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We come now near to the end of chapter four of the Gospel, and to the conclusion of this volume of reflections. There remains yet one more encounter for us to relate, one that takes place when Jesus has returned to Cana in Galilee. A royal official who is stationed in Capernaum approaches Jesus and pleads with him to heal his son, who is ill. As Martin and Wright explain, “The term for ‘royal official’ indicates that this man was probably an official of Herod Antipas, Rome’s client-king of Galilee. The official could be either Jewish or Gentile, but for several reasons, the likelihood is that he was Gentile. First, this episode follows on the account of the faith of the Samaritans, who are non-Jews. Second, this episode resembles two other Gospel accounts where Jesus heals a Gentile’s child at a distance (the centurion’s boy in Matt 8:5-13; Luke 7:1-10; the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter in Mark 7:24-30).”i If the official is indeed a Gentile, this portrays beautifully the “crossing-of-the-distance” that is already being wrought in Christ, by which he not only traversed the distance between heaven and earth in his Incarnation, but also the distance separating peoples from one another, to make them all one in himself: “In the one Christ, we are one,” as Saint Augustine said. And as Saint Paul expresses so beautifully:
Now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law of commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an end. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. (Eph 2:13-22) What a beautiful text! It summarizes very pointedly many of the themes that have emerged in our reflections, and deepens and confirms them. Indeed as I re-read these words now, I am encouraged anew, and am profoundly grateful, for the gift of our Mother Church, the custodian of the Word of God and his life throughout the ages. Because of the Church who speaks with the authority of Christ and who safeguards the gifts entrusted to her by him, we can have confidence—the littlest of us—that we are abiding in the truth of authentic faith and life. Wherever we have come from and whatever our background, Christ has drawn us near in his precious blood and has welcomed us, in the Spirit, into the heart of the Father, and he builds us up into unity in his one Body, the Church, kept strong and secure upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, whose authority and security in faith remains alive in their successors even to this very day. So let us allow ourselves to be founded upon the rock of Christ in the family of his Church, let us rejoice in him and allow ourselves to be truly a dwelling place of God in the Spirit, that the love and communion of the Trinity may flourish within us and spread through us, by his pure and gratuitous gift, into the hearts of others near and far. Let us return now to the Gospel text and reflect shortly upon it. Here is what it says: So he came again to Cana in Galilee, where he had made the water wine. And at Capernaum there was an official whose son was ill. When he heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went and begged him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death. Jesus therefore said to him, “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.” The official said to him, “Sir, come down before my child dies.” Jesus said to him, “Go; your son will live.” The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and went his way. As he was going down, his servants met him and told him that his son was living. So he asked them the hour when he began to mend, and they said to him, “Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him.” The father knew that was the hour when Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live;” and he himself believed, and all his household. This was now the second sign that Jesus did when he had come from Judea to Galilee. (4:46-54) This is an incredible account which soberly contrasts the unexpectedly ardent and true faith of this man with the often petty and superficial enthusiasm of Christ’s own people in Galilee and elsewhere, which had led Jesus to say that “a prophet has no honor in his native country” (4:44). We should also not allow the “familiarity” that most of us have with the accounts of Jesus’ miracles to numb us to the wonder and awe that such acts would have had in his day, and which they should have among us even now, two-thousand years later (not to mention that such miracles still occur among those who believe). Or said better: we should open our hearts to be truly moved by the awesome manifestation of God’s loving presence and power that Jesus’ miracles—his signs—represent and make accessible. Let us put ourselves in the shoes of the official, therefore, and consider his anxiety and desperation, his deep love for his child who is now on the point of death. He approaches Jesus out of the depths of this desperation, this anguish and pain, and he approaches him with the beautiful flower of faith and hope crying out for intervention and life. And Jesus summons this faith and hope to the surface even more vividly, and contrasts it explicitly with the superficial credulity of the others in the region roundabout: “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.” But the official is not hindered by this statement; indeed, it is as if, as we saw earlier concerning the authentic nature of accompaniment, Jesus knew that these very words would land well and stir yet greater enthusiasm in the man. He is not asking for the healing of his son in order to see signs and wonders, nor relying upon such things to sustain his faith. He reaches out in his desperate need to the person of Jesus himself, and with touching simplicity says: “Lord, come down before my child dies.” It is as if