One Catholic Life One Catholic Life

We are given very powerful readings today,

powerful individually and powerful collectively.

And at the heart of them all is a line by St. Paul

in his letter to the Romans:

“…be transformed by the renewal of your mind,

that you may discern what is the will of God,

what is good and pleasing and perfect.”

So today we’re given three challenges:

transformation, renewal, and discernment.

First Paul says, be transformed.

This is what Jesus is trying to help Peter do in today’s Gospel.

When Jesus explains what it means to be the Messiah

— that it means suffering, death, and resurrection —

Peter rebukes him.

The fisherman rebukes the Messiah!

Peter is stuck thinking as human beings do,

not as God does.

And Peter is arrogant enough to think

that he needs to correct Jesus, the Christ.

In reality, Peter is an obstacle to Jesus.

In that moment, in fact, he’s just as much an obstacle as Satan.

But Jesus is patient with Peter,

he wants Peter to be transformed.

He wants what’s best for him. He cares for him. He loves him.

Peter has been raised to believe certain things about the Messiah,

things that don’t match with what he is hearing from Jesus.

So Jesus wants Peter to grow in his understanding

of what it means to follow him.

Jesus wants us, too, to grow in our understanding

of what it means to be a disciple.

He wants what’s best for us. He cares for us. He loves us.

We can misunderstand and distort the gospel

because of how we were raised,

or because of what we read or see on social media,

across the spectrum of ideologies.

Like Peter, we can be tempted to arrogance ourselves,

thinking we have the correct answer,

that we know what God wants,

and that everyone else needs to conform

to our way of thinking about God — even the Pope!

But when we do that,

we become obstacles to to Jesus,

thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.

And we’re not only obstacles to Jesus,

but we’re obstacles to other people’s relationship with Jesus.

So the challenge for us is to let ourselves be transformed by Christ,

just as Peter was transformed.

Think of all those whose lives were transformed by Christ:

Mary Magdalene, Matthew the tax collector, Nicodemus the Pharisee, etc.

It’s challenging to be transformed,

because transformation means change,

and change is always frightening,

It means leaving our comfort zone.

It means temporary confusion and instability

as we hover between our old self and our transformed self.

And transformation is a lifelong process,

so that means being uncomfortable over and over again.

We would much rather stay where we are than risk transformation.

There’s security in remaining where we are,

but there is also stagnation and death.

It’s the difference between being a living lake or a stagnant pond.

Lakes benefit from water constantly coming in and going out,

a steady exchange that brings life.

Lakes are blue and fresh and filled with life.

Stagnant ponds, on the other hand,

have no life, no color, and they’re filled with the stench of decay.

That’s because there is no exchange of water,

the water just sits there still and unmoving.

There is no renewal.

And that’s our second challenge,

to be transformed by the renewal of our mind.

Renewal is walking in the newness of life in Christ.

It’s a constant exchange

between ourselves and the living water of Christ.

As we prayed in today’s psalm,

“My soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God.”

Our soul thirst for Jesus, the living water.

Renewal is a steady drinking of the living water of Christ,

It’s a sad fact of history

that the largest religious community

that ever lived together in the same place

in the history of the Catholic Church

was at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany during World War II.

Over 2,500 Catholic priests became prisoners in Dachau,

in Cellblock 26, known as the Priestblock.

They were from 144 dioceses and 25 countries,

and they made up about a third of Dachau’s total population.

While they were there at Dachau,

the priests ministered to the other prisoners the best they could,

and they tried to strengthen each other, and give each other hope.

As the days went by, they even held theological discussions

to try and make sense of what was happening,

not only to them, but to the world.

They talked about the holocaust that was happening before their eyes,

and the war raging across the world,

weapons of destruction worse than any other in history;

and all this coming after what had been called “The War to End All Wars.”

These 2500 priests considered all of this,

and as they pondered,

one question kept returning to them.

“How could this happen?”

But that was not the complete question they asked.

The complete question, the full question, included a key phrase at the end.

Their full question was,

“How could this happen in Christian nations?”

Germany was a Christian nation. Italy, France, Great Britain,

the United States; even Russia had its Christian roots.

And these priests asked themselves,

“How could this happen

among people who professed to be followers of Christ?

We must do better!” they said.

We must do better.

And that is what Jesus is telling his disciples in today’s gospel.

He says, “your righteousness must surpass that

of the scribes and Pharisees.”

In other words, “You must do better.”

The law is not simply to be observed,

it is to be lived.

