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The body is the incarnation of the unique person, a gift from God and a gift oriented towards relationship; indeed, it is the sacrament of encounter and communion in the very likeness of the Persons of the Holy Trinity. And this sacramental encounter with God, this “light of the glory of God shining in the face of Christ” (2 Cor 4:6) is an encounter with ineffable and uncreated Beauty. There is therefore another question we must ask. Namely: what is beauty? Beauty is often described as that which attracts when beheld or received. Visible beauty attracts the eyes, captures our attention, and invites the heart along with the eyes. Audible beauty draws the attention of the listening ear, and the heart with the ear. The beauty of coherent clarity, of harmonious unity in the mind, draws the spirit, draws forth the intuition of the heart with a compelling and yet gentle force. The beauty of drama, of story, issues an invitation to us to step forth into its sphere, to co-live it, to experience it. Here we see that beauty does indeed attract; and yet beauty is not attractive merely because it is pleasant, though this may seem to be the case on the surface. Rather, what is pleasant and what is beautiful are very different things.
A pleasant meal is precisely that, enjoyable, but it is not beautiful for that reason. Basking in the sunlight is pleasant because of its warmth and comfort; but the beauty of the sunlight is something different than the pleasure it gives. Here we see that the true philosophy of beauty is something far different than hedonism, the pursuit of the deepest possible pleasure with the least amount of pain. Rather, beauty is something that surpasses pleasure, even though most kinds of beauty (perhaps all), in the process of being received, bestow pleasure, if not of the senses, at least of the mind or heart or emotions. For there is beauty also in heroic virtue, in an act of generous self-sacrifice, in suffering born with nobility, and indeed in the very being of a person who has allowed himself to be transformed by the grace and love of God, becoming in this process, holy. Here, in beholding the beauty of such realities, we see that beauty is far more than the mere attraction of pleasure. But we also need to acknowledge that beauty is more than the mere attraction to the promise of our own personal fulfillment. Beauty is more than the mere promise of benefit. I can be attracted to things because I recognize, even just intuitively, even just instinctively, that they are “good for me,” that they will help to fulfill me as a person. But this promise is not beauty. So here a distinction must be made which will lead us to our conclusion. Beauty is the voice of goodness, the voice of the good. Philosophical thought distinguishes what are termed three “transcendental properties of being,” meaning three aspects of everything that exists, which can be found in all things. They are beauty, goodness, and truth. All things that exist portray themselves to us as beautiful, as good, and as true. And yet these properties are transcendent because they point beyond themselves, or rather the manifestation of these properties in limited, imperfect, transient created things points to their utter fullness in the infinite Being, in God. God is infinite and eternal Beauty, Goodness, and Truth. And there is an order, a harmony, between these properties of being. In fact they are only one, converging in a unity at the heart of Being, and in the heart of every created being as it is rooted in God’s creative love and his cherishing gaze. Thus the core of Being itself, its essence, is Love. Love is the Truth of all things, and this Love is Good, this Love is Beauty. And thus being is also always relational, it is always communion, intimacy. Here we get a glimpse of the heart of the life of God, the inmost mystery of the Trinity. In God, who is Being in its fullness, all is pure Relationship, the everlasting Communion of the three divine Persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The words of Saint John, “God is Love,” therefore imply that God is both the act of loving—which includes everything involved in this, namely a gaze of receptive, cherishing tenderness, as well as the pouring out of one’s heart to the other and the welcoming of them into oneself—and also the fullness of love, which is Communion, the co-living of persons within one another in the joy of mutual belonging, the fullness of life which is perfect intersubjectivity. All of this is to say that being is not merely abstract, or even merely concrete. Being is also always personal. The fullness of Being, God, is eternally personal, eternally the intimacy of three Persons united in love. And everything that exists within this world derives from God, is born of God’s own love expanding out of the inner life of the Trinity in order to create outside of itself, to pour itself out in gratuitous and cherishing generosity. And nothing can exist in created reality that has not already existed, in its utter fullness, in its all-surpassing perfection, in God himself. Thus all created being is also personal, both in being born of the creative life of the personal God, as well as in being seen by the personal gaze of God at each moment, this gaze that holds all things in existence without ceasing. Here we can summarize and come to our conclusion about the nature of beauty. There are three transcendental properties of being: beauty, goodness, and truth. And these three are the traits of the Love-that-is-Communion. The essence of being, created being imperfectly and uncreated Being perfectly, is love-that-is-communion. Love-Communion is the essence of all things as participation in the life of God, as born of him and sustained by him. Thus all things bear a Trinitarian stamp and are Trinitarian in their core, rooted in God and pointing to him, even as in their imperfection and limitation they are infinitely below him who is utter fullness of Love, utter consummation of the Intimacy between three infinite and eternal Persons. In this world all things exist in interrelationship with one another, and for relationship; even impersonal and organic things do so. But human persons, the apex of God’s creation fashioned in his own image and likeness, live and are oriented towards this essence of being in the fullest possible way. Being in his image, we are persons after the likeness of the divine Persons. We do not merely bear the mark of personal love, as a tree bears the mark of God’s personal love which has fashioned it, and a painting bears the mark of the personal love of its painter; rather, we are gifted with the mystery of personal existence. We are persons who are not a mere “what,” but a “who.” We have our own inner subjective life—what we termed as solitude—which is opened in nakedness to interpersonal relationship in mutual self-giving, aimed at the fulfillment of communion. Thus we share in being in the fullest way, since, as we said, all being is personal and personhood is the highest expression of being. The fullness of Being is Persons, Persons united eternally in Love. We have been created in God’s image as persons precisely so that, through reciprocal love, we can be transformed in him and exist in the manner that he does. We have been made in his image so we can live in his likeness, namely, in the fullness of personal relationship, in intimacy. All of this is important to say, but we need to distill it down to return to our point. If all being is personal, rooted in the ultimate Being who is Persons-in-Love, then this illumines our understanding of the three transcendental properties of being: beauty, goodness, and truth. When I referred to the essence of being, in fact, I was speaking about the truth. The truth is defined simply as “what is.” Truth is the what-ness of things, their core identity. The Truth of God is that he is a Trinity of Persons united in perfect Love. The truth of human persons is that we are created persons fashioned in the image of God and called to his likeness, unique in our singular identity and yet opened wide to communion with God, with other created persons, and indeed with the whole creation. This is our truth. And this truth is good. Goodness, the Good, is the property of truth that makes it desirable, but not only desirable but desirable under a particular aspect. Or rather, the good is manifested in many degrees. Food is good, for example, both because it tastes good—the enjoyable or pleasant good—but also because it nourishes our body—the utilitarian or necessary good. But under both of these there is also a gratuitous good; in other words, food is good by the very fact of its existing, of its participation in being. Everything that exists is good simply because it is, because it shares in the perfection of being, which is made and sustained by God, and leads back, ultimately, to the fullness of Being who is God himself. This is what Scripture means when it recounts that God, looking upon all that he made, exclaimed: “It is very good!” It is good not only because we get anything out of it (though this is also good, and rightly so), but simply because it exists, because it manifests the mystery of being. Here we touch upon what Gerard Manley Hopkins terms “inscape,” and which he said poetry sought to express (we could say all art). Inscape is the inner expanse that lives within each limited thing, an expanse that points beyond itself towards the infinity of God who sustains it, as well as reveals the inner richness of each thing itself in God’s intentions, the “inner richness” hidden within it. Each thing thus has, as it were, a “bounded infinity” within it. A created thing is not infinite; it is limited. But because it participates in being and points back to God, God himself and his own eternal Being can be encountered in and through it; and, in fact, even the smallest of created things cannot be fully known or loved unless loved in the light of the eternal Being. This is how the new creation at the end of time, when the light of the Trinity-as-Communion shall permeate all things, shall reveal the true goodness and meaning of all things, and thus bring them to consummation in God. We see in the prophecy of the temple that is Christ’s body something beautiful. We see that humanity, and the human body itself, becomes the dwelling-place of God and the space where grace pours out freely and in abundance to water and fecundate the entire creation. This is the basis of all the Sacraments of the New Covenant, but also the deepest confirmation and realization of the “sacramentality” that has marked the human body, and indeed all of material, created reality, from the beginning of time.
