(I meant to post this yesterday but, well, life intervened.)

In this Friday’s Morning Prayer we have a reading from the letter to the Galatians that made me really, truly, stop and think.  We read:

I have been crucified with Christ, and the life I live now is not my own; Christ is living in me.  I still live my human life, but it is a life of faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Gal 2:19b-20)

For some reason every time I’ve read this passage I’ve always at least partially dismissed it as Paul’s description of himself.  I don’t think there is any arguing that St. Paul was a zealot, so seeing such strong and complete language from him isn’t very surprising.  But yet this is far more than a reflective statement – more than just Paul explaining why he acts the way he does.  Behind these words is the cry, “I have come this far, come with me, live only in and for Him!“  It is, as is only fitting, a call to follow.

So … all those times you have the opportunity to do what you want or do what you ought, which do you pick?  And when you do do what you ought, do you do it begrudgingly or with the joy of knowing you are following Christ’s call to charity?  Do you find joy in the freedom of being yoked with Christ or look askance at your perceived loss of freedom?  It may be that in surrendering what we perceive to be our freedom we find ourselves only then to be truly free.

The Bible is, after all, a Catholic book.

At tonight’s RCIA class one of the sponsors spoke up more fully than he has before.  As he spoke strongly and softly about the Scriptures the thought crossed my mind, “he doesn’t sound like a Catholic”.  Then a further thought came, “and how sad a statement is that?”  The Bible is, as a friend loves to say, a Catholic book yet we have ceded controlling interest to our Protestant brethren – to the point even where if someone makes a concerted Scriptural defense of a matter of Catholic doctrine one wonders if he wasn’t Protestant at some point in his life.  That, simply, will not do.

The Scriptures are a gift given by God to the Church and through the Church to the world – let us again look upon the Word in all its glory.  Let us read, rejoice and be filled.  Let the eyes of your soul feast upon the Word, just as the body consumes the Eucharist and the soul is strengthened.  Even as we labor to recover our liturgical heritage, let us at the same time reclaim our literary heritage – that heritage given by God for the salvation of souls.

There’s something about looking at Scripture, turning it a bit sideways and seeing what is there that’s just eminently appealing to my quirky little mind.  Tom at Disputations finds a rather interesting connection in today’s Gospel reading for the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord (Lk 2:22-40) in the roles of Anna and Simeon.  Is he right?  I don’t entirely know, but there is surely something to the thought.

As I’ve said many times here, my brain is wired a little funny.  I’m just curious if anyone else noticed this little … oddity … from one of the options for the readings this past Sunday, the Feast of the Baptism of Jesus.  The alternate reading comes from Isaiah 40, and in Is 40:3 we read:

A voice cries out: In the desert prepare the way of the LORD! Make straight in the wasteland a highway for our God!

As Catholics, and I’d assume most good Bible Christians, we make the direct correlation to the description of John the Baptist, e.g. in Mark 1:3:

A voice of one crying out in the desert: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.’

Now I recognize that Hebrew does not use the punctuation style we take for granted in English, but it does leave me to wonder – just what can we get out of the difference between “a voice of one crying out in the desert” and “a voice cries out: in the desert”?  In one the voice crying out is in the desert; in the other the one spoken to is in the desert.

So…am I over-thinking this, or just maybe is this a providential difference from which we can glean some additional insight?  Let me know what you think.  Please.  The comboxes are lonely.

Or really, for anyone who wants to get a better grasp on the readings from Mass.  Mike Harrison operates the Daily Word Google Group which provides the readings and the commentary from the The Navarre Bible, which is I think without a doubt a (perhaps the) premier Catholic Bible Commentary.

Only in praying the Liturgy of the Hours do we get to pray

As for man, his days are like grass;

he flowers like the flower of the field;

the wind blows and he is gone

and his place never sees him again.

Ps. 103:14-15

and then immediately pray

Glory to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit:

as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be for ever.  Amen.

and do it all right before Christmas.  There’s just something about not always being able to pick for yourself what part of the Bible you’re going to read that’s both revealing and refreshing, and I must say quite freeing.  As I’ve been taking to saying a lot more lately, God knows what He’s doing…

When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?”  He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.”  He said to him, “Feed my lambs.”  A second time he said to him, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”  He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.”  He said to him, “Tend my sheep.”  He said to him the third time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”  Peter was grieved because he said to him a third time, “Do you love me?”  And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.”  Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep.” — John 21:15-17

Before anyone asks, this isn’t going to be a treatment of the issue of agape and filio in this selection.  While I find that both stimulating and moving, it’s not why I’m here today.  That said…

For some reason this passage came into my head several days ago and I’ve been mulling it over ever since.  I’ve always felt a particular attachment to Peter due to the dual reasons of our shared name and personality.  And perhaps because we both continually find new ways to screw up and are gently dusted off by our Lord and set on a straight path again.