he says, “Lord, I do not need all that. Others may be demanding it of you left and right, and clinging to your every word and action for the marvels that they bear. But I do not care about such things. I desire only you and the life you bring. So please, only come and heal my son, whom I love!” And Jesus replies: “Go; your son will live.” And the official believes. Even without having seen, he believes. He goes his way in gratitude and trust even without having seen the healing of his son, for the word of Jesus is enough for him. This encounter contrasts greatly with a healing that we shall see in the next chapter, that of the paralyzed man beside the pool, who when Jesus approaches him directly and asks him whether he desires to be healed, responds not in the affirmative, but with questions and doubts about the possibility of such a thing. No, the official whose son is healed stands on an entirely different footing. He does not need to have everything figured out; he does not need to control either the conditions nor the manner in which God’s grace is communicated to him and at work in his life. He simply expresses his faith-filled plea, and he simply receives with gratitude the response of God’s goodness and love. And yet he is not thereby bereft of the joy of witnessing the marvel of God and the fruit of his activity. Rather, he receives it in abundant measure. For before he has even completed his return journey, his servants come to him and tell him that his son has begun to mend. And when he asks the time that the fever left him, they tell him at the seventh hour—one in the afternoon—which the official recalls is the precise time that Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live.” And the man believes just as freely and just as spontaneously as he had believed the day before. And this belief is not a passing enthusiasm or even merely a matter of accepting the miraculous healing of his beloved son. No, this belief is a true and abiding faith which becomes abiding conviction in the person of Jesus and also the sharing of this faith with others. For as the text says, “And he himself believed, and all his household.” May such also be true in us. May our loving God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit grant us such bold and confident faith that we may welcome unreservedly the gifts of love that he desires to bestow upon us—especially his own loving presence and intimacy with him. And may this loving presence, received in faith, spread also to all those whom we know and love, indeed spread to all of our brothers near and far, that we may rejoice together in the unity and peace that are born of God’s love and nearness. May we know the fulfillment that comes only through intimacy with the One-in-Three and Three-in-One who are our Origin and our Consummation, who love us, call us, heal us, and draw us, that we may find in their embrace fullness of life, happiness, and everlasting rest. **** NOTE **** i. Martin and Wright, The Gospel of John, 93. We see the dynamic nature of faith and life beautifully in the fact that, upon encountering the love of God in Jesus, upon receiving him as the true Lover of her heart and the fulfillment of all her longing, the Samaritan woman spontaneously and joyfully casts aside the cares and fears of her old life of isolation and spreads the joy that she has found with others. As Pope Francis says in the same letter quoted above:
Goodness always tends to spread. Every authentic experience of truth and goodness seeks by its very nature to grow within us, and any person who has experienced a profound liberation becomes more sensitive to the needs of others. As it expands, goodness takes root and develops. If we wish to lead a dignified and fulfilling life, we have to reach out to others and seek their good. In this regard, several sayings of Saint Paul will not surprise us: “The love of Christ urges us on” (2 Cor 5:14); “Woe to me if I do not proclaim the Gospel” (1 Cor 9:16). The Gospel offers us the chance to live life on a higher plane, but with no less intensity: “Life grows by being given away, and it weakens in isolation and comfort. Indeed, those who enjoy life most are those who leave security on the shore and become excited by the mission of communicating life to others”. When the Church summons Christians to take up the task of evangelization, she is simply pointing to the source of authentic personal fulfillment. For “here we discover a profound law of reality: that life is attained and matures in the measure that it is offered up in order to give life to others. This is certainly what mission means”. Consequently, an evangelizer must never look like someone who has just come back from a funeral! Let us recover and deepen our enthusiasm, that “delightful and comforting joy of evangelizing, even when it is in tears that we must sow… And may the world of our time, which is searching, sometimes with anguish, sometimes with hope, be enabled to receive the good news not from evangelizers who are dejected, discouraged, impatient or anxious, but from ministers of the Gospel whose lives glow with fervor, who have first received the joy of Christ.” (Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 9-10) Granted that there are many different vocations and also as many unique contours for the sharing of faith and life as there are persons in the world, we can affirm joyfully and wholeheartedly that faith breaks down the walls of isolation in order to create communion, releases from the shackles of fear to introduce the heart into the current of self-giving: first the reciprocal self-giving of the human heart to God and also the gift of oneself to others in the likeness of the love that one has first received. Such is the path by which the seed of faith, hope, and love received in grace sprouts, grows, and comes to full