Severed from the fatherhood of God, from his goodness and his gift, we have lost the ability also to see and understand ourselves, our own unique existence, as a gift—our bodies as a gift, our gender as a gift, and every moment of our life in all its rich fabric as a gift. “A world charged with the grandeur of God” has become instead a world that is hardly more than the domain of “individual rights” and “causes” where every person is fighting to create and defend his own reality against others, and demanding the institutionalization of these rights (for institutional approval is the “last step” on the road of redefining reality). Only when we can see the body again as it truly is, as belovedness and as capacity for love, can we heal from the wounds that afflict us. And we can only rediscover this truth if we rediscover God and his love. The body has become opaque because the spirit has become anemic. The body is gorged because the spirit is starved, or the body is starved because the spirit is insecure, lost, and afraid. And this rupture of the body, of relation to the body, and of our beholding of the body—whether in art, in media, or in person—is not an accidental and side problem. Rather, it is central. Why is this? Because the body is the locus in which all the questions of human life are ultimately asked, and in which they play out. Even abstract thought is first of all born from concrete, bodily experience, and should remain rooted in the concreteness and singularity of what is, of material, bodily reality. So too holiness and wholeness cannot be merely in the mind or the spirit. Rather, the fullness of our humanity comes about when body and spirit are united together in complete harmony once again, such that the inmost truth of our spirit lives in every act and experience of the body, and the body participates fully and freely in everything pertaining to the spirit. There is something more primary, and in which this reconciliation within ourselves (and also with other created persons and the whole created order) can occur: namely reconciliation with God, healing from the rupture caused by sin and admittance back into communion with God who is Love. Thus the heart of all holiness is not self-enclosed perfection, but atonement, in its literal meaning as at-one-ment, the making one of Lover and Beloved in a single embrace of mutual belonging. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. By looking at our bodies and contemplating their meaning, we can find a “doorway” back into the meaning of the entire universe itself, and of our own humanity within it. We can indeed discover ourselves as “dialogue-partners” of the divine, of God, who has created us as we are precisely to stand before him as child before Father, bride before Bridegroom, creature before Creator. He has created us for prayer, and not just to pray, but to be prayer, living prayer incarnate, a prayer springing from the indivisible unity of our entire being—body and spirit—as “a living sacrifice holy and acceptable to God, our spiritual worship” (Rom 12:1), consummated in intimacy with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. What then is the meaning of the body? The body is gift, a gift oriented towards the communion of persons in mutual self-giving, bathed in reverence and tenderness. My body is me, and what I do in my body I do as me, just as the way that I see, respond to, and treat the bodies of others is done to them. This is an essential truth: the body is the incarnation of the person. It is not an external appendage, a tool, a mere accident that can be traded out for another body or for a wholly body-less existence. Rather, my own spiritual identity as a person, while transcending the mere body, nonetheless lives in and as the body, as my fully in-the-flesh self that I experience each day, with all of its desires, feelings, aches, pains, limitations, and longings. And this is not a regrettable truth, nor a state that is temporary, eventually to pass away when I cast off this external prison and take flight into the purely spiritual realm. Rather, this is a positive plan on the part of God, his gift to me. The body is gift first of all because it is God’s gift to me, the gift of my being, of this embodied spirit who I am, in which I enter into relationship with him, with other persons, and with the whole of the visible creation. The body is the locus of belovedness, where I experience anew every day the concrete gift of my existence as a human being. It is where I experience my own solitude, not merely as an aloneness, an isolation, but as the capacity and openness—and therefore longing—of my heart to reach out beyond itself in order to receive another and to give myself. And thus the body is gift also in the sense of being the locus of encounter, the space in which I make contact with others, with all things, and am invited to receive them into the sanctuary of my heart, made a home of reverent tenderness, as well as to entrust myself into the welcoming embrace of others. Through this encounter, solitude is opened to solitude, heart speaks to heart through the body, and unity is born. But unity can come about only when the body is seen, not as an object of use, whether for my own hedonistic or pragmatic purposes, but rather as a living person deserving of love. Indeed, true love welcomes others in all of their bodiliness, not merely as “other,” as a “you” standing before my “I.” Rather, love is also empathy; it is the ability to feel with and for the other person the resonance of their own subjective experience, and in this feeling to reverence them there, in the sacred space of their own solitude. Of course, in the limitations of this mortal life I cannot ordinarily experience the subjectivity of another person (namely their own inner experience of their own life), but I can draw near, I can welcome, and I can taste with the eyes of love something of their own sacred inner mystery and experience. What a beautiful truth, but also how vulnerable! Through my body I am exposed, I am as it were opened to the gaze and approach of another person, and they to me. The body, after all, always speaks a language of gift, and invites to relationship, to unlock the doors to the solitude of the heart. Thus the body is always also nakedness. And to the degree that this mystery of nakedness is lived by persons in mutual beholding, this vulnerability by which they share themselves with each other and allow themselves to be seen, unity is born. Intimacy is birthed from the sharing of nakedness in love. Of course there are many forms of nakedness, and many degrees of sharing. The innermost sanctum of our solitude, for example, is only shared with those most deserving of our trust, just as we should hope to receive others in this sacred solitude of their hearts only if we are trustworthy, and also hear from God his own word of entrustment giving us permission to enter into this holy space. From solitude through nakedness to unity. This is the trajectory of human life incarnate within the body. In fact, these are the primal experiences that lie at the foundation of all experience, the fabric that makes up—even unconsciously—every experience that we have within this world. The body is solitude oriented through nakedness to unity. It is, thus, a vessel of encounter and of love. It is, to speak most clearly, a sacrament. In other words, the body is the making-visible-of-the-invisible so that it may become a gift between persons for the establishment of unity. This is what all the Sacraments of the Church exist for, in forging and deepening the relationship of covenant-union between God and ourselves and also our unity as members of his single mystical Body. But the Sacraments themselves can only be sacraments because the human body is first a sacrament. John Paul understood this well when he wrote, as the “thesis statement” to his own Theology of the Body: The body, in fact, and only the body, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden from eternity in God, and thus to be a sign of it. (19.4) We see here that the visibility of the human body—and also, of course, the visibility of the entire created universe, beheld and received in the body—is a true sacrament that grants us access to the sphere of what is not visible. We cannot see the heart of another person; we cannot see God; we cannot see the angelic realm or, indeed, the inner essence of anything that God has made. It is, as it were, concealed from our eyes. And yet, through the body, through materiality, it is made manifest, made naked, to be received, loved, cherished, affirmed, and cared for. But the body is a sacrament, materiality is a sacrament, because it veils even as it reveals; in other words, it protects even as it communicates. The body is like a doorway to the heart, and yet also more than a mere doorway. It is the heart spread out into the visible word, in order to enter into communication with other hearts and with the essence of all things as created and sustained by God. But the body can be opaque, proving a locked door, if the heart of the beholder is not pure. The impure heart corrupts what it sees just as it pollutes what it touches. It cannot see through the body to the inner meaning. It does not understand; and worse, it usually twists and distorts the image, the sacrament, in the very process of receiving it. As Jesus made so clear, only the pure of heart can see: “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God” (Mt 5:8). Indeed, whenever the twisting tendencies of our fallen nature due to original and personal sin are purged and healed, what before was a stumbling-block becomes transparent and radiant with pure light. For the temptation lies not in created things, not in the body, but in the impurity of our own hearts. “God created all things that they might exist, and the creatures of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them; and the dominion of Hades is not on earth” (Wis 1:14). Thus, whenever our hearts are truly made pure by grace, everything is pure. “To the pure all things are pure” (Tit 1:15). In fact, the human body itself is not a temptation, not a near occasion of sin. It remains as it was in the beginning: the gift of the person radiant with the light of God and bathed in his love, the sacrament of encounter between persons where intimacy is born. Yes, it is marked by suffering, illness, mortal limitation, and destined for death, and the radiance of God through the human body is dimmed. But this dimming is not an eradication; the integrity of the body remains, and its beauty, and its capacity both to reveal the person as well as to be seen and cherished as the person. But even further, the body is not only the manifestation of the person whose body it is; it is not only a sacrament of encounter between persons. As the above quotes make clear: the body is a revelation of the mystery of God, of the inner life of the Most Blessed Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.” God, and not merely man, not merely creation. The pure, indeed, see God in and through all things, tapping back into the sacramentality that marks the whole visible universe. So too they are able to begin to behold the human body, even in all of its frailty, in the light of eternity, to begin to see it again with virginal eyes that look beyond the temporal sexual capacity (which shall pass away) and to the chaste capacity for interpersonal relationship, to the radiant mystery of the inner person manifest in the body. And they see God in the body, God’s image manifest through the orientation of the person from solitude, through nakedness, to unity. For God’s eternal life is nothing but Love, the Love that is the origin of the whole universe, of human heart and body. And this Love has fashioned us to live according to love, to relate to one another, to all things, and to God himself, in the way that the divine Persons relate to one another for all eternity. For the Father unveils himself before his Son without reserve, in breathtaking tenderness bestowing his very self upon his Beloved as a gift, and in this process giving the Son the gift of his own being and identity. And the Son welcomes the gift of the Father totally, accepting and cherishing the gift of his own self in intimacy with the Father, and allows this gift to flow back to the Father with an equal tenderness, bathed in immeasurable delight born of a gaze of cherishing love. Yes, in this movement of mutual self-giving between the Father and the Son, in which the depths of the beauty of each is beheld by the other in the very process of being given, and is received and sheltered in the very process of being received, the deepest and most perfect intimacy is consummated. And this energy of love binding the Father and the Son together, this kiss of unity that they share, the radiant fruit of their intimacy as well as the seal of their mutual belonging, is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, born of the love of the Father and the Son, is also seen and loved uniquely in himself, welcoming the gift of the Father and the Son and letting himself flow back as gift into each of them. This threefold unity, this triple belonging in a single life of love, makes the three divine Persons truly One, One God in three Persons, and three Persons in One God. For the Love they share is One; the life they live is One; they are distinguished from one another not by what separates them (for nothing separates them!), but rather by the fullness of relationship in which they exist, which totally permeates all that they are such they are defined by their very relationships: the Father is the Father because he is the One who begets the Son and births the Spirit; and the Son is the Son because he is the One begotten of and united to the Father and the One who, with the Father, breathes forth the Spirit of their union; and the Spirit is the common bond of the Father and Son, the gift of love that they share as well as the fruit of their love, cherished by both and sealing their union. How amazing this is! This is the reality from which and for which God created us. In our very bodies we are meant to share in the inner life of the Trinity. But because of sin we have fallen far from our destiny, and experience agonizing fracture from our identity as God’s beloved. This is why God the Father sent his Beloved Son into the world, taking to himself a body of flesh as the Sacrament of union between God and humanity. Yes, in his Incarnation, the Son of God, taking humanity unto himself, wedded every single human person, every single human body, lifting us up in nuptial union into himself and carrying us into the joy of his own filial intimacy with the Father in the Spirit. And through this union he has permeated our being with the light and grace of God anew, to heal what was wounded by sin, to unseal the beauty that was blocked by darkness, and to join all the energies of heart, mind, will, and body to his own eternal love, such that we can love with the very love with which he has first loved us. In the Paschal Mystery of his Eucharist, Passion, and Resurrection the Son has met us at the heart of our solitude, at the innermost sanctuary of our hearts wounded by sin and yet longing for redemption. He has met us and has unveiled himself to us in complete, vulnerable nakedness. He has laid bare his own Heart and his own Body upon the Cross. He has given it as a sacramental gift in the Eucharist, which makes present, fully and truly, throughout time and space the reality of his gift of self on the Cross. And the One we receive in the Eucharist is the Risen One. For the gift of himself in the most vulnerable place of suffering and death, meeting us where we need him the most, did not end here, but carried us across the chasm of ruptured relationship, across the fear of definitive aloneness, and into the joy of everlasting communion at the heart of the Trinity’s embrace. In the Resurrection Christ carries humanity definitively into the innermost life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And in the Eucharist he gives himself to us in the fullness of this glorious life, victorious over all suffering and death. By welcoming him in faith and Sacrament, and letting the energies of healing and transfiguring grace permeate our being and our life, we are little by little prepared for our own definitive resurrection, our own passage beyond the boundary of death and into the endless life of God. Indeed, the redemption wrought in Christ has already permeated the entire universe like a hidden seed, present and at work, germinating in the heart of every created thing and every human life, making it new, until the definitive renewal comes at the end of time. Then Jesus will return to bring about a new heavens and a new earth, irradiating all things with the unmediated light of the Trinity and lifting it up into the heart of the Trinitarian embrace. Indeed, there the obscurity of the invisible, communicated only through the body, will pass away. In that most blessed home, which is nothing but the life of the Trinity made visible and tangible to us, even in the flesh, and permeating the entire universe with its radiant light, body and spirit will be perfectly joined together and will manifest, with perfect transparency, the beauty of the essence of each person and each thing, and the beauty of God himself who looks upon all with love and cherishes all within himself, even as his beauty is seen and known in everything by hearts ravished with his love. There is so much more to discover in the letter of Pope Francis, but this is not the place to do so. It is possible, however, that we shall quote it again later in these reflections when our contemplation of Scripture leads again to its themes, hopefully thereby enriching both our understanding of the Bible and our understanding of the letter—in other words, our understanding of the single reality of which they both speak: the throbbing heart of Jesus Christ, both human and divine, in which the very infinite and eternal love of the Trinity dwells, pouring out into everyone and everything, and drawing it all back into the embrace of the Trinity once again.
