lord, may I come to trust you and see in your law my way to freedom and life!”

I wonder if you have heard of a man by the name of Jean Vanier.In 1968, Jean went into a state run asylum in France, invited two men with mental and physical handicaps to come home with him, and began making a life with them.The day he did this, Jean knew there was no going back.There wasn’t because you don’t simply invite persons into your life and then turn them out again when you no longer feel up to it.Somehow, you make it work whether you’re up to it or not.

This was the beginning of a worldwide movement of communities call L’Arche, French for ‘The Ark.’These are communities of persons with mental disabilities living with their assistants.Jean Vanier speaks of the central human and spiritual ‘event’ that takes place when a person of ‘normal capacities’ begins a life lived with those who have significant handicaps.As the person of ‘normal capacities’ looks into, through daily contact, a life filled with brokenness and wounds, they begin to encounter, often in most unpleasant ways, their own brokenness and woundedness.In the encounter, deep-seated anger rises to the surface, an incredible lack of patience and tolerance appears, one’s powerlessness to love, to really love the other is encountered over and over again.In the midst of this, one is confronted with a dramatic choice, either to despair over one’s own emptiness or to turn to Jesus for healing, mercy, and salvation.In short, the encounter with woundedness in the other exposes one’s own woundedness and brings about the awareness of one’s profound need for a Savior, for Jesus Christ.

Somehow, this gets us at the point Jesus is attempting to make in the parable he tells in today’s gospel (Mt 18:21-35).How is it that we are made into a person of true compassion, a person capable of forgiving hurts done against us seven times seventy-seven times, a person truly sympathetic to the other?Somehow is can only happen when we are deeply and profoundly aware of the depths of our own woundedness, our own need for forgiveness and healing.It is only out of a wounded heart, a heart that has desperately needed and found forgiveness in God and others and has allowed that experience of forgiveness to authentically shape it, that one can be truly free, truly liberated from the need to hold on to hurts that come into one’s life.

Notice, please notice, this is not about feeling badly about ourselves.It is not because we do in fact have a Savior, we do indeed have a source of healing and forgiveness, our Lord, Jesus Christ. No, it is about liberty and authentic freedom.Liberty and freedom to live, not in the clutches of pasts hurts, but in the joy of new beginnings and fresh days.Still, somehow, to touch that freedom, the liberty of being able to truly forgive and move into that new life, we simply must come to the recognition of our own, prior need for just such mercy and forgiveness.Only mercy received can be mercy given.

Am I truly aware of my brokenness and my desperate need for a Savior?How and where, what are the relationships in my life, that reveal my real emptiness and thus my need to be filled with the compassion of Christ?When have I known, really known the need to be forgiven, the need for tender mercy?

We are moving toward the celebration of that act of love which brought Jesus to offer his very life for us on the cross to the Father.That act, that horrendous act, is utterly incomprehensible apart for the knowledge of our enormous need for a savoir. It is simply beyond anyone to conceive why the Son of God went to such lengths apart from the deep experience of our own need to be healed and redeemed.

One of the greatest blessings of my life was the opportunity to spend a semester studying in Israel, the Holy Land.That land has been call the ‘fifth gospel’ and an ‘eighth sacrament’ because it reveals so much of who Jesus is and what he is about and to experience it is to somehow be touched by the very plan of God for his people.

I remember standing on the shores of the Sea of Galilee for the first time.I recall too my first encounter with the Jordon River.To be honest, what struck me on those first encounters was how utterly unimpressive this particular lake and that specific river are.Coming from Minnesota, the land of lakes and rivers, all I could say to the Lord was, “But Father, we have much more impressive lakes and rivers at home.Why would you choose this spot to reveal yourself?Of all the possibilities, why here?”

Obviously, I was not the first to feel this way.Naaman the leper in today’ first reading (2 Kings 5:1-15) is told by the prophet Elisha to plunge seven times in the Jordonto obtain his healing.Naaman is agast! “I thought that he would surely come out and stand there to invoke the Lord his God, and would move his hand over the spot, and thus cure the leprosy.Are not the rivers of Damascus, the Abana and the Pharpar, better than all the waters of Israel?Could I not wash in them and be cleansed?”Naaman, before rethinking things, then turns in anger to return home.

The spring I was in Israel, I spent a week after Easter on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.While there I was contemplating that same question, “Why here?”Sometime in that week I had an insight.Why here, indeed!The very ordinariness of it speaks most loudly of all.If God could accomplish his plan here, and this is the insight I had, certainly he can accomplish it anywhere.There can be no place, no person, too ordinary, too obscure, too small or too insignificant.God accomplished his greatest work on a stretch of land 150 miles north and south, 50 miles east and west.Certainly he can accomplish his plan in Minnesota, in South Dakota, in Alaska.Clearly he can do so in me.Small, insignificant, without anything to particularly attract anyone to me—nonetheless, God can do his work in and through me!That was the insight.

