O Almighty God, as the man Jesus you were hungry and fed the hungry as God. You were hungry and man and yet are the true Bread of Life. As a man you were thirsty and yet called all to “come and drink”. You were, as man, weary and yet You are our rest. I ask you to come into my heart and truly prepare me to celebrate Your birth as a man and commit myself to living as You lived. Help me to live as You did, unconditionally loving even those who betrayed You and killed You. I ask Your help and offer praise to You, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, now and ever and forever. Amen.
To whom will all this piled-up wealth of yours go? That is the way it works with the man who grows rich for himself instead of growing rich in the sight of God.
In today’s Gospel reading we hear the Lord’s exhortation to Trust in God and not in possessions. This seems so very poignant as we get ever closer to Christmas. It seems that our modern society has made Christmas all about getting and giving things! Our modern Christmas experience also seems to tell us that giving things that you can buy on sale is the way to go since then you can have more for yourself. I realize that our Christian religion has the story about the Three Wise Men who gave gifts to the Christ Child as a way of expressing their adoration and praise. I suspect that this story may have led us to believe that things – gifts – are the way to express love for someone and celebrate Christmas.
All this got me to thinking. We spend about the first 50 to 70 years of our lives amassing things and then the last years of our lives trying to get rid of things. It seems that it is only when we get older that we realize that things are a burden and don’t grant us a longer life or mortality. I think that psychologically our behavior of amassing things is due to our uncertainty about the length of life. Things also seem to be symbols of human success. The more things I have, the more successful I feel since I know that people measure success by the amount of things I have.
Having said all of this, I would raise the questions that are suggested in Matthew’s Gospel when he shares the Jesus parable about the imprudent rich man: What does it mean to be rich in the sight of God? What do I have to do in order to be rich in God’s sight?
Jesus suggests, I believe, that to be rich means to be a successful human being. To be a successful human being, in God’s sight, means to live as God intended when He created human beings and have loving relationships that can create wonderful memories.
I have shared with you many times that it is my belief that the only things that we take with us into the next life are our memories. Therefore having a wealth of happy memories can make one right in the sight of God. Think about it. If I come and stand before the throne of God and present Him with an abundance of good memories that are based on living as Jesus did, that is with love, respect, kindness and goodness towards others, I know that I will be rich in His sight. Why? Because He will know that I truly understood the revelation he made to me through His Son Jesus!
In last week’s Bulletin I presented some ideas about our ascetical practice of fasting as a means of preparing us to celebrate the major winter feasts. We should never fast because we believe that it is some sort of obligation. Ascetical practices should be freely chosen.
St. Philip the Apostle
Fasting, as I know my readers probably already know, was passed on in the early Church from Jewish practice. In Matthew, Christ says, When you fast do not be like the hypocrites, which indicates that the Jews fasted. It also indicates that Christ assumed that one fasts, for He says when you fast not if you fast. Fasting is not something that only developed within Christianity. Rather, it is a practice that had been followed by the Jews and even Scripture mentions that Christ fasted. It seems that all religions, even very Eastern religions, have integrated fasting into their religious/ascetical practices.
As I shared with you last time, the purpose of fasting is not to give up things or do something sacrificial, it is to learn discipline – to gain control of those things that are indeed within our control but that we so often allow to control us.
In our culture especially, food dominates the lives of many people. Just think about the problem of obesity that is rampant in our nation. There is even a television program that celebrates the person who loses the most weight. Further, we collect cookbooks and even have an entire television network devoted to food [the Food Channel]. We have eating disorders, diets galore, weight loss pills, liposuction treatments – all sorts of things that proceed out of the fact that we often allow food, which in and of itself cannot possible control us, to control us. Therefore we fast in order to gain control, to discipline ourselves, to gain control of those things that we have allowed to get out of control. Fasting helps us to develop the discipline that is needed to live the Jesus Way of Living. If we can control our food intake, we will be more prepared to control our other behaviors.
It is critical that we do not fast with the false notion that we must suffer for our sins. We fast in order to get a grip on our lives and to regain control of those things that have gotten out of control.
I realize that much of this will seem to be a repetition of what I have already shared with you. I repeat it in a slightly different form since I believe that it is difficult for most of us to embrace the true nature of fasting which is the cornerstone of the spiritual life in the Eastern Church. I believe the misguided notion of fasting has come from our Western society. People fast in order to lose weight or have been led to believe that if they fast it is to suffer for their sins. This notion is completely contrary to the Eastern Church’s way of thinking and her ascetic practices.
In the last issue of this article, the Gospel of Matthew has a particular fivefold structure to its narrative that is similar to the five books of the Torah, the Pentateuch. The theme expressed in this structure also shows up in particular details. For example, the first of the five blocks in Matthew begins with Jesus going up the mountain to pray. This sets the stage for what follows in chapters 5 through 7, namely the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew is the only gospel that says that Jesus taught from a mountain. Jesus is like Moses, a new Moses, revealing God’s will from a mountain, a new Sinai.