But let us continue our journey through the Gospel. After the wedding at Cana, Jesus spends some time in Capernaum with his mother, his relatives, and his disciples. And then the Scriptures tell us this: The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers at their business. And making a whip of cords, he drove them all, with the sheep and oxen, out of the temple; and he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; you shall not make my Father's house a house of trade.” His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” The Jews then said to him, “What sign have you to show us for doing this?” Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” But he spoke of the temple of his body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word which Jesus had spoken. (2:13-22) For the first of four times in the Gospel of John, Jesus goes up to Jerusalem for a feast, this time the high feast of Passover, an anticipation of the definitive Passover wherein he shall give his life and transform the paschal feast of the Old Covenant into the definitive Paschal Mystery of the New that redeems the whole world and opens up for it access into the very innermost life of God. And as he enters the temple, Jesus sees the money changers and those who offer the animals for sacrifice for the pilgrims who have come from far away. On the basic level, he is aggrieved that the temple has become a marketplace or a “den of thieves” (Mt 21:13), and he seeks to cleanse it, as the prophet Zecharaiah wrote, “No longer will there be merchants in the house of the LORD of hosts on that day” (Zech 14:21). For as necessary as commerce may be to man’s life and coexistence with others, it has no place in the sacred house of God, which Jesus acknowledges before all to be “my Father’s house,” thus manifesting his sonship and acknowledging in his own person both the affront against the holiness of the temple and the right to speak against it and correct it. And this he does, and more, for his act of fashioning a whip of cords and driving all of these people out of the temple is not a momentary outburst of anger or indignation, but a prophetic action. As the prophets of old would proclaim God’s message to the people not only in words but also in symbolic and effective action, so does Jesus do. And the authorities of the Jews recognize this; they recognize the deeper prophetic significance of his action. This is why they respond not with fear or fury, but with a theological question: “What sign have you to show us for doing this?” They recognize that Jesus intends to communicate something through this gesture, and they ask him to both explain it and to give proof that he has a right to act in the manner of the prophets of old. But before we explore Christ’s answer, let us look for a moment at the actual effect of his actions. As a result of his driving the money changers and sellers out of the temple, he has disrupted the necessary structures that allow the Passover sacrifices to continue efficiently and unabated for the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to Jerusalem for the feast. In effect, he has halted the temple sacrifice at the very high point of the feast, foreshadowing the days when the temple sacrifices themselves shall cease, not for a moment only, but permanently. And this indeed happens in 70 A.D. with the destruction of the temple by the Romans; for two-thousand years now the temple has yet to be rebuilt and the sacrifices of the Old Covenant to be reestablished. So many of the hopes stirred by the prophets were thus dashed—hopes of a universal worship wherein even the gentiles would come to the temple to offer sacrifice to the one God, wherein they would lay hold of the cloak of every Jew and say unto him, “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you” (Zech 8:23). Or rather, these hopes were taken up and given a new meaning and a new interpretation. It is not in the old law of Israel or in her temple cult that true universality is achieved, but in the redeeming sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, and in the new Israel, the Church, born of his opened heart, from which blood and water flow as from a temple. And thus we come to Jesus’ response to the question of the Jewish authorities. He says, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will rebuild it.” They misunderstand him and think he speaks of the temple of stone, built by the hands of man in obedience to the command of God; but Jesus speaks, as his disciples shall come to understand after his death and Resurrection, of the temple of his own sacred body. The body of Jesus henceforth becomes the true temple, the place of true worship of God, the living-place where guilt is absolved and grace is given, where atonement occurs, the space wherein divinity and humanity are drawn together and reconciled, made one in the marriage toward which the whole Old Covenant was forever striving but which itself could not attain. Now, in the body of the One who is God himself made flesh, offering the perfect gift both from the heart of humanity to the heart of God and from the heart of God to the heart of humanity, this marriage is effected and brought to consummation. And it cannot happen in any other way, for only God himself can restore what sin has torn asunder, and only God himself can grant access into his own innermost life; but only as man can he draw man, only as a human can he draw human persons up into the trajectory of love, into the true paschal exodus of self-giving, of love received and given—of a heart and a life become pure love by the pure gift of love received—the exodus that leads into the innermost life of eternal joy and unbreakable intimacy of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is precisely what happens in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ, in the “destruction” and “rebuilding” of this holy Temple. And this movement is in fact a fulfillment of the prophecies and hopes of the Old Covenant, even as it brings about in their very heart an unexpected newness. For if Ezekiel described a river of water flowing from the side of the temple and giving life to lands far away (Ez 47), so Zecharaiah speaks of the same river of life flowing from the “Pierced One”: And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of compassion and supplication, so that, when they look on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a first-born. On that day there shall be a fountain opened for the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to cleanse them from sin and uncleanness.(Zech 12:10, 13:1) The author of the Letter to the Hebrews understood this well. He wrote concerning Christ, taking up the beautiful words of Psalm 40 and reinterpreting them, not merely as the obedience of man before God, of man who says, “ears open to obedience you have given me,” but as the words of the Incarnate One himself, who says, “a body you have given me”: Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said, “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure. Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do your will, O God,’ as it is written of me in the roll of the book.” When he said above, "You have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings” (these are offered according to the law), then he added, “Behold, I have come to do your will.” He abolishes the first in order to establish the second. And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. (Heb 10:5-10) Yes, he recognized in Christ the High Priest of the New and Everlasting Covenant, as the One in whose sacred body were are all not only freed from the burden of our sins and the suffering and estrangement that are their fruit, but are granted access beyond the very veil into the innermost secret of God’s own life and love: Therefore, brethren, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way which he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. (Heb 10:19-22) The great journey of Christian life, therefore, of human life, is to experience the outpouring of the human and divine love of Jesus Christ, this love manifest and pouring forth from his Body upon the Cross and in the Resurrection—from his humanity made a pure vessel of his divinity, and of his Father—and to let this love harness us in a reciprocal love, such that we are taken up into the very circulation of the inner life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is our becoming one body, one spirit with the Lord, our offering of our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, our spiritual worship (Rom 12:1). This is our marriage-bond with the divine Bridegroom, the Incarnate Son, and our full adoption and integration into the life of the Father, into the holy home of everlasting intimacy that pulses with the presence of the Spirit as the love shared ceaselessly in an interchange full of delight between the Father and the Son. I had quite a bizarre experience this morning, though I use the term “bizarre” in the best way possible. Today, October 24th, 2024, Pope Francis released an encyclical on the divine and human heart of Jesus, entitled Dilexit Nos, in which he explored the mystery of the heart as the core of personal identity and the wellspring of love (among many other beautiful things). What made this bizarre for me is that in reading his words it felt like reading my own—or rather like reading a direct confirmation of all that I have sought to communicate over the last ten years, and what has gripped me and drawn me from my youth. This really illuminates in a beautiful way the true universality and simplicity of the Church, of the heart of the Church, that two people from entirely different backgrounds and states in life can nonetheless speak of the central reality (knowing it is central!) in almost identical words and with the same fire of longing and enthusiasm. It is as if we both, a simple and ordinary layperson and the universal shepherd of the Church himself, are both but little children looking upon the Sacred Heart of Jesus burning with love, compassion, and delight as he in turn looks upon us, and seeking to speak in frail and imperfect words of this awesome reality in order to invite others in turn to open their hearts, to let them blossom in the love and intimacy for which we were made. My prayer in all this is that Pope Francis’ words are received deeply by many, many people, and enkindle in them anew the longing to live on the level of the heart, in the sanctuary of intimacy with God, with oneself, and with all of one’s brothers and sisters.
