We hear all the time that what we want as Christians is a personal relationship with Jesus. And when people say that, if you’re like me, it makes you feel uncomfortable. For the cynical, it can sound like having an imaginary friend, someone you make up conversations with as if you were really talking. At a deeper level, though, maybe the barrier is even more difficult to overcome: We don’t imagine that God could take an individual interest in us and our manifest imperfections. At best, God might be a benevolent employer who loves all of us equally, at an appropriate and necessary distance. But an intense love for us…
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This is a gospel we wish we could have been there for, to see someone being raised from the dead. If you were directing a film, you couldn’t have set it up better: the crowd gathered around the tomb, the stone being rolled back, the dead man staggering out in his burial garments, maybe squinting at the sunlight. Even in Jesus’ own resurrection, we don’t have anything like this: so dramatic that John’s gospel says this was what convinced the Jewish leaders that Jesus had gone too far. Someone who could create a scene like this could do anything. But as for what happens before this great moment in the…
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Just to be fair, we should start any reflection on this gospel with a word in favor of rules. The fact is, rules are good. Moral laws are good. They’re good, because we need them, rules about what’s good and evil, about how we behave and how we must not. After all, God has told us clearly to live according to his law of love and justice, and that means rules. And not only that, we are asked to have confidence in our judgment. If we know something is wrong we are obligated to speak out, when we see sin, it’s sometimes necessary to come out and say so. But…
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It’s now been about four years since I stopped working inside a big company and started being self-employed. Sometimes people ask me if there’s anything I miss about my former life. And you know, there are some things. I liked how somehow, magically, every two weeks, like clockwork, money got deposited in my checking account. The same amount every time, no matter how hard I worked or didn’t work, or how bad a job I did. I liked that. I haven’t yet discovered any pattern whatsoever to the way money gets added to my checking account now, so there’s one thing I definitely miss. But if I think about it,…
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There is a real problem with any attempt to reflect on the word “obedience.” That problem can be summed up by the observation that all of the books on “obedience” over at Barnes & Noble seem to be in the Dog section. We generally look at obedience as putting aside our own identity, turning off the thought process, turning our will over to someone else entirely. Great for dogs. Not for humans. As Catholics, we also have a little history here, and we suspect that this idea of “obedience” can be a code word for turning off your brain and just accepting what you’re told. I know that when I…
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Today’s readings introduce two words that we all have difficulty with but that are part of what we need to confront as Lent draws to a close and all our preparation for Easter begins to reach a climax. The two words are suffering, and obedience. St. Paul’s second reading links the two in that mysterious phrase that we still puzzle over: “through suffering, he learned obedience.” And in this Gospel, from the Gospel of John just before Jesus faces his passion and death, which we face with him next weekend when Holy Week begins, we see Jesus himself struggling with this idea that suffering and obedience are a necessary part…
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A lot of people are uncomfortable reading the book of psalms. Not all of the psalms, but a lot of them. For example, everyone likes the 23rd psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd.” It is comforting to think of God that way, as a shepherd, and a good number of the psalms are psalms of comfort, or of quiet confidence, or of happiness, even occasionally some good advice. But many of the psalms are desperate. The largest group of them, in fact, are lamentations. They are songs about things that have been lost, about an empire that seems to have gone to pieces, of enemies that are on every side…