Don't be afraid of John 6

 "Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

These are St. Peter’s words after many of Jesus’ disciples left him because of his “hard saying” on the Eucharist.

The creators of The Chosen, like many Protestants, skipped over John Chapter 6 and had St. Peter say these fateful words as Jesus was about to head into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.

They are certainly free to make their show however they want.

Since the series skipped John Chapter 6, it was moving to see Jonathan Roumie perform a dramatic reading of the later verses of the chapter on stage at the National Eucharistic Congress in July with the Middle Eastern accent he uses on the show.

He thanked the crowd for their attention as he would not have the opportunity to perform these pivotal words otherwise. Check out the full speech here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7iZEOxAWoE

Sunday Homily: Ephesians 5 and John 6

 “This saying is hard; who can accept it?”

These readings are packed with hard sayings.

Holy Mother Church even offers us a shorter version of that Second Reading in case we want to skip the hard parts.

But could skipping the difficult passages help create a healthy spiritual climate?

The shorter version skips the first part that says twice:

“Wives should be subordinate to their husbands…”

 

Perhaps people think it seems offensive or out of touch.

But when we unpack it, we see it really is beautiful.

In fact, properly understood, every bride preparing for marriage would insist on using this reading at her wedding.

And she would remind her husband of it often.

 

First, the translation says: “be subordinate.”

It does not say: “obey your husbands,” nor: “be subject to your husbands.”

Many of us know Fr. John Ricardo, from Catholic radio.

He wrote his doctoral dissertation on this passage.

He says the translation would be more accurate not to say: “be subordinate to your husbands,” but rather: “wives should subordinate yourselves to your husbands.”

This means: wives, who are absolutely equal in dignity to your husbands, trust yourselves to his loving care.

 

I find it helpful to unpack the reading in reverse.

We get all distracted in the first part of the reading anyway:

“What did he just say?”

And we miss the rest of the passage.

 

So, what are the obligations of the husband?

St. Paul offers more instructions for him than for her.

First, he is commanded to love his wife.

That is not optional.

 

“Husbands love your wives, even as Christ loved the church…”

How did Christ love the Church?

The crucifix is our reminder.

He laid down his life for His bride.

He died by crucifixion.

He asphyxiated.

He was no longer able to breathe.

He was hanging on a cross because of the nails that were driven through His hands and feet.

Before that: He carried His Cross to Calvary.

Before that: The very people He was suffering for fastened a crown of thorns onto His head to humiliate Him.

The Shroud of Turin shows 36 puncture wounds to his scalp, eyebrows, and ears.

Before that: His arms were wrapped around a pillar to stretch out his back to be scourged. 

If there were no children present, we could go into more detail about how that was done.

We could talk about the instruments the Romans used to maximize damage and suffering.

Before that: He made his commitment to go through it all, as He prayed on the Mount of Olives.

In that garden He took on the guilt of humanity that had offended God with every single sin.

The sins of the world caused such distress that He sweated blood.

The name for that is: Hematidrosis.

 

The point is:

Jesus is not pleasing himself but rather spending himself for the good of his bride, the Church.

He models love, self-denial, spending ourselves for the good of another.

 

In the reading, St. Paul refers to Jesus as the head of His Church.

His self-emptying love makes him so.

The husband as head is not boss of his wife.

The head is the one who takes the initiative in being a servant for the beloved.

A husband can never really be head of his wife until he imitates Christ the head, and gives himself up for his bride.

 

“Husbands love your wives, even as Christ loved the church…”

The word “love” has lost its true meaning in our culture.

English only has one word.

The Greeks have 4 words for love.

In our present day culture, to love something means to desire it.

“I love pizza,” means I desire pizza.

So, with our cultural ears, when we hear St. Paul say, “husbands love your wives,” me might hear: “Husbands desire your wives.”

So, the uninformed husband might say:

“Yeah, that’s easy. Now she has to be submissive to me, right.”

Wrong!

If the husband doesn’t hand himself over for love if his wife, there is nothing for her to entrust herself to.

 

We recognize: The love St. Paul refers to is not an emotional feeling or a desire.

Rather, it is a decision of the intellect to do the good of the other.

And what is the ultimate good? communion with God, now, and forever in Heaven!

So, if a guy decides to love his wife, by making decisions with his intellect, that result in her good, what does this look like?

 

St. Paul tells us in the reading as he continues explaining how Jesus loved the Church.

