The Old Man and the New Man

Second Sunday of Lent

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Not long before Toby Keith died, a little more than a year ago, I heard a song that he released in 2019 called, “Don’t Let the Old Man In.”  While the song sings of death, personified by an old man, for us Catholics, the old man is Adam, our fallen, sinful self, while the new man is Christ, raised from the dead and sinless.
    And as we hear the readings today, we get the comparison between the old man and the new man.  St. Paul lays out one of the sins that is part and parcel of the old man: lust and fornication.  St. Thomas Aquinas defines lust as seeking sexual pleasure not in accord with reason.  And fornication, in its simplest form, is sexual relations between an unmarried man and unmarried woman, though more broadly it can refer to adultery (where at least one person is married) and other sexual sins.
    There is no doubt that the sexual passions are strong.  The old joke is told of a man asking a priest when he would no longer have to worry about lust.  The priest answered, “Five minutes after you’re dead.”  Our bodies, when they are not subjected to the soul, tend towards their own desires.  Especially in youth, they operate as if the propagation of the human race depended entirely upon one’s self.  And while one can have a legitimate desire to seek sexual pleasure that is in accord with reason (indeed, the gift of sexuality is a great gift from God), the old man, whose body, mind, and soul are not ordered properly and subjected in obedience to God, seeks simply to satisfy those desires whenever and however he wants.  
    And this is true even beyond lust and sexual desire.  The old man, the disobedient Adam, always seeks his own will over and against God’s will, no matter what the subject matter.  The old man spends money as he wants, without any reference to God; eats whatever he wants, without any reference to God; pursues whatever he wants, without any reference to God.  In all these cases and more, God is, at best, an afterthought, and, at worst, not considered at all in one’s actions.  The old man, St. Paul says, is earthly, and was addressed on Ash Wednesday: Remember, man, you are dust, and to dust you shall return.  

    But the Gospel we heard today, the Gospel of the Transfiguration, shows us what the new man can be.  Christ receives transfiguration from the Father to show the three great Apostles what will happen after the Passion and Crucifixion.  But that foresight connects to obedience, obedience to the Father’s will, no matter where that leads, even if it leads to the cross.  Moses, who appears on Mount Tabor with the Lord and Elijah, also received a much smaller gift of transfiguration when he beheld God.  His face radiated, so much so that people would have him cover it up because they were put off by it.  Moses would only remove his veil when he entered the presence of God.  But, St. Paul also says that it was a radiance that faded.  Whereas the radiance God desires for us in heaven will never fade away, just as the radiance of Christ never fades away.
    That radiance comes when we stop living like the old man, doing it “my way,” and when we, by the grace of God, open ourselves up to God’s transforming grace, His life, so that it begins to change us from the inside out.  We start to transfigure when we do it God’s way.  Sin blocks the light of Christ that we received at Holy Baptism from shining through us.  Repentance, especially through the Sacrament of Penance, cleanses us from the mud of sin so that the light of Christ can shine through us and glorify God.
    As far as our sexual passions go, living the life of the new man means treating our gift of sexuality as the precious gift it is, rather than simply a physical relief from stress or loneliness.  Since we live in a GM city, the image of the gift of sexuality I use is like a new corvette.  Most would care for it, protect it from misuse, and make sure no one is eating or drinking in or around the car.  Misusing it would be to take it on two-track roads in a forest, or let kids eat ice cream in the back seat, or drive it through bogs.  When we view things we shouldn’t, or try to simulate the sexual act on our own, or engage in acts of affection which are proper to marriage, or even engage in sexual acts as spouses that are not open to life (and I’m not talking about NFP, which cooperates with how God has made the human body to achieve or delay conception), we run our corvette through the mud.  The more we put ourselves into temptation regarding our sexual faculties, the harder it is to get out of the mud.  So we want to make sure that we are not allowing our sexual desires get the better of us as much as we can.
    But, as I said, living a transfigured life isn’t only about sex.  It’s also about being kind to a co-worker who puts us down; or being a friend to someone who is friendless, even if they are a little off; or not seeking undue attention and puffing ourselves up by bragging about our achievements; or treating even our enemies with human dignity and respect.  Living the life of the new man is about asking what God wants us to do in this moment.  And the more we practice it, the easier it becomes.  As we think about the saints, for many of them towards the end of their life, living a Christ-centered life didn’t require as much effort, because they had trained themselves to think with the mind of Christ and love with His Sacred Heart.  
    We don’t have to live like the old man.  We don’t have to fall to our passions and let them rule us.  That is the precious gift we were given in baptism.  So, to quote the last verse of Toby Keith’s song: “When he rides up on his horse / And you feel that cold bitter wind / Look out your window and smile / Don’t let the old man in.”  In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

More Than Rules

Second Sunday of Lent
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  The Church Fathers have consistently taught that the Gospel we heard today, that of the Transfiguration, allowed Christ to assuage the distress of the announcement of His Passion, so that the Apostles could know that, after the Passion, the glory of the Resurrection would follow. 

