Exaltation of the Holy Cross (Year A) 2014

EXALTATION of the HOLY CROSS (Year A)

(Numbers 21: 4b-9; Philippians 2:6-11; Saint John 3:13-17)

 

Who can tell us about heaven?  Obviously not any Tom, Dick, or Harry. In the old dispensation Isaiah, Daniel, Baruch, and Enoch, for example, were among those said to have had heavenly visions; Elijah, we know, was taken up into heaven in a fiery chariot; while Moses spent forty days in the presence of  God on Mount Sinai before he was able to communicate God’s ‘teaching’ to Israel.  Such persons’ testimony we could understand; and we might even be prepared to give serious attention to some of the things they appreciated and found themselves able to say about heaven and heavenly matters.

Jesus, however, cannot be compared with such seers, visionaries, and prophets, even though specially chosen by God, because His association with, knowledge of, heaven is clearly something infinitely more than that learned in any of the relatively short-lived experiences or limited commissions accorded to all others:

No one has gone up to heaven except the One Who has come down from heaven, the Son of Man.

Jesus claims to be unique not only because He had been in heaven and come down from heaven, but because – even while present among us on earth – He is in heaven.  Heaven is not a place, Jesus teaches us, but a state, a state of being in God’s immediate presence; and Jesus alone knew from experience – ever current and continuous – about heaven, because He always was, even when amongst us here on earth, in His Father’s presence, with His Father.  

In our Gospel reading today Nicodemus asked Jesus how men could possibly be born anew so as to be able to see the Kingdom of God.  Jesus told him how with the words:

Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in Him may have eternal life.

Those words ‘the Son of Man must be lifted up’ make initial reference to Jesus  being ‘lifted up’ -- figuratively raised up heavenwards -- on the Cross of Calvary; before receiving their ultimate fulfilment in His going -- in most sublime and glorious reality -- to His Father at His Ascension.  And all this took place:

            So that everyone who believes in Him may have eternal life

The bronze-serpent symbol showed as dead the death-bringing serpent. The Cross, however, Saint Paul tells us, shows One cursed freeing us from the curse of the Law:

Christ ransomed us from the curse of the Law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, ‘Cursed be everyone who hangs on a tree,’

teaching which is in accordance with the accusations levelled against Jesus by both Jewish Temple and religious authorities.

However, not ‘everyone who believes in Him’ as Saint Paul declares, would see one cursed by the Law in the figure of Christ on the Cross … only a very few former Jews, learned like Paul, would appreciate that aspect of Christ’s crucifixion and death.    The vast multitude of those coming to ‘believe in Him’ would see Him on the Cross as one abusively punished by the Roman State and grievously vilified by religious authorities, but in truth:

a Man commended by God with mighty deeds, wonders and signs which God worked through Him,   (Acts 2:22)

a Man God raised on the third day to Whom all the prophets bear witness, that everyone who believes in Him will receive forgiveness of sins through His name.  (Acts 10: 40ss.)

And there, in the figure of a dead wrong-doer, they could, and indeed would, see Christ hanging and dying in place of and for themselves! 

Just as the desert symbol showed as dead the serpent lifted up on the pole, there on the Cross is shown One:

            Human in appearance, humbled and become obedient to death,

One inviting every self-accusing sinner to see himself there, before turning to Christ -- with true contrition and humble confidence – for healing and salvation.

The Cross of Christ is supremely worthy of exaltation because of the wondrous integrity of its signification whereby:

both the glory and the goodness of God are made manifest:

For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might nor perish but might have eternal life;

as is also its invitation to us and all believers that we join together in thanking Him most fittingly.  To which end we are told by Saint Paul, again, that:

For just as in Adam all die, so too in Christ shall all be brought to life, but each one in proper order: Christ the first-fruits; then, at His coming, those who belong to Christ; then comes the end, when He hands over the kingdom to His God and Father, when He has destroyed every sovereignty and every authority and power. For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet.  (1 Corinthians 15:22–25)

With those few last words we are enabled to recognize the truly sublime beauty and comprehensive majesty symbolized by the Exaltation of the Cross of Christ.  For there, Christ most assuredly reigns supreme as the Crucified One, Victor over sin and death; but for us, however, not in power and wrath triumphing over His enemies and trampling them down under His feet so much as graciously receiving the praise and thanksgiving of all His former enemies: sinners converted into supplicants, now looking up to the gaze of His compassionately lowered eyes, and, under the shelter of His outstretched arms, humbly praising and whole-heartedly loving and glorifying Him, the First-fruits and Lord of all creation, the Author of our salvation.