It is the insight to be obtained from the sacraments as well.In a pinch, a single drop of dirty water will serve to baptize a person, giving them a share in the very divine life of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.Bread, that hardly looks like bread, and wine, no more then ordinary table wine, will serve to become the very offering of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, body, blood, soul and divinity.And the point of the sacraments?Well if God can work in those things—a drop of water, ordinary bread and wine—,and as we know he most certainly does, then he can work through any event, person, place that my daily life brings me to encounter.When I know, through faith, the encounter with the living God in the Sacraments, I gradually grow in the insight of faith that God is working out his plan of salvation for me in each person, event, and place of my life.

The ordinary contains the extraordinary and the extraordinary transforms all that is ordinary.

Today’s first reading (Ex 3:1-8b, 13-15) is one of those great ‘hinge’ stories of the Scriptural account of Salvation History.Having murdered a man in Egypt, Moses fled to the land of Midian.There he got a job tending sheep and, as part of the deal, he got a wife (sorry, but that is how it seems to have worked).Settling down to a normal, quiet, private life, he encounters God in the burning bush who sends him back to Egypt and on course for the incredible tangle of events known to us as the Exodus, the giving of the covenant on Mount Sinai, and 40 years of wondering in the desert in an attempt to make what should have been a couple of days journey to the Promised Land.

How telling this is, in so many ways.What strikes me is the contrast between the incredible, personal encounter with the living God made to Moses in that burning bush in the midst of the emptying of the wilderness and flowing from it the dramatic, public life Moses is led into by God.This is the rhythm, you might say, of Judeo-Christian spirituality.God deals with us as persons.He comes to meet us face to face, as it were.He calls out to us, as he did Moses, using our own name, “Moses, Moses” (v. 4).God meets us, calls us, and dwells with us a personal subjects.

Yet, always from the personal encounter there arises a call, a mandate to insert ourselves into the company of God’s people and to allow God to use us to build up his people.In other words, though the encounter with God that we discover in Scripture is always personal it is never, ever private.It is always directed at the formation of a people, a community who lives in the promise and under the life-giving law of God.

This story is repeated over and over.The person of Abraham is called in order to be the father of a ‘multitude of nations.’Moses, as we have said, is called personally to lead a people from slavery into promise.David is personally anointed that he might build for God a righteous kingdom.Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, all the prophets, have a personal call placed on their lives to announce a word from God to invite his people to repentance, healing, justice and new life.God knows us personally, calls us by name, and seeks to dwell within us.God does so that he might draw us into his people and through us, somehow, build his people up to be a holy nation, a people set apart, a royal priesthood to offer loving praise to God the Father.

Somehow, there are these two sides of the same reality:personal faith set in the midst of the People of God.The People of God not made up of a people of truly living and personal faith would somehow be a People without a soul.Personal faith without the whole People would somehow be a soul without a body.And further, personal faith simply must bear fruit for the good of the whole (see today’s gospel, Lk 13:1-9).

There is one more striking thing for me about this Moses affair.There is no figuring just why God chooses us personally to be part of his plan.After all, why pick a shepherd who is wanted on charges of murder to go very publicly into the very place he is wanted on those charges to influence the very people who are accusing him of the crime?Somehow, perhaps, the very call of God and our acting on that call are the first stages of our own redemption, the healing of our broken relationships, that is the ultimate plan of God for all his people.Somehow, it is in the very act of drawing into the community, where our brokenness is most known and experienced, that redemption, healing beings.

Sunday is the great day of Christian gathering.In baptism, we have been called personally by the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.We have been so called, though, to be made part of the great family of God.There is no telling why he has called me personally.There is no telling why he has chosen this particular people.He has though and so, to respond to that call, I must place myself within his People and at his service within his People.And so we gather at the family table, the altar, and share the family meal, the Holy Sacrifice of the Eucharist.

I am reminded as I reflect on today’s readings, particularly the gospel (Lk 15:1-3, 11-32), of a certain childhood experience.When I was very young, my family, living in Milaca, had a house on Central Avenue, at the crest of a gentle hill coming up from the direction of the Rum River.A block or two down that hill was my father’s Culligan Water Softeningbusiness.The memory being stirred up today is one involving my father and my youngest sister.Occasionally, Lynn and I would be outside, in the front yard, at the time my dad would be walking up that hill coming home for supper.We would catch sight of him, start walking and then running down the little hill to meet him.By the time we got to him we would be running about as fast as our little legs would carry us, right into the open arms of dad, who would grab us up, hold us, and carry us along for several feet.Then we would walk the rest of the way home with dad.

It really is, for me, a memory of tenderness and the enthusiastic joy of a child encountering a parent.

That is the heart of Jesus’ parable.The tenderness and enthusiastic joy of a son encountering a father.Here, though, that tenderness and joy is amplified.Amplified by a separation most disrespectful, by an absence of great duration, by the son’s fear about what kind of reception he would receive melting away in the amazement of mercy, and by a father’s surge of joy with the disappearance of an agony as he realizes that his son is not dead, but alive!

This amplification of tenderness and joy is captured in one line of the parable.I remember running toward my father.The Father of Jesus, though, “ran to his son, embraced him, and kissed him” (v. 20).Dirty, broken in spirit, shamed and foolish, still somehow, and it is beyond comprehension, the son remains utterly attractive to the father, the father remains utterly caught up in love for the son.