    The Transfiguration also demonstrates what Christ desires to happen to us if He joins us to Himself through Holy Baptism.  The glorification of the head also means the glorification of the body.  God does not keep His glory to Himself, but shares it with those whom Holy Baptism joins to Himself and those who, through a holy life, keep that union strong. 
    And during our Lenten observances, as we discipline ourselves and “waste away” from fasting and abstaining, it is good to keep our eyes on the prize and realize for what God made us.  Because God did not solely destine us for this earth and all of its fallenness.  God made us so that we could live with Him eternally in heaven, and the glory that He has by nature He would share with us by grace.  We, too, are meant to be transfigured.
    So often Catholicism is simply presented as rules to follow.  St. Paul today tells us not to give in to fornication and not to give in to lust, as do the pagans.  And in this way, St. Paul tells us, God will make us holy.  Certainly, many people think about the Church’s teaching on sex as “don’t do [fill in the blank].” 
    But the Gospel reminds us that Catholicism is not, at its heart, about rules.  Catholicism is about letting God transfigure us to be more like Himself, which is how He made us.  Rules can often seem very external, but God desires that His grace not only affect our actions, the externals, but also affect our entire being, both externals and internals.  The chief complaint from the Lord about the Pharisees was that they only cared about the externals, so He calls them cups where only the outside is washed, while the inside remains dirty, or white-washed sepulchers, finely decorated on the outside, but full of death on the inside.  The catch-word for Lent, repent, comes from the Greek 𝜇𝜀𝜏𝛼𝜈𝜊𝜀𝜄𝜏𝜀, meaning a change of mind or a change of being. 
    And as we hear St. Peter say that it is good that they are at Mt. Tabor, and should stay there in three tents, even he, in a sense, thinks only about the externals.  Christ allows His divinity to shine through, and Peter is awe-filled.  But it doesn’t require any change of his own life.  He can simply watch the Lord and bask in His brilliance.  But a disciple is not just about “me and Jesus,” to use a common Christian phrase.  Following the Lord means that we allow God to transform our life, which pushes us out to share that new life with others.  When we conform our lives to God, we conform them to love, which is diffusive; it wants to be shared with others, not kept to ourselves. 
    This transformation cannot only be on the outside.  St. Paul, elsewhere, talks about the glory of the law, which pales in comparison to the glory of righteousness.  Moses, the Apostle writes, had this glory, but the glory faded, which is why Moses covered his face: so the Israelites didn’t see the slow fade of the glory.  The Law had some transfiguring effect, but not a total transfiguration.  Moses could give the law, but grace and truth came through Christ, as we hear in St. John’s prologue at each Mass. 
    It is all too easy to “do the right things.”  It is easier to simply do the external things that we are told that we need to do than to allow those things that we are supposed to do change us, both outside and inside.  But the point of the externals is to change the internals.  God does not only want us to look good, He wants us to be good.  And so those things that we do should change our interior dispositions to be more like Christ.
    So as we engage in our Lenten disciplines, ask yourselves: is this discipline opening me up to the grace of God so that I can be transformed?  Or is it only an outward action that does nothing to my interior spiritual life?  And if we’re not being transformed, it’s not that we stop our penances.  We can’t simply eat meat on Fridays because we don’t experience how abstaining from meat on Fridays transforms us to be more like Christ.  What it does mean is that we have to examine how that practice, or any others that we undertake, can make us more receptive to God’s grace.  Maybe by not eating meat by choice, I ponder those who cannot choose what they want to eat because they have no money.  My heart grows in love for the poor, and I am led to consider how I can help them according to my own state in life.  I no longer see them as “others” who annoy me, but as beloved of Christ, and even Christ Himself, as He says in Matthew 25, for whom I have a responsibility to care. 
    I know I preached about externals and internals on Ash Wednesday, but the Gospel of the Transfiguration reminds us that Christ did not come only to change religious practices.  Christ came to make us more like God, not on our own terms, like what Adam and Eve tried to do when they disobeyed God, but on God’s terms, with a transformation that shines more brightly.  May our Lenten practices not only discipline our bodies, but also help us to be more like Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

From the Heart

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

            In case there are any guys out there who are not otherwise prepared and have not gotten flowers or made reservations for dinner, tomorrow is Valentine’s Day.  It’s a day that we focus, in one sense on love, but in another sense, on the heart.  From the very earliest days that we celebrate this holiday in school, hearts are important to this day.  We make hearts out of red paper and doilies.  We might give those little card-stock Valentine’s Day cards that say, “You’re My Valentine” with little hearts on it.  We might even give out Sweethearts candy with cute sayings like, “Be mine” or “True Love.” 