Connections with Moses and the exodus also appear in Matthew’s story of Jesus’ birth. After presenting a genealogy that underlines Jesus’ origin in Israel’s heritage going back to Abraham, the first block is dominated by King Herod’s plot to kill the newborn king of the Jews. Even the story of the wise men is integrated into this theme. Herod’s behavior echoes Pharaoh’s in the story of the exodus, including the order to kill Jewish infants. Other details in first-century Jewish versions of the story of Moses’ birth also shape Matthew’s birth story. It functions as an overture to the gospel, announcing its central theme: Jesus is a new Moses leading a new exodus from a new pharaoh into a new way of life.
You will recall that the Eastern Church truly calls the Resurrection of Christ the Pasch, the Jewish term used for Passover. You will also recall that Moses was the one who led the Jewish people our of Egypt and through whose intercession God’s Angel of Death passed over all the homes of the Jews that had the blood of a lamb smeared on the doorpost. When we pray Matins (Morning Prayer) on Easter Morning, our prayers are filled with images of the Resurrection being the new Exodus and Christ, therefore, being the new Moses.
Matthew’s fivefold structure and the theme it expresses indicates the gospel’s deep roots within Judaism. Of course, the other gospels and the New Testament are also rooted in Judaism, but Matthew emphasizes this more. The author of this gospel structured it in this manner on purpose since he wanted to signal to the potential Jewish converts that Jesus is the new Moses and that God is calling them to form a new, more genuine, community.
Not counting allusions or echoes, the author of Matthew quotes the Jewish Bible 40 times with an explicit phrase such as It is written and another 21 times without such a phrase. Matthew affirms the eternal validity of the law and the prophets, designations for sections of the Jewish Bible in his time.
As a preparation for the next article on Matthew’s Gospel, read chapter 5, verses 17-18. That will make the above statement much more understandable
As I stressed in the last issue of this article on the Divine Liturgy, the sobornal character of the Liturgy is something that we should think about when we gather for our communal worship of God. Truly one of the primary purposes of the Liturgy is to gather together heaven and earth and all creation in Christ and to offer praise and worship to our Father-Creator God. We accomplish this through the action of the Holy Spirit together with Jesus Christ, God incarnate. The Liturgy is truly the sacrament of the assembly. Christ came to gather into one the child of God who were scattered abroad (John 11:52) and from the very beginning the eucharist was a manifestation and realization of the unity of the new people of God, gathered by Christ and in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. We need to be thoroughly aware that we come to the temple not for individual prayer but to assemble together as the Church. I highlight this in order that my readers might transform their thinking and make sure that they think about this when they come to worship.
As I highlighted in the last issue, the first part of the Divine Liturgy (i.e., from the beginning up to the sermon), is meant to help us to help us remember when we have come together and to hear the Good News proclaimed, how people like Paul interpreted this Good News and how we might apply the insights about living life that Jesus taught.
The next section of the Liturgy focuses on the petitions that we desire to address to Almighty God. In years past it was also at this time that prayers for those who were preparing to convert to the Church were offered. It is in this section that we also offer the prayers of the faithful and prepare to bring the gifts of bread and wine, which represent our lives, to the Holy Table (i.e., called altar in the West). The bringing of the gifts is called the Great Entrance. As we follow the priest carrying the gifts through the temple, we should mentally place ourselves on the paten together with the bread and into the wine that is carried in the chalice. Again, it truly enhances our celebration IF we project ourselves into the action of the Liturgy and actually think about what the actions of the Liturgy are meant to represent.
The next section of the Liturgy is the profound profession of our faith, which is accomplished through the recitation of the Creed, the summary of our beliefs. It is important to remember that before we are called to recite the Creed we are asked to love one another so that we might be able to profess belief in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit Who we believe are three-in-one. When we do the Kiss of Peace at this juncture of the Liturgy, it is meant to help us remember that we must love one another so that we can worship our God.
In last week’s Bulletin, I introduced the fact that Greek thought originally showed much opposition to the concept of divine-humanity. It seemed impossible to not only conceive of the idea but also to express the idea that somehow Jesus was both God and man. There weren’t even words to express how this mystery could be possible. Two very characteristic expressions of this opposition were the heresies of Nestorianism and Monophysitism which troubled the Christian world for entire centuries and which never ceased to represent two tendencies or inclinations in the attitude of Christians.
Nestorianism expresses our tendency to see in the person of Jesus Christ as only a human being that was endowed by God with special gifts and extraordinary abilities. This tendency survives very widely in a large number of people who speak with great respect for Christ but who recognize Him merely as a great moral teacher, a person who indeed led humankind to very important ethical accomplishments.
Similarly, Monophysitism, expresses our tendency to see in the person of Jesus only an intervention of God in history, to see just simply the God who seemingly appears as a man but who is just a shadow of a man and not man in his true nature or essence. This tendency survives in those people who want to maintain within Christianity a form of philosophical and ethical dualism, to maintain, that is, the unbridgeable polarization between the divine and the human, the spiritual and the material, the eternal and the temporal and the sacred and the profane.
