Why Are We Running?

Easter Sunday

    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  Forrest Gump, after returning home from the Vietnam War, and after he sold his shrimping company, and after he had tried to figure out what to do with his life, got off his porch and, as he said, “That day, for no particular reason, I decided to go for a little run.  So, I ran to the end of the road, and when I got there, I thought maybe I’d run to the end of town.”  He ends up running through his county, through Alabama, and across the United States.  In reflecting on his super marathon, Forrest says, “For no particular reason, I just kept on going.”
    While I have run the CRIM once, and sometimes run as part of my cardio workouts, I’m more in the camp of those who run solely because they’re being chased or chasing after someone.  And as for being chased, as long as you’re not the slowest, generally you’re ok.  
    But John’s account of the first Easter Sunday talks about Sts. Peter and John running to the tomb.  They run there to see if what St. Mary Magdalene said was true: that someone had taken the Lord.  John, who wrote the Gospel, adds what I like to think was a little fun jab at Peter: “They both ran, but the other disciple [that is, John] ran faster than Peter and arrived at the tomb first.”  Peter would have been in trouble if they were running from a bear.
    But they both ran with a purpose: to see the empty tomb.  They saw the burial cloths, and the cloth that had covered the head in a separate area.  They believed Mary Magdalene, that someone had taken the body somewhere else, as St. John makes clear, “they did not yet understand the Scripture that he had to rise from the dead.”  It would not be until the Risen Lord appeared in the Upper Room that evening that they would know that He had risen from the dead.  
    Do we, like Peter and John, run towards the resurrection?  Or do we, like Forrest Gump, run for no particular reason?  As followers of Christ, we should run towards a goal, not aimlessly.  Our life should be a run towards the risen Christ in heaven.  If we’re just running, with no goal in mind, we never know where we might end up, and it might not be in heaven.  
    As we go through each day and the different activities of life, we can treat the parts of the day like smaller races: waking up and getting myself and/or the kids ready–100 meter dash; working in or out of the home–3200 meter run; making dinner and cleaning up the house–400 meter dash.  And as we begin each race, we should do so with a prayer.  Maybe it’s a simple prayer as you wake up, like a morning offering, of even the short pious phrase, “My Mother, My Confidence!”, entrusting our day to the intercession of the Blessed Mother.  Maybe it’s the sign of the cross as you enter your car to drive to work, or as you begin a load of laundry at home.  Maybe it’s the Angelus on your lunch break.  Maybe it’s Grace Before and/or After Meals.  Maybe it’s a pray of thanksgiving as you put your kids to bed or go to bed yourself.  But praying throughout the day makes sure that we’re running towards a goal, and not just running like a chicken with its head cut off.  
    If we don’t focus our energy, we run towards other goals than heaven–earthly prosperity, power, fame–which do not endure and will not save us.  Or, it’s more like running on a treadmill, which expends the same amount of energy, but without actually going anywhere.  To share in Christ’s Resurrection, we have to want to get there.  Simply making our legs go back and forth won’t necessarily get us closer to the new life that Christ wants for us and that fulfills our human nature.  How sad would it be to find out, at the end of our life, that we ran the wrong way, or even didn’t run any distance, but only ran in place.  

The empty tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

    Today, let us join Sts. Peter and John, running toward an empty tomb, because Christ has risen from the dead.  Let us run the race that God has put before us, not aimlessly, but with our eyes fixed on our goal: heaven.  Each day we can run the small and long races, which hopefully push us closer to eternal life.  We use prayer to make sure we’re on the right track, the path that leads to heaven.  
    Forrest Gump later in the movie says, “I had run for three years, two months, fourteen days and sixteen hours….I’m pretty tired.  Think I’ll go home now.”  He had run for years, but without a purpose, without reaching a goal.  May our race of life have purpose, like Peter and John, and, spurred on by the grace and mercy of God, lead us to heaven.  [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.]