This Lent we have already heard the call to repentance many times.The depth of our bondage to deadly passions has frequently been pointed out.The immense need for forgiveness in our relationships has been made ever so clear.

When all is said and done, though, today’s gospel parable tells the true tale.The real problem with all that is that it serves to keep us from a Father who loves us, delights in us with a running out to us sort of love, a Father who wants nothing more then to embrace us, kiss us, and bring us around his table to demonstrate his celebrating love for us.

We are a wounded people.I, at least, am a wounded person.How hard it is for me to get this reality of the God of Jesus Christ into my heart.How many times and ways I still go off, like that younger son, searching for my hearts fulfillment when I have a Father who is Lord of all that is and who says to me “My son…everything I have is yours” (v. 31).

Today, I need to pray, to really bring my heart to the Father. I will ask him to heal all that keeps me from his love, from living in the reality of his love.All the false images, the self-condemnation, the distortions of my wondering passions.I will repeat, slowly and within myself, the response to today’s psalm, “The Lord is kind and merciful…the Lord is kind and merciful…the Lord is kind and merciful…”

Writing this doctoral dissertation involves a great deal of solitude.Solitude, to be honest, that is experienced more as isolation much of the time.It is me, my books and my computer, writing on a topic no one else is writing on, in a house of men who are writing on topics only they are writing on, as a result living with guys who have little but the isolation to common, if isolation can be shared in common.

The isolation gives a certain volume to inner voices that otherwise are normally shouted over by the voices of activity and interaction with others.These inner voices are not always of the welcomed sort.Memories of past failures, self-condemnation and doubt, passions seeking attention, emptiness that calls out for consumption of just about anything, hollowness that seeks to convince me of God’s ultimate absence—all come bubbling to the surface at moments I least expect them and most often when they have not been invited.

The isolation has served, though I don’t often look at it as a service, to stand me up to a mirror and see things rattling around on the inside.

The readings for today’s liturgy serve somewhat of the same function, that of a mirror somehow reflecting some of the often deep seated passions that root themselves in the human heart.The first reading (Gn 37:3-4, 12-13a, 17b-28a) tells a story of the depth jealousy can reach into the human heart and the lengths to which it will push those in its possession to seek the destruction of the ‘other.’

Jesus, in the gospel (Mt 21:33-43, 45-46), tells a parable that reflects back to its hearers the violence that flows from hearts absorbed with greed and lust for control.

Certainly, those griped by the describe passions were not, either aware of their presence, or didn’t spend enough time reflecting on the depth of them to seek to confront them.The brothers of Joseph did not say, “Gee, we are really jealous of Joseph.Instead of taking it out on him we should deal with our relationship with our father.”The chief priests and the Pharisees, though they knew Jesus was addressing the parable their way, did not stop long enough to see what truth there was in it.

We live in a society that is especially marked by frenetic activity and stuffed with emotion masking ‘things’.The problem with this is that often what really drives us, what really controls our actions are deep-seated passions we aren’t even aware of.Passions like jealousy, greed, anger, lust, hurts of the past not forgiven, fear of emptiness and loneliness, a hidden sense of shame and guilt.The dreadful truth is, we are often not nearly as free as we would like to imagine ourselves to be.

Fasting.Prayer.Almsgiving.These spiritual practices are a way into the passions.They serve, you might say, to stand us up in front of the mirror that we might take a good look and see what is really there, down deep.

The parable of Jesus concludes in a most remarkable way.“The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; by the Lord has this been done, and it is wonderful in our eyes” (v. 42).Those stones, the passions that hold us down and keep us from authentic freedom, by the work of Jesus in us, can become cornerstones of a new life.We might be tempted to reject—cover up and run from—these dark, inner passions.However, standing face to face with them, daily submitting them to the transforming power of Jesus’ Holy Spirit, they can be made into a new house of liberty and authentic joy.

I can tell you from experience, this is no easy task!It is a real test of faith.Can Jesus be trusted to give me the freedom he has promised?Is Christ more powerful then the passions that keep me captive and drive me in all sorts of directions I do not want to go?My prayer, fasting and almsgiving through this Lenten Season are meant to be an act of faith that says to such questions, “Yes, I believe.Lord, help my unbelief!”

Through much of the 1990’s, as most of you know, I was the co-pastor of five parishes in central Minnesota.It involved a fair amount of time in the car, going from one parish to the other.My time in those parishes also coincided with the economic boom of the ‘90’s.While I was in my car, often I had the radio turned to National Public Radio.It was simply amazing how much of the programming in those years dealt with personal finance.In particular, I remember listening often to the program Sound Money.And why not all this talk of investments, after all it seemed as if nearly everyone was getting rich on the stock market.I remember also a book on the bestseller list at the time called The Millionaire Next Door.The upshot of so much of all this was that, yes, you too could be a millionaire!All that was required was a good look at your financial portfolio, the watch word for Sound Money listeners, and making sure that you had the proper balance of investments between stocks, bonds, 401Ks and the like.

Now honestly, I am not, normally, too enticed by the prospect of having tons of money.To tell you the truth, though, listening to the talk of investments by the folks on NPR’s Sound Money and how it was paying off for absolutely everybody was tempting.As I drove around those parishes, listening to that talk of money and more money, I could see in my own heart a growing desire to be part of it.Certainly, if everyone was going to be a millionaire, I didn’t want to be left behind.And besides, all it took was a little, sound investment on my part and, so it seemed, I could be!