This is how husbands are to imitate him in loving their wives.

St. Paul says Jesus “handed himself over for her to sanctify her…”

He is making her holy.

He continues with a few more descriptors: “cleansing her,” “in splendor, without spot or wrinkle,” “holy and without blemish.”

 

So, the loving husband is going to lay down his life for his bride, serving her instead of himself, making her holy, and whisking her off to the joy of Heaven for eternity.

So, if the husband’s life agenda is this self-giving love, that results in Heaven for his wife, what woman wouldn’t be delighted to subordinate herself to his initiative?

 

There’s even an online support group for men who want to live this.

They call themselves e5 men, short for Ephesians 5.

One requirement for membership is for the men to fast on bread and water for one day a month, for the spiritual growth of their wives.

That is love.

That is choosing Heaven, the ultimate good for the beloved.

 

The hard sayings in these readings invite us to make decisions.

In Ephesians 5, husbands are called to decide to put themselves aside, do the good for their brides, ultimately choosing the good of Heaven.

In the first reading, Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel to decide whom they would serve, false gods or the One True God.

In the Gospel we hear that people were leaving the Lord and returning to their former way of life because of His teaching on the Eucharist.

Peter and the apostles decided to stay with Him.

 

Now we have the opportunity to ask ourselves:

Are the decisions I make nudging my loved ones and me closer to Jesus or closer to Hell?

Do the decisions I make prove that I love the people I say I love?

The grace of the sacrament of matrimony makes it possible.

Our spiritual nourishment in the Eucharist makes us more and more like Jesus, the one we receive.

Issue 1 in Ohio; What to do next

How do we move on from the passage of Issue 1 in Ohio? I keep coming back to the need to tell the world what abortion is: the physical killing of small humans in the womb. The medical textbooks show it. Every doctor knows it. And the only reason some of them do it is because they hold radical autonomy higher than human life. And be assured: the politicians will not remind us what abortion is. We have to do it. So, that’s one task. 

Perhaps we have seen the photo of the pro-abort lady with her sign at a rally: “Unlimited Free Abortion.” Let me get this straight: You are going to do the thing that makes humans, and if a human happens to be made, you want the human you made to be killed and I have to pay for it. That means the second task at hand is to get people to care about someone other than themselves. 

Leading up to the election I was praying in front of the abortion facility. A Pepsi driver was flipping me off as he drove his truck past me. Why would he want abortion to be legal rather than illegal? It ensures that men can do whatever they want with women without ever having to make a commitment or a gift of self. Since the anthropology of the world seems to be doing whatever feels good at the time, our third task is to show the world there is a more adequate anthropology. That Pepsi driver is made to make a gift of self, a commitment in love, not to be a perpetual baby in a candy store. His girlfriend is designed to nurture life. If only we could share the Theology of the Body with the world! 

I posit that abortion is the worst because of the sheer number of occurrences and that every one of those victims is innocent and is killed. It is worse than slavery, and segregation as horrible as those things were. Imagine the outcry across the world if one of our southern states put a referendum on the ballot to reinstate segregation. Every bishop in the country, and maybe even the world would decry it. The pope would decry a state referendum from the Vatican. But we heard from very few outside the six bishops in Ohio over Issue 1, the legal killing of the innocent. 

Can we call our society civilized? The pagan Romans killed the unborn. The Aztecs performed human sacrifice. Christians stopped it for a while, but it’s back. The human person has shown he does not know or choose what is good for himself. Look at the recent destructive history in Ohio. With one vote over 50%, we can vote in casinos as we try to gamble ourselves into prosperity. We can legalize marijuana for an altered state of consciousness. We can make it legal to kill the unborn. The aged are next because they will also be deemed inconvenient. Then what? Prostitution? Why not? Society can argue they are consenting adults. Laws can be put in place attempting to regulate it. They will sell it by convincing the masses that money can be put aside for education, like they always tell us. 

The human person will never find fulfillment in any of these things but only in a gift of self as per our design. Read or listen to Theology of the Body, a more adequate anthropology.

Musings on Life

Over the past several months, I jotted down some thoughts on the sacredness of human life. Here is the most recent train of thought:

I recall before the Dobbs decision came down this past June that I was fairly optimistic that people were mostly pro-life and would like to see the killing of unborn humans go away but just lacked the political energy to fight something that seemed so permanent, remains hidden, and has been allowed as "the law of the land" for nearly 50 years. 