As one can probably imagine, these struggles in trying to find a way to express who Jesus is, led to other misguided notions of who we are as human beings. For a proper understanding of our human condition, we must be able to accept the fact that God IS both God and man in the Person of Jesus Christ. The Church did not struggle for four full centuries over an abstract notion. She did not even struggle for the soul of man. She wrestled to save his body. Can the body of man, the flesh and not only the soul, be united with God without confusion, without change, without division, and without separation?
The Church wrestled for four centuries to save the body of man from the absurdity of death and declare the possibility that humans can be united with God, that the corruptible can truly be clothed in incorruptibility. It is important how and understand who Jesus is for He is the revelation of God’s union with us.
It is an article of our faith that God did, in His incarnation as a human being, made this revelation known to us, namely, that we are united to God by a sharing in His divine life. Because the God-man Jesus is possible, we are possible!
In the last issue of this article I presented one way to reach out to God by the use of Prayer of the Heart or Mental Prayer. While this kind of prayer is simple, the complication of our lives makes it difficult for us to be at peace with ourselves so that we can enter into true solitude. I wonder how many of my readers can find time to enter into this type of personal solitude. I know that if you have a family it only complicates things. It is not an easy thing for us to do this – surrounded as we are by countless noises – to sit quietly and wait. It is not easy for us – people who are geared to be productive and not to waste time – to be present and expect “nothing” to happen as a result of our presence.
Many of us find great difficulty with reaching out to God in the simple, quiet prayer of the heart. We find it most difficult to shift gears and go from living frantically, productively, noisily and always conscious of time, to being quiet, peaceful and open to whatever God wants. We need some form of discipline that goes counter to the hurly-burly mood of our culture. We need to practice some kind of introductory method as a prelude to the prayer of the heart. We need to learn “how to be” in a simple and quiet way so that we can actually be with the Lord.
There are several things we can do to make this type of prayer more possible in our lives. First, we must become truly convinced that we need to have a quiet time for ourselves and a desire to actually integrate this type of prayer into our lives. Second, we have to have a place where we can be alone. We need to use the same place always for our alone time. Third, we need to designate a very definite, fixed time when we go to our prayer place to be alone. This means that we need to ask others, if we don’t live alone, to honor our “alone time” by not interrupting us during this period (we don’t need to tell them why we need alone time). Fourth, we need to just begin sitting for short periods of time doing nothing, so that we can get use to having alone time with ourselves and God.
FOR YOUR REFLECTION
The whole story of Christmas is wrapped up in the two names for our Incarnate God: Emmanuel, which means God IS With Us and Jesus, which means God IS Salvation, God Saves. God knows my name and in His grace He has granted me to know His name that I may call upon Him freely and enter into His presence. May the name Jesus beat in my heart and on my lips and help me to celebrate the coming feasts of God’s manifestation.
I have been attempting in this article to provide some ideas about what it means to be a Vibrant Christian Community. I have suggested that it means that the majority of the people in the community understand that God has called us to holiness and are committed to doing all in their power to achieve a greater degree of holiness. This call to holiness is also a call to make a spiritual journey. The spiritual journey we are called to make is, like the journey of life, not without challenges and struggles. The Church and the spiritual community we are a part of joins us on this journey as a support and help. The Church shares the insights that Jesus put forth in His teaching and conveyed to us through the New Testament and the Church (the Church is the maintainer of Tradition which is the early Church’s understanding of Jesus’ teachings and expressed through her worship and practices). The spiritual community provides us with the initial opportunities to develop unconditional love for all other human beings.
Jesus taught about this spiritual journey. He told a parable about a king whose enemy was marching against him. He counted his troops to see whether he had a chance of defeating the enemy. Only after he clearly knew his resources and had weighed his chances of winning could he decide whether it was better to march out to meet the enemy or to try to make peace before fighting.
We have to identify clearly the obstacles of our spiritual journey and the resources we have to meet them before we can decide whether to wrestle with them without giving an inch, to bend a bit, or to acknowledge that by ourselves we are powerless against them. The first step in our struggle is to come to grips with our limits.
The most significant obstacles on the spiritual journey come from within: weaknesses, bad habits, negative feelings and attitudes that we have formed and chosen over the years. We carry these obstacles to growth with us and often do not recognize them when they are at work.
Sometimes we live in the past and let unhealed wounds and disappointments color the present. Unhealed wounds can give rise to feelings of failure, guilt, bitterness, low self-esteem and anger. These can create roadblocks to the openness required for healthy relationships. The struggle may well be to leave the past behind and accept the inner healing offered by Jesus.
It seems to be a propensity of humans to carry around the burden of past disappointments. These we must let go!
O Heavenly Father, help me to prepare myself, like Bethlehem, to be the place of Your truth birth. Help me not to live in such a manner that I say, by my actions, to you, there is no room for Your presence in my internal Bethlehem. Help me to truly understand that I can, with Your help, make my heart and mind a fitting place where You can dwell. I know that I can do this by transforming the way that I think and, therefore, the way that I act. I know that all I have to say is: Come, O Lord Jesus into my heart. I will make room for You in my life and make Your Kingdom real by the way that I voluntarily respond to all who come into my life and to the events of life. I ask your help and offer praise to You, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, now and ever and forever. Amen.