The readings today (Jeremiah 17:5-10; Lk 16:19-31) would make for good investment advice on a program called, not Sound Money, but Sound Theology.The heart of theology, after all, is faith.Faith is very much about trust.The question of faith concerns what you invest your trust in, what word you lean into for support, what strategy for life you adopt.

More precisely, faith is about origin and return (exitus-reditus in the Latin—now you are meant to be impressed because maybe I am investing myself in impressing you?!).It is about, in other words, where we as human beings come from and were we are going.The advice we receive from today’s program of Sound Theology is that it is best to invest in that which our origin and our end is found.In short, the sound investment is in a deep, abiding relationship with the living water, God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit (see the image at the beginning of that first reading).

As I said, though normally not too enticed by loads of money, I was often amazed by how desirous my emotions would become to somehow get my share of the economic boom that was going on.Lent could be looked at, I suppose, as somehow allowing our hearts to be enticed by the prospect of sharing the fullness of divine life, being taken up in the enormous life of the Trinity.

Prayer, fasting and almsgiving are the means to this growing enticement.Like my spending time listening to Sound Money on the radio enticed my heart, the three pillars of Lenten spirituality promise to entice our hearts to a Sound Theology.And who knows, if it catches on maybe someone will reach the top of the bestsellers list with the book The Saint Next Door.

Personally, I don’t want to move to far away from the heart of the matter that this Lenten Season is calling us to.That is, again, the act of love which brought Jesus to offer his life as gift to the Father on our behalf, that act of love which is meant to become more and more our act of love by the action of the Holy Spirit.

Nonetheless, the gospel today (Mt 20:17-28) really does require us to reflect further on the nature of power and authority in the life of the Christian community.

Let me share with you something from Fr. Yves Congar, which really does place the question of authority right at the heart of the gospel.Fr. Congar says that our relationship as Christians to authority demands “a radical conversion…We must, in fact, sacrifice, abandon our human relationships in the form in which we receive them from the physical world of our first birth, which consist of two terms only:man and woman, master and servant; and we must receive them afresh from the hand of the Father as Christian relationships, and let them shape our lives ‘in the Lord,’ so that we live in the unique relationship of love of God, of Christ, and of men as God and Christ love them, or, better, of the very love with which God and Christ love them…Only after such conversion can the relationship of authority exist and be lived in a Christian fashion” (Power and Poverty in the Church, 99-100).

You see, when it comes to authority, as in every other area of our lives, conversion is demanded.As a matter of fact, questions of authority often draw us immediately to the central gospel call to ‘radical conversion’.They do precisely because authority touches on human relationships, particularly those that impinge on my personal freedom.

In the quote from Congar, we are reminded of Jesus’ call to those who would be his disciples to leave father and mother, brother and sister, husband and wife behind.We must, because sin—original and actual sin—has so marked our relationships that they have been reduced to relationships of opposition:me verses you; us verses them; etc.This is exactly the fruit born of sin—division, antithesis, opposition, competition.

These relationships must be altogether abandoned that God our gracious Father by his precious Holy Spirit might work within us a transformation.A transformation which heals the way we view the other.So that rather then looking upon the other as a competitor, we might look upon them as a brother, a sister who in love we seek to lift up, advance upon life’s journey, and build up.A transformation from seeing the other as an obstacle to my self-fulfillment, a competitor, to discovering in the other and in their fulfillment my own way to fullness of life.

The desperate need we have for such a transformation is often most clear in our relationships with persons in authority.How often we see the person who has authority in our lives as an enemy to our happiness.So naturally—natural only in the sense that it is simply in us because of original sin, not because it is the way God made us—we resist those in authority, fearing that somehow to submit is to be weak, to be diminished in some way.

Of course, Jesus puts the first call to such transformation on the hearts of those entrusted with authority.They must be the first to sacrifice all—their desire for approval, lust for power, greed for advancement, insecurities which lead to defensiveness—so as to be free to give, rather then take.

And in this is found what the heart of one in authority must be like and, indeed, the distinction of all authentic Christian relationship.Christian relationship is marked by the freedom to give, even to the point of losing one’s own life, that the other might find full life.Just what we discover, by the way, in the act of love in which Jesus offered himself to the Father on our behalf on the cross at Calvary.

Today’s (Mt 23:1-12) and tomorrow’s (Mt 20:17-28) gospels speak about leadership or authority among the People of God.The gospel for today speaks, specifically, of the leadership of the scribes and Pharisees among the Jewish people.

Clearly, the People of God, under the old covenant, had positions of authority. Equally, the New Testament testifies to positions of authority in the structures of the New Testament community.

Today’s gospel makes clear at least one criteria Jesus places on those possessing authority in his community; that is, integrity.

Now this is important, the lack of integrity in the life of one possessing authority does not void that one’s authority.“The scribes and the Pharisees have taken their seat on the chair of Moses.Therefore, do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you” (vs. 2-3).There is, in other words, an objective aspect to authority.There is, because, God desires his people to live in the security of knowing they have access to his truth.God will, through those he has established, maintain his people in the truth, despite the possible ‘untruthfulness’ of the lives of those entrusted with this responsibility.