In my optimistic train of thought, I would make excuses for people. "They vote for all these pro-abortion politicians at all levels because Roe is too solidly in place," or: "Since the overturning of Roe seems so unlikely, they vote for more social programs." And I kept coming back to the seven unelected justices on the Supreme Court who made the killing of unborn humans legal. I thought: "If only the people had the chance to vote on it, the killing of unborn humans would go away." We know when life begins. Science is on the side of life. Heck, there's not even much of a stigma these days for a woman to have a child out of wedlock.

Then on November 8, 2022, Election Day, I realized I have been overly optimistic. People in several states all over the country voted in favor of making it legal to kill unborn humans. Moreover, the pro-abortion side is no longer about "safe, legal and rare." Now it's about: Have as much sex as you want. Human beings will be created. Kill as many of them as you want before they are born and have the taxpayers pay for it.

Come Lord Jesus!

Death of Roe

The death of Roe brings three things to mind that I would like to mention:

First: Thanks be to God! I was starting to wonder if I would see the end of Roe v. Wade in my lifetime.

Second: It may be helpful if we defenders of innocent human life continue to point out, every chance we get, that there is a strong precedent for earlier, wrong and embarrassing Supreme Court cases to be overturned by newer, more correct ones, as better information becomes available. For example, virtually no one disagrees with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas as it overturned the now shameful Plessy v. Ferguson case which allowed for "separate but equal" 58 years prior. Dobbs overturning Roe is likewise a beautiful correction.

Third: What about future embarrassment for companies who are on the wrong side of history? Just like slavery and the extermination of Jews are on the wrong side of history, I am confident that the killing of the unborn will some day be on the wrong side of history. Even though I was born almost three decades after the end of World War II, I remember in my early adulthood a story that was still a public relations nightmare for the Bayer Company. Reports show that they supported the Third Reich and benefitted from experiments that were done on human subjects who were imprisoned in the Nazi's concentration camps: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/bayer

An apology was issued in 1995: https://apnews.com/article/7b473229d1d46f012c2639d4648319d7

How embarrassing will it be for Disney and all these other companies when they are found to be on the wrong side of history for funding their employees' travel to get abortions in states where it is less restrictive? https://www.reuters.com/world/us/companies-offering-abortion-travel-benefits-us-workers-2022-06-24/

Do they provide it for the sake of profits? Is it because maternity leave causes a disruption in efficient production? I would rather see them profit by promoting human life and more future customers.

My prayer is for the conversion of hearts. Come Lord Jesus!

Sunday Homily: Baptism of the Lord - Union with God

This homily is four months in the making. It contains some thoughts and reflection from my sabbatical. Since it is now in print form in this blog, I am not constrained by time, so have developed certain parts a little further.

Because I kept a journal, I can tell you exactly how it went down. On September 17^th, I received an email blast from Dr. Scott Hahn, a Catholic Bible scholar who used to be a Protestant minister. He wrote about two things in the email blast: 1) Holiness; and 2) the question: Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus?

He wrote: “As a Protestant, I must have asked people that question a thousand times. And not once did I doubt what the answer should be. If a person didn’t have a personal relationship with Jesus, then they needed a personal relationship with Jesus. A personal relationship with Jesus, I believed, was that for which every one of us was made. Then I became Catholic. And I realized God was calling us to so much more than a personal relationship with Himself. …God isn’t calling us to a mere relationship. He’s calling us to union. He’s calling us to be filled with His own life. He’s calling us to become partakers of His divine nature. That sounds radical. But it sounds even more radical as we grow in our understanding of the holiness of God. When Christians use the word “holy,” we usually mean someone who is good, who is prayerful, charitable, and long-suffering. But God’s holiness is a consuming fire. It surpasses what our minds can comprehend. And yet, that’s the holiness we’re called to possess.” (Bold emphasis in original; italicized emphasis mine)

Pope St. John Paul II encouraged us to add the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary to our prayer lives. The first Mystery is all about today’s feast: the Baptism of the Lord Jesus in the Jordan. As Christians, we imitate Jesus and follow his command to be baptized. This is when our union with him begins. We are made new as sons and daughters of God. We receive the life of God, active in us, which we call grace. St. John Paul II gave us these mysteries because it’s exactly what we need. We have forgotten the power of baptism. Some people even wait to have their children baptized as if something better is going to come along. All that does is decide that the child will not have faith. Nothing better is coming. Union with God is the best thing. It’s why we were made. And it begins with baptism.