I want to take the liberty here, therefore, before continuing our reflections on the Scripture text, to summarize much of what we have explored until now by quoting at length some passages from our Holy Father. His words, indeed, seem to fit right into the context of our explorations of the Gospel of John, and specifically of what we spoke about in the previous reflection about the encounter that begets in us the poverty of love and that marks out for us the path to true sanctity in intimacy with the Trinity. All in all, I hope that my sharing—besides simply allowing you to directly access the wonderful words of Francis—will help to condense within your heart many of the themes of our reflections thus far. In addition, if you have journeyed with me through any of my other writings as well, you shall see, I trust, in the words I quote a deepening and confirmation of so many things: from the reality of the heart to the reality of the home; from the beauty of solitude to the call for hospitality; from the importance of play to the call to lighthearted mature responsibility and the blossoming of nuptial intimacy; from the extraordinary beauty of ordinary things to the importance of poetry, nostalgia, and storytelling; from the mystery of “bearing” to the call to tenderhearted service; from the interrelationships of the human faculties in the domain of the inner heart to the importance of enfleshment, of bodiliness, where in the heart both spirit and body unite as one person, living and acting, praying and loving; from the truth of our identity within God’s sustaining love to the consummation of our being in intimacy with the Trinity. We see here again the truth of the identity of each person as God’s beloved in the sanctuary of my being before him, and the truth that only from the wellspring of belovedness can I become a lover of others, but also that in relation to others I discover myself more truly. We see affirmed and deepened the “cordial” way that we have been approaching Scripture and indeed reality itself, that is, “from the heart.” Here the intuition of the “inner person”—little, vulnerable, and poor—brings into unity and convergence the spirit and the body, the mind, will, affection, and senses within the centerpoint of the “I” before the “Thou” of God. And ultimately this leads anew to the realization that the Heart of Christ is the one true Centerpoint, the Convergence-Point of all things, where all the disparate strands of the universe are gathered together into unity and made one again, one within the very intimacy of the life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And so I quote: In this “liquid” world of ours, we need to start speaking once more about the heart and thinking about this place where every person, of every class and condition, creates a synthesis, where they encounter the radical source of their strengths, convictions, passions and decisions. Yet, we find ourselves immersed in societies of serial consumers who live from day to day, dominated by the hectic pace and bombarded by technology, lacking in the patience needed to engage in the processes that an interior life by its very nature requires. In contemporary society, people “risk losing their centre, the centre of their very selves”.i “Indeed, the men and women of our time often find themselves confused and torn apart, almost bereft of an inner principle that can create unity and harmony in their lives and actions. Models of behaviour that, sadly, are now widespread exaggerate our rational-technological dimension or, on the contrary, that of our instincts”.ii No room is left for the heart. The issues raised by today’s liquid society are much discussed, but this depreciation of the deep core of our humanity—the heart—has a much longer history. We find it already present in Hellenic and pre-Christian rationalism, in post-Christian idealism and in materialism in its various guises. The heart has been ignored in anthropology, and the great philosophical tradition finds it a foreign notion, preferring other concepts such as reason, will or freedom. The very meaning of the term is imprecise and hard to situate within our human experience. Perhaps this is due to the difficulty of treating it as a “clear and distinct idea”, or because it entails the question of self-understanding, where the deepest part of us is also that which is least known. Even encountering others does not necessarily prove to be a way of encountering ourselves, inasmuch as our thought patterns are dominated by an unhealthy individualism. Many people feel safer constructing their systems of thought in the more readily controllable domain of intelligence and will. The failure to make room for the heart, as distinct from our human powers and passions viewed in isolation from one another, has resulted in a stunting of the idea of a personal centre, in which love, in the end, is the one reality that can unify all the others. If we devalue the heart, we also devalue what it means to speak from the heart, to act with the heart, to cultivate and heal the heart. If we fail to appreciate the specificity of the heart, we miss the messages that the mind alone cannot communicate; we miss out on the richness of our encounters with others; we miss out on poetry. We also lose track of history and our own past, since our real personal history is built with the heart. At the end of our lives, that alone will matter. It must be said, then, that we have a heart, a heart that coexists with other hearts that help to make it a “Thou”. Since we cannot develop this theme at length, we will take a character from one of Dostoevsky’s novels, Nikolai Stavrogin.iii Romano Guardini argues that Stavrogin is the very embodiment of evil, because his chief trait is his heartlessness: “Stavrogin has no heart, hence his mind is cold and empty and his body sunken in bestial sloth and sensuality. He has no heart, hence he can draw close to no one and no one can ever truly draw close to him. For only the heart creates intimacy, true closeness between two persons. Only the heart is able to welcome and offer hospitality. Intimacy is the proper activity and the domain of the heart. Stavrogin is always infinitely distant, even from himself, because a man can enter into himself only with the heart, not with the mind. It is not in a man’s power to enter into his own interiority with the mind. Hence, if the heart is not alive, man remains a stranger to himself”.iv All our actions need to be put under the “political rule” of the heart. In this way, our aggressiveness and obsessive desires will find rest in the greater good that the heart proposes and in the power of the heart to resist evil. The mind and the will are put at the service of the greater good by sensing and savouring truths, rather than seeking to master them as the sciences tend to do. The will desires the greater good that the heart recognizes, while the imagination and emotions are themselves guided by the beating of the heart. It could be said, then, that I am my heart, for my heart is what sets me apart, shapes my spiritual identity and puts me in communion with other people. The algorithms operating in the digital world show that our thoughts and will are much more “uniform” than we had previously thought. They are easily predictable and thus capable of being manipulated. That is not the case with the heart. The word “heart” proves its value for philosophy and theology in their efforts to reach an integral synthesis. Nor can its meaning be exhausted by biology, psychology, anthropology or any other science. It is one of those primordial words that “describe realities belonging to man precisely in so far as he is one whole (as a corporeo-spiritual person)”.v It follows that biologists are not being more “realistic” when they discuss the heart, since they see only one aspect of it; the whole is not less real, but even more real. Nor can abstract language ever acquire the same concrete and integrative meaning. The word “heart” evokes the inmost core of our person, and thus it enables us to understand ourselves in our integrity and not merely under one isolated aspect. This unique power of the heart also helps us to understand why, when we grasp a reality with our heart, we know it better and more fully. This inevitably leads us to the love of which the heart is capable, for “the inmost core of reality is love”.vi For Heidegger, as interpreted by one contemporary thinker, philosophy does not begin with a simple concept or certainty, but with a shock: “Thought must be provoked before it begins to work with concepts or while it works with them. Without deep emotion, thought cannot begin. The first mental image would thus be goose bumps. What first stirs one to think and question is deep emotion. Philosophy always takes place in a basic mood (Stimmung)”.vii That is where the heart comes in, since it “houses the states of mind and functions as a ‘keeper of the state of mind’. The ‘heart’ listens in a non-metaphoric way to ‘the silent voice’ of being, allowing itself to be tempered and determined by it”.viii At the same time, the heart makes all authentic bonding possible, since a relationship not shaped by the heart is incapable of overcoming the fragmentation caused by individualism. Two monads may approach one another, but they will never truly connect. A society dominated by narcissism and self-centredness will increasingly become “heartless”. This will lead in turn to the “loss of desire”, since as other persons disappear from the horizon we find ourselves trapped within walls of our own making, no longer capable of healthy relationships.ix As a result, we also become incapable of openness to God. As Heidegger puts it, to be open to the divine we need to build a “guest house”.x We see, then, that in the heart of each person there is a mysterious connection between self-knowledge and openness to others, between the encounter with one’s personal uniqueness and the willingness to give oneself to others. We become ourselves only to the extent that we acquire the ability to acknowledge others, while only those who can acknowledge and accept themselves are then able to encounter others. The heart is also capable of unifying and harmonizing our personal history, which may seem hopelessly fragmented, yet is the place where everything can make sense. The Gospel tells us this in speaking of Our Lady, who saw things with the heart. She was able to dialogue with the things she experienced by pondering them in her heart, treasuring their memory and viewing them in a greater perspective. The best expression of how the heart thinks is found in the two passages in Saint Luke’s Gospel that speak to us of how Mary “treasured (synetérei) all these things and pondered (symbállousa) them in her heart” (cf. Lk 2:19 and 51). The Greek verb symbállein, “ponder”, evokes the image of putting two things together (“symbols”) in one’s mind and reflecting on them, in a dialogue with oneself. In Luke 2:51, the verb used is dietérei, which has the sense of “keep”. What Mary “kept” was not only her memory of what she had seen and heard, but also those aspects of it that she did not yet understand; these nonetheless remained present and alive in her memory, waiting to be “put together” in her heart. In this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity. No algorithm will ever be able to capture, for example, the nostalgia that all of us feel, whatever our age, and wherever we live, when we recall how we first used a fork to seal the edges of the pies that we helped our mothers or grandmothers to make at home. It was a moment of culinary apprenticeship, somewhere between child-play and adulthood, when we first felt responsible for working and helping one another. Along with the fork, I could also mention thousands of other little things that are a precious part of everyone’s life: a smile we elicited by telling a joke, a picture we sketched in the light of a window, the first game of soccer we played with a rag ball, the worms we collected in a shoebox, a flower we pressed in the pages of a book, our concern for a fledgling bird fallen from its nest, a wish we made in plucking a daisy. All these little things, ordinary in themselves yet extraordinary for us, can never be captured by algorithms. The fork, the joke, the window, the ball, the shoebox, the book, the bird, the flower: all of these live on as precious memories “kept” deep in our heart. This profound core, present in every man and woman, is not that of the soul, but of the entire person in his or her unique psychosomatic identity. Everything finds its unity in the heart, which can be the dwelling-place of love in all its spiritual, psychic and even physical dimensions. In a word, if love reigns in our heart, we become, in a complete and luminous way, the persons we are meant to be, for every human being is created above all else for love. In the deepest fibre of our being, we were made to love and to be loved. ... Where the thinking of the philosopher halts, there the heart of the believer presses on in love and adoration, in pleading for forgiveness and in willingness to serve in whatever place the Lord allows us to choose, in order to follow in his footsteps. At that point, we realize that in God’s eyes we are a “Thou”, and for that very reason we can be an “I”. Indeed, only the Lord offers to treat each one of us as a “Thou”, always and forever. Accepting his friendship is a matter of the heart; it is what constitutes us as persons in the fullest sense of that word. Saint Bonaventure tells us that in the end we should not pray for light, but for “raging fire”.xi He teaches that, “faith is in the intellect, in such a way as to provoke affection. In this sense, for example, the knowledge that Christ died for us does not remain knowledge, but necessarily becomes affection, love”.xii Along the same lines, Saint John Henry Newman took as his motto the phrase Cor ad cor loquitur [heart speaks to heart], since, beyond all our thoughts and ideas, the Lord saves us by speaking to our hearts from his Sacred Heart. This realization led him, the distinguished intellectual, to recognize that his deepest encounter with himself and with the Lord came not from his reading or reflection, but from his prayerful dialogue, heart to heart, with Christ, alive and present. It was in the Eucharist that Newman encountered the living heart of Jesus, capable of setting us free, giving meaning to each moment of our lives, and bestowing true peace: “O most Sacred, most loving Heart of Jesus, Thou art concealed in the Holy Eucharist, and Thou beatest for us still… I worship Thee then with all my best love and awe, with my fervent affection, with my most subdued, most resolved will. O my God, when Thou dost condescend to suffer me to receive Thee, to eat and drink Thee, and Thou for a while takest up Thy abode within me, O make my heart beat with Thy Heart. Purify it of all that is earthly, all that is proud and sensual, all that is hard and cruel, of all perversity, of all disorder, of all deadness. So fill it with Thee, that neither the events of the day nor the circumstances of the time may have power to ruffle it, but that in Thy love and Thy fear it may have peace”.xiii Before the heart of Jesus, living and present, our mind, enlightened by the Spirit, grows in the understanding of his words and our will is moved to put them into practice. This could easily remain on the level of a kind of self-reliant moralism. Hearing and tasting the Lord, and paying him due honour, however, is a matter of the heart. Only the heart is capable of setting our other powers and passions, and our entire person, in a stance of reverence and loving obedience before the Lord. (Pope Francis, Dilexit Nos, nn. 9-21, 25-27) ****NOTES**** i. Saint John Paul II, Angelus, 2 July 2000: L’Osservatore Romano, 3-4 July 2000, p. 4 ii. Ibid., Catechesis, 8 June 1994: L’Osservatore Romano, 9 June 1994, p. 5 iii. The Demons (1873). iv. Romano Guardini, Religiöse Gestalten in Dostojewskijs Werk, Mainz/Paderborn, 1989, pp. 236ff. v. Karl Rahner, “Some Theses for a Theology of Devotion to the Sacred Heart”, in Theological Investigations, vol. III, Baltimore-London, 1967, p. 332. vi. Ibid., p. 333. vii. Byung-Chul Han, Heideggers Herz. Zum Begriff der Stimmung bei Martin Heidegger, München, 1996, p. 39 viii. Ibid., p. 60; cf. p. 176. ix. Cf. Ibid., Agonie des Eros, Berlin, 2012. x. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, Frankfürt a. M., 1981, p. 120. xi. Saint Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, VII, 6. xii. Ibid., Proemium in I Sent., q. 3. xiii. Saint John Henry Newman, Meditations and Devotions, London, 1912, Part III [XVI], par. 3, pp. 573-574. Through the sign by which Jesus turned water into wine, he manifested his glory and his disciples began to believe in him. We explored the meaning and beauty of this sign—of water and wine—in the previous reflection. It only remains now to reflect upon the dynamic of faith that is given to us here in this phrase: in the manifestation of glory and its response in belief. We see immediately that true faith is not a blind shot in the dark nor wishful thinking no superstition; it is, rather, a response to the revelation of love. It is the response of the human heart, awakened and sustained by the Holy Spirit within us, to the making-visible of the love of God in Jesus Christ. That is the true meaning of Christian faith, the faith of a child of God who accepts the redeeming and re-creating gift that comes in the incarnate Son of the Father, and allows herself to be grafted into his own sonship, into his own filial intimacy with the Father. And thus faith is a wholly personal reality, a reality of interpersonal relationship.