O for a thousand tongues to sing my great Redeemer’s praise, the glories of my God and King, the triumphs of His grace!

Dear People of God, in these days of conflict and confrontation it is most important for us who believe in Jesus -- in both His Person and in His Truth -- to know our measure of that Truth not only accurately but also lovingly, for Truth is not even really known, let alone loved, if its beauty is not sufficiently appreciated.

Accordingly, Mother Church, being the chosen instrument for God’s Holy Spirit at work on earth, must needs learn to give ever more faithful expression to both His Truth and His Love; not in separation -- for what God has joined man must not separate -- but as inseparably One: the loveableness and beauty of His Truth and the truthfulness and power of His Love; manifesting the inherent beauty of revealed Truth and proclaiming a Love inspired and sustained by such Truth.

To that end we, her children, must endeavour in our words of human sincerity and Catholic witness to show our appreciation of the beauty of the Truth we believe and live a Love in harmony with and expressive of that Truth, for the early Church spread so rapidly in the Roman Empire not so much by dint of doctrinal expositions, verbal conflicts, and scholarly triumphs, as by the totally overwhelming beauty and humble power of Christian witness: men and women, boys and girls, all embracing  and Exalting the Cross in their witness to Him who once hung thereon for their sake and was now looking down from heaven in compassionate love and comforting them in His world-wide embrace, as they sought to serve His glory by walking gladly in His footsteps along His way.

 

 

       

 

 

23rd Sunday Year A 2014

 23^rd. Sunday of Year (A)

(Ezekiel 33:7-9; Romans 13:8-10; Matthew 18:15-20)

When the harmony of human life was shattered by sin, that mutual love which fostered harmony was forgotten, as each individual became more independent of, less concerned with, his or her neighbour, brother or sister.  As a result when God asked Cain:

             Where is Abel your brother?

Cain’s reply was:

             I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?    (Genesis 4:9)

… the very prototype of all ancient and modern ‘couldn’t care less’ and ‘look after number one first of all’ attitudes!

But in the Kingdom of God, in the new, restored, human community -- inaugurated by the sacrifice, and configured to the teaching, of Our Blessed Lord -- such cold indifference has no legitimate place, as the Gospel reading for today shows:

Jesus said to His disciples: ‘If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone.  If he listens to you, you have won over your brother.  If he does not listen, take one or two other along with you …..

Some ancient writers have understood that particular passage absolutely literally and proclaimed it as a serious commandment of the Lord in all its literal understanding; and indeed, they have declared with relentless logic that anyone sinned-against who would not go through such a procedure of confrontation, possibly with witnesses, was to be considered a much greater sinner than the one guilty of the original fault!

It is alas true, that even those who loved the Lord are found to have, at times, falsified His words unwittingly with an interpretation or accent of their own; as Father Faber laments in these famous verses of his:

For the love of God is broader Than the measure of our mind; 
And the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.

But we make His love too narrow By false limits of our own; 
And we magnify His strictness With a zeal He will not own.

Thanks to the work and achievement of modern scholarship we are now in a better position to understand, more accurately and more lovingly, that which previously our best virtue and most serious endeavours had only been able to hold-fast and hand-down literally and completely.

Today we know that St. Matthew had a particular community for which he wrote his Gospel memoirs of the Lord, and they are often referred to as Jewish Christians: former faithful followers of the Mosaic Law (as Jesus Himself had been brought up) and who had, through faith in Jesus as Son (of God) and Saviour, left the synagogue and gathered themselves into the Church in Jerusalem.

Now their background was far different from that of the pagans -- the rest of the world! -- for whom the letters of St. Paul and the Gospels of Mark, Luke and John were mainly addressed.   Had Jesus nothing to say to His own who had left all for Him, for those rejected by their former fellow Jews and perhaps not fully understood by their new-found fellow Christians?

Of course He had!  And St. John tells us in his Gospel (10:15s.) that Jesus taught:

I lay down My life for the sheep.  And I have other sheep that are not of this fold (to which He had devoted His own public ministry).  I must bring them also and they will listen to My voice (addressing them through My apostles),

and St. Matthew most earnestly desired to guide and sustain them in the ways of their chosen Lord and Saviour, their former fellow Jew, Jesus of Nazareth.