Seeing the Risen Jesus

Solemnity of Easter

The entrance to the aediculum

   [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.]  One of the most memorable things that I experienced when I went to the Holy Land for the first time in 2007 as a seminarian was attending Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the place where Jesus died and rose from the dead.  At the place where the tomb was, there is a small building inside the church called the aediculum, and inside that aediculum is where a slab of stone rests that held the dead body of our Lord.  The Franciscans gave us permission to have Mass there one day.  The way Mass works in that space is that the Liturgy of the Word/Mass of Catechumens happens outside the aediculum.  For the Liturgy of the Eucharist/Mass of the Faithful, the priest enters the aediculum and says the Eucharist Prayer inside there, which you can hear, but not see, because of how small it is inside.
    The great moment is when the priest gets to the point where he says, “Behold, the Lamb of God,” because the priest leaves the aediculum, and, holding the Body of the Lord above the chalice says, while showing the Eucharist to the people.  Part of the power is that this is the same risen Lord, coming from His tomb, alive for us to see, though of course under sacramental signs.
    As we celebrate Easter today, we remember the event that changed the course of human history.  While the Prophet Elisha had raised a person from the dead in the Old Testament, and our Lord had raised the daughter of Jairus, the son of the widow of Nain, and Lazarus from the dead, the resurrection was altogether different.  Our Lord’s Body no longer suffered under the restrictions of the physical world, as we will hear next Sunday when we hear about Him entering a locked room through the door.  While the Body was certainly His, and bore the marks of His crucifixion, in a glorified state there was something different about it.  I often imagine it as having a slight glow to it, though maybe that was not the case.  It was different enough that the disciples on the road to Emmaus didn’t recognize Christ as He walked with them, until He broke bread in a room with them.  
    But that event that changed everything, starting really with Good Friday and culminating with Easter Sunday, we celebrate and enter into each Sunday in particular, and each time we come to Mass more generally.  At the Mass, we begin by acknowledging that we are sinners and that Christ suffered for us and because of us.  We stand at the foot of the Cross and nail our sins there with Christ so that they can be forgiven.  We offer our lives–the joys and sorrows, pain and comforts, work and leisure–since the last time we attended Mass united to the perfect offering of Christ to His heavenly Father on Calvary.  We stand there at Calvary and hear God’s word proclaimed to help us understand what work God does in our lives.  And then, during the Eucharist Prayer/Canon of the Mass, we enter into Christ’s offering of Himself on the cross, and His burial in the tomb.  In fact, the Catechism of the Catholic Church references how the altar, besides being symbol of Christ Himself and the Cross, also symbolizes the tomb.
    And that is perhaps a bit clearer as we celebrate Mass facing the Lord together, or ad Dominum.  During the three days between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, Christ’s Body laid in the tomb, unseen by all others.  After the elevations which follow the words of institution, the words that Christ Himself spoke (“This is my Body”; “This is my Blood), Christ is not seen by the faithful in the pews until the priest shows the Body of Christ while saying, “Behold the Lamb of God.”  This is, as it were, Christ breaking forth from the tomb, and appearing before His disciples after the Resurrection.  The same experience I had in Jerusalem, of seeing Christ in the Eucharist come forth from His tomb you can experience as I remove the Body of Christ from the tomb of the altar and He rises so that you all can see Him and His glorified Body, which is not limited in the way our bodies are limited.
    And the Lord does not just show Himself from afar as I show Him to you.  At the time for the reception of Holy Communion, He comes near to you, as He came near to Mary Magdalene at the tomb or as He came near the Blessed Mother, the Apostles, and the disciples in the Upper Room.  He stands right before you, and then even enters in to you to bring that power of the Resurrection into your individual lives.
    And what is our response, then?  The same as the disciples who realized that Christ was risen: they had to tell other disciples, and, after Pentecost, everyone.  Knowing that Christ had died, but that He was truly risen, they could not remain silent, but shared that joy and the transformation of their lives that the Resurrection made.  Death no longer had the last say.  Sin no longer could hold them in slavery.  They could not contain the joy of that revelation, but had to tell others.  And so should we.  The joy of this day should cast away all sorrow and fear and lead us to greater holiness of life.