But indeed this is true even on a natural level, is it not, in the communion between human persons? I come to trust in another person, in their good intentions, in their wisdom and insight, in the security of their love and their care, not through a blind wishfulness but through responding to the revelation of their love. And this love comes through “signs,” in other words, through incarnate actions that manifest this love, that make it visible and tangible in my life and in the world. For as contemplative as love is, as deeply hidden in the sanctuary of the heart, in the solitude where we abide alone before the Father, love is also supremely active, prolific in good fruits, harnessing us in tenderness, compassion, care, and service. Love is playfulness in the presence of our Abba, and repose in the embrace of his love, the gratuitous silence of simply “being” before him, but it is also the same spirit of play holding and expressing itself within—and in turn being held by—the mature accepting of care for others, of the responsibilities of this world that spring from my belonging to a single human family, knowing that my brothers and sisters also depend upon me, as I do upon them, as we are all laced together in a single Body of Christ. Love is thus custodianship of my own life in the sight of God, and custodianship of my brothers and sisters in his name. But it is custodianship springing from the abiding awareness of being always in the custody of God, being held and sheltered in his perfect Love, which always seeks my authentic good as it seeks the good of all, in every detail of life small and great, even if I do not always see this. Thus love is born of the womb of faith and the seed of hope. It is a journey into maturity just as much as it is a journey into childhood. Or rather it is both simultaneously and inseparably. The “signs” of love, therefore, are signs that elicit in the heart that receives them a spirit of trust, of confidence in both the good intentions and the wisdom of the Lover, and in his ability to express this love and care with efficacious power. This is what is meant, concretely, when we speak of God being “omniscient, omni-benevolent, and all-powerful.” It is the faith-filled recognition, begetting hope and love, that God sees all things, sees me, and in seeing looks only with tenderness and love that desires the well-being of his beloved, and that also has the ability to bring this about regardless of any obstacles placed in its way. And so the signs of Jesus’ glory throughout the Gospel of John—and all the Gospels, as well as in the whole fabric of history—are the revelation of this very love of God, {alive and active, two edged sword}. The “glory of the Lord,” therefore, a term that occurs repeatedly in the Bible, refers not to an abstract quality of radiance or beauty or lordship, but to Love. The glory of God is Love. All of his beauty, all of the pure and holy radiance of his light, and his reign in this world as the King of all hearts, all of this is explained by and contained within his very essence and activity as perfect Love. Indeed, God is eternal glory precisely because he is Trinity: because he is the ceaseless circulation of love between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the reality at the foundation of the entire universe, and the origin of all that is beautiful, good, and true in this world. It is the “one thing” that matters, and that we glimpse in every glimmer of light, in every echo of beauty, that touches our hearts and draws them on with restless longing and aching desire. The longing for beauty, the nostalgia for home, the desire for love and communion, the hunger for truth, the impetus toward life, and every other desire, experience, and aspiration is rooted in this and expresses this: our yearning to return to God’s eternal Love and to share in his life, in the inner life of the Trinity. But we cannot do this unless Love first comes to us, unless Love approaches us, manifests himself before us, and throws a bridge upon which we may walk into the reality of loving relationship. And such are the signs of Love, the sacraments of his presence, whether they be more immediately glorious and miraculous or more rich with spiritual reality as in the Sacraments of the Church or in the miracles in the life of Christ and the lives of his faithful; or whether they be the more simple and “ordinary” as in the daily expressions of God’s love and care in all the details of human life in a world that, despite the brokenness and suffering that inhere in it due to sin, is nonetheless beautiful, good, and true. God’s Love is always communicating itself to us, working for our healing, renewal, and transformation in the likeness of his Son, and thus our only true and abiding happiness and fulfillment, at every moment. And in this communication and care of Love, he is also attentive and concerned for every smallest thing that matters to us, every struggle, desire, fear, or experience, however insignificant. For God, nothing is insignificant. His gaze of love upon our life encompasses everything, permeates everything, and affirms it all. And in this gaze it also issues the call to faith, to reciprocal love, within everything. This means that if everything matters to God, if in everything he expresses his love for us—and thus we can receive his love through all that he authentically gives to us—we are also called to let our whole life become love in response, a reciprocal love for the One who has first loved us, and who loves us without ceasing. And thus unfolds before us, in all of its mysteriousness and unpredictability—something that God alone can mark out before us in the uniqueness of each day—the path to sanctity, the path to transformation in God’s love reaching its consummation in mature nuptial intimacy with Christ, in the full flourishing of filial relationship with our Abba, and in our utter permeation with the life and energy of the Holy Spirit. It is holiness. And so as we stand before the awesome generosity and love of God that stands at the origin of our existence and at the foundation of every single moment of life, our response is not to grasp selfishly for ourselves whatever we can take. It is not to “hoard” God’s goodness and the good things of this world, closing our hearts off to him or to others. Rather, paradoxically, the response is the exact opposite. Our profound trust in the generosity of God allows us to let go of all our tendencies toward fearful or selfish clinging, toward false striving for greatness or achievement, toward the pleasures and pasttimes of life, and instead to become hands and heart wide open to receive and to give, before both God and each one of our brothers and sisters. Thus the abundance of God begets in us the poverty of love. For we learn that God’s love itself is poverty—poverty as abundance—for it is the fullness of mutual belonging between persons, between Lover and Beloved, as the fruit of their reciprocal sharing of all that is theirs, and of their very selves. So too it seeks to be in our lives, permeating us through God’s gratuitous and saving gift, and transfiguring us in the beauty of his glorious light, until we too become pure love, and every thought, feeling, and act of our life pure love. The Gospel text tells us that this, the changing of water into wine, was “the first of Jesus’ signs, which he accomplished at Cana in Galilee, and his disciples began to believe in him” (2:11). Every part of this is significant. It is significant that the first sign of Jesus, the first miraculous manifestation of his divinity, was an act whereby he took what was ordinary and made it extraordinary, what was natural and made it supernatural. He took what was plain and readily available, what we could offer him in our poverty, and transformed it into something savory, something festive, anticipating the eternal marriage that is our destiny and our unending happiness. And so it is in all of Jesus’ signs. So it is in all of history and every moment of our own lives. Every single event of our life, every single moment, and even the slightest hopes, desires, prayers, sufferings, joys, and actions of our existence become “sacraments” of God’s gift to us, water that becomes permeated by the wine of grace and, in turn, is lifted up to become itself the wine of the eternal marriage feast.