blossom, granting us to live in love, gift, and communion in the likeness of the very Persons of the Blessed Trinity. Thirst. The divine Lover who ever seeks out each one of us, each precious human person whom he has made, takes on flesh in order to make himself present, tangible and visible, to us. Encounter. Christ comes face-to-face with us, and we, too, are granted to see him and to hear his voice; yes, and even we who are not contemporaneous with the years of his time upon earth in the flesh see him and hear him, mediated through the Word and Sacrament that he has given, through the Church that perpetuates his Incarnation throughout time and space, and in the unique story of each one of us sustained by grace. Communion. As the precious fruit of this encounter, this encounter of thirsts, this encounter of hearts, a profound unity grows between the heart of Christ and the human heart, a unity of being and life that transfigures us in the likeness of the love of God and grants us to be participants in his way of being, and also so harnesses us in love that we become servants of this love for others. And this is the will of the Father and our true food: that we ourselves and all of our brothers and sisters may come to know and to rejoice in the love of God and in the beauty of communion that is brought to flower as the most mature and succulent fruit of such love, touching and making hearts new, and drawing them together—with God and with one another—in the deepest and most enduring way. This is the gift that touched the village of Sychar through the catalyst of Jesus’ encounter with a lonely Samaritan woman at a well, and it is the gift that is continually being realized in all times and places throughout history wherever God’s love makes itself known and is accepted and shared. We find ourselves here at the heart of the Gospel where passionate prayer and ardent evangelization intersect in the mystery of love’s self-gift, indeed, in the gift of God’s love alive and at work in human hearts, spreading itself abroad throughout the world. We find ourselves here at the center of “worship in spirit and truth,” in other words, letting ourselves be inserted into the life of the Trinity, welcomed into the bosom of the Father, through Christ the incarnate Word (truth) and the Spirit whom he has given to us. By this sanctification and divinization, by our becoming participants in the divine nature and coming to live the very life of God by God’s own gift, our life itself, our very concrete existence, becomes spirit and truth, permeated by the “love of God that has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom 5:5), and becoming a perpetuation of the enfleshment of the Word who is the everlasting Truth of God. In the conversation between Jesus and the woman of Samaria, we also witness the true nature of evangelization and of charity as encounter, the encounter with the face of the other, and tender and abiding attunement to them in all that they are such that we may walk together along the path to the fullness of truth. We see this in the words and the disposition of Christ as he meets the woman where she is, in her thirst, and gradually walks with her from her merely earthly way of seeing to one that is heavenly, from her enclosed sinful shame and into the vulnerability of love, from her isolation into the communion born of faith, the union born in the discovery of the One in whom alone all are made one. Here she allows herself, having been met by Christ where she did not expect to meet him, to be inserted into the very communion of the divine life of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and also inserted anew into the human community from which she was estranged.
Thus the isolation caused by sin and ignorance, the loneliness that afflicts so many hearts, is overcome in her. For the light of love shines upon her through the presence of the loving man who breaks the conventions that demand us to keep our distance from one another, who encounters her and enters into dialogue with her, and who walks with her in this dialogue until it bears its fruit in newness of life and fullness of truth. And so too is it to be realized through all the ages of the history of the Church, as Christ perpetuates his presence and his loving incarnation in the communion born in the world through his gift. We see the depth and tenderness of Christ’s accompaniment of each unique heart throughout the pages of the Gospels, in that he relates to every person differently according to the contours of their heart. His heart is a listening heart, a heart of incredible presence that looks only to love and hears only to listen, and that judges not to condemn but to open up space for the journey to God to express itself, for the heart to heal and to find its way back into the fullness of life for which it was made. And how many different faces does this accompaniment have at different moments and for different hearts! We do well to keep this in mind both in reading the pages of the Bible as well as in our relationships with others and our own efforts in evangelization and accompaniment. Only the love that is born of God, the love that is first received in my own heart and allowed to affirm and renew me, is both deep enough and wide enough to also encompass and affirm the uniqueness in heart and in journey of those whom I meet as they walk the paths of this life. Just as is the case with truth, that only in the one truth can we all meet and dialogue in a fruitful manner, respecting and cherishing diversity precisely because it occurs within, and expresses, the amazing richness of truth—so too is it with the one love: only love can cherish and accompany diversity, even in its transient imperfection and sin, confident that God, the source of all Love, is ever near to us and walks with us every step of the