Nonetheless, there is what might be called a subjective aspect to authority, and it is to this that Jesus seems to address himself most intentionally.Yes, Jesus said, follow the teaching of the scribes and Pharisees, “but do not follow their example.For they preach but they do not practice” (v. 3).The problem that Jesus has is that the truth proclaimed is not the truth lived!There is, in other words, a lack of integrity.For this lack of integrity, just go on to read the rest of this chapter in Matthew to see it, Jesus rain downs intense condemnation.Make no mistake about it, to hold authority within the People of God demands, absolutely demands, from the one holding it a life that corresponds to the truth of God.It demands integrity!

Where is this lack of integrity focused?“They tie up heavy burdens [hard to carry] and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them” (v. 4).Rather—“as for you” (v. 8)—“The greatest among you must be your servant.Whoever exalts himself will be humbled; but whoever humbles himself will be exalted” (vs. 11-12).The lack of integrity, somehow, centers on the making of God’s truth a burden.It does because to do so is to contradict the very nature of that truth.The revelation contained in the life of Jesus is a truth that sets free, that liberates.To turn it into a burden is to turn it on its head, to make the word preached and the word experienced stand in contradiction.

You see, those with authority in Jesus’ band of disciples, must themselves first of all be converted to the truth of the gospel.That gospel is none other then finding life by the giving of life.Those who use their authority to grasp at life for themselves, will in the end loss their very lives!

Again, I am struck, this is pretty demanding stuff.Over the last two years we have witnessed how far our leaders can miss the mark.

Still, to be faithful to the way of Jesus demands not that I point to those ‘others’ who have failed, but that I first get the message straight myself!Is my life a life of integrity?Does my life, in its most personal dimensions, correspond to my words about God and my religious practices?How do I use whatever positions of authority I might hold to stuff my ego rather then to open the way for Jesus to lift up and free others from their burdens?

How appropriate the opening prayer for today’s Liturgy:

Lord,

watch over your Church,

and guide it with your unfailing love.

Protect us from what could harm us

and lead us to what will save us.

Help us always,

for without you we are bound to fail.

Grant this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,

who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,

one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Two days ago we heard Jesus’ call, “So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48).Today’s gospel (Lk 6:36-38) specifies for us what the perfection of God is, after all.“Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (Lk 6:36).The perfection of God is found in his compassion, his mercy.

“The life of integrity born of fidelity to the dream has a precise meaning in the mind of Christ.It leaves no room for romanticized idealism, condescending pity, or sentimental piety.When a disciple’s every response, work, and decision is motivated by compassion, he has ‘put on Christ’ and walks in the way of integrity.Biblically, compassion means action.Copious Christian tears shed for the dehydrated babies in Juarez is heartfelt emotion; when combined with giving them a cup of water, it is compassion…

“Every time the gospels mention that Jesus was moved with the deepest emotions or felt sorry for people, it led to his doing something—physical or inner healing, deliverance or exorcism, feeding the hungry crowds or intercessory prayer.The good Samaritan was commended precisely because he acted.The priest and Levite, paragons of Jewish virtue, flunked the test because they did not do anything” (Brennan Manning, A Glimpse of Jesus:The Stranger to Self-Hatred, 125-126).

This description of the perfection of the Father as grounded in compassion highlights just why the Christian Tradition has always stressed the centrality of what has been called the “Corporal Works of Mercy.”To feed the hungry, cloth the naked, visit the sick and imprisoned, to shelter the homeless, to bury the dead—is to act as God acts, to be ‘perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect.’

The corporal works of mercy paint a broad picture for us of the Lenten practice of almsgiving.

The great fourth century bishop of Constantinople, St. John Chrysostom, is exacting on this.“Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life.The goods we possess are not ours, but theirs” (quoted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 2446).I am struck by his words “to not enable the poor to share in our goods.”It is not just about a willingness to share, but, again, in the nature of biblical compassion, it is about finding ways to make it happen!

Here, again, we can sense the greatness of the demand of discipleship to which Jesus calls us.In this we simply must see the intrinsic link between the practice of almsgiving and that of prayer.Only in prayer will we receive the Spirit of Jesus, that Spirit that opens our eyes to the possibility of generosity, enkindles the desire to fashion lives of generosity, and the spiritual strength to act generously (to be in fact compassionate as our Father is compassionate) .

Lent has its origins in the preparation of catechumens for baptism at the great celebration of the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday night.With the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults the Church has restore this wonderful connection between baptism and the season of Lent.

Throughout the course of the Sundays of Lent, there are rituals (exorcisms, giving of the creed, etc.) involving the catechumens placed within the Sunday Eucharistic Liturgy.In this way, the whole Christian community is meant to be drawn into prayer for those to be baptized at Easter and, further, to deeper reflection on our own baptism, the promises of which we will all renew at the Easter Vigil.

In this Sunday’s first reading (Genesis 15:5-12, 17-18), we have the account of God’s call and promise given to Abram.God’s call always contains within it a promise.A new future, marked by new and fullness of life, necessarily flows from the call of God placed on our lives.

