Experiencing the Real Jesus

THE SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT. Gospel -  Matthew 17:1-9. Theme: Experiencing the Real Jesus

In today’s gospel, we hear about the Transfiguration of Jesus which took place after he had informed his disciples that he was going to be arrested and crucified. The fact that this mystical event happened on Mt. Tabor was no accident because it was an important place of a great military victory for the Jewish nation. And this is a key to unlocking the meaning of the Transfiguration. 

You see, many of the Jews of Jesus’ time believed that the Messiah-Savior promised by God was to be a great Warrior-King who would free them from Roman tyranny. They believed that he would give Israel another military victory, their greatest victory actually, by overthrowing the Kingdom of the Pagans and establishing the Kingdom of the God of Israel in its place. That this National-Hero would be captured by the Romans and be shamelessly put to death by them was the polar opposite of their expectations. That the liberation he brought them would be from sin and death, and that his kingdom would not be of this world, didn't even enter their minds. This did not fit in with their concept of a Messiah or what he would do for them.

Jesus bought the disciples to Tabor, the mountain of military victory, to show them that he was, indeed, the Savior-Liberator.  But at the same time, he wished to reveal to them who he really was underneath the flesh and bone of his humanity.  He wanted to straighten out their false understanding of who he was and what he was going to do for them.  Even God the Father entered into this revelation, confirming who Jesus was by thundering his declaration, "This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased; listen to him."

Of course, the disciples did not at first understand the full meaning of what they had seen and heard.  Like their peers, they too were expecting a Savior who was a Warrior-King and Mighty-Hero, but Jesus would help to correct their misunderstanding by including two other heroes of Israel in this Transfiguration vision   They were not the political-military heroes of the Jews such as Joshua, or King Saul or King David. Rather, they were the spiritual warriors of Israel: Moses, who received the Ten Commandments and liberated God’s people out of Egypt, and Elijah the Prophet who called the people to turn from sin and worship the Living God.

Through the Transfiguration, Jesus was visually telling his disciples that yes, he was the Messiah, but no, not the one they imagined. He was God come-in-the-flesh and his victory would not be military but spiritual.  On that mountain, Peter, James and John learned a lesson that we call can benefit from and take to heart: that our expectations of who Jesus is and what he will or can do for us, are far beyond what we can hope for or even imagine. That’s a powerful message for us today

Like Peter, James and John, we can all develop false ideas about who God is and have our own short-sighted expectations of what we want him to do in our lives.  And I think that if we are honest about it, we must admit that our default expectation is that God will grant us all our wishes and make our lives as perfect as can be.  I call this a “genie-in-a-bottle” type of god.

And I think that this warped sense of who God is and what he will do for us is a major reason behind the loss of faith among those who begin to style themselves as "atheists".  And it's becoming quite common to encounter pop-culture atheists today, especially among the young.  But when you have a real conversation with them, you often find out that their budding or imagined atheism is really not unbelief.  Instead, it’s anger at or disappointment with this the false god of their expectations.  Very much the same way that the Jewish people formed a false idea of the Messiah and then rejected him when he did not deliver what they had hoped for and wanted.

Many of these new-style atheists had created for themselves an unrealistic god, a god fashioned according to their own making, a god of their own imagining and hoping.  And this false god simply did not deliver on what they wanted. Perhaps he did not hear their tearful prayers for their parents to not divorce, or did not bring these parents back together again to somehow form a happy family. Or maybe it was a god who allowed grandma or grandpa to die, despite the child’s desperate prayers to spare their lives; or who disappointed them in some other traumatic way.

But I also think that along with this personal disillusionment they have been listening to and following the false voices in our culture that drown out the voice of the beloved Son. They hear the voices of secular society, of selfish materialism, and of hedonistic celebrities constantly piped into their brains through music and social media. These voices lie to them and plant within them unreal expectations.  They are bombarded with the false messages of happiness through the accumulation of wealth, of popularity at the expense of moral integrity, of striving for happiness independent from the God who gives them life.

So many people today need to encounter the real Jesus and banish from their minds the false ideas they have about God and about what brings us true happiness.  When Jesus and the disciples came down from that mountain, he gave Peter, James and John the mission of sharing what they had personally experienced with others after his resurrection took place. It was not an experience that they were to keep to themselves. The testimony of those three disciples, their experience of Jesus on Mount Tabor, helped to form the very foundation of the Church and to produce the Gospels that give witness to Jesus. By not keeping quiet about it, they literally did their part in bringing hope to others and changing millions of lives throughout the centuries.