way. Pope Francis wrote beautifully of this process of encounter and accompaniment in his letter on the joy of evangelization: In a culture paradoxically suffering from anonymity and at the same time obsessed with the details of other people’s lives, shamelessly given over to morbid curiosity, the Church must look more closely and sympathetically at others whenever necessary. In our world, ordained ministers and other pastoral workers can make present the fragrance of Christ’s closeness and his personal gaze. The Church will have to initiate everyone – priests, religious and laity – into this “art of accompaniment” which teaches us to remove our sandals before the sacred ground of the other (cf. Ex 3:5). The pace of this accompaniment must be steady and reassuring, reflecting our closeness and our compassionate gaze which also heals, liberates and encourages growth in the Christian life. Although it sounds obvious, spiritual accompaniment must lead others ever closer to God, in whom we attain true freedom. Some people think they are free if they can avoid God; they fail to see that they remain existentially orphaned, helpless, homeless. They cease being pilgrims and become drifters, flitting around themselves and never getting anywhere. To accompany them would be counterproductive if it became a sort of therapy supporting their self-absorption and ceased to be a pilgrimage with Christ to the Father. Today more than ever we need men and women who, on the basis of their experience of accompanying others, are familiar with processes which call for prudence, understanding, patience and docility to the Spirit, so that they can protect the sheep from wolves who would scatter the flock. We need to practice the art of listening, which is more than simply hearing. Listening, in communication, is an openness of heart which makes possible that closeness without which genuine spiritual encounter cannot occur. Listening helps us to find the right gesture and word which shows that we are more than simply bystanders. Only through such respectful and compassionate listening can we enter on the paths of true growth and awaken a yearning for the Christian ideal: the desire to respond fully to God’s love and to bring to fruition what he has sown in our lives. But this always demands the patience of one who knows full well what Saint Thomas Aquinas tells us: that anyone can have grace and charity, and yet falter in the exercise of the virtues because of persistent “contrary inclinations”. In other words, the organic unity of the virtues always and necessarily exists in habitu, even though forms of conditioning can hinder the operations of those virtuous habits. Hence the need for “a pedagogy which will introduce people step by step to the full appropriation of the mystery”. Reaching a level of maturity where individuals can make truly free and responsible decisions calls for much time and patience. As Blessed Peter Faber used to say: “Time is God’s messenger”. One who accompanies others has to realize that each person’s situation before God and their life in grace are mysteries which no one can fully know from without. The Gospel tells us to correct others and to help them to grow on the basis of a recognition of the objective evil of their actions (cf. Mt 18:15), but without making judgments about their responsibility and culpability (cf. Mt 7:1; Lk 6:37). Someone good at such accompaniment does not give in to frustrations or fears. He or she invites others to let themselves be healed, to take up their mat, embrace the cross, leave all behind and go forth ever anew to proclaim the Gospel. Our personal experience of being accompanied and assisted, and of openness to those who accompany us, will teach us to be patient and compassionate with others, and to find the right way to gain their trust, their openness and their readiness to grow. Genuine spiritual accompaniment always begins and flourishes in the context of service to the mission of evangelization. Paul’s relationship with Timothy and Titus provides an example of this accompaniment and formation which takes place in the midst of apostolic activity. Entrusting them with the mission of remaining in each city to “put in order what remains to be done” (Tit 1:5; cf. 1 Tim 1:3-5), Paul also gives them rules for their personal lives and their pastoral activity. This is clearly distinct from every kind of intrusive accompaniment or isolated self-realization. Missionary disciples accompany missionary disciples. (Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 169-174) Let us try to open our hearts to truly interiorize the import of the words of Christ, his request for a drink and his offer to satisfy our thirst, to let them touch our hearts deep within. Here, the love of God can unveil itself, stirring into flame our thirst for intimacy, our thirst for intimacy with the very Source of all love, the very Consummation of all intimacy in the heart of the communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And indeed, this thirst is already within us, and has always been within us, at the core of our humanity fashioned in God’s image and called to his likeness. And not only that, but God already thirsts for us, and seeks us out, infinitely more deeply, constantly, and ardently than we have ever thirsted for him. He comes and initiates the gift. He is already at work in us—in me—to convert my heart to him, to ravish me with his beauty, and to attract me into the joy of his embrace.
