THIRD SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIMES, 1999

Think of who we are

THIRD SUNDAY OF EASTER, 1999

Readings (no. 46, pg. 310): Acts 2.14, 22b-28; 1 Pet. 1.17-21; Lk. 24.13-35.

First of all, just a little note about the first and third readings; they are both from the same person who we call Luke, the person who wrote the book of the Acts of the Apostles which was intended as volume II of his Gospel. And what Luke does is create a theology of history. So he can understand all human events in terms of some great overarching theological scheme. And he does this in order to precisely accommodate the scandal of the cross. As I have been saying, the cross is simply nonsense one of those indigestible, unpalatable things that generally we simply escape or ignore, certainly the Church does that routinely. But, when people knew what crucifixion was and what it meant socially, then this was a very difficult thing. So they had to accommodate this intellectually. So, Luke has this inevitability built into the crucifixion. "Was it not necessary that", this is the line that we find over and over again. The problem with that is to certainly downplay the freedom of Jesus’ own life. Jesus did not have to die. Jesus chose to die. Why? Because that is the way he chose to live. And that was the cost of living the way he did. So if you talk about this great Divine plan, it certainly can be justified. Well what is God’s plan for Jesus. The same as God’s plan for all of us -that we grow up and that we somehow construct a life faithful to God. That is God’s plan. Now how that works out in particular, of course, is different for each of us. This is the way it worked out for Jesus. So we have to be really, really careful of this, when reading this stuff. Otherwise, it just puts it all at a nice safe distance from us and does not really impinge on our real lives.

This famous passage from Luke: the trip to Emmaus. Luke constructs this as we saw last week John constructing that little identification passage with Thomas, so that it would have as its climax this phrase " and they recognized him in the breaking of bread". Now what does that mean? Luke takes the very word "he took bread, blessed and broke it" from the words of what we call the institution of the Eucharist. But much more is entailed here. What was Jesus breaking bread about? It was the great scandal of his life. This man eats with sinners. This man consorts with everybody. This man has opened the table, that great symbol of human sharing, of human community and made it available to everybody. So that became a by-word, "this man eats with sinners". And when we are talking about Jesus taking bread, blessing it, and breaking it, all of that stands behind the sense of this thing. Somehow they became aware, we do not know historically, but it is that identification that whatever is of Jesus is that which opens up with absolute generosity to everybody in the world. When you recognize that wherever, then you recognize the risen Jesus.

A theologian friend of mine said that basically the Christian life, however, is not lived in the light of Easter. Rather we live in a kind of protracted Holy Saturday, according to him. It is a state of waiting, a state which therefore is going to necessarily entail more of Good Fridays for us. It is within this context that I want to talk today about the Church. A couple of weeks ago, in the New York Times, there was a cover article, in the magazine, on the second biggest seminary in the United States. And what struck me at the end of the text, is that these men were prepared to basically confront the world as the enemy. They are there as some grand crusading figures and the division between themselves and everything that was not ecclesiastical was absolute. finishing the article I felt enormously saddened, and I couldn’t figure out why for days. Until it dawned on me that what the article described is a reconstruction of the ghetto kind of Catholicism that I grew up with one in which you never went into a Protestant church, much less to a synagogue. You knew who was who and what was what. And you knew where all the good was located and where all that menaces that good was located as well. What is wrong with that? First of all, this is a massive reversal of what was supposed to happen in the second Vatican Council. If you can get a copy of it, go re-read John the 23^rd’ ‘s opening address. First the Church is to be open to everybody. Indeed, that is supposed to be the very distinctiveness of the Church. In other words, the boundary lines are radically redrawn between what is good and what is bad, what is Godly and what is ungodly. Then, a new role for the Church was encouraged at the time of the council. We were to be able to recognize, as John the 23^rd said over and over; "the signs of the times". And this means what? That the absolute boundary of the ghetto has now been perforated and that the action of God and God’s spirit is not circumscribable in terms of what only goes on in the Church. But as John said over and over, that we are called to recognize the Spirit of God in all kinds of events, peoples, realities outside the Church.

But, what seems to be going on in the seminaries, to a frightening extent, is the re-erection this great filtration system, whereby we can say where God is and where God is not. But if you go to all of the documents of the council, for the first time ever in our history, we are to be honest enough to say that the Spirit of God operates among the Protestant churches. The Spirit of God operates in all of the great religions of the world and indeed in the world at large. And therefore what is called for, is not some absolute exclusion but some refinement of our powers of discernment. And only if we do that can people recognize in us the presence of the risen Jesus.

Let me enhance all this with a small anecdote. I just came back from a funeral of an atheist Jew who wanted no funeral. Martin Seidman and I were very good friends for years. His wife, an Irish Catholic, and he made me part of their family. For three years, I ate with them every night. I got involved in the lives of their eight children. At the request of Anne, Matin’s wife, I spoke at the beginning of his informal memorial service. After I spoke a father-in-law of one pf Martin’s kids came to me and basically consigned Martin Simon in the outer darkness because he was not a Christian. But Martin was a man more generous, who spent his life more for the causes of justice and poverty than virtually anyone I knew. Yet this little Jew from Brooklyn couldn’t get a job, when he got his Ph.D., because he was a Jew. And here was this "Christian", quite ready to know who was what and who was where. Now this is an extreme form of the very thing that I am talking about. How is love possible if we are blinded? Are we re-creating people, a kind of clerical case? Who are so certain of their vision? With whom will they eat? We need to use the open table fellowship of this man Jesus as the model for who we are and what we say we believe.

Holy Saturday, we live in the Holy Saturday period. What suffering will be necessary for us inside the Church to be able to do this? The guy I wrote my dissertation on, who was confessor to Pious the 12^th said that the Church is the cross from which we suffer. Romano Guardini’s very first book was both on the Church’s paean to the beauty of the body of Christ and the Christian community, and yet he also said that. So it is enormously important: that we think of who we are: where we are: what we want. And that when we must raise our voices in the Church and say we are being unfaithful, and to repent for that infidelity.

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