Our experiences of Jesus today, our meaningful encounters with him through prayer, through pondering the gospels, and in his real living presence of the Eucharist, can be like our own personal transfigurations. They can be times when God somehow allows us to see Jesus, with spiritual vision, in a special way and understand what he means in our lives. And as with the disciples, these spiritual experiences are not something that is meant to be kept to ourselves either. Our personal testimony is meant to be shared with others. 

By sharing what Jesus and our faith-relationship with him mean to us, by inviting them to come to Mass and encounter Jesus in the Eucharist, we can help those with whom we live, work and socialize to seek Christ. We can encourage them to listen for the voice of the Beloved Son speaking to their hearts. Like the disciples of the Transfiguration, we can bring hope to others and reveal to them the true Jesus, the real Jesus, in whom they will find the love, acceptance and peace that they have been seeking.

The Problem & The Solution

The Catholic Liturgy for the First Sunday of Lent, Gospel – Matthew 4:1-11.  Theme: The Problem & The Solution

The great scientist, Albert Einstein, was once asked what he would do if he had just one hour to solve a difficult situation. He replied: “I would spend 55 minutes getting to know the problem, and then I would need just 5 minutes to come up with the solution.”  In other words, if we don’t have an accurate handle on what’s wrong, we cannot come up with an effective way to fix it. And I think that is what today’s readings are telling us as we confront the reality of sin and evil in the world and within our own lives.

So, the first thing to do, following Einstein’s advice, is to name the problem and discover where it comes from. We find the key to this in our first reading from the Book of Genesis. In the age-old story of Adam and Eve we discover that the origin of the problem is found right within us, within the human person.  Like those first humans, we so foolishly choose to live life on our own terms in opposition to plan of God our Creator.  We are often so very convinced that we know what is best for ourselves. Fundamentally, our problem is the misuse of free-will, of the power our Creator gave us to choose good and avoid evil.

God created us in his image which is love and as we all know, love is a choice that must be embraced freely. Sadly, those first humans did not chose love but chose selfishness instead. By doing so they caused a rupture in their relationships with God, with each other and even within themselves as individuals.  We call this triple rupture the effects of original sin and it is passed on to all of us, their descendants, generation after generation.

And so, we find ourselves today in the predicament of wanting to do what is good yet so often failing to carry it out, no matter how well intentioned we might be. We find ourselves failing to love God, others and ourselves as we should. In the words of the Bible, we find ourselves committing sin. And no matter how hard we try, we human beings cannot fix ourselves. 

We spend billions of dollars trying to fix ourselves and so often we mistakenly focus on the outside, thinking that’s where the problem resides. Maybe if I look better, if I dress better, if I have a better job, if I move to a different place…And yet are we any happier inside ourselves? Are we free from broken hearts and relationships? No, we are not! Because the problem is spiritual and is rooted in a wounded human nature that cannot fix itself.

In our second reading, St. Paul tells us that the solution to this problem is found in the God-Man, Jesus Christ. Just as only God created the human person, so only God can recreate us and make us new again from the inside out.  And that’s exactly what he did by becoming one of us in all things except sin. By his becoming man, Jesus was able to embrace and experience all aspects of human life from womb to tomb, transforming them with his divine presence and inviting us to follow him and experience a total transformation.

In today’s Gospel, we see that Jesus, like Adam and Eve, encounters Satan, the enemy of the human race, who instigated our fall right from the beginning. Satan tries to do to Jesus exactly what he did to Adam and Eve and what he and his minion demons try to do to each one of us. This Father of Lies cleverly ties to convince us that we know what is best for us and that God – with all his commandments – is nothing but a tyrant, a spiritual bully.  But he fails and Jesus triumphs in the name of us all.

So, I think the million-dollar question is this: what do we have to do to share in this victory of Jesus? How do we connect the dots and plug ourselves into his heart-changing, life-transforming rescue and restore mission? Fortunately for us, Jesus himself as given us the answer in his responses to Satan’s temptations.

Jesus proclaims: “One does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” He shows us that in order to share in his victory over sin and selfishness we must turn prayer, especially reading and pondering the Scriptures. We need to feed our souls daily on the spiritual food of the Word of God.

Jesus says to us: “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.” We must work on building up a relationship of trust in God, convinced that he really does only want what is best and good for us. We can to this by rejecting the devil’s lies that God is a tyrant, out to ruin our fun and restrict our freedom. Because fundamentally, that’s the deception that is behind every temptation. 