For this reason he has created me, and for this reason he redeemed me in Christ, who became man to be close to me in the flesh, and suffered and rose from death to take all that is my own into himself and into the very life of the Trinity. Let us not fail to wonder at this gratuitous and undeserved gift, poured out into our lives from the opened Heart of Jesus Christ on the Cross and in the Resurrection. Let us rather, stirred by wonder and gratitude, simply cry out, “Jesus, I trust in you!” opening our whole being to welcome the gift of grace—of God’s own life as Trinity—pouring into us. And as we accept this gift every day, as we surrender to its currents surging through us, our own reciprocal response of cooperation will be born, sustained, and brought to fulfillment. At the beginning, therefore, I would like to emphasize the primacy of receptivity, of a wonder-filled acceptance of the love of God bestowed upon us in each moment and circumstance of life. This is an attitude both filial and spousal, the attitude of childlike and virginal receptivity to the gift of God and his love. It is the attitude of prayer. Everything else that we shall explore in coming reflections will be held within, and never unfold outside of, this primal receptivity, this primal experience of being seen, known, and loved by the God who has created us and chosen us for himself. Indeed, to the degree that we repose in this already-given gift of love, in the delight of God who looks upon us in Christ, and, in looking, loves, we can walk the path of love ourselves, in healing, transformation, and total surrender, throughout all that this entails in the sorrows and sufferings of this life—and in all its joys!—until we are taken home to eternal rest in the bosom of the Trinity. The longing of Christ, expressed so subtly yet so deeply in his request to the woman who comes to the well to draw, is the same as that expressed in the Song of Songs, where the Bridegroom cries out to his Bride: Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away; for lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of the cliff, let me see your face, let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet, and your face is comely. (Song 2:10-14) The Bridegroom revealed to us in these words is one who truly feels, who is deeply moved by love for his bride, in the tenderest spaces of his heart and in his whole being. And he calls her forth—he calls each of us forth—from her hiddenness in fear and sin, that she may step forth from the clefts of the rock into the light of his loving gaze, that he may see the beauty of her face and hear the loveliness of her voice. In other words, this love of the Bridegroom, who is Christ, is thirst. It is important to emphasize this, not only because so few people recognize it, but because this is so central to who God is and how he loves. God is a God not merely of agape, of self-sacrificing love, but of eros, of ardent longing. Indeed he is the One in whom agape and eros are inseparably united, a single and indivisible love: the desire for the well-being of the beloved and the longing for union with them; the outpouring gift of self for the other and the openness to receive the other into oneself. God’s love is thirst because it is ardor, passion, affection, tenderness. Thus, even though God—being infinitely perfect in himself and lacking nothing—cannot suffer, he can nonetheless, as Saint Bernard says, suffer-with. He can open himself to be moved by us in com-passion (in co-suffering), feeling with us our own pain, as well as feeling, in himself, the way that our sins and infidelities—as well as our love, our receptivity, our gratitude—affect him. How, in fact, could it be otherwise? If the ability to be touched and moved by others in vulnerable love is a perfection, a virtue—indeed the heart of all love—then it must exist in God, not in a lesser way, but in a fullness infinitely more rich and abundant than it exists among human persons! Yes, in his love for us, God has made his very being, as it were, a longing-for-us. And he has done so without reserve and irrevocably. This is what love is, in its inner essence, after all: vulnerability before the other, to receive and to give. Thus God does not, and never will, relate to us in any other way than in vulnerable longing, in humble invitation, in uncompromising self-outpouring, and in pure acceptance of us in all that we are. Let us pray that we can hear his plea, filled with tender longing and also touched with deep sorrow at our betrayal and our apathy: “They do not know me, so they do not want me,” as Christ lamented to Mother Teresa of Calcutta. We hear this same voice in Scripture, “They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and have hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns, that can hold no water” (Jer 2:13); and in the liturgy: “My heart had expected reproach and misery. And I looked for one that would grieve together with me, and there was none; and I sought one that would console me, and I found none.”i Mother Teresa comments on these words so beautifully, and we can take her invitation with all seriousness: Tell Jesus, “I will be the one.” I will comfort, encourage and love Him. … Be with Jesus. He prayed and prayed, and then went to look for consolation, but there was none. … I always write that sentence, “I looked for one to comfort Me, but I found no one.” Then I write, “Be the one.” So now you be that one. Try to be the one to share with Him, to comfort Him, to console Him. So let us ask Our Lady to help us understand.ii Saint Thérèse saw the same: ...this same God, who declares He had no need to tell us if He is hungry, did not hesitate to beg for a little water from the Samaritan Woman. He was thirsty.