Who am I?

I really enjoy questions, problems and puzzles with definite answers.  I don’t particularly care how difficult the problem is to solve, as long as its solution is well-defined, specific, and precise.  Jigsaw puzzles, crosswords, Sudoku, Ken-ken, let me at them.  But give me one of those soft, touchy-feely questions and I’m looking for the nearest exit.

So someone asks me who I am and I say “Norman Roos.”  Oh, they say, that’s just your name, that doesn’t tell me who you are.  Okay, I say, I’m a teacher.  No, that’s not enough, that’s just what you do, who are you?  Ugh, self-reflection – the ultimate touchy-feely!   Is there any answer that is good enough?  Where’s the door?

Even though I’m out of my comfort zone, St. Paul insists that I know who I am.  And he also insists that my answer to this question is determined by my answer to the question of who Jesus is.  My very salvation hangs in the balance.  I can’t look for the door on this one, for the door I duck out of leads to hell.

Well, that puts today’s Gospel passage under a bright light, doesn’t it?  Jesus is asking his own disciples, as he is asking you and me, “Who do you say that I am?”  Peter seems to have the right answer, but if we can shed 2000 years of hindsight, we realize that Peter’s answer doesn’t really cut it - it’s ambiguous, open to many interpretations, some of which can lead us astray, one of which leads to salvation.

Peter claims that Jesus is “the Christ,” equivalent to the Hebrew word messiah – the anointed one.  For the Jews, two kinds of people were anointed ones, kings and priests.  The kings ruled over the people, the priests ruled over the temple and its sacrificial rituals, connecting the people to God.  Which one is Jesus, either, both, or even more?

King is an easy one.  Of course, Jesus is my king.  I want to obey him, I want to be judged righteous by him at the end of time, I pledge my loyalty to him.  But is that all he is to me?  Who do I become if I simply see him as my king, my law-giver, my judge? 

St. Paul knows, because St. Paul lived this life.  As a young man, called Saul at that time, he was a devout Jew, a Pharisee dedicated to strictly following the law given by God to Moses and the people on Mt. Sinai.  He was very proud of his obedience, but also judgmental and vindictive against those who opposed the law, or who simply didn’t follow the law as closely as he did. 

I become this same person when my focus on Jesus is simply obedience to laws of my king.  Unfortunately, I’m not even as good as Paul was at following the rules, so I’m easily frustrated by my failures and shortcomings.  My consolation is to claim that others are obviously a lot worse at this than me.  They commit much greater and more plentiful sins than me.  I may not be quite good at this, but they are the truly evil ones.  In sum, I become petty, judgmental, legalistic, self-righteous, and exclusionary.  This list goes on but it’s not a pretty picture.  It is a picture of hell.

What about Jesus as my priest, the holy one who connects me to God?  Jesus is certainly that.  Yet, when I limit my idea of Jesus to this, I become passive in my relationship to God.  After all, Jesus, my priest, takes care of that.  All I must do is show up, say the right prayers, offer my tithe to the Jesus the priest, and all is well.  And if Jesus has the God-thing covered, I can devote myself to making this life as comfortable for me and mine and I can.  I can even equate my worldly, material success as a validation of my God’s good graces.  If I’m doing well, it’s because I’ve accepted Jesus as my go-to guy with God.  I’m a bit confused when I’m not doing well.  I then look out for those who seem to have cheated me, who wish to take what I have, or wish to hurt those I love.  I become sanctimonious, greedy, selfish, and vengeful – another ugly picture, a picture of hell.

So who is this Jesus for me?  He is king, yet he does not simply give me laws, he lives the law that I am to follow – a law of love.  As he loves me, so I should love others.

He is my priest, yet not a mere connection to God, but he is one with God, offering his own life as sacrifice that I might be saved, that I might spend eternity in the presence of my all loving, God.  He calls me to follow him in love and to follow him in sacrifice, picking up his cross. 

He gives me the power to do this by being present to me in a very real sense every time I participate in this great celebration of thanksgiving – the Eucharist.  The sacrifice He made for us 2000 years ago transcends space and time to become present for me and for you this very day on this very altar.  And He promises to be with us until the very end of time.

