Not Safe, But Good

Feast of Christ the King
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  In his wonderful work, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis has a dialogue between the three children and Mr. Beaver, where Mr. Beaver introduces the character of Aslan.  Mr. Beaver says that Aslan is:

“the King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea.  […]Aslan is a lion–the Lion, the great Lion.”
“Ooh!” said Susan, “…Is he–quite safe?  I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”
“That you will, dearie, and no mistake,” said Mr. Beaver.  “If there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”
“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver.  “Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you?  Who said anything about safe?  ‘Course he isn’t safe.  But he’s good.  He’s the King, I tell you.”

As we celebrate Christ the King, we celebrate the King to whom Aslan points, not safe, but good; the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, whom we, the sons of Adam and Eve, can embrace as our brother, but a Lion, nonetheless.

    Christ as a King is both a strong warrior who defeats the enemy at the gates, but also our brother, by our adoption by His Divine Father.  Words limp at such an apparent paradox.  Christ Himself tells parable about killing the enemies of the king, and says on the night before His Passion that the prince of this world is being cast out.  And at the same time He asks the woman caught in adultery, “‘Has no one condemned you?  Neither then do I condemn you.  Go, and from now on, sin no more.’”  He is the Good Samaritan who binds up our wounds, puts us on His beast, and takes us to the inn where He pays for our recovery; but at the same time He is the one who “will put those wicked men to a wicked end” for not taking care of His vineyard and harming and killing the messengers of the vineyard owner.  He is, in the Apocalypse, the Lamb who was slain, and yet who has a sword which comes from His mouth to strike down the nations that oppose Him. 
    Perhaps that is why we are presented with two distinct images of His Kingship in our readings: St. Paul’s description of the Lord as the firstborn of all creation, the head of the body, the Church, who has primacy over everything; and the innocent victim, standing before the merely temporal Roman governor, yet submitting to Pilate’s decision that would mean the sacrifice of Christ’s life.  Christ, like Aslan, is both approachable and terrifying; Lover and Lord. 
    Perhaps that is why our relationship with Christ the King is also so hard to explain and put into words.  The Lord says in John, chapter 15, “‘You are my friends if you do what I command you.  I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing.  I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.’”  But then St. Paul, who met the same Christ on the road to Damascus, refers to himself as “Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus,” in his epistle to the Romans.  St. Ignatius of Loyola would “baptize” his former life as a mercenary, and talk about himself as a knight serving the King of Kings.  While St. Catherine of Siena would describe the Lord as “sweet Jesus, Jesus, Love.”  The responsory from the post-Conciliar Divine Office for the Second Reading on the Memorial of Sts. Cornelius and Cyprian says, “We are warriors now, fighting on the battlefield of faith, and God sees all we do; the angels watch and so does Christ.  What honor and glory and joy, to do battle in the presence of God and to have Christ approve our victory.”  While St. Theresa of Calcutta saw Christ hanging on the cross, telling her, “I thirst” and asking her to quench that thirst by serving the poorest of the poor.  All of those images are true, as contradictory as they may seem at first glance.
    His Eminence, Cardinal Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, recently issued a pastoral letter to the Patriarchate which also expresses this tension.  He meditates on words from the Gospel of John, “‘I have told you this so that you might have peace in me.  In the world you will have tribulations, but take courage, I have conquered the world.”  The Cardinal writes:
 

[Christ] addresses these words to His disciples, who will shortly be tossed about, as if in a storm, before His death.  They will panic, scatter and flee, like sheep without a shepherd.
    Yet, this last word of Jesus is an encouragement.  He does not say that He shall win, but that He has already won.  Even in the turmoil to come, the disciples will be able to have peace.  This is not a matter of theoretical irenic peace, nor of resignation to the fact that the world is evil, and we can do nothing to change it.  Instead it is about having the assurance that precisely within all this evil, Jesus has already won.  Despite the evil ravaging the world, Jesus has achieved a victory, and established a new reality, a new order, which after the resurrection will be issued by the disciples who were reborn in the Spirit. 
    It was on the cross that Jesus won: not with weapons, not with political power, not by great means, nor by imposing himself.  The peace He speaks of has nothing to do with victory over others.  He won the world by loving it.

This letter was written for the Feast of Our Lady of Palestine, celebrated on 25 October, in the midst of yet another war in the Holy Land, the Land of the King of Kings and Prince of Peace.
    What can we do as we celebrate Christ the King, which is also the anniversary our our own Traditional Latin Mass Community in Flint?  We do our best to live in imitation of our King, Conqueror and Victim, Conqueror because He is Victim.  We do our best to put to death the works of evil, starting with ourselves and the planks that are in our own eyes, but also working to promote life by opposing the evils without and the splinters in the eyes of our neighbors.  We seek the victory and the triumph which so often are made manifest through the rituals of this beautiful Mass, doing so by the reality to which this Mass points, the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, lived out in our own lives daily.  We do not shun the cross, but realize that Christ reigns from a the throne of a tree, and so we seek to reign with Him through our own daily crucifixions. 