… But when He said, “Give me to drink,” it was the love of His poor creatures that the Creator of the universe was asking for. He was thirsty for love.... Ah! I feel it more than ever before, Jesus is parched, for He meets only the ungrateful and indifferent among His disciples in the world, and among His own disciples, alas, He finds few hearts who surrender to Him without reservations, who understand the real tenderness of His infinite Love.iiiiv In speaking about the thirst and lament of Christ, of God, it is important to clarify that we do not mean that God is needy, that he is imperfect or scared or needs our help, or that he seeks us for his own fulfillment, or that he relates to us as a clingy lover, a narcissistic user, a controlling parent, or any other faulty human analogy. This is a danger that can be felt or seen in certain other writings about the thirst of Christ, even beyond our own projections, focusing on satiating his thirst or consoling his heart. Such false understandings can be deeply harmful, so it is important to emphasize anew that God’s thirst is far beyond and far different than all of this. God’s thirst is born not of his need but of our need. His thirst is free, gratuitous, lighthearted, joyful, playful, and serene. It is a gift born from the fullness of joy, of delight, which desires to share itself with us, so to turn our sorrow into joy, our loneliness into communion. Thus God’s thirst, even the thirst of the man Christ, is abundance. It is but another name for his overflowing generosity, his abundant joy in the everlasting playful intimacy of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Here we see more deeply how in God eros and agape are one. In all of this, we see how prayer is the encounter of God’s thirst with our thirst. We are thirsting for God, created as we have been precisely for union with he who is all beauty, goodness, and truth. And yet he is also thirsting for us, tender love and ardent mercy that he is, the magnetism of intimacy that seeks to draw his precious creatures into the same eternal joy that is his as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And if this is true, then his love is not a mere willing, but a movement of the heart, an affection, a tender surging of delight and desire, as well as, when confronted with evil, apathy, and sin, an experience of inexplicable, divine sorrow, pain, and lament. And thus his mercy is not a mere forgiveness bestowed from on high, a mere legal act of dismissal of guilt, but an ardent pursuit of us even in our darkest place, even in the lostness of sin, in order to gather us up in his arms and to bring us home. His mercy is thus not opposed to his justice, but one with it; it is God’s own fidelity towards himself, towards his infinite goodness as Father, as eternal Love. And, when faced with human misery and sin, with a broken and shattered world, mercy alone can restore justice. Mercy, as love poured out into poverty and brokenness, can alone restore what is broken and draw human hearts back into right relationship with God. And this restoration, this right relationship, is precisely what justice is (thus the meaning of the term “justification,” in which, through faith and baptism, we are reconciled with God and admitted into his own inner life of love). If we stand, therefore, in a world so broken, so filled with ignorance of God and even rejection of him, it is very appropriate that we begin these days of reflection by stilling our hearts and listening. Let us listen to the lament of Christ longing for love, Christ on the Cross crying out, “I thirst,” and thus revealing to us the depths of longing in the heart of God to love and be loved. Only this can reveal to us the true nature of our heavenly Father, the true love of our divine Bridegroom, and the breath of the Spirit who seeks to fill us with himself. Indeed, in this listening to Christ, we can hear our own lament, our own desire, our own hope, voiced by him, taken up and offered to the Father. We can hear the voice of all humanity gathered together in Christ and made a single prayer of pure love: When the hour had come for him to fulfill the Father’s plan of love, Jesus allows a glimpse of the boundless depth of his filial prayer, not only before he freely delivered himself up (“Abba...not my will, but yours.”), but even in his last words on the Cross, where prayer and the gift of self are but one: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise,” “Woman, behold your son” - “Behold your mother,” “I thirst.” “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” “It is finished;” “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” until the “loud cry” as he expires, giving up his spirit. All the troubles, for all time, of humanity enslaved by sin and death, all the petitions and intercessions of salvation history are summed up in this cry of the incarnate Word. Here the Father accepts them and, beyond all hope, answers them by raising his Son. Thus is fulfilled and brought to completion the drama of prayer in the economy of creation and salvation. The Psalter gives us the key to prayer in Christ. In the “today” of the Resurrection the Father says: “You are my Son, today I have begotten you. Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession.” (Catechism, par. 2605-2606) Let us therefore listen deeply, and, in listening, allow our own true voice, our own heart’s deepest and most hidden longings, to come forth, and to express themselves vulnerably before Jesus. Let us listen, in turn, to his own voice echoing in the silence of our heart, revealing to us his ardent thirst of love, for all of humanity and for us, uniquely and specifically. Here two voices will come together, at the foot of the Cross of Love, and speak in a dialogue of love, in which both voices begin to assuage the thirst of one another, and birth the joy of intimacy. **** NOTES **** i. Offertory of the Mass of the Feast of the Sacred Heart. Quoted in Michael E. Gaitley, MIC, 33 Days to Morning Glory (Stockbridge, Massachusetts: Marian Press, 2011), 81. ii. Ibid. iii. Letters of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, vol. II, translated by John Clarke, O.C.D. (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1988), 995. iv. Among many other examples, we can include St. Margaret Mary Alacoque: “He made me rest for a long time on His divine breast, where He showed me the marvels of His love and the unspeakable secrets of His sacred heart that had always been hidden before. He opened them to me there for the first time, in a real and tangible way. … He said to me, ‘My divine heart is so impassioned with love for humanity, and for you especially, it cannot contain the flames of its burning charity inside. It must spread them through you, and show itself to humanity so that they may be enriched by the previous treasures that I shared with you.’ Afterwards, He asked for my heart. I begged Him to take it and He did, placing it in His own adorable heart. He let me see it there like a little atom consumed in a burning furnace. Then He returned it to me in a burning heart-shaped flame and placed it where it had been.”(Autobiography of St. Margaret Mary, trans. The Sisters of the Visitation (Rockford, IL: TAN Books, 1968), 69. Quoted in Gauthier, 64) The story of Christ’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well bears in it so much richness that here we can only touch upon its depth. We can only draw a bit from such a profound wellspring. We behold first of all the beautiful encounter of thirsts that lies at the heart of prayer and evangelization: the encounter of the ardent thirst of God with the thirst of the human heart. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church expresses so beautifully:
“If you knew the gift of God!” The wonder of prayer is revealed beside the well where we come seeking water: there, Christ comes to meet every human being. It is he who first seeks us and asks us for a drink. Jesus thirsts; his asking arises from the depths of God’s desire for us. Whether we realize it or not, prayer is the encounter of God’s thirst with ours. God thirsts that we may thirst for him. “You would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” Paradoxically our prayer of petition is a response to the plea of the living God: “They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water!” Prayer is the response of faith to the free promise of salvation and also a response of love to the thirst of the only Son of God. (par. 2560-2561) The language of the Bible is a language of relationship. From the earliest history of humanity marked out for us in the book of Genesis to the final pages of the book of Revelation giving a glimpse of our eternal destiny, we see God’s plan to draw us into intimate relationship with himself. This means that, in order to understand the authentic beauty of Scripture, of the history of salvation laid out before our gaze—as well as the very meaning of our own lives on this earth—it is necessary to understand the nature of this relationship. What kind of relationship does God establish with us? How does he seek to relate to us, and how does he desire us to relate to him? These questions get to the root issue for each one of us: who is God? Is he a relentless taskmaster, a harsh judge, a distant patriarch, a master over his slaves? Is he an egoist who clings to his prerogatives and uses his creatures to minister to his own wishes and self-gain? This is what the evil spirit, symbolized by the serpent in Eden, tried to convince Adam and Eve of at the beginning of human history. But it was a lie; and it is still a lie when we believe it today, however subtly. Whenever we flee from the face of God into sin and selfishness, we are not liberating ourselves unto freedom; we are descending into slavery, far from the love of our Father who only desires our good and happiness. For he created us out of his abundant generosity for no other reason than to share in the happiness of his own eternal life, already in this world and forever in the renewed creation at the consummation of history. This is the true nature of relationship that God desires to have with us, one that manifests his own inner being as Love—as Trinity—in the everlasting communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the truth written all over the Bible, growing in an ever increasing crescendo throughout the Old Testament until it bursts forth with radiant clarity in the New. But this truth is also written all over our human existence, and in our very bodies as man and woman, as children, spouses, and parents. For the relation of God to us is not adequately understood as that of Master and servant, as Lord and subjects, or even as Creator and creature. As John Paul II says, “The paradigm of master and slave is foreign to the Gospel.” Nothing but intimacy, a deep intimacy that mirrors the most intimate of human relationships that we experience in this life, while also infinitely surpassing them in depth and ardor—nothing but intimacy can truly express the depth of communion that the God of heaven and earth desires to have with each one of us. A love aflame with desire, burning with ardent thirst, this is the love that God has for us, for me. It is a love that longs for me with tenderness, seeks for me with passion, looks upon me with delight, and reaches out to touch me, hold me, and caress me with gentleness. It is a love that restores, through sheer grace, what my own sin and foolishness has destroyed, plunging to the depths of the darkness in my suffering heart in order, there, to affirm my hidden beauty, to set it free and restore it, so that in God, in union with his love, I may be beautiful as I was meant to be. This alone is the kind of love that can do justice to the nature of God that is revealed to us in the pages of the sacred text, and is presented to us throughout history in the preaching and life of the Church. Yes, the language of the Bible is the language of family, and the God revealed to us therein is a God thirsting to establish a relationship of intimate love with each one of his children. From the first