The gospel (Lk 9:28b-36) is the wonderful account of the transfiguration.Jesus takes his closest companions—Peter, John and James—up a high mountain and there is revealed, with Moses and Elijah, in splendid light.The voice of the Father can not be missed, saying “This is my chosen Son; listen to him.”This event happens, of course, on the way ‘up to Jerusalem’ where the saving events of Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection will soon take place.

What was it like to be Abram?Already an old man, without descendants, given the promise that he would be the father of a multitude of nations?

And to be those three, chosen disciples?To experience intensely and unmistakably the truth of the glory of Jesus?

But what about our own baptism?In baptism we were given a call with a promise of a ‘land,’ a share in the riches and splendor of the kingdom of God.In baptism, too, we were given a new relationship to Jesus, one in which we might hear his voice and follow his way through death to new life.

Baptism.To be called.To live our lives in the light of promise.Taken into relationship with the Divine Son of God.To pass always the way of death—the many little deaths we encounter in our lives—to new and fuller life.

How, in what ways, and even where have I encountered God’s call in my life?

What are the promises, the hopes flowing from my relationship with Christ do I cling to in my heart and that shape the way I live my life?

How do I go about, day by day, honoring my relationship with Jesus, listening to the voice of the Son?

How has my life of faith enabled me, empowered me to pass through the disappointments, struggles, real sufferings of life to find a more profound sense of life?

In all these ways, baptism shows itself to be an immense gift.It is, all said and done, our very share in divine life.Yes, divine life—life abundant beyond description and utterly indestructible.

Today’s gospel (Mt 5:43-48) helps me out a bit with yesterday’s.First, it goes along way to answering the question, “So just who are my brothers and sisters” (Cf. Mt 5:23-24)?Well, quite frankly it seems Jesus means everybody.After all, just who is it that the sun shines on when it shines if not everybody (Mt 5:45)?So there it is, everyone is included and Jesus demands that I live in harmony with them.Second, it goes along way to answering the question as to how to be reconciled, how to love the ones who have set themselves up as my enemies.“Pray for those who persecute you” (Mt 5:44).

This call to pray, I think, is important and perhaps its implications are not so easily or immediately grasped.It says a lot, again, about the nature of Jesus’ teaching.It sets it on the fundamental foundation for the type of ethic Jesus establishes for his kingdom.You see, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes in particular, is not some super-charged version of the Ten Commandments.In other words, we are not simply to take the precepts of the Sermon, set them alongside the Ten Commandments, and conclude that Jesus has just given us a harder ethic to live by which simply calls for greater effort.Jesus’ Sermon is not, let this be clear, about working harder to please God!

Well, if this is true, then what is it?Because certainly the Sermon on the Mount does intensify, specify and amplify so much of what is already contained in the Covenant with the People of Israel.How is it not to be understood as simply demanding more from the People of the New Way?

“Let it be said again:If we are clear about this first, we avoid the misunderstanding that we human beings can, by our own strength, heal all human wounds, eliminate all unjust conditions, create a final state of rest, peace, and welfare…For Jesus, the issue is the crossing of all boundaries, the victory of a conduct governed by law and justice, the surpassing of all previous rules of conduct established by human beings.That is the meaning of his extreme instructions, or, as we could also say, his ‘radical’ demands which penetrate to the roots of the human heart.He establishes them in view of God’s incomprehensible conduct in spite of all earthly difficulties, detached from all otherwise human considerations and objections.It is a supreme moral appeal as a result of his union with God and his will.This must be established with all clarity and urgency before we turn to the question of how these demands by Jesus can be realized in earthly situations.First we must be gripped by Jesus’ optimism which grows out of his trust in God and his salvific power: ‘All things are possible to the one who believes’” (Schnackenburg, All Things are Possible to Believers, 34).

This underlines why prayer for one’s enemies is the key to reconciliation with one’s enemies.Prayer, unceasing, places us before the heart of the Father.It is only by the action and the power of his divine Holy Spirit that we can hope to love as he loves, to cross boundaries that only he can cross.In prayer the possibility is created for our hearts to be caught up in the enormity of God’s power to heal and reconcile.

Prayer is the key.Let us make no mistake about it, though, it is the key because it is a real thing.To pray is to really encounter the Father of Jesus Christ.That is to say, ultimately, that it will in fact change us!It will move me to love my enemies, to step over myself, and to be reconciled!God reconciling the world, in the end, to himself through me!

Today’s gospel (Mt 5:20-26), as well as Saturday’s and Monday’s, puts us in the middle of what we know as the Sermon on the Mount (although Monday the gospel is from Luke, and he calls it the Sermon on the Plain).

The Sermon on the Mount is an incredibly rigorist ethic of the coming kingdom of Jesus Christ.I think it, upon reading or hearing it read, really demands at least these two things from us: First, it demands that we do indeed take Jesus enough at his word to be startled by what he seems to expect from his disciples.Now this reminds me of the incredible play on the life of St. Thomas More, A Man for all Seasons.A friend of Thomas More is trying to convince him to sign off on the king’s edict expressing his sovereignty over the Church in England, effectively separating the Church from the Catholic Church.His friend explains to Thomas that it must be alright since even the nobles have signed it.Thomas interrupts immediately and says, “My friend, the nobles of England would have snored through the Sermon on the Mount.”This teaching of Jesus demands at least to be heard for what it is and if it is it should startle rather then bore.Second, it should give rise within us to the question, “How is it possible to live this life?”The Sermon on the Mount lays out an incredible rigorist ethic and the possibility of fulfilling it is not self-evident.