All that we can offer to God is our poverty, our need, our human weakness and frailty, our faltering fidelity and desire—as strong as this may be, as necessary as this may be, it is never enough—and he receives it all with graciousness, with kindness and gratitude, lifting it up by love to become more than it is. Or rather he imbues it with something beyond itself, something entirely new which nonetheless unlocks and fulfills all the hidden potential buried within it. We are water, and he is wine. We are the water of nature coursing through history, a water that has been created and given by God and thus is good, indeed very good. But it is not enough. For this water yearns to be raised up to communion with God, to intimacy with the divine, to the festival of eternal union. Yet on its own it cannot do so. How can a river lift itself up and flow toward the heavens? How can plain water become festive wine? Only if a deeper and higher river descends into its current and mingles together with it—only if the river of God’s eternal Love, the everlasting circulation of love in the innermost life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, penetrates and pervades our humanity and makes it new from the inside. Here we see even more truly the real depth of the sign of the changing of water into wine. It is a symbol of the very mystery of salvation: of the redeeming Incarnation of Jesus Christ, his “becoming flesh” to wed all flesh to God in an everlasting marriage; of the saving Passion by which he transforms bread and wine into his Body and Blood, sealing and consecrating his gift as a Bridegroom’s gift to his bride to consummate their marriage, and making this gift effective in her even through her own sinful isolation and the burden of suffering and death that she bears, suffering with her and for her to the very end; and in his glorious Resurrection, by which he breaks the shackles of sin and death and opens up a new life, life beyond the grave, communion beyond estrangement, beauty and enduring celebration beyond death’s dissolution, in the very life of God into which he lifts all of humanity, and indeed the entire cosmos, there to live forever in consummate Love. The Church understands the meaning and significance of this miracle profoundly, just as she understands and presents before us—indeed makes effective for us—the redeeming mystery of Jesus Christ until the end of time. This is illustrated beautifully by an event that takes place in every single celebration of the Eucharist, in every Mass. During the preparation of the gifts we present to God “our water,” our humanity and the poor fruits of the earth, bread and water and earthly wine, and also, spiritually, our whole selves and all that makes up our existence. And God transforms it into Jesus Christ, transforms it into God, into the wedding of God and humanity within his own Bridegroom-Son. Yes, God receives our gift with tenderness, with that gaze of cherishing delight and affirming love with which he always beholds us without ceasing. He takes it up, he draws it into the orbit of his own love incarnate in Christ, and transforms it such that it becomes what it was always meant to be: it becomes bride consummated in union with the Bridegroom, becomes life and love in the embrace of the Trinity. As the priest himself prays at the moment when he mixes the water and the wine: “By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.” Here we see just how well the Church, the Bride of Christ and our Virgin Mother, understands the mystery of the Eucharist. Here we witness her own invitation, in the name of her Bridegroom, for us to surrender ourselves to God’s love, to release our lives into the embrace of Christ and of the Father, so that we might become partakers in the very divinity of the One who humbled himself to share in our humanity. He wedded himself to us in every way; he wedded himself to our “water” and made it his own, from the moment of conception in a mother’s womb through all the trials and joys, labors and experiences, blessings and losses of human life, and even through suffering and death, in order to transform this water into “wine.” Such a transformation does not destroy the integrity of water, does not eradicate it or efface it before the greater reality, the wine; rather, it shelters, safeguards, and affirms the reality of the water—the beauty of our own humanity and of the unique, irreplaceable personhood of each one of us—even while elevating and transfiguring it to make it something more: to consummate it in ceaseless intimacy with the Trinity, in an everlasting participation in the very divinity of God, who is Beauty, Goodness, Truth, and Love. Here the very potentialities of nature are at last fulfilled, the question that it has always posed is answered, the hopes and longing innate within it are at last brought to fulfillment. And this occurs not on its own power, but through a gift from above, a gift that has entered into it and healed, sanctified, and transformed it from the inside, drawing it above itself, or rather drawing it up as itself, until it is made capable of living in God the very life of God, as God himself lives his life in us. Such is the marriage of water and wine, in which water is transformed into wine because wine has taken water into itself. Here wine alone remains, for all is transformed by God into God. And yet water has not been annihilated; rather, it has been consummated as wine. The Bride is divinized, made a partaker in the divine nature, sharing in the very life of her Bridegroom and in the joy of his Father, who has become her Father too. Here her Lover’s inheritance and life is her own, fully and completely. Here she is enabled to live the life for which she has always yearned but which has forever eluded her grasp. For here, through the transforming touch of his love that enfolds her, penetrates her, and permeates her every pore, every recess of her spirit and ever atom of her body, she is transformed into the pure wine of love. It was the role of the bridegroom at the wedding feast to provide the wine for the guests, as is illustrated by the fact that the steward calls the bridegroom and says to him, “Every man serves the good wine first; and when men have drunk freely, then the poor wine; but you have kept the good wine until now” (2:10). Clearly, therefore, Jesus is positioning himself in the role of the Bridegroom, the one who gives the true wedding feast in the celebration of the definitive marriage, and who provides not old wine but new. How many different passages of Scripture this reality brings to mind! We think of the parable of the king who throws a feast for his son and sends out messengers to call everyone, rich and poor alike, to the feast—the heavenly Father welcoming all of humanity to the banquet of the union of Christ and the Church, in which we find our own everlasting joy and fulfillment in intimacy with God. We think of the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, who were asked to keep vigil in the night of waiting for the arrival of the mysterious Bridegroom. We think, specifically along the theme of new and better wine, of the following words of Christ:
No one puts new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine desires new; for he says, “The old is good.” (Lk 5:37-39) In context the image refers to the disbelief and rejection of the Jewish authorities of Jesus’ day, who in their self-righteousness were too closed, too possessive, too hard of heart to welcome to newness that Christ came to bring. Drinking the old wine of a self-enclosed legalistic justice—a righteousness based on the law, to use Saint Paul’s phrase—they did not recognize their need for new wine, for the wine of grace and mercy that alone can make a man truly righteous in the sight of God, that is, in truth. And this righteousness is not, as Martin Luther claimed, a mere fiction, the white cloth of God’s pardon thrown over the dung hill of sin, but a true inner renewal of our being, until the very inmost wellsprings of our being and activity are permeated by grace and respond spontaneously to all things according to God himself, for God lives within us and unites us to himself. As we have already explored in earlier reflections, this “old wine” is still a danger for us today, a danger for all of us. It is a danger for many who call themselves Catholics, or who are Catholics and yet neither understand nor live the full depth and breadth of the mystery of Christian life, and who cast out the new wine of Gospel freedom—of an intimate, confident, and free relationship of a child with his Abba, of a beloved heart with her Lover—and descend back into the bondage of law, obligation, striving, and ceaseless performance. In this are fulfilled the words of Christ, “The lay heavy burdens on men’s shoulders” (cf. Mt 23:4). What a grievous thing this is! For Christ came to set us free. “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Gal 5:1). Only on the foundation of the freedom of grace, coming as an undeserved gift from the outside, far beyond my own efforts and achievements, only as gift flowing from a prior gift received, can I become a lover in truth. Only in the gratuitous grace of love received can I become a servant of God and of others, not in the feverish pursuit of my own righteousness or perfection, but in humble awe and abiding gratitude for the Love that has saved me. Yes, in the discovery of love, in the experience of being loved, lies the heart of the Gospel—and not only at the “first moment” but forever, from beginning to end, from initiation to consummation. Love alone can bring about the “righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and pharisees” (Mt 5:20), the righteousness that is greater than the law, that surpasses the law while simultaneously fulfilling it. For it breaks apart the paradigm of master and slave, or lawgiver and subject, and opens up instead the truth that God desires—a truth in heart and in life—the intimate relationship of Father and child, of Lover and beloved, the gift of gratuitous intimacy with the saving and redeeming Trinity. And this marks out the true path of all our striving, the rich drama of our journey throughout this life and into the next. It is a path from Love into Love, from the experience of being loved into the blossoming of our own love for God and for others, until we are a lover in the likeness of Christ and filled thoroughly with his Spirit. It is a path from the incipient union of baptismal grace, the seed of communion, to the full maturity and blossoming of the tree of mature nuptial intimacy with the Trinity, the intimacy that we come to witness so powerfully in the writings of the saints, but which is God’s loving intention for each and every one of us, in this life and in the next. Thus the words of Saint Paul ring true in two senses: “Stand fast, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Gal 5:1). God does not wish for us to return to the “old wine” of sin, to the yoke of our disordered passions, to “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life; for these are not of the Father but of the world” (1 Jn 2:16). But neither can we try to fit the new wine of grace and intimacy with God into the “old wineskins” of self-righteous performance, of the false image of God and of ourselves that cannot contain it, for then “the wineskins will burst, and the wine be lost” (Mk 2:22). Yes, God does not desire us to sink back into the yoke of the law, to drink the “old wine” of legalism or mere external performance, of attaining righteousness based on our own efforts, of forever striving to overcome our own humanity in the repressive asceticism that has painfully marked the previous five-hundred years, and which so many “traditionalists” today seek to revive. Both “old wineskins,” in fact, have the same root, even if they express themselves in opposite extremes—whether liberalist license or traditionalist legalism—and neither can contain the new wine of grace. For both push God off the scenes and put in his place the activity of man, the wants and desires of man, and his own affairs, and in the last analysis he becomes the goal of his own life and the center of his own worship. Whether it be the liberal disregard of the moral law written into the very fabric of the universe and the attempt to redefine what is good and true, or whether it be the self-focused liturgies that gorge themselves on “beauty” and “reverence” in the name of honoring God whereas in fact they foster the pride of man. In both cases God is pushed from the scene; in both cases the tender face of the true Father, our loving Abba, is obscured, and the loving presence of Christ ignored, and man and his own ego takes its place. It matters not whether this ego is driven by arrogant rebellion as in the case of the prodigal son or by feverish, fear-filled service (still rooted in pride) as in the case of the other brother: in both cases they forget that the Father’s love is their everything, and that he says ceaselessly unto them: “You are always with me, and all that is mine is yours” (Lk 15:31). Paul wrote so often and so fervently against both of these extremes, for he knew and lived in the newness of the Gospel, in the radiant beauty of grace, neither “under the law” nor “as the pagans live” (either in bondage to the law or in rejection of it, but rather in its innermost fulfillment through grace). He invites us to accept the gift that has been given in the redemption brought by God’s abundant love: to live “in Christ,” according to the very life and love of the Trinity. And this life alone can fulfill all righteousness, as the energy of the Holy Spirit flows through us from the kiss of the Father in the Son and vibrates through our whole being, harnessing us in union of mind, will, and heart with God, consummating us in the intimacy of his embrace, and granted us to live in the freedom that is not mere obedience nor arbitrary license, but is the synergy of co-action between Lover and beloved, in which I live in God and God lives in me, according to the very freedom and abundance of his own unending Love. I share here in this context a previous meditation written on the first cry of the Bride in the Song of Songs, to which our reflections have led us. It will hopefully help to flesh out a bit more the themes of nuptiality, of spousal intimacy with God, and of the love that is deeper than wine, and open up new avenues of prayer and life in response to the word of the Bible.
Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth! For your love surpasses wine. (Sg 1:2) Saint Bernard of Clairvaux writes about this: Tell us, I beg you, by whom, about whom and to whom it is said: “Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth.” How shall I explain so abrupt a beginning, this sudden irruption as from a speech in mid-course? For the words spring upon us as if indicating one speaker to whom another is replying as she demands a kiss—whoever she may be. But if she asks for or demands a kiss from somebody, why does she distinctly and expressly say with the mouth, and even with his own mouth, as if lovers should kiss by means other than the mouth, or with mouths other than their own? But yet she does not say: “Let him kiss me with his mouth;” what she says is still more intimate: “with the kiss of his mouth.” (On the Song of Songs, 1.III.5; p. 3) I couldn’t improve upon these words, and the delightful way in which he expresses the sense of wonder and intrigue created by the beginning of this Song. We are indeed immediately immersed into the heart of a dialogue, into the passionate request of this woman that “he would kiss me with the kiss of his mouth.” But who is he, and indeed who is she, and why does she phrase her request in such an abnormal way? What is also intriguing is how this woman immediately alters the object of her address—in mid-sentence. She cries out, “Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth; for your love surpasses wine.” It is as if, at the mere remembrance of her Beloved, at the mere vocalization of her longing for him, she immediately enters into a dialogue with him and addresses him directly. “Let him…for your…” Perhaps in this we also find our doorway into understanding who is being addressed, and also who is addressing. Is this not at the heart of prayer: getting in touch with our innate longing for God and opening it to him, precisely in this way experiencing that he is intimately present? My mind goes immediately to a scene from the Gospel of John that is deeply rooted in the Song of Songs, as is indeed the whole of John’s Gospel. Mary approaches Jesus during a wedding at Cana and says, “They have no wine.” A marriage banquet, and there is no wine! “What is that to me and to you?” Christ replies to his Mother, “My hour has not yet come” (cf. Jn 2:3-4). The hour to give the true wine of the new and everlasting covenant has not yet come, and yet Mary knows that the Love of her Son far surpasses wine. She knows the joy of his kiss, and wants all to experience it, and so she invites him to respond to the need of an earthly couple, thus symbolizing the gift of the divine Love which effects a heavenly marriage. The gift of the wine of his Love brings a lasting joy that is greater, purer, and truer than any wine, or even any merely human love, can provide. It is in your kiss alone, my Jesus, that I will find the satisfaction of my desires. No other kiss can satisfy me, no other joy, no other inebriation—except that which is given by your own Love. As the beautiful hymn of Saint Ambrose so touchingly celebrates: Christusque nobis sit cibus, potusque noster sit fides; laeti bibamus sobriam ebrietatem Spiritus. Let Christ so be our food, and faith so be our drink, that we may joyfully receive the sober inebriation of the Spirit. Your Love alone, Jesus, can bring me the sober inebriation for which I thirst, breaking beyond the boundaries of fear, beyond the constricting confines of my woundedness and pain, not with a substance that obscures mind and heart and submerges the spirit in the flesh, but by filling me with the very Spirit’s presence and lifting me up to be made one spirit and one flesh with the Bridegroom who is Incarnate Love himself. Yes this is an inebriation which is wholly sober, not a dulling of the faculties but an awakening to greater lucidity, not an alteration of the body which effects the mind but an illumination of the mind which irradiates even the body. It is the permeation of my entire being by the outpouring of the Spirit’s presence, who pervades me with the joyful and life-giving vibrations of his eternal breath. But here I am getting ahead of myself… Let me step back and pose the question again: why does the loving heart, made a bride of Christ, cry out in this way, “Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth”? Why not just ask him to kiss me? Or, at least, why not ask him to kiss me with his mouth? Why ask him to kiss me with the kiss of his mouth? What does it mean, anyway, to kiss someone with a kiss, as if we could kiss them with something else than a kiss? Well, there…I’ve asked the same question in four different ways, but let me see if I can give a single answer. The answer is the Trinity. There is an inherent Trinitarian structure to the request of the bride: there is the one who kisses, there is his mouth, and there is his kiss. The One who kisses is the Father, and he kisses us with his mouth, his eternal Word, who is his beloved Son, and the kiss that the Son bestows on us in the Father’s name is the very kiss of the Holy Spirit. It is therefore a sign of humility and reverent awe that the bride does not ask directly, “Let him kiss me,” for she knows that “no one can see God and live.” But she is urged on by the confidence that, even though “no one has ever seen God, yet the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, has made him known” (Jn 1:18). It is the Son himself who receives the direct and unmediated kiss of the Father, in the radiant light of eternal glory. And the kiss that the Father and the Son share is the Holy Spirit. The kiss of the Spirit seals the union of Father and Son in a movement of ceaseless exchange and self-communication, as both are made one in a single life of love, as lip presses upon lip and breath is exchanged between two in a single breathing of eternal bliss. And yet, and yet this kiss is then turned toward us and seeks to communicate itself to us! The mouth of the Father comes to us, and he sends us the Spirit, so that by pressing upon us, he may breathe into us the fullness of his own divine life. “Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth.” Yes, let the Father unite himself to me in the Son through the Holy Spirit; and let the Spirit draw me in himself, through the Son, to the Father. I dare not ask for the direct kiss of the Father, but I know that “whoever has seen” the Son “has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9), and that this same Son has breathed upon us the fullness of the Spirit’s presence, in this way kissing us most intimately. Therefore I can ask for this kiss, and in bold confidence I can even expect it, for he himself said that he would send the Spirit, that he would kiss me in this way. Breathe into me, Holy Spirit, from the mouth of the Incarnate Son. Be for me the tender kiss of his love, and by your very presence, irradiating my whole being, grant me to experience the sober inebriation of true joy. Yes, bring to maturity in me this chaste union of my heart with God, which fills and transforms even my very flesh with the purity and gentleness of the Trinity. Come to me and kiss me in such a way that I may open my mouth and God may fill it, that the One who was made man for my sake may also make me one flesh and one spirit with him, in the mystery of the Holy Eucharist and in the resurrection of the body at the end of time. The conversation between Mary and Jesus commences the fulfillment of the Sinai covenant, to which the people of Israel reply, “Whatever the Lord has said, that we will do” (Ex 19:8) with Mary’s invitation, “Do whatever he tells you.” And yet much more than just this happens as well. This wedding in a small town in the land of Galilee, wherein a relatively unknown carpenter’s son at the request of his mother turns water into wine, initiates the fulfillment of all the prophecies, hopes, and expectations of the entire Old Covenant and indeed of human history as a whole. Let us look at a few of the passages of prophecy now, so that we can situate this wedding feast in its proper light: as the beginning of the wedding feast that is the very fulfillment of history.
The wine mourns, the vine languishes, all the merry-hearted sigh. The mirth of the timbrels is stilled, the noise of the jubilant has ceased, the mirth of the lyre is stilled. No more do they drink wine with singing; strong drink is bitter to those who drink it. The city of chaos is broken down, every house is shut up so that none can enter. There is an outcry in the streets for lack of wine; all joy has reached its eventide; the gladness of the earth is banished. … On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of fat things, a feast of wine on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wine on the lees well refined. And he will destroy on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death for ever, and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth; for the LORD has spoken. It will be said on that day, “Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the LORD; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.” (Is 24:7-11; 25:6-9) We see here how the wine is a symbol of joy in God. It is a sign of the blessing of God upon the land, manifested in the joy of merrymaking, the mirth of the lyre and the timbrel. We fail to understand this aright, however, if we view wine through our contemporary lens; for in the last five hundred years or so alcoholic beverages have been more and more separated from their properties of sustenance and nutrition and associated instead with intoxication and “partying.” When the Bible speaks about a “feast of wine” it is not referencing nor encouraging parties of the contemporary variety nor the feasts for example of the ancient Greeks or Romans, which were basically intoxicated orgies. Rather, the Bible is referring to a sober, spiritual reality as manifested in the fruitfulness of the land and the abundant sustenance that this provides. After all, if an entire society lives off the land, its desolation spells suffering if not death for the people, and its super-abundance is a vivid sign of life and flourishing. This is the context of this prophecy and of similar prophecies. The Bible never encourages drunkenness or excess, but condemns it, as for example: “And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery; but be filled with the Spirit” (Eph 5:18), and again: “These also reel with wine and stagger with strong drink; the priest and the prophet reel with strong drink, they are confused with wine, they stagger with strong drink; they err in vision, they stumble in giving judgment. For all tables are full of vomit, no place is without filthiness” (Is 28:7-8). In ancient Palestine, on the other hand, wine was a staple of a person’s diet, and a wise ingredient in one’s health. It was the same in the Middle Ages, as ale provided much of the daily nutrition both of peasants and higher classes, being made of grains and filled with nutrients, and also having an alcohol content of far less than the liquors of today. Thus Saint Paul was able to write to Timothy: {and take a little wine for your stomach}. Here we see that Timothy’s asceticism—while proper and necessary in itself to establish the interior freedom necessary both for purity of heart and for liberty of love—had become excessive. Paul saw that his asceticism was becoming counter-productive and was harming his health. So he said “take a little wine.” The spiritual understanding of the natural symbolism of feasting and abundance is evident in how easily Isaiah transitions from the prophecy of a feast (which is really just a symbol of a deeper reality) to the true liberty and the definitive feast: the victory over death and estrangement from God, and the wiping of tears from all eyes. And this is what Jesus brings, and why, in the context of the marriage feast in Cana, he refers so easily and spontaneously to his “hour,” for his hour is the time of the fulfillment of this prophecy voiced by Isaiah hundreds of years before. This unfolds itself before our gaze even more deeply in another passage of Isaiah, in which he writes: Ho, every one who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Hearken diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in fatness. Incline your ear, and come to me; hear, that your soul may live; and I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David. Behold, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples. Behold, you shall call nations that you know not, and nations that knew you not shall run to you, because of the LORD your God, and of the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you. Seek the LORD while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the LORD, that he may have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. (Is 55:1-7) How beautiful this is! The feast of reconciliation with God, the feast of righteousness and communion in God’s new, everlasting covenant. Yes, how can we not see in this the Paschal Feast of the Eucharist, a feast in which we participate in every single Mass? As Jesus himself said at the Last Supper: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this in memory of me” (Lk 22:20). The liturgy in which we participate is a real foretaste of the eternal banquet of heaven, the banquet in which God himself becomes our food and drink, intimacy with him our sustenance, our life, and our everlasting joy. Therefore, let us respond to him when he knocks on the doors of our hearts, so that his words may prove true in us, in this life and in the life that awaits: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me” (Rev 3:20). Thus we come, at last, to the beautiful text of the Song of Songs, the radiant expression in poetic form of the romance between the Bridegroom God and his people, who is Israel and the Church, who is indeed all humanity taken up in the redeeming embrace of Christ and, by the gift of his love, made Church, made Bride. In these words, also, and in the person of the bride, who is beloved of God, we can each see ourselves. In coming to accept God’s love, his own fatherly and spousal relationship with us, we come to know ourselves truly and to live from the authentic wellspring of our being and our life, which is belovedness, which is God’s own love flowing within us and uniting us to himself. When the wine at the wedding feast runs short, Mary brings this concern to her Son, and a mysterious conversation ensues. She says simply, “They have no more wine.” No explanation, no plea, no entreaty. Just a simple statement of fact, of a lack and a need, filled with faith and trust in a response. And Jesus replies to Mary with the words, “Woman, what is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” And in response she simply turns to the servers at the feast and says to them, “Do whatever he tells you.” Now, it seems that this conversation does not make for good storytelling, doesn’t it? It is missing so much that makes for a good conversation, nonetheless what would make it easily comprehensible to the reader! Is John therefore being deliberately esoteric and difficult to understand? I think not. After all, he knew very well, as indicated from his first letter, the dangers and disorders of gnosticism, one of the traits of which is the belief in an inaccessible, esoteric knowledge closed off from the “ordinary” people and accessible only to the “elite” few. John is not trying to do that here, but something else? He is doing what he so often does: he is portraying an earthly event, a historical action, from a theological, top-down perspective, in order to invite us into an attitude of contemplative faith that sees not merely the surface but the inner truth, the sacramental reality inviting us in to receive grace and love from God.