Inside the aediculum

    Christ has risen from the dead.  It is not just a past event, but a reality that we get to join every Sunday, which the Church calls a “little Easter.”  May we recognize the Risen Christ as we see and receive Him in the Eucharist, the Lamb of God, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit, live and reign for ever and ever.

Voices

Fourth Sunday of Easter
    Chris Young, a country singer, has a song called “Voices,” in which he talks about the voices he hears in his mind.  But it’s not a sign of being crazy.  He sings about the voice of, “My dad saying working that job, / but don’t work your life away. / And mama telling me to drop some cash / in the offering plate on Sunday.”  Those are the voices that guide him in his life to help him make good decisions.

    Jesus today refers to Himself as the Good Shepherd, and says that His sheep follow Him because they recognize His voice, and He calls us each by name.  But it begs the question: do we listen to the voice of the Good Shepherd, or do we listen to other voices?  Do we recognize the voice of the Good Shepherd in our hearts, or is another calling for us who does not know our name?
    We often refer to the voice of God in our heart as the conscience.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in paragraph 1776 (quoting the Vatican II document Gaudium et spes) states:
 

Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey.  Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment.  […In his conscience] he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths.

Our conscience is the voice of the Good Shepherd.  But too often, we now refer to our conscience as what we simply want to do, which may bear no relationship to what God tells us.  It is not a law unto itself, but the law given to humanity by God, to help a person know how to follow God in each particular circumstance.
    In order to hear the voice of the Good Shepherd in our hearts, we have to know what that voice sounds like.  How do we familiarize ourselves with His voice, to make sure that it’s not merely our own?  We read the Scriptures; we learn what the Church, the Body of Christ, teaches, since Christ cannot teach one thing through the Church, and yet tell us to do something different in our hearts. 
    Part of recognizing the voice of the Good Shepherd is recognizing that He calls us by our name.  In the Gospel of John, on Easter Sunday, Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb but does not see Christ, but just the empty tomb.  Later that day, after telling the other disciples her experience, she returns to the tomb and sees a man, whom she presumes is the gardener, but it is really the risen Christ.  It is not until Christ calls her name that she recognizes Him as the same Jesus she saw die on the cross.  I think about the times when I was younger and in a crowd of family and/or friends.  If I was trying to get my mom’s attention, I might try saying “mom” a few times, but if that didn’t work (because there were lots of moms there), it always worked when I called out “Sue.”  She heard my voice and she heard her name and responded.  Jesus has that personal connection to us, and calls us by name.  Another example is that in the last moments of a pope’s life, if they are examining the pope to see if he is still alive, they will use his baptismal name, knowing that the name he was called by his parents would beckon him if he is still alive.
    Another important aspect of the voice of the Good Shepherd and calling us by name is that He doesn’t call us by our failures.  The thieves and mercenaries who want to steal the sheep and lead them away to bad pastures remind us of the wrong that we’ve done in order to keep us in that pain and hurt.  Jesus will identify our sins, when we have not chosen to follow God, but He doesn’t identify us with our failures, but still calls us by name, even as He calls us to repent.
    When it comes to our conscience, the voice of the Good Shepherd, we are not deciding what is right and what is wrong.  We have no power to call good: bad; or bad: good.  What our conscience helps us to do is to take what God has shown us is good or bad, and apply it to this particular situation in which we find ourselves.  If we find our conscience telling us to do something that God has forbidden, then we have not formed our conscience well; we have not accustomed ourselves to the voice of the Good Shepherd, but decided to wander off to other fields and listen to other voices rather than God’s voice.  As I said earlier, God will never contradict Himself.  So if we think something is right which the Bible or the Church says is wrong; or if we think something is wrong that the Bible or the Church says is right, we need to go back and evaluate to whose voice we have been listening. 
    If we are living a Christ-centered life, then we will hear voices every day of our lives.  No, not crazy voices, but the voice of God, helping us to choose the good and avoid the bad in all the circumstances of our life, which we call the conscience.  If we are following the voice of thieves and robbers, then we will miss the gate to eternal life which is Christ.  But if we follow the voice of the Good Shepherd, even if we have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death with Him, we know that we will make it through the sheep gate and “dwell in the house of the Lord for years to come.”