It is not enough to merely avoid murdering someone, he says,

that’s not enough.

You must do better.

If you have conflict, resolve it.

Disciples are not to call people fools or other demeaning names.

These people you try to humiliate are my brothers and sisters.

Before you even approach the altar with a gift,

if you have a problem with someone,

go reconcile with them,

and then come back.

You must do better.

It is not enough to avoid committing adultery.

Don’t even look at someone with lust.

That’s exploitation,

using someone else for your own pleasure.

You must do better.

It is not enough to avoid false oaths.

Live a life of integrity,

be who you are at all times,

in public and in private,

so that your yes means yes

and your no means no.

You must do better.

This is what Jesus is telling his disciples.

It’s what Jesus is telling us.

When we look at the world today,

the escalation of conflicts between nations,

the out and out war taking place,

we must do better.

When we look at our nation,

the polarization, the name calling,

the attempts to utterly humiliate opponents,

we must do better.

Even when we look inside our Church,

we see infighting, bickering, lack of charity between fellow Christians,

even, sadly, among Church leaders.

Is this reconciling with our brother or sister before coming to the altar?

Is this living a life of integrity where our yes means yes

and our no means no?

We must do better!

The 2500 priests at Dachau who saw the need to do better

also had discussions about how to do better.

In the face of the great evil they were experiencing,

they had an insight,

perhaps even the grace of the Holy Spirit inspiring them.

The feast of the Epiphany commemorates the arrival of the magi,

and their journey to find Christ can inspire us

to reflect on our own journey to encounter Christ in our lives.

Each of our journeys is unique,

and no one finds Christ in the quite the same way as anyone else.

The magi in the Gospel of Matthew found Jesus in their own way.

The names and numbers of the magi are not given in Matthew’s gospel,

but we think of them as a group of three,

probably because of the three gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Our tradition gives them the names Caspar, Balthasar, and Melchior.

These three magi, or wise men, read and studied the signs,

and when they noticed a particular star at its rising,

they traveled far from their own land in the east

and they found Jesus in Bethlehem.

For some of us, our journey might be similar:

following clear signs, point A to point B.

For others of us, the path is different,

a more winding road.

Such was the case with the other wise man, Artaban.

You won’t find Artaban in the Bible.

His story is told by the author Henry van Dyke.

It seems that Artaban had studied the stars with his friends

Caspar, Balthasar, and Melchior,

and he knew that a king was to be born among the Jews,

a King who would change the world.

So Artaban arranged to meet up with his three friends

and travel with them to visit this King,

once they saw his star.

In preparation, Artaban sold his possessions and bought three jewels –

a sapphire, a ruby, and a pearl – to carry as gifts to the king.

One night, Artaban looked up and said,

“The star! The King is coming, and I will go to meet him.”

He had ten days to get to the rendezvous

and join his friends’ caravan,

so Artaban immediately got on his horse

and rode across fields of Concabar, past Selucia,

across the Tigris and Euphrates rivers,

and finally arrived at Babylon at nightfall on the tenth day,

his horse exhausted,

just three hours away from his friends.

But what was this?

There was a man lying across the road, a poor Hebrew exile, almost dead,

in the grip of a deadly fever.

Should he turn aside, if only for a moment, to help this poor man,

and risk missing the caravan?

He couldn’t leave the man to die,

so Artaban jumped from his horse, brought the man water

and cared for him until the man recovered.

But, alas, he missed the caravan and his three friends.

Sometimes we think we may have “missed the boat,”

and we look back on the choices we have made,

wondering if they were right.

But Artiban was persistent.

However, he couldn’t cross the desert with only a horse,

so he sold the sapphire

to buy the camels and supplies necessary for such a long trip.

Fortunately, the Hebrew man he had saved

told him that, according to the prophets,

the King of the Jews would not be born in Jerusalem, but in Bethlehem.

So Artaban set off for Bethlehem, hoping to meet his friends there.

He crossed deserts, mountain ranges,

endured the fierce heat of day, and the bitter chill of night.

and finally arrived in Bethlehem.

As he walked through the village looking for his friends,

Artaban heard a woman’s voice through a doorway,

singing her baby boy to sleep.

When she noticed his foreign clothing,

she told Artaban of the three strangers from the far East

who had appeared in the village three days ago,

and how they said a star had guided them to the place

where a newborn child lay.

But the young mother also told Artaban

that the strangers had gone,

and the child and his family were gone too,

rumored to have fled to Egypt.

