Friday of the Seventh Week of Easter

Visitors to the Eternal City, to Rome, will always encounter at least one disappointment.While moving about the city, they will eventually come to one of the great monuments, works of art, or Churches that they had looked forward to seeing and find that it is completely obstructed by scaffolding.It is simply inevitable.It is, too, something understandable since these great structures are hundreds of years old and dwell in a large city with pollution. They simply demand periodic cleaning and maintenance.

As we move toward the end of this Easter Season, I would like to invite us to look back on all we have reflected on these past weeks and highlight from it those elements that make up the scaffolding and tools of the spiritual life.In Christ we have, after all, been made into the Temple of the Holy Spirit from where the worship of the Father flows forth.This Temple, too, demands consistent cleansing and maintenance.

First, to speak of the scaffolding, or those aspects of our life of faith that provide the ‘structure’ for building and maintaining the spiritual house of God.(Tomorrow we will reflect on the ‘tools’ needed for this maintenance.) We have seen, many times, how the very heart of Christianity is the reality of faith.We have come to understand that faith is the revelation, the free self-disclosure by God of the ‘mystery’ concerning God’s plan for human beings and the whole cosmos, that plan hidden from all eternity in the heart of God, now revealed to us in Jesus Christ.The content of faith is the self-communication of God the Father through Jesus by the action of the Holy Spirit to us human beings.Faith becomes for us, then, a way of seeing, understanding, and living in the truth of how things ‘really are’ and how they ‘will come to be’ fully realized in the Second Coming of Jesus.All events, personal and global, come to be viewed in the light of this knowledge of faith which is God’s saving action to draw all things into a communion, a relationship of love which is the true foundation of all that is.

To say that faith is the self-disclosure of God, and this is central, is to say that it comes from another, the Divine Other, and is not something to be found within ourselves.It is not given by ‘flesh and blood’ but by our ‘heavenly Father’ (cf. Mt 16:17).As we have seen, the Father communicates this concretely in time through, first, the prophets and, then, finally ‘in the fullness of time’ in his Son, Jesus Christ.This revelation travels the course of time, to us today, by the action of the Holy Spirit.And yet, as all of God’s self-disclosure reveals, this is not done in some disembodied, merely spiritual way.The Holy Spirit acts in the very concrete realities of Word and Sacrament to communicate to us the saving plan of God and to make that plan effective in our lives today.

And in these two realities—Word and Sacrament—we have the ‘scaffolding’ for the building and maintenance of the structure of our spiritual lives, the Temple of the Holy Spirit.The Word, we know, is not a book but a person, the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ.This living Word, the person of Jesus Christ, touches us through Sacred Scripture and Tradition.Scripture and Tradition are carried, and this is how we encounter them as Living, in the Church by a ‘cascade of missions’ from Jesus to the apostles to the bishops to the whole People of God.The Sacraments are those signs, respecting our human nature, through which we see, hear, and touch the spiritual reality of Jesus Christ drawing us into the saving plan of God by the action of the Holy Spirit.