The great German biblical scholar, Rudolf Schnackenburg, offers what he thinks is the key to this teaching of Jesus.I think he has it right.

“[The] scandalous trust that inspired Jesus himself and that he desired to awaken in his disciples appears to me…to be a key to understanding the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus’ extreme demands astound and irritate us.But they do not stand alone:they must be read in the context of Jesus’ whole message and proclamation…It bears direct witness to Jesus’ fundamental trust in the Father which he wished to bring to his disciples” (All Things are Possible to Believers, 3).

Here it is again.To understand Jesus, his life and his teaching, is to somehow receive from him the same kind of relationship of intense intimacy with the Father which leads to absolute confidence in God’s desire and power to bring us to good.

Or in another way, connecting this to the specific precept laid out in today’s gospel, to live in this radical peace and harmony with our neighbor simply demands that we be touched and shaped by the radical relationship that the Son shares with the Father.

It is not hard for me to recognize how far beyond me this call of Jesus is.I have now lived long enough and have carried enough responsibility to have left behind me certain people who still hold one thing or another against me.Jesus’ word is, “If you bring your gift to the altar, and there recall that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be reconciled.”Did you notice?“The other person’s guilt is simply not in question; it suffices that ‘your brother or sister has something against you” (Schnackenburg, The Gospel of Matthew, 55).

In attempting to live by this command, I have all too often been confronted by my pride, unable to step over it and acknowledge my guilt.I have, also, been confronted by the wall put in place by the other unwilling to forgive me.What am I to do?To be honest, I really don’t know.Somehow, though, the “key” is setting my heart more firmly on the Father.Somehow, the “key” is sitting more closely at the feet of Jesus in order to receive the Father from him.

And yet, I can not afford to delude myself into thinking that this relationship with the Father will not change my relationship with others, will not demand of me actions that will seek to being change in those relationships.

On Tuesday, I went with a group of friends from the States to Assisi.Assisi, of course, is the home of the saint said by many to have lived most like Jesus, St. Francis.It made me think of the movie Francesco, the best I have seen on the life of Francis.There is an amazing scene in that movie, near the beginning of Francis’ life lived in radical poverty, where his is standing in this little, broken down chapel, the Portiuncola, surrounded by the destitute, poor, and lepers of Assisi and the surrounding area.Friends of Francis come out in hopes of talking some sense into him, bringing him back home, and enjoying the company of their fun-loving friend again.As these friends try to convince Francis, Francis takes out his small, tattered New Testament and says, “Have you ever read this?Listen to what Jesus tells his disciples…”And he reads from Mark 6: 8-9.“Jesus instructed them to take nothing for the journey but a walking stick—no food, no sack, no money in their belts...”Then, suddenly, he appears shaken.He reads further, only now to himself, “and not even sandals on your feet…”He looks down at his feet…sees his broken up sandals, stoops down, unfastens them, and leaving them laying on the ground, he walks away, bare footed, with his eyes intensely focused on the New Testament, totally taken up in the words of Jesus.[Now an aside here, the passage actually says “They were however to wear sandals” but the point, though not so accurate here, is most accurate in the sense it gives of what was happening in the life of Francis.]

I love that scene, because it tells us something deeply true about what it was that made Francis turn so radically toward discipleship of Jesus and what, further, has made him so attractive to people throughout the ages.It is, I think, that Francis simply took Jesus at his word!For some reason, comprehensible to faith alone, Jesus impressed himself upon the heart and mind of this man of Assisi in such a way as to give him the sense that he could follow him anywhere and anyway the Master said.

How about today’s gospel (Mt 7:7-12)?Jesus says to us:“Ask and receive…seek and find…knock and it will open.”How can Jesus be so sure?Because, and it really is this direct, he knows the Father.“Your heavenly Father will give good things to those who ask him.”

Wow!That is simply incredible, good news.Maybe, even, too incredible to believe.

My pilgrimage to the city of the poor man of Jesus has inspired me, in my Lenten journey, to take Jesus more literally.To say it better, to take Jesus more at his word.

I pray for all of you, and please pray for me, that whatever that grace was that moved the heart of Francis to so utterly cast himself on the words of Jesus might somehow move in our hearts!I am asking….now lets receive it!That is, after all, how Jesus says it works!

Today’s first reading is from the prophet Jonah (3:1-10).In the gospel (Lk 11:29-32), Jesus refers to the ‘sign of Jonah’ to give some indication to the gathered crowd about the prospects for his own life.