Once upon a time there were two towers.

Both towers began to be constructed about the same time,

in the late 1800s.

Both were constructed in Europe and designed by European architects,

and both of them were ambitious projects,

with plans for multiple levels, huge arches,

and decorative statues.

Each structure was designed to reach high into the sky,

and to be built of sturdy stone.

And both of these towers are unfinished to this day.

Both architects died during their construction,

and neither building was ever completed.

Today Jesus talks to the crowds about building a tower.

He compares building a tower

to being his disciple.

When you construct a tower, he tells the crowd,

you must count the cost beforehand.

In the same way, he says,

to be his disciple,

you must count the cost,

you must understand fully what it takes to follow him.

Otherwise you may find yourself unable to finish the work.

There is a cost to building a tower.

There is a cost to being a disciple of Jesus.

What is the cost of discipleship?

Jesus is very clear about this:

“Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me

cannot be my disciple.”

The cost of discipleship is the cross.

The spiritual writer Dietrich Bonhoeffer explores this idea

in his book The Cost of Discipleship.

Bonhoeffer distinguishes between what he calls

cheap grace and costly grace:

“Cheap grace is grace without discipleship,

grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ.

Costly grace is the treasure hidden in the field;

for the sake of it, a man will gladly go and sell all that he has.”

“Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow,

and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ.

It is costly because it costs a [person] his life,

and it is grace because it gives a [person] the only true life…

Above all it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son…

and what has cost God so much cannot be cheap for us.”

“…what has cost God so much cannot be cheap for us.”

Jesus did not give up his life for us

so that we could “leave the world for an hour or so

every Sunday morning and go to church…”

He gave up his life so we could follow him 24/7:

carrying our own cross each day,

letting go of all that we possess, and all that possesses us.

Today we hear Jesus ask us if we have we factored that

into our calculations for building a spiritual life.

We often calculate costs in life.

How much do I need to save for a down payment for a mortgage?

How long will it take me to save it?

We calculate how much a vacation will cost us,

or what kind of car we can afford,

how much we’ll spend on gas or maintenance.

We calculate and estimate and predict.

Jesus is inviting us to do the same thing

with the spiritual life.

Jesus challenges us to calculate the cost of discipleship.

Because if we don’t,

we risk leaving the work of our spiritual lives unfinished,

like a building that is abandoned before it is done,

like a tower that is never completed.

Returning to the two unfinished towers we started with,

we saw that they had a lot in common.

Both were made of stone, both were started over 100 years ago,

both remain unfinished.

But there are also some significant differences between them.

The first one was designed in Scotland

by a man named John Stuart McCaig.

It was McCaig who commissioned the tower to be built,

and it was McCaig who designed it.

His purpose was to create a lasting monument to his family,

in the style of the Colosseum in Rome.

He designed it to be an elaborate structure,

with arches and arches,

On this Solemnity of Pentecost the red vestments and red altar cloths are reminiscent of the fire that descended on the disciples. We see this color more and more in our own lives as the weather heats up and the fire season begins.

As we know so well from the fires that typically begin to plague us in the summer, fire can be destructive and deadly.

That’s one of the reasons pop singer Billy Joel used fire as a metaphor for chaos, crime, and war in his 1989 song, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” He got the idea for the song from a conversation he’d had with a young man. Joel had just turned 40 years old, and the young man told him that the world was in an “unfixable mess.” When Joel tried to console him by saying, “I thought the same thing when I was your age,” the young man replied, “Yeah, but you grew up in the fifties, and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties.”

Joel was taken aback by this and replied, “Wait a minute, didn’t you hear of Korea, the Hungarian freedom fighters, or the Suez Crisis?” Those events then became the origin of the song, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Throughout the course of the song, Joel sings a litany of headlines from 1949 to 1989: North and South Korea, Joseph Stalin, the Thalidomide children, the Bay of Pigs invasion, Watergate, AIDS. And as Joel rattles off headline after headline, the chorus pounds out:

We didn’t start the fire

It was always burning

Since the world’s been turning

We didn’t start the fire

No we didn’t light it

But we tried to fight it

It’s been over thirty years since Billy Joel wrote those words, and unfortunately we can keep adding to his list of headlines: the pandemic, the epidemic of school shootings, the war in Ukraine. And on and on and on.

It sometimes seems that our world has always been engulfed in a raging wildfire, and we don’t know how to put it out.

How do we fight it?

One possible answer is to fight fire with fire.