            The heart is also important in our Gospel today.  This passage is part of the Sermon on the Mount, the same place where Jesus gave us the Beatitudes, like “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”  At this point, Jesus gives us a law, not new, but the fulfillment of the Law that God gave to the Israelites on Mount Sinai.  This fulfillment of the law does not abolish the old, but as Jesus says, fulfills it.

            And this law has a lot to do with the heart.  Whereas in the Law given on Mount Sinai, certain acts were condemned, like murder and adultery, Jesus tells us that those acts stem from something much deeper.  They stem from the heart.

            Because long before the act of murder takes place, there is a hatred that stems from the heart.  And so, in the Kingdom of God, where all people live as God desires, not only murder must not happen, but even unrighteous anger, so that one person no longer says to another, “raqa,” which means in Aramaic, “empty-headed”; we might translate it colloquially as, “moron.”  If we are harboring a grudge against another who has wronged us, or even if someone has done nothing to us but we still harbor hatred towards them, then we are not living according to the Kingdom, and we might even be endangering our place in that kingdom. 

            The same goes for adultery.  Long before a person has sex with a person who is married to another, the desire to do so is in the heart.  So, Jesus tells us, using a man as an example (ladies, don’t feel that you’re off the hook when it comes to looking at men), when a man looks at a woman with lust, he “‘has already committed adultery with her in his heart.’”  The objectifying of another person as an object of sexual pleasure starts the person down a path which could lead to the sin of adultery, and begins not when the couple “hooks up,” but when the desires are unchecked in the heart.  Again, this is not what God intended for the human heart, and already shows a departure from the way that life is supposed to be in the Kingdom.  The human person is never an object to fulfill a need, but is a subject with inestimable dignity because he or she was created in the image and likeness of God.  This is why, as shocking as the teaching is, soon-to-be-Blessed Pope John Paul II could say that the sin of lust could occur even with a married couple, if one or both of the spouses was simply looking at or using the other spouse as an object of pleasure.

            This can seem really hard.  The bar is certainly set very high for us.  But, by the grace of God, this is possible.  And the payoff is literally “out of this world!”  As our first reading tells us, “If you choose you can keep the commandments, they will save you; [God] has set before you fire and water…life and death, good and evil, whichever [a person] chooses shall be given him.” 

            By ourselves we cannot keep the fulfillment of the Law that Jesus gives us.  There are too many times when we are drawn to anger: when someone cuts us off while driving; when a co-worker gossips about us; when a professor gives us a lower grade than we believe we deserve on an exam, paper, or project.  It is in these moments, and all those when we feel the onset of deep anger and hatred that we need to turn to the Lawgiver Himself, Jesus, and ask for his grace that we might be able to have His peace and cast out that hatred from our hearts so that it does not poison us and lead to other hateful acts.

            There are too many times in our very sensual culture when we are exposed to images of a human person with barely a fig-leaf on; when a salacious add pops up on the computer; when internet pornography is just a click away; when a movie adds a steamy sex scene.  It is in these moments that we need to turn to Jesus to ask Him for His grace to keep our hearts and minds pure so that we do not dwell on those thoughts and passions, and then have those passions develop into actions with others or by oneself. 

            The great news, too, is that if we should fall in a major way with anger or with lust, we have a loving God who will welcome us back if we are truly sorry and will forgive our sins through the Sacrament of Reconciliation.  That even if we break the fulfillment of the Law that Jesus gives us, because of His death and resurrection, we can come back into a good relationship with the Lawgiver, against whom we have sinned. 

Part of the way we express our hearts at the Mass is by how we greet each other.  In November, the greeting dialogues will change a little, but will remain, as they are now, a way of expressing the peace that we need to have before offering our gift at the altar of God.  As the priest, the person who acts in persona Christi capitis, in the person of Christ the Head, I offer you in the name of Christ, God, in whose name Jesus came, as I will say, “The Lord be with you.”  No change there.  Or, from time to time, expanding on what I am giving you as I greet you in the name of Christ, I might say, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all,” expressing the gift of the Trinity, based upon 2 Corinthians 13:13.  Not much different.  But, your response will change slightly, reflecting the words of 2 Timothy 4:22, and will be, “And with your spirit.”  All of this is simply to prepare our hearts to receive the Word of God and the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.

Christ has set the bar very high.  He has commanded us examine our hearts to see where our love truly is.  But if our hearts are configured to Jesus’ heart, then we know that we have eternal life waiting for us.  Let us lift up our hearts to the Lord, that our hearts will lead us to act justly and lovingly towards others, and so fulfill the Law that Christ has given us.