New Life

Easter Sunday

           

New life.  The phrase has become so common that we often forget the power of those two, short words.  But those words have power, because everything changed from that point in time for all eternity, both all time that had come before, and all time that would follow after.  People had dreamed about life that would never end, but it was always something that could not be seen, could not be experienced.  Now, new life was not just a theory or a pious idea, but a reality that we saw in Jesus.  He was the same Jesus, but He was different.  He still bore the marks of His crucifixion, but His body was not the same type of body as before; it was filled with the glory of God.

            New life.  What an effect it had on those first disciples: Mary Magdalene, the first to see the risen Christ; Peter and John who ran to the tomb in today’s Gospel; the Blessed Virgin Mary, who received back the Son that she had watched die on the cross.  What a shock it was for them first to find the empty tomb, and then to see Jesus appear in their midst, though the doors were locked. 

            New life.  It gave Peter the courage, after the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, to proclaim to the Jews who were gathered for Passover that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah, the fulfillment of the prophecies of Moses and all the other prophets.  It gave Peter the courage to preach that Jesus is “‘the one appointed by God as judge of the living and the dead…[and] that everyone who believes in him will receive forgiveness of sins through his name.’”  It gave countless numbers of people the courage to be put to death rather than deny Jesus as their Savior.

            New life.  It caused the first believers, most of who were Jewish, to not only observe the Sabbath, the Saturday rest, but also to observe the 8^th day, the first day of the week, when Jesus rose from the dead, and gather together each Sunday to remind themselves of what seemed to good to be true, but was true; to hear the prophecies that referred to Jesus; and to fulfill the commandment of the Lord made at the Last Supper and celebrate the Eucharist in His memory.  It caused the first believers, especially Gentiles, non-Jews, to change the entire way they lived their lives.  No longer would they worship idols or the emperor; no longer would they participate in the sexual immorality of their neighbors; no longer would they base their life on pleasure and worldly wisdom, but on the Word of God, both through what was in Scriptures and the Teachings of the Apostles, as what ruled their lives.  They did as St. Paul wrote to the Colossians, and as we heard in our second reading today: “seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.  Think of what is above, not of what is on earth.”  They put on a heavenly mindset, even while living their earthly pilgrimage.

            Brothers and sisters, the power of the resurrection, the power of new life is not only in the past.  It is a power still as potent today as it was in the first century when Peter and John ran to the tomb.  It is still as potent as in the third century when Sts. Perpetua and Felicity died in the arena rather than deny Christ.  It is still as potent as in  the thirteenth century when St. Francis divested himself of all that his earthly father had given him in order to follow in poverty his Heavenly Father. It is still as potent as in the nineteenth century when St. Marianne Cope dedicated her life to serving those in Molokai who had Hansen’s disease.  It is still as potent as in the twentieth century when St. Maximilian Kolbe put himself in the place of another prisoner at Auschwitz.  You can grab on to that power, and you can have new life.  You can be transformed, first on the inside, and then, after the resurrection of body at the end of time, on the outside.

            If you know Jesus, then everything is different.  Sure, we may look the same as we did before, but the way we live our lives will testify to the fact that we have new life in Jesus.  It changes the way we treat each other.  It changes the way we make decisions.  It changes the way we spend our time.  We base our lives not on our own ideas, but on the logic of God found in the Scriptures and in the Teachings of the Apostles and their successors.  We gather together each Sunday to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus and to remind ourselves of the power that new life can have in our lives.

            “This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad.”  Jesus said to his disciples how He came to set this world on fire, and how He wishes it were already burning.  New life, and the power it has, can set this world afire with God’s love.  I invite you today, paraphrasing the words of St. Paul: Arise, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give you new life.

Don't Look Back!

Fifth Sunday of Lent

            One of the hardest things to do when you’re running a sprint in track is not to look back to see who is coming up behind you.  No matter whether you’re first and you want to see if anyone is gaining on you, or you just don’t want to be last, as you’re running those last meters, you want to know if you’re going to win, or if you need to push it harder.  Ironically, for most people who look back, they seal their fate and the other person often passes them, because looking back slows us down.

