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But a hireling, he who is not the shepherd, one who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees.

What’s wonderful about the “Good Shepherd” passage is the cast of characters introduced. Of course there’s the Good Shepherd. We’ve spent a lot of time on Him. He demonstrates to us that God is good; His goodness is revealed in Christ; Christ shows this goodness by dying for us and giving us His flesh and blood to eat and drink; we thank God for this always.

But there’s also the sheep, the hireling, and the wolf. Each one deserves a little case study. First, the sheep.

Some like to use the derisive term “sheeple,” to describe the sort of people who blindly follow whatever they hear on the news, or whatever some politician tells them, or who follow the crowd. This smacks of elitism.

Elitism clings to human nature even as Gnosticism is the theology of a fallen human nature (the human attempt to figure out meaning in a fallen world on their own) which naturally believes it’s “in the know” about the truth, while meanwhile everyone else is just following the crowd.

Or else the philosophy of Frederick Nietzsche might fuel their elitism. Nietzsche divided the world into masters and slaves, supermen and the herd. Most people, of course, are the herd, but those such as he – and those who think like him – are the supermen who triumph over herd-like thinking. They don’t follow; they create new values and new truths.

Nietzschean thinking actually intersects with Gnosticism on this point. Both begin with a “death of God” premise. Gnostics reject the “God of this world,” and Nietzsche famously said, “God is dead.” Gnostics saw salvation in a transcendent, trans-cosmic God who had nothing to do with this world. Nietzsche’s salvation was more subtle, but like the Gnostics he posited a meaning that transcended anything reason or revelation could provide, a salvation centered on the Self’s creation of values, which loops back to Gnosticism which also centered salvation on the self.

Non-sheep religiosity is Self Theology. Non-sheep religiosity sees the Self as a lion, or fox, or ox, or spider monkey, or an owl, something powerful, sly, strong, agile, or wise. Non-sheep religiosity believes you can go from being a sheep to being something better than a sheep.

Here’s a truth: Until anyone can come back from the grave and tell us the ultimate truth about things, everyone’s a sheep. Everyone’s wandering around in the dark trying to figure things out. I have to laugh at the scientist confidently telling us what’s what in the universe. Are they aware not too long ago the thinkers of the day told us the world was flat? Why? Because that’s what was observed – the world sure looks flat to me! Of course, someone would say, “Yeah, but they didn’t have the full picture from which to make their observations. They didn’t have all the tools.”

And how is that any different than what’s going on now? Do you think scientists have all the tools, and all the data, and the correct theories, to really understand what’s going on out there? Goodness, they know very little about dark matter and dark energy, which make up the majority of the universe! They know nothing. They’re sheep wandering around.

We could go on and on with all sorts of topics. We are all sheep wandering around going “baaa.” Even Nietzsche. Especially Nietzsche. Nietzsche was a writer using the written word to prove there’s no such thing as writing – every word he writes binds him up in a paradox. He did the same with philosophy. “All philosophