Cars and Jerusalem

Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  While this is my eighth year living in Vehicle City, I will admit that I’m not a car guy.  That is to say, I don’t get cars and how they work.  I know how to use them, but if I were to pop the hood, I wouldn’t know how everything is supposed to work together.  I know there are things like spark plugs, carburetors, belts, fans, etc., but how they are all supposed work together is beyond me.  My grandfather, who worked tool and die at Fisher Body in Lansing for most of his adult life, probably would just shake his head at my ignorance, if he were alive today.
    But when we don’t understand how something is supposed to go together or function properly, we can easily miss when something is amiss.  We might have a sense that something is wrong (is my car supposed to sound like that?), but we couldn’t really tell you if something was really wrong, or what it might be.  

Church of Dominus Flevit

   That’s sort of what Christ bemoans in the Gospel today.  This is the time when the Lord weeps over Jerusalem because she does not realize the time of His visitation, the presence of the long-awaited Messiah, the Prince of Peace.  There is a beautiful church just outside the old city of Jerusalem called Dominus Flevit, Latin for the Lord Wept, that recalls this Gospel passage and could have been the place where the Lord wept over Jerusalem, because you can see much of the old city from this elevated point outside.  There is a chapel that has an iron grate, which stands between the viewer and the old city, and the grate has both a chalice with a host, as well as a cross seemingly overlaid over the landscape of modern Jerusalem.  
    Jerusalem had a particular destiny, as the king’s city, to welcome the Messiah when he came.  But because of the hardness of their hearts, most did not recognize the Lord as their long-awaited Messiah, and they missed the opportunity to welcome the Prince of Peace into His city.  So, because Jerusalem rejected peace, the Redeemer prophesied that war would come the city and stone would not be left upon stone, a prophecy that was fulfilled some forty years later when the Romans sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the ancient city, and took away many of the treasures that were there.
    We, too, are meant to recognize the Messiah when He comes.  Of course, we recognize that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, as far as the macro scale goes.  We know we’re not waiting for His first advent, but His second advent, His return in glory.  But do we recognize His third advent, how he comes to us each day, month, and year?  Do we recognize what God is trying to do in our life?
    If we don’t, we might still arrive at the destination the Lord desires for us: heaven.  But it will be much harder than it has to be.  A blind man may reach his destination by wandering around and bumping into obstacles.  But it helps if he has a guide to make sure he doesn’t fall into holes, or lose his sense of direction and start walking towards a destination he doesn’t desire.  So, too, for our salvation: if we are not attentive to God, we might still make our way to Him.  But it will be much easier and less dangerous if we attend to how God communicates.  How does God communicate?
    First, we can look to the Scriptures.  St. Jerome famously said, “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.”  By reading the Bible, whether as a whole or in a guided Bible study or at least the more prosaic parts (I know the genealogies of the Old Testament can be tough to get through), we come to see how God works.  We see His special love for the poor, the widow, and the orphan.  We see how He often chooses those whom the world considers losers or worthless to accomplish His mighty deeds.  We see how He calls people to follow His will, and gently (and sometimes not-so-gently) reminds them to come back if they have wandered away.  
    Secondly, we can look to the Church.  The Church takes all the Scriptures and reads it in the light of Christ and salvation.  Our Holy Mother Church teaches us what we need to know about how to be saved, which is really just teaching us how to follow Christ.  She helps us to recognize, through saints and reflection on God’s revelation, how God is working, and how His voice sounds, as opposed to the voice of the world, which can often sound more enticing.
    Thirdly, we can look to prayer.  A daily habit of prayer doesn’t meant that life will go smoothly for us.  But it does mean that through the ups and downs of life, we can better see what God is doing because we’re asking Him on a regular basis, “What are you doing, Lord?”  In prayer we should take time to bring our joys and sorrows, our understanding and our questions to God.  But we should also make time to listen, silencing our minds as best we can to allow God to speak to us and enlighten us with His plan, which, as God said to the prophet Samuel, is not always what we would do.  
    When we come to know God’s will, we can have peace.  Not simply a peace that means we are not struggling, but a peace knowing how the struggle will work out, or at least that it will in some way work out in a way that God has directed for our salvation and the salvation of the world.  The saints show us this peace time and time again, even in the midst of violent persecutions, because they know that whatever God allows will somehow give us the opportunity to grow closer to Him, even to the point of shedding our blood, if necessary.
    Throughout life, we might not understand how everything fits together and works out.  It might seem as foreign to you as the inner workings of a car seems to me.  But if we are attentive to Christ’s presence in our life and in the world, we are more likely to understand, and cooperate with God’s will, rather than working to frustrate it or simply wandering around in the dark.  Lord, through your word in the Scriptures, through your Bride, the Church, and through our daily commitment to prayer, help us to know your will, to love your will, and to embrace your will.  In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Justice and Mercy

 Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
    

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  The saints are often known for pithy quotes that make one think, or sometimes chuckle.  For example, St. Theresa of Avila is quoted as saying to the Lord, “If this is how you treat your friends, it is no wonder you have so few!”  Or St. John XXIII, who had a particularly good sense of humor, would say to God each night before he went to bed, something to the effect of “Dear Lord, it’s your Church; you take care of it.  I’m going to bed.”  Or St. Theresa of Calcutta, who said, “I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle.  I just wish that He didn’t trust me so much.”    I bet we all can or have once had the same feeling.
    St. Paul reminds us today that “God is faithful and will not let [us] be tried beyond [our] strength.”  This is a good thing to remember in our day-to-day life.  We do not have to give in to our temptations; we do not have to sin.  God gives us what the scholastics called sufficient grace, or the power of God which is required to say no to temptation.  Certainly, venial sins may pop up which are simply due to weakness of our character or pre-dispositions, but when it comes to knowingly being tempted to commit a venial or a mortal sin, we do not have to give in to the temptation and act contrary to God’s will.
    But how often do we call upon that grace?  How often do we call out to God to save us in time of temptation?  Or how often do we rebuke the temptation as having no power over us?  In our daily temptations, we can turn to the Lord, and then rebuke, mentally or verbally, that temptation as not being from God.  Sometimes out-loud is especially effective, because it gets us out of our head.  
    The other option, giving in to temptation, leads to consequences.  It’s a kind of spiritual law of physics.  Just as for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, so in the spiritual life, for every sin to which we acquiesce, there are consequences with which we might have to deal.  It is true that sometimes God can withhold that consequence, for a time or for ever, but He can also let the consequence of sin (which is death) affect us.  
    St. Paul mentions that in his epistle as well.  He mentions the fall of the twenty-three thousand as a consequence of immorality, or those who died by serpents on the way to the Promised Land.  And in our Gospel, we hear our Lord prophesying the destruction of Jerusalem, because the city did not recognize the time of its visitation.  
    We tend to look at these things as punishments.  We think that God is striking this person or that person down because of evil.  But, from other parts of the Gospel, it’s not quite that simple.  Our Lord himself, when talking about the tower that fell, or those who were killed by Pilate, argued that they were no more guilty than others.  Only God knows how, why, and when to allow the consequences of sin to catch up with a person or a group of persons.  And His patience is always for the purpose of allowing for conversion, as St. Peter says in his second epistle.  
    There’s a rather horrible contemporary hymn that was written, and which was very popular in my first assignment, called “The Canticle of the Turning.”  It’s a kind of very, very loose paraphrase of the Magnificat written to the melody of an Irish bar song (sort of the example of everything wrong with contemporary hymnody).  The refrain states, “My heart shall sing of the day you bring / Let the fires of your justice burn.”  I don’t know about you, but if I have the choice between God’s mercy and God’s justice, I will take God’s mercy every day, and twice on Sundays, as the saying goes.  
    But what we want to receive, we need to give to and desire for others.  Our Lord’s teaching on loving our enemies is one of the tougher teachings of the Gospel.  It’s easy to immediately want what we consider to be justice, for the other person to get their just desserts.  How often when I am driving do I see a car run a red light, and I opine, sometimes out-loud, that I hope that there’s a cop around to pull them over.  I can tell you it’s not so much because I’m concerned about my own safety or the safety of others that I want that person pulled over (which would be fine), but because I want that drive to be punished for breaking the rules, which I strive so hard to follow.  If we want to receive mercy, we need to show mercy.  If we want others to have Divine Justice, then we need to be prepared for it to fall upon us as well.

    There is a small chapel on the Mount of Olives, overlooking the city of Jerusalem from the west, called Dominus Flevit, which, for those whose Latin isn’t that sharp, means The Lord Wept.  It’s called that because it is the place (or at least it’s around the place) where today’s Gospel took place and the Lord wept over Jerusalem.  It’s one of my favorite chapels, because as you attend Mass, you see the present-day city of Jerusalem.  But you see it through a wrought-iron image that includes a cross and a host over a chalice.  Outside of pandemics, I would guess that chapel is used every day.  It’s a great reminder for us that the Mass is the prayer of reconciliation of Jesus to the Father, pleading for, not just Jerusalem, but the world, which should be seen through the mystery of the Eucharist.  May our hearts be moved daily to show the mercy of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.