            Isaiah talks about it in our first reading.  He says for the Lord, “Remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago consider not; see, I am doing something new!”  God tells the Israelites not to dwell on what led them into exile (their idolatry, their trust in foreign nations), but to look ahead and see the good that God wants them to accomplish.

St. Paul talks about that in our second reading today: “forgetting what lies behind but straining forward to what lies ahead, I continue my pursuit toward the goal, the prize of God’s upward calling, in Christ Jesus.”  St. Paul certainly had stuff that he could have dwelt on in his past.  He was a zealous Pharisee; he arrested men, women, and children for following Jesus; he condoned the stoning of Stephen.  But, while he did not forget his past, he didn’t keep looking back to it to weigh him down.  He recognized he was the least of the apostles because he had persecuted the Church of God, but he used that to propel his missionary activity, and is still the greatest missionary the world has ever known.

            We see it in our Gospel passage today.  Jesus doesn’t ignore the woman’s past.  He doesn’t condone the fact that she was caught in adultery.  But He forgives her, and tells her to move on, to “‘Go, and…do not sin any more.’”  He does not want her past to determine her future, unlike the scribes and Pharisees, who want to end her future because of her past. 

            When we focus too much on our past, we lose our future, just like the sprinter who can lose the race because he looks behind him.  We all have a past, we all have things that we wish we would not have done: not just mistakes or accidents, but choices that we have made that we should not have.  It’s called being human.  Look at St. Peter: he denied that he even knew Jesus.  But he didn’t stay there.  He repented, he wept for his sins, and he reaffirmed his love for Jesus.  Look at St. Mary Magdalene: she had seven demons that Jesus had to cast out of her.  We don’t know exactly how they got there, but it wasn’t a pleasant past.  But she didn’t stay stuck on the fact that she had seven demons, she followed Jesus, even to the cross when all but one of the other apostles abandoned Jesus, and was able to be the first to see the risen Christ.  And that’s just the beginning!  Through the millennia, there have been saints who had serious sins in their past.  But they, like St. Paul, forgot what was behind them, and continued their pursuit towards the goal of union with God forever in heaven.

            “But Fr. Anthony, you don’t know what I’ve done!”  Or, “Maybe I haven’t done any one thing that was really bad, but I’ve got a whole lifetime of little bad things that sure add up!”  Please!  Don’t give your sins that power.  None of them are so heinous as to be unforgiveable.  Bring them to the Lord and let Him nail those sins to the wood of the cross so that new life can come from our death to sin and life in Christ.  What happens when we do give our sins that power, when we remain stuck in the past, is what happened to Judas: despair and death.  Judas could not turn away from his past and turn towards the Lord, and so could not receive the forgiveness that he wanted and needed.

            Now, in not looking back, it certainly does not mean that we do not learn from our past sins.  God wanted Israel to look ahead to the future, to see the blessings of fidelity to God, but He certainly didn’t want them to slip back into their old sins.  St. Paul continued to run the race and look ahead to the prize of salvation, but he didn’t think that he could just go back to being a Pharisee and persecutor of the Church because he had been forgiven.  And Jesus exhorted the woman not to be adulterous in the future.  Not looking back doesn’t mean that we forgo true conversion and treat our sins as if they do not offend God.  They do offend God, and harm whom we are called to be.  But they are not more powerful than God, and God can write straight even with crooked lines. 

            The same happens in reconciliation.  We don’t pretend we haven’t done anything wrong.  Rather, we confess our sins, acknowledging how we have turned away from the Lord, and then He forgives us and urges us to press on towards Him and the road to salvation, that straight and narrow road that Jesus spoke of in the Gospel.  But just as we don’t pretend we haven’t sinned, we also don’t let our sins bog us down afterwards, because God has forgiven them.

            Don’t be the sprinter who loses the race because you looked back and were overtaken by the past.  Win the race by learning from past sins and pressing onwards toward God, keeping Him always before your eyes.