We see the fire of the Holy Spirit in the Acts of the Apostles today. “From the sky a noise like a strong driving wind,” “tongues as of fire.” It sounds like a wildfire from heaven.

The Holy Spirit descends like fire upon the disciples gathered together, but unlike a wildfire, it does not consume them. This is a different kind of fire.

Think of the burning bush on Mount Sinai, where Moses received the Law. God was present in a bush that burned but was not consumed, and from that fire God gave Moses the Law. It was that Law that connected the Israelites to their God. For generations, the way to be in relationship to God was to be faithful to the Law, to follow the instructions of the Torah.

For Jews, Pentecost celebrates the giving of the Torah, the giving of the Law to God’s people. The Law comes to Moses from a burning bush that is not consumed.

It is fitting then, that it is on Pentecost that the disciples receive the fire that burns but does not consume. The Law is now written on their hearts. That burning bush now dwells within them. They burn with God’s presence and are not consumed.

We, too, have received this fire. Through Baptism, Confirmation, and the continued reception of the Eucharist, the Holy Spirit has come to us “like a strong driving wind,” in “tongues as of fire.”

So on the one hand we have the raging fire of violence, destruction, and death outlined by Billy Joel’s song, “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” and on the other we have the fire of the Holy Spirit descending on the apostles.

Is this how we fight the fire that Billy Joel writes about? Do we fight fire with fire?

Yes. And no.

When we hear the phrase “fight fire with fire,” we likely think of using an opponent’s strategy against him or her.

For instance, in politics, if an opponent starts slinging mud, then a candidate might fire with fire by slinging mud right back.

Or in business,

If you have been listening to the Bible in a Year podcast and are still on schedule,

then you probably finished listening to the Gospel of John on Good Friday.

Don’t worry if you’re not on schedule,

my family and I are a little behind, too.

But if you are on schedule, then during Holy Week

you heard John describe all the many signs and wonders

that Jesus worked:

He turned water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana.

He cured the official’s son from a distance.

He healed the man who had been blind, lame and paralyzed for 38 years;

he cured another blind man by making mud and smearing it in his eyes.

He raised Lazarus from the dead.

We have all heard these stories before,

and we know that the signs and wonders

that Jesus worked while he lived among us

were meant to encourage the people to believe in him.

Today we’re told that that is the very purpose of John’s Gospel:

“these are written that you may come to believe

that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God…”

The signs and wonders Jesus performed were powerful and effective,

even if they were temporary.

Jesus turned water into wine

that was gone once the wedding guests drank it up.

He gave sight to blind eyes that would soon be closed again in death.

He raised Lazarus from the dead only for him to die again.

His bodily cures did not last forever,

and they were never meant to.

But he used those visible signs and wonders,

those temporary cures

to build up people’s faith,

to bring about eternal healing and salvation.

Some might say we need those signs and wonders today,

that since Jesus no longer works such miracles among us,

the Church was better off in its early days.

We might wish to see signs and wonders with our own eyes:

Jesus curing cancer in our friends and family,

or driving out the demons of addiction and depression.

Surely a little extra wine at our wedding this summer would be nice.

Then, like the early disciples,

we would be more easily able to believe in him,

and so would all those we know who have fallen away from the Church.

But let us not be jealous of those early Christians

who had the signs and wonders of Jesus in person

to help them in their belief.

On the contrary, as St. Augustine says,

today Jesus puts those who have never seen and yet believe

ahead of those who believe only because they see.

Even those who lived with Jesus and saw him every day

struggled with their belief.

So fragile was the disciples’ faith at that time,

that even when they saw the Lord

they found it necessary to touch him

before they could believe he had really risen from the dead.

They were unable to believe the testimony of their own eyes,

until they had touched his body

and explored his wounds with their fingers.

Only after this could Thomas,

the most hesitant of all the disciples, exclaim:

“My Lord and my God!”

It was by his wounds that Christ,

who had so often healed the many wounds of others,

came to be recognized himself.

They knew him by his wounds.

Now we might ask:

couldn’t the Lord have risen with a body

without any wounds at all,

a body with no scars?

And we know he certainly could have;

but he knew that his disciples carried within their hearts

a wound so deep that the only way to cure it

was to keep the scars of his own wounds in his body.

The disciples had left everything behind to follow him.

They had devoted their lives to him,

only to see him brutally crucified like a common criminal,

and buried in a tomb, dead and gone,

like all their hopes and dreams, seemingly.

Their pain and disappointment was a gaping woundbr ...