When I see Jesus as my God, my Lord, my Savior, and the source of all my hope and my love and my strength, I am changed.  St. Paul tells the Galatians as he tells us that all the artificial divisions we cherish and live with – ethnicity, there is neither Greek nor Jew; gender, neither male nor female; social status, neither slave nor free – are irrelevant if we know that Jesus had sacrificed to save us all, simply because of who we are, created in God’s image, loved by God so much that he gave his only Son to us.  Our anxiety is transformed into peace, our fears into joy, greed into generosity, pettiness into kindness, violence into gentleness, hatred into love.   Led by the Spirit, our lives bear the fruits of the Spirit.

When I know in my heart that this is Jesus, I can answer confidently when asked who I am.  By God’s infinite and divine grace, in union with every other human being, I am a loved child of the all-loving God.

It is enough.          

Righteous attitude

Prayer, fasting and almsgiving have always have been a holy troika of righteous deeds in Judaism, Islam, and other religions – and they remain so for us today as well.  We hear this passage from Matthew (Mt 6:1-6, 16-18) every year on Ash Wednesday as we emphasize these three practices during our Lenten journey.   Today, we hear Jesus’ teachings on them in the context of the Sermon of the Mount, from which we’ve drawn the daily Gospel reading for the past week and a half.

Throughout the Sermon, Jesus emphasizes that righteousness lies not in our deeds themselves, but rather in our attitudes and motives behind the deeds.  Our motivation for any work that we do should be to draw ourselves closer to God, the source of total happiness.  Thus, our attitudes must not be rooted in the finite, relativistic, and conditional world in which we live, but in the infinite, absolute, and unconditional love of the God with whom we aspire to live, the God who so loves and desires to live with us.

Oftentimes, I find that my behavior belies my faith in this infinite, unconditional, and absolute love of God.  My attitude and my motivations are askew.  My eyes are not on the prize.

I pray, fast, give alms and dutifully adhere to the commandments in the hope that perhaps God will love me more if I am more diligent in my righteous acts.  Yet, how can God love me more if his love for me is already infinite? 

I turn away from others who so obviously do not love God and obey God’s commands as well as I do.  I refuse to help them; refuse to love them; refuse to forgive them as God must love these ne’er-do-wells less than he loves me.  Yet, how can this be if God’s love is unconditional?

I work hard, yet I am still anxious that I can earn enough of earth’s treasures – wealth, power, respect and honor – that I will be happy forever, yet how can this be if I can only find the absolute and eternal in the one who created the heavens and the earth, the one who will be, forever and ever, my God, my savior, my joy?

Today, Jesus reminds me to look behind my exterior acts, righteous though they may seem.  He insists that I set my interior disposition on the only thing that matters, the only thing that can save me, the only thing that can make me truly happy – being one with the infinite, unconditional, absolute and eternal love of God.

More than civil

I am eight years old and my mom’s birthday is coming up soon.  I have a dollar or two saved up from my allowance so I ask her what she wants for her birthday.  She says for me get along with my brothers, stop fighting and arguing with them and she will be happy.  Get along with my brothers!  This is way too much.  I’m thinking: why can’t I just do what everyone does and buy something or make something.  Isn’t that good enough?

And, of course, that is one of Jesus’ points today.  It is good to follow the law, for as Jesus says, not the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law and anyone who teaches against the law will be the least in heaven.  So the law is good, but it’s not good enough.

Without law, society as we know it would be impossible.  Laws are the basis of all civil societies.  Without laws, anarchy reigns.  Jesus knows that.  But Jesus wants more.  Jesus does not call us to be civil; he calls us to be holy.  Holy cannot be legislated, for holy is in our hearts.  Holy is in our souls.  Holy cannot come from Congress or the President or the Supreme Court.  Holy comes from God - the law fulfilled by the love of Jesus Christ, Son of God.

Following today’s passage (Mt 5:17-19), Jesus shows us how love fulfills the law.  Of course, we should not kill one another, it’s unlawful, and we are subject to judgment.  But anger, calling names, or thinking badly of one another is not against the law, yet it is unholy, for it disparages one whom God created out of love in his very image and likeness.  Anger subjects us to the judgment of God.

Of course, we should not exact undue retribution – an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth seems fair.  But this “just” retribution is unholy, for it contradicts the unconditional love that God has for us, the infinite mercy God showers upon us, and the eternal life that God has prepared for us.  Thus we should “turn the other cheek,” “walk the extra mile,” and “give the cloak with the tunic.”

One of the most important and, it would seem, most holy parts of the Jewish law was laws regarding sacrifice, the bringing gifts to the altar of God.  Just so, we have laws which obligate us to participate in the Eucharist.  Yet Jesus insists that true holiness – reconciling with one another, loving each other as God loves us, forgiving one another as God forgives us – is a necessary prelude to bringing gifts to God.  It is this day-after-day holiness which is our best and truest gift to God.