No other Gospel relates the words of Jesus read in today’s Gospel but the very clear teaching of Jesus which is the core of it can be seen in St. Luke’s Gospel:

If your brother sins, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him.  And if he wrongs you seven times in one day and returns to you seven times saying, ‘I am sorry’, you should forgive him. (17:3-4)

Matthew had been appointed as ‘watchman’ for his congregation, to serve and to help save them; and they had lived their whole lives till then faithfully obeying the Law of Moses and following traditional Jewish practices.  Matthew had good reason to think that  – with Paul – he  too ‘had the mind of Jesus’:

 We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the things freely given us by God.  And we speak about them not with words taught by human wisdom, but with words taught by the Spirit, describing spiritual realities in spiritual terms.  For “who has known the mind of the Lord, so as to counsel him?” But we have the mind of Christ.   (1 Corinthians 12-16)

Even more, Matthew had the very words of Jesus explaining what he, imitating His Lord, was seeking to do for his congregation in our Gospel passage:

Jesus said: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.  You pay tithes of mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier things of the law; judgment and mercy and fidelity.  But these you should have done without neglecting the others. (Matthew 23:23s.)

With such an example before him Matthew would not rubbish the life-background and devout upbringing of his community by trying to eradicate all traces of it ‘hook, line, and sinker’; he followed his Lord’s own example, these you should have done, without (necessarily) neglecting (what has formed your whole life in the former People of God). 

We can now turn our attention back to St. Paul, himself interpreting, presenting, the teaching of Jesus, handed down to us verbally by St. Luke:

If your brother sins, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him.  And if he wrongs you seven times in one day and returns to you seven times saying, ‘I am sorry’, you should forgive him.

This teaching, St. Paul – with the mind of Christ – himself handed on to his former pagan converts with no former Jewish faith or upbringing:

Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience,  bearing with one another and forgiving one another, if one has a grievance against another; as the Lord has forgiven you, so must you also do.

Try to learn what is pleasing to the Lord.  Take no part in the fruitless works of darkness; rather expose them, for it is shameful even to mention the things done by them in secret. (Col. 3:12–13; Eph. 5:10-12)

How wonderful and instructive to be able to see Saint Matthew and Saint Paul both interpreting the ‘mind of Christ’ for those for whom the Spirit of Christ had established them both as watchmen! 

I would now like to dwell, just for a moment, on another point.   Jesus wants us to be concerned about, to love, both our fellows and the truth: He wants us to be concerned that, in the right way, we might ‘win back our brother’.

We are not to judge hastily; we are not to condemn; as our Blessed Lord commanded explicitly:

            Stop judging, that you may not be judged (Matthew 7:1),

and as His most faithful Apostle Paul re-iterated to the Romans (14:10):

Why then do you judge your brother? Or you, why do you look down on your brother? For we shall all stand before the judgment seat of God.

Nor are we to make accusations freely and inconsiderately before other people, for the name given to Satan in the early Church was ‘The Accuser’ as we read in the book of Revelation (12:10):

Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say: Now have salvation and power come, and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Anointed. For the accuser of our brothers is cast out, who accuses them before our God day and night.

In cases of necessity we are to speak,  not secretly to ourselves – cherishing grudges or contempt – not openly to other people – slandering our neighbour, ruining his public reputation unnecessarily – but charitably to the offender himself; not, however, in order to accuse him, but only if such action might serve to help win him back to the right way:

We urge you, brothers, admonish the idle, cheer the fainthearted, support the weak, be patient with all,  (1 Thess. 5:14);   for:

Better is an open rebuke than a love that remains hidden (Proverbs 27:5).

Over and above all, however, in cases of necessity, we should recommend the whole affair, the offender, and ourselves the offended, to the Lord Who lived among us and, in the Spirit, knows us all most intimately: our actions and our intentions, our fears and sensitivities.

As St. Paul says (Romans 12:17-18):

Do not repay anyone evil for evil; be concerned for what is noble in the sight of all.  If possible, on your part, live at peace with all.

And here I would add myself: having committed everything to the Lord, live at peace yes; and above all at peace with, and in, yourself, your own heart and mind -- a skill, an art, not always easy but one which can be learned by those who are humble and patient enough.

Do not be conquered by evil but conquer evil with good.  (Romans 12:21)