It is with that in mind that I look at this not as a proof-text but as something even greater than the simple words on the page.  To me this is not just a conversation between two men, or even between a man and God – it is a question asked to each and every one of us and a way of framing every decision we make in our lives from here on out.  Do you love me more than these?

Several days ago my best friend’s father passed away.  This got me thinking about the judgment each person faces after death.  Now, as far as I know, the Church has no official teaching about how exactly this judgment will go, but I get the feeling this question will have something to do with it – Do you love me more than these?  Imagine having that question posed to you by Jesus Himself, seeing the nail marks in His hands and then saying, “yes Lord, I do.”  I wonder … could I say that?  Could I say it now, will I be able to say it then?

There is, of course, more to it than that.  One question has long vexed me – who or what are the “these” to which He refers?  Generally it’s understood Jesus is asking Peter if he loves Him more than do the other Apostles.  That is not however, at least in the English translation, the only way it can be interpreted.

Wrapped in the question is also, “do you love me more than these” – i.e. does your love for Jesus outweigh your love for everyone else, even your closest friends and family.  Does Jesus come first, and do you really love everyone else through the lens of your love for Him?  It sounds like an easy question to answer to many, but when you really get down and wrestle with it, well, do I?

The net can be cast yet wider too.  Do I love Him more than all the other gadgets, gizmos, trophies, quests, people and places in my life?  When it comes down to it, when my love for Him is placed on one side of a scale and my love for all the other people, places and things in my life on the other, which way would it tip?  When I look at the places I go, the people I see, the things I do – do they resonate with a love for Him that surpasses my love for anything else?  Do I, really, love Him more than these?

Thoughts such as these are usually greeted with a friendly reminder about keeping balance in life.  As much as I appreciate these comments, and I truly do for my life seems to have all the balance of a broken Weeble-wobble at times, it stands in stark contrast to the complete, and some would say reckless, abandon found in the examples of so many of the saints.  It is, as a friend said recently, very hard to look a spouse or a child right in the eye and know that we are called to love God even more.

The call, it seems, is impossible.  But that doesn’t make it any less real or any less necessary.  For me, for you, this is impossible, but only if we do it alone.  There are no unfunded mandates with God; all we have to do is step back, relax, and cooperate with the grace God offers us.  The only thing stopping us … is us.  So, “Do you love me more than these?”  Lord, help me to love You that much.

It’s been a while, eh?  I’ve been thinking over this post for a few days now, waiting for a chance to actually sit down and think it through at a keyboard.  The reading for Midday Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours for this past Friday struck me as another one where you can really get an awful lot more out of it by putting an accent on certain words rather than with just a flat reading.  First, without the accent of which I’m thinking:

Yet it was our infirmities that he bore,

our sufferings that he endured,

While we thought him as stricken,

as one smitten by God and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our offenses,

crushed for our sins.

Upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole,

by his stripes we were healed.

I think just about any Christian, and particularly any Catholic, should be familiar with this reading from Isaiah 53:4-5.  In the story of the Suffering Servant none in my mind are more poignant.  Come Good Friday as you are staring at the Cross, think back to this and remember.  But now look at the accents and see how this jumps out:

Yet it was our infirmities that he bore,

our sufferings that he endured,

While we thought him as stricken,

as one smitten by God and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our offenses,

crushed for our sins.

Upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole,

by his stripes we were healed.

Notice the symmetry in almost all of the highlighted lines – “his – our”, “he – we”.  Of all the things he has done, we are the beneficiaries.  Of all the things we have done, he accepts the chastisement.  Freely.  Willingly.  Intentionally.  As Archbishop Fulton Sheen pointed out in his Life of Christ, Jesus was the only man ever born with the express intent of dying.  You might notice one other thing – we are responsible for doing none of the good here but yet we are the recipients of all those benefits.  We are not worthy, we cannot be worthy, yet receive them we do.

Take time this Holy Week to contemplate how freely this gift was given, how costly this gift is, and how unworthy we are to receive it.  Keep all three in balance, for all three are important and all three feed on and magnify the others.  Let us say with the centurion, “Domine, non sum dignus…”

A few weeks ago during one of our RCIA sessions someone asked a seemingly simple question the answer to which I hate to admit I simply don’t know.  We were discussing the Transfiguration of Jesus (Matthew 17:1-9, Mark 9:2-8, Luke 9:28-36) and how He talked with Moses and Elijah when someone asked, “but how did Peter, James and John know it was Moses and Elijah?  It’s not like they had pictures or anything.”

The best answers I could come up with were either that: 1) they did actually appear as they’re depicted so often with the tablets and scroll and so the Apostles were able to discern their identities from their symbols; 2) their names were brought up in the conversation they had with Jesus or 3) they asked Jesus afterwards who it was (although that leaves Peter’s build tents, “one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah” rather awkward).  So, I leave it to you, St. Blog’s, to see what kind of answers you might have.