Of course, holiness is a much higher bar than mere civility and following the law.  I understood this even as an eight-year old boy who simply wanted to buy a present for his mom.  Instead of my easily purchased gift, she wanted what Jesus wanted – holiness.  Imagine that, my mom may not have known the Sermon on the Mount by heart, but she certainly knew it in her heart.

Holiness seems hard, that’s an understatement.  It is actually impossible for us to be holy simply by trying our best or by obeying the law.  But it is very possible to live holy lives with the grace of God, a grace that, as Pope Francis stated in one of his recent homilies, is offered to all – believers, atheists, and everyone in between.  

The only way to be holy is accept this universal grace.  This is faith.  This is the faith that saves us.  This is the faith that helps us realize the holiness and the godliness with which we were created.  This is faith that gives us the desire, courage and strength to obey the fulfilled law of love.

Only with this faith can we hope to meet the challenge that Jesus lays down for us at the end of Matthew 5 – be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect.

One flock, one shepherd

On the surface, it seems natural to celebrate the feast of a martyr like St. Boniface with Jesus describing himself as the Good Shepherd – the one who lays down his life for his sheep.  But for St. Boniface, the connection is even more apt.

As a young Anglo-Saxon boy in the late seventh century, St. Boniface entered a Benedictine monastery in what is now England.   He became very learned, eventually being ordained a priest in the monastery.  While a very successful teacher and on the “abbot track” at the monastery, he longed for more.  He felt called to be a missionary to his ancestors in what is now Germany.

When he arrived in Saxony, he discovered that the Christians there had slowly drifted back to paganism.  With the fall of the Roman Empire several centuries earlier, they had lost all connection to Rome and the pope.  Spiritually, they were rudderless.  Gradually, pagan practices and superstitions – even the worship of pagan gods – became common.  When Boniface traveled to Rome to report this, the Pope appointed him as bishop with the mandate to bring the people back to the Church.  After many, many years, Boniface was successful in this mission and today is regarded as the “Apostle to the Germans.”

But Boniface’s influence was far greater.  In reforming the German people, he also helped to reform the church in France, ruled by Charles Martel, Charlemagne’s grandfather, and then by Pepin the Short, Charlemagne’s father.  In doing so, he facilitated the union of this important family with the Pope – a relationship that led to the creation of the Holy Roman Empire in the year 800.  Boniface’s role fulfilled what Jesus tells us was his goal as the Good Shepherd – that there be one flock and one shepherd (Jn 10:16).

Ultimately, Boniface was martyred as he tried to draw more of the Germanic tribes – some of who had never been Christianized at all – into the one flock of Jesus Christ.  But long before he literally laid down his life, he had figuratively laid down his comfortable life in the monastery for the arduous work of a missionary to further this goal of unity.

Like Boniface, we are all called, in ways large and small, to promote unity among Jesus’ disciples and, ultimately, to draw others into the flock. 

But that’s always been a tough one for me.  I have been long conditioned to work independently, to earn my own keep, to look out for number one.  Surely, I’m willing to listen to and work with others, to be one with others, as long as they can help me maximize pleasure, possessions, power and protection for me and mine in this world. 

Boniface knew that this self-driven motive also drove the people to whom he preached.  He realized that this pattern could only be broken by creating unity with Rome and the vicar of Christ.  Without this intimate connection to the teachings and traditions that stretched back to the apostles and to Jesus himself, they would simply continue to drift their own way and Boniface would have no hope of rebuilding true faith among the German and Frankish tribes.

Thus, Boniface reminds me that my connection with the Church – the one flock led by the one shepherd – is vital.  He call me to consider how I have reconciled my personal feelings, interests and desires with the magisterium of the Church, with the teachings of the vicar of Christ, our holy father in Rome? 

Only by more building a deeper and more intimate connection with the Church, can I hope to figuratively lay down a life centered on self-gratification.  Only then can I even hope to do what Jesus calls me to do – place my complete trust in the God who loves me unconditionally and eternally, love my neighbor as myself, do unto others as I would have them do unto me, forgive seventy-seven times, and pray that I can offer my will that it becomes God’s will, but God’s will be done nonetheless. 

St. Boniface not only reminds us to be one with the shepherd, he also helps us to be one.  All we have to do is ask.

St. Boniface, pray for us.