    Christ is a King, and He is our brother.  We kneel before Him in fealty, and we run to embrace Him in love.  We acknowledge that He is not a domesticated animal, that He is not safe, but that He is good, in fact, Goodness Incarnate.  Christus vincit!  Christus regnat!  Christus imperat!  Christ conquers!  Christ reigns!  Christ commands!  He who is one with the Father and the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever.  Amen.   

A Deeper Law

Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Sometimes what is obvious is not as obvious as it seems.  When we hear this Gospel of the Good Samaritan, I am willing to bet that most of us can’t understand why the priest and the levite don’t help the man who was accosted by robbers.  We likely feel that it’s obvious what a person should do.  In fact, many States have laws called “Good Samaritan laws” that protect people who are trying to help, even if things do not go well, as long as there is no malfeasance intended or vincible negligence allowed.
    But listen to Leviticus 21:1-3: “The Lord said to Moses: Speak to the priests, Aaron’s sons, and tell them: None of you shall make himself unclean for any dead person among his kindred, except for his nearest relatives, his mother or father, his son or daughter, his brother or his unmarried sister.”  It continues in verses 10-11: “The most exalted of the priests, upon whose head the anointing oil has been poured and who has been ordained to wear the special vestments…shall [not] go near any dead person.  Not even for his father or mother may he thus become unclean.”  All of the sudden, with this in mind, the priest and the levite don’t sound quite as bad, or, at least, there’s a question as to what they were supposed to do.
    Of course, our Lord’s point is quite obvious: we are still supposed to help those in need.  Love of neighbor, which is part of inheriting eternal life, means caring for others.  The man was left for dead, and if the priests were truly living out the law, then they should have helped the man who had been robbed.  
    We learn, then that there is a kind of hierarchy of laws.  The levitical laws were important.  God gave them so that the priests could offer worthy sacrifice, and obtain mercy and blessings for God’s Chosen People.  But there was a more basic law, also found in Leviticus, two chapters earlier: “The Lord said to Moses: Speak to the whole Israelite community and tell them: Be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.  […] You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  Love of neighbor is part of the way that the Israelites were to be holy, like God.  And it was a law for all Israelites, not just the priests or levites.  
    It reminds me of the scene from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, where Aslan, who has risen from the dead after he sacrificed himself on the Stone Table, says:
 

…though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know.  Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time.  But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation.  She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.

Yes, the priests and levites were supposed to stay ritually clean, but they had a previous commitment to love as God loves, and to care for the most vulnerable.  And they didn’t even check to see if the man was dead.  They simply walked on by.
    Ironically, it was the priests and levites who could not distinguish, though they were well-educated, between the letter and the spirit.  I know this dichotomy is often abused to mean that anything goes.  And I’m certainly not advocating that position.  But Christ came to help us understand what it truly meant to live as children of our heavenly Father.  Elsewhere he condemns the fact that a person could free their beast of burden from being entrapped on the Sabbath, but He could not liberate a person from demonic possession or from illness on the Sabbath.  Again, some had lost sight of the point of the law: to help the People live as God’s own possession, and to witness to His life and love by their own actions and words.  
    And Christ could make this point, because, as the Church Fathers say, the parable of the Good Samaritan is really an allegory for what God did for us.  God displayed His holiness by seeing us beat up on our path.  We were walking the wrong way, away from Jerusalem, the city of the Temple, to the city of Jericho, the city cursed by Joshua after they destroyed it.  Satan and his horde had accosted us, taken away from us our rightful inheritance by tempting us to sin, and then left us for dead after we caved to sin.  The law and the prophets were sent to us, but they could not fully help.  But then our Savior, who was both one of us but also God, came to our rescue.  He put us on His shoulders as He bore the weight of the cross, and made sure that we could be healed at His own expense, even promising to do whatever was necessary for healing even after He departed from earth.  
    Strictly speaking, God had no need of us.  He didn’t need to save us.  He would lack nothing if all of humanity were damned to Hell.  But, because He loves us, He descended to hell so that we wouldn’t have to.  He came to our rescue through no merit of our own.  And so God desires that we do our best to live in imitation of Him.  God desires that we participate in and share His holiness with others.  And that is part of evangelizing.  When we demonstrate the love of God in our actions and words, especially when others know that we are Catholic, they can be drawn, even if only little by little, to a relationship or a deeper relationship with God.  
    The parable of the Good Samaritan seems obvious.  In some ways it is.  But at the end, the point is that, in order to inherit eternal life, we must do our best to demonstrate the holiness of God.  Sometimes, perhaps most often, the laws help us demonstrate God’s holiness.  But any law that exists always draws its authority from how it helps us to be holy as God is holy.  May we be helped each day to love our neighbor as ourselves, and to love with all of who we are God: the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.