pages of Genesis, when God creates humanity as male and female, husband and wife, and commands them, “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1:28), to the climax of the book of Revelation, in which the Bride cries out to the Bridegroom, “Come, Lord Jesus!” (cf. Rev 22:17-21), we see that God delights in the family, and relates to us as members of his own family. Of course, this participation is imperfect, weak, and incipient at the beginning of history, and only grows gradually over time as God educates humanity in his ways and enters into a series of ever more intimate covenants with us. This climaxes in the covenant wrought through Jesus Christ, in which all of God’s activity in the world and in history reaches its definitive fulfillment, a fulfillment that is only awaiting its final consummation with the conclusion of history. Yes, God’s relationship with us is one that is both paternal and spousal, and also brings forth in us the fruitfulness of parenthood. He wishes to relate to us, and to truly be, our Father and our Bridegroom, even if he is so in an infinitely more real and profound manner than the imperfect way these relations are manifested in the context of human relationships in this world. And through this union of breathtaking communion, we are rendered transparent to his light, living with his very life, such that it passes through us—through our own freedom joined to his freedom—into the world and into the hearts of our brothers and sisters. God has impressed upon us, in both body and spirit, this orientation towards intimacy through self-giving. And this is manifested primarily in the three fundamental relationships of child, spouse, and parent (with friendship being, as it were, the common thread of all love in the simple mutual affirmation of persons). This vocation to love lies at the origin of our very existence—received through the conjugal gift of man and woman and the growth of life in the womb of the woman's body. And such a love is also the foundation of our experience of self and of reality—in the gaze and smile of our mother, whose very love awakens us to consciousness and grants us an intuition of the Love that lies at the very origin of the universe and is the deepest meaning of all things. Coming from Love, sustained by Love, enfolded in Love, and called to enter ever deeper into Love in reciprocal love and total self-surrender. This is the marvel of human existence, a marvel gravely wounded by sin at the beginning of time and by every personal sin committed since, and yet a marvel affirmed and redeemed by God in Jesus Christ at the fullness of time. And this gift of redemption, of the “re-giving” of our very humanity anew, restored and ennobled in Christ, seeks only to be appropriated by us, to touch us and enter into us, renewing us to such a degree that the wounds of sin are healed and we become partakers in the very nature of God’s own life and love. This is the reason that we were created in the beginning, and it is the reason that, lost as we are in sin, God became flesh to redeem us: so that we may live the very life of God, as God himself lives it, and may do so, not as the result of our own efforts or merit, but on the basis of the free gift of God given in Christ Jesus. We have been created, redeemed, and chosen to share in the intimate life of the Trinity, to be partakers in the very inner life of God. Nothing, absolutely nothing in the universe finds meaning outside of the love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Rather, all finds its purpose in the light of his loving self-communication and its fulfillment in returning to him anew, through the heart of man and woman surrendered to him in reciprocal love. To be a beloved child of the heavenly Father, a spouse of Jesus Christ, the divine Bridegroom, and to be radiant with the fecund love of the Holy Spirit! This is my vocation and my destiny. This is the reason for which I was made by God. This is the reason that, lost as I was in sin and selfishness, covering over my nakedness in shame, fear, and guilt, he came to me—naked himself in vulnerable love upon the Cross—to reopen me to the flow of acceptance and reciprocal self-giving, to being loved and loving, that in this way I may enter anew into intimacy with his own life. And what is unveiled to me in this naked vulnerability of God upon the Cross, in the gaze and voice of Jesus Christ in his Passion? Here God has become flesh for me—the second Person of the Trinity, the eternal Son, has become a man and married himself to my own humanity, my own experience, my own flesh, even my own darkness. And he has done so precisely so that he can unveil to me anew his own inmost Heart...yes, the Heart of his Father, who, through adoption, is my Father too. So what does he reveal? As Teresa of Calcutta expressed it: it is God’s infinite longing to love and be loved. This is the kind of God that I have, and the One with whom I am invited to enter into deep relationship. It is a God who not only desires me to be happy, to find fulfillment in his love, but who also thirsts for me, who yearns for me, moved as he is by the beauty that he sees in me, a beauty that he himself created and redeemed. Shall I refuse him this gift of myself, turning away to veil my nakedness in shame, in the million possible distractions? Shall I remain in the lies of the evil one, insinuated into me to keep me far from the Father who loves me, from the Bridegroom who seeks me? Or shall I step forth from the trees of the garden, throwing off the fig leaf of fear, in order to be looked upon by his cherishing love, to be approached by him, and to give myself to him who, in this sacred space, gives himself, in all his ravishing beauty, to me? |
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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