Finally, Jesus reminds us: “The Lord, your God, shall you worship and him alone shall you serve.” We have to be faithful to our baptismal call to be a people of worship because worship reminds us that God is, well… God…and we aren’t!  This is why we gather for Mass every Sunday so that true worship may be offered to the Father through his Son in the power of the Holy Spirit, and so that the Son can strengthen us by the Sacrament of his Body and Blood.

And so, let’s remember that, having done all that he can do on his part, we need to also do our part and ask Jesus for the grace to participate in his victory over Satan, temptation and sin and make it real in our everyday lives.

Love is Forgiveness

Catholic Liturgy for the 7^th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Feb. 23, 2020. Gospel of St. Matthew 5:38-48. Theme: Love is Forgiveness

In today’s gospel, Jesus presents us with what is probably the most challenging of his teachings for us to both accept and to live: love for one’s enemies. Our official definition of an enemy is “a person who feels hatred for, fosters harmful designs against, or engages in antagonistic activities against another.”  And when most people think of “the enemy” they typically have in mind some foreign anti-American militants spewing forth hatred and threatening our lives from afar.

But you know, I think the reality is that for many of us, the “enemy”, that is, the person who is antagonistic or spiteful or abusive to us can most often be found among our own circle of relatives and acquaintances, in our neighborhoods or even right within our own homes.  The most real up-close-and-personal enemy is the spouse who is unfaithful or who has abandoned the family; the child or sibling who is an addict, always lying to us and often stealing from us; the whacky neighbor who falsely and repeatedly accuses us of imagined grievances, destroying our peace of mind and heart; the co-worker who got the promotion we wanted and always seem to find a way to throw it back in our face. The list can go on and on but you know what I mean. These are the ones who challenge our commitment as Christians to willingly embrace that difficult and unique form of love called forgiveness.

Jesus directly addresses the desire we all experience to “get even” when we have been hurt physically or emotionally. He even quotes a very famous line about payback from the Old Testament, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I bet that most of us do not know that this law of Moses was not promulgated to justify “getting even”. Believe it or not, it was actually a law that sought to promote peace and stop the escalation of violence! You see, before that law was declared, people would take TWO eyes for an eye and a WHOLE MOUTH OF TEETH for a tooth! 

But Jesus moves us upward from this notion of strict justice to the higher level of mercy when he says, “Offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strike you on the right cheek, turn the other one as well…”  What Jesus is actually saying is that we can, indeed, respond to hatred and violence, but in a way that ignores our gut reaction to fight back. He teaches us that we must step up and do our part to break the cycle of retaliation and put an end to the cancer of revenge that keeps repeating itself over and over in our lives and relationships.

Dr. Robert Enright, a devout practicing Catholic and an internationally acclaimed psychologist, whom Time magazine called the “Trailblazer of Forgiveness” give us this wise advice: “When you forgive someone who has deeply hurt you, you let go of resentment and the urge to seek revenge, no matter how deserving of these things the wrongdoer may be. You choose to give the great gifts of acceptance, generosity and love. Forgiving is an act of mercy toward someone who does not necessarily deserve our mercy but you don’t let that stand in your way. Rather, you give mercy because you have freely and intentionally chosen to have a merciful heart.”

Now, we all know that this is not an easy thing to do. And Jesus is not saying that forgiving comes naturally to us.  Refusing to retaliate towards someone does not mean that what was done to us was ok nor does it give permission to the offender to keep offending. But we are not concerned with trying to control or change the other person.  We are called to control and change only ourselves. And the curious thing is that the more allow ourselves to be changed through prayer and God’s grace, the more we do indeed end up having a positive influence on those around us and bringing the hope of healing and new life into our relationships.

(In the audio version, I now tell the story of St. Maria Goretti)

The desire and decision to intentionally forgive is a sure sign that the Holy Spirit is alive and active within us.  When we choose to forgive another just as God forgives us, it’s proof that we are becoming more and more like Christ whom we strive to know, love and follow.  And this “becoming like Jesus” is something that can only come about in us by the Eucharist celebrate and receive. We’ve heard it said that we become what we eat, and this is so very true about Holy Communion. The more we receive the Risen Body and Blood of Christ with humility and devotion, the more we will become like him. By the grace of God and through the power of the Holy Spirit, the Eucharist we receive will enable us to love and to forgive bit-by-bit, day-by-day, more-and-more like Jesus, our Beloved Brother and Lord.

Artist depiction of Alessandro's Forgiveness Dream

Mrs. Goretti & Alessandro at Maria's Canonization