The story of Jonah is classic, and from childhood on, Christians have loved to hear and tell the story.God commands Jonah to preach repentance to the people of Nineveh.Jonah, wanting nothing to do with it, hightails it out of there, boards a ship, the storm comes up, Jonah is thrown to the sea, swallowed up by a large fish, and three days later spit up on the shore.Taking the hint, he goes off to Nineveh, shouts out “Three days more and Nineveh will be destroyed.”To his chagrin, however, Nineveh is not destroyed because God responds in mercy to their sincere repentance.In the end, there is Jonah sitting beneath a gourd plant, completely bewildered by the action of God is his life and in the world.

The Irish Dominican, Fr. Paul Murray, has written a wonderful little book on Jonah, Journey with Jonah:The “Spirituality of Bewilderment.”He reflects on the ‘stormy’ experience of Jonah in the light of Christ.I would like to share a couple of thoughts with you from his book.

“But what of the Christian experience?What of life in Christ? As believers can we not expect to enjoy the security, the serenity, of faith?Are we not protected from ‘the shocks that flesh is heir to’ and from the storms of fate? We are protected, I would say, and we are not protected.Life in Christ—true religion—does not take the cross out of our lives.It does not render us immune to great suffering or misfortune.And yet, because Christ himself is at the heart of the storm, and because, as our Redeemer, he lives within us, and we in him, we have no reason to be afraid” (41).

And a bit later, more directly from the experience of Jonah, he writes: “So the moment of actual failure and breakdown—the experience of bewilderment in our lives—can be the moment of breakthrough, the moment when God’s grace finally shakes down all our defenses.And then, to our amazement, from out of the belly of failure, from out of the death of false dreams and false ideals, and even from the jaws of a living hell, we can begin to experience the grace of resurrection” (43).

That is the ‘sign of Jonah’ Jesus speaks of in the gospel.Look, there is the tomb, a place of death.But in his enormous love for the Son, the Father draws him forth from the belly of the earth to life.

A couple of days ago, I shared with you how I think about faith as a way of seeing.Here it is again.As Christian people, we just see differently.Into the hardships of life, the breakdowns in communication, the disruptions of our days, the pains of an illness, and even, somehow, the moral failures—we see the opportunity for growth, renewed relationship, healing, mercy, and life itself.

You know, Jonah, all and all, comes off rather cynical.Cynical about doing the task God as asked of him.Cynical about the people of Nineveh.Cynical, even, about how God finally reconciles those people.

I can see myself in Jonah.I have a real cynical streak—about people, the world, the church.At the moment, I sense the call to repent, which means, in the end, a call to see things differently.I need to pray that I might at last, more deeply grasp the meaning of the ‘sign of Jonah’ and turn my cynical eyes in for eyes of hope and expectation.

Our age is marked by what has been called the ‘eclipse of God.’The possibility for most modern persons to ‘touch’ God in the fabric of daily life seems remote.God just seems so far removed from the technological sophistication, mass production grind and fast-paced flow of it all.Perhaps it has something to do with the incredible atrocities that marked our globe in the 20th century.Presently, the incredible scandals in the life of the Church that have come to light in these past two years adds enormously to it.Can anyone be trusted?Is anything as it seems?Is all this religion, spiritual stuff just a false façade?Ultimately, even, can God be trusted?Is God for real?

The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, no doubt having faced the incredible questions of faith raised by the apparent ‘absence of God’ in the midst of the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, is the one who originated that phrase about the ‘eclipse of God.’

“An eclipse of the sun is something that occurs between the sun and our eyes, not in the sun itself.When, as in this instance, something is taking place between heaven and earth, one misses everything when one insists on discovering within earthly thought the power that unveils the mystery.He who refuses to submit himself to the effective reality of the transcendence as such contributes to the human responsibility for the eclipse” (Eclipse of God, 23-24).

The problem with the modern person’s relationship with God is not, most certainly, in God and it is not even, as such, in persons themselves.Somehow it is in between the two.Buber’s insight, I think, that the rediscovery of God consists in submission in faith to the transcendence beyond sight holds the key.

It is, I believe, just what gets us to the heart of the life of Jesus, the essence of what is taking place in today’s gospel (Mt 6:7-15).The prayer he offers to us is a prayer of submission to God:submission to his will, to his coming kingdom, to his daily provision for our needs, to his mercy in our brokenness, to his ultimate protection from evil.The motivation Jesus offers for such submission is his very self, in whom we encounter the God who is Father, reflected in the gracious, extending, healing, present life of the Son.

Pope John Paul II, in the very last response given in his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, speaks of original sin as Satan’s attempt to obscure the ‘radiation of Fatherhood,’ to somehow convince the man and the woman that God is not a Father who can be trusted.This is a story retold in so many ways, on so many occasions in human history and, I would guess, in most of our personal histories.Things happen, the twists of life occur that obscure for us the ‘radiation of Fatherhood,’ the radiation of God’s tender, present love for us as his dear children.Rather then submit, we so often are tempted to hide from God in fear.

I guess this makes me wonder:where do I go to hide from God?So many places to hide.Destructive relationships, endless activity, some form of emotion numbing drug, filling up the space with noise.Sometimes I wonder, personally, if I hide from God in my ideas about God.

Jesus says:“Your Father knows!”Whatever has brought about the eclipse of God in my life, hiding God from me, it has not hidden me from God!The Father sees me.The Father knows me.The Father loves me! Can I trust that and submit my life to him?