If this is the case, then this passage should not remain opaque and obscure but, in the light of the entire context of the Gospel, should become radiantly evident in its meaning even if this meaning always remains too deep and broad for our complete comprehension—as, of course, is the case with everything that exists, and particularly with the mysteries of our faith. That, after all, is why we call them mysteries: not because they are incomprehensible, absurd, or unknowable—an absence of light—but rather because they offer us a fullness of knowledge that surpasses our limited and weak vision—an abundance of light. So what mystery do we contemplate here? There are two directions of inquiry here, both bearing abundant fruit for reflection and prayer: 1) situating these words and this event in the light of salvation history as a whole, in the context of the revelation and action of God in the Bible; 2) situating them in the context of the specific language and narrative of John’s Gospel, and indeed the entirety of John’s writings in the New Testament. We begin with the address that Jesus uses: “Woman.” Even though to our ears it sounds like a title of disrespect, it is not. Nonetheless, it is an unusual form of address for one’s mother, and it makes sense only if both Jesus and Mary knew and understood why it was being used, and what was meant. Recognizing the depth of intimacy and communion between them, and the immaculate purity and conformity with the Father’s will of both their hearts, we can confidently assume this. Or at least we can assume that if Mary did not immediately understand, the words of Jesus would set her on a journey to understanding, just as the events at the beginning of Jesus’ life did the same, as Luke emphasizes for us by saying: “And Mary pondered all these things in her heart” (Lk 2:19). But indeed the context seems to indicate a profound understanding, even if it is not complete; for Mary is not confused and does not argue. She simply turns to the servers and calls them to trust in God and obedience to the word of Christ, whom she herself trusts without reserve. So what then does the title “Woman” mean? In terms of the Bible, it refers first to the book of Genesis, to the woman who was taken from the side of man by the hand of God and given to him as a fitting companion. “And she shall be called Woman, for she was taken from Man” (Gen 2:23). Such was the first marriage, for “this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” (Gen 2:24). In the context of a marriage feast, therefore, calling his mother Woman does some profound things: it situates her as the fulfillment of womanhood and of all that was promised to Eve in the beginning, in the Garden of Eden. As Catholic tradition has so long acknowledge based on the evidence of Scripture, Mary is the “new Eve,” whose fidelity to God unties the knot of Eve’s disobedience and opens up the path to communion with God once again. Indeed, in her integral femininity, she is the archetypal bride, the true bride, the one who stands in the role of the wife before her bridegroom and husband. And thus we see that the “wedding at Cana” immediately transcends itself. For the bride and the groom of the wedding are hardly mentioned (the groom only once and the bride not at all). This is because Jesus is the true Bridegroom of the wedding—of the wedding of God and humanity which he came to fulfill and consummate through his Cross and Resurrection, through his Eucharistic gift—and the Bride is humanity, the Church, of whom Mary is the first and primordial member and model. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. As for the context of the Johannine writings, the term “Woman” appears only twice elsewhere: Mary is again called Woman as she stands at the foot of the Cross of Jesus, receiving and reciprocating the outpouring of his love and receiving into the orbit of her care the beloved disciple. Here the ecclesial dimension is radiantly apparent, that Mary stands as the Bride before her Bridegroom, as beloved before her Lover, and allows the marriage to be consummated in the fullness of mutual self-giving. John is thus the first fruit born of this mystical union of Bride and Bridegroom, a child of the love of God and of Mother Church, as each one of us is invited to recognize of ourselves as well. The second reference expresses the same thing. In the book of Revelation, John sees a vision of the temple of heaven opened and the ark of God descending, the ark of his covenant which has borne his earthly presence and mediated it to his people, and which was promised to be revealed at the end of days, when God shows mercy to his people (see 2 Mac 2:4-8). The ark, in other words, that is most fully realized not in a box of gold, but in the body and the heart of the Virgin Mary. And that is exactly what John sees: Then God’s temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of his covenant was seen within his temple; and there were flashes of lightning, voices, peals of thunder, an earthquake, and heavy hail. And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars; she was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery. (Rev 11:19-12:2) This Woman is portrayed simultaneously both as Mary and as the Church, and indivisibly so. She is the mother of Jesus, but she is also the mother of all the disciples of Jesus, of those who “keep the commandments of God and bear witness to Jesus” (Rev 12:17). She stands with her Son and for her Son at the heart of the eschatological battle between good and evil, light and darkness; and in this fight she is protected by God himself, sheltered by his love and his presence. She is Bride and Mother, disciple and companion, home and Church and tabernacle of God: she is Woman, as woman was always meant to be, and in her all women can find light for their own journey, truth for the integrity of their own being as designed by God himself and by him tenderly cherished. This means that when Jesus says, “Woman, what is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come” he is situating this event, this shortage of wine at a provincial wedding, in the context of the great drama of salvation history, of his work of redeeming and recreating humanity and the cosmos itself. For his “hour” refers to the moment of his Paschal Mystery: his Eucharistic gift of himself, his Passion and death, his atoning suffering, and his glorious Resurrection in victory over death opening up the path to endless life. As John says in chapter 13 at the beginning of the Last Supper: “Knowing that his hour had come and that he had come from this world and was going to the Father…he loved his own in this world, and he loved them to the end” (v.1). This “love to the end,” to the utmost gift of self beyond the boundaries of sin and death and into the endless radiance of new life: this is the hour of Jesus. It is the consummation of the marriage of God and humanity, Christ and the Church. And it commences the journey to the fulfillment that awaits us at the end of time, when Christ shall return a final time to make all things new, admitting the entire cosmos into the innermost life of the Trinity such that all becomes ceaseless marriage, eternal intimacy between God and the world that he has created, loved, redeemed, and welcomed into the innermost heart of his own embrace. We could thus paraphrase Jesus’ words to Mary: “You are Woman, and you stand before me as such. So do you know what you are asking? You ask me to initiate my redemptive journey, to manifest my glory and thus to commence my ‘hour,’ which shall reach fulfillment only upon the Cross and in the Resurrection, and which shall inaugurate the end times, consummated in the marriage-feast of the Lamb and his Bride at the conclusion of history.” And Mary’s response is simple and immediate. She turns to the servers of the feast and tells them: “Do whatever he tells you.” In other words: “My Son and my Beloved knows what he is about, and I support him wholeheartedly. He accomplishes his Father’s will without reserve, and this will too is my delight, for it is nothing but love and tenderness. Therefore I say to you: whatever he says to you, do.” The question of whether or not Mary invited Jesus to “anticipate” his hour, therefore, by asking for a miracle early, seems to me an unhelpful and irrelevant one. The point in this passage is not concerned with such things as the question, “Did Jesus intend to begin his ministry here and now through a miracle, or did Mary ‘force’ him?” The union between them is complete, for their daily bread is the will of Abba, their Father, the Father of us all. So whether or not there was a momentary disagreement or a request on the part of his mother, Jesus takes up the whole event and makes it an opportunity for profound revelation, a beautiful epiphany. He takes this opportunity to unveil the true essence of his mission as one of marriage, and the goal of all his life and activity as intimacy, the intimacy that he wants to bring about between himself and his disciples, and, through this, our admittance into the very intimacy of the Trinity’s inner embrace, that we may be one with the Father as is the Son himself, and may thrill with delight in the kiss and breath of the Spirit vibrating through us. And thus it is beautifully fitting that Jesus commences his “hour” precisely in response to a plea from his Bride. How else, after all, could he do so? He became man in order to save his wayward Bride, humanity, and to espouse her to himself, thus transforming her into Church. And Mary, as the representative of humanity before God, as the bride in whom all of us are contained, lifted up, and brought close to God, expresses this plea, this cry of the heart, to which the Bridegroom responds: “Yes! I shall save you. I shall provide for you the wine of the new covenant that is everlasting intimacy with the Trinity in the joy of the new creation. And this great drama, and this awesome destiny, commences now.” |
Joshua ElznerI am a humble disciple of Jesus Christ who seeks to live in prayerful intimacy with the Trinity and in loving service to all through a life devoted to prayer, compassion, and creativity. On this blog I will share the little fruits of my contemplation in the hopes of being of service to you on your own journey of faith. I hope that something I have written draws your heart closer to the One who loves you! Archives
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