In talking about union with Jesus, I sometimes use the word “relationship,” but I use it with caution. We have hundreds of human relationships. But in every one of them, I’m over here and you’re over there. No human relationship will ever be like the union that Jesus wants with us: union on a soul-deep level where we partake in His divine nature. Therefore, this is an important part of the answer to another question many of us likely hear from our friends: “Why do I feel so much better when I leave the big box church than when I leave Mass?”

Feel? Is it about how we feel? Or is it about Jesus whom we know with our intellect? St. Teresa of Calcutta had a 40-year dry spell. She didn’t feel good about Jesus for decades. But she knew she received him in the Eucharist every day. Read St. Paul, who wrote about 2/3 of the New Testament. Did he ever write about the importance of feeling good? On the contrary: He wrote about the multiple times he was whipped with 39 lashes, the times he was stoned, shipwrecked, starved, etc. St. Paul did not feel good, but he knew he had union with Jesus from the moment Ananias baptized him. He knew it was Jesus he was receiving as he offered Mass. Then when he did get the chance to stop and pray, did he feel good in prayer? He said he had concern for all the churches on his heart. Could he focus or was he distracted? He probably was not feeling good consolations in prayer.

Let’s not forget about the related topic of holiness, which I mentioned at the beginning. At the same time I was reflecting on these things, I was also reading St. Josemaría Escrivá. He wrote: “There is no such thing as second-class holiness. Either we put up a constant fight to stay in the grace of God and imitate Christ, our Model, or we desert in that divine battle.”

Plus, my meditation that day from In Conversation with God by Fr. Francis Fernandez ended with this: “All roads that lead to God have to pass through prayer and sacrifice.” Moreover, in the Gospel that day, Jesus used a parable to talk about those who follow quickly with joy and then fall away. Fr. Fernandez added: “At the moment of truth they succumb because their allegiance to Christ has been rooted solely in feeling and not in prayer.”

Prayer is difficult! Are we seeking ourselves, or are we seeking God? St. Augustine pointed out: “Few look for Jesus for the sake of Jesus.” Will we follow Jesus in prayer, sacrifice, in His footsteps, even if the path is difficult? The Lord Jesus calls the pleasures of the world “thorns.” St. Basil the Great points out: Pleasures don’t seem like thorns at the time, but we end up with bloody hands. The bottom line is: prayer and mortification bring fruit; focus on feeling good is sterile.

It is worth pointing out here in print something I did not take time to expand in the homily in my desire to keep it short and streamlined. Feelings are gifts from God and can be quite useful. They are neither good nor bad in themselves but need to be used appropriately. We just need to be careful not to be misled by our feelings, or to make decisions based on feelings alone without the use of intellect. “Mot” is the root of both the words “emotion” and “motivation,” so we can see they are related. It is possible to have an emotional experience from a certain type of music, for example, or to be fired up by a motivational speaker, and think we are having a spiritual experience. It certainly may be a spiritual experience, but maybe not. And we certainly should not forget what we know with our intellect.

When it comes to worshiping God and entering into union with Jesus, we don’t need a motivational speaker that makes us feel good. And even though we do our best to praise God in song, our music will never be to the same level as the entertainment industry. What we do need is a generous yes to share in the divine nature of the Lord Jesus. We need a real union with Him, which we know He brings about in the Sacraments of His Church.

So, what do we do now? Love demands that we invite others to the best thing, which is union with Jesus. I tried it just the other day. I assured a friend, who is a fallen-away Catholic, that I am praying for his mother, who is declining in health. But I also revealed that I am praying for his return to Sunday Mass. Much to my delight, he said it has already been on his mind and he is making plans for his return. Thank you, Jesus!

End of the Pilgrimage

Santiago de Compostela is the end of the pilgrimage for pilgrims who make the Camino de Santiago. So, it seems appropriate that Santiago de Compostela was my final side trip of my sabbatical before heading back home. I was fortunate enough to concelebrate Mass at the main altar here in the cathedral of Santiago (St. James) and pray at his tomb:

As pilgrims enter the cathedral at the end of the camino, they encounter the world's most famous giant thurible, the "Botafumeiro," which takes eight men to operate. Since I was not there on a feast or solemnity, I did not get to see it in action, but there is plenty of video footage online.

Find out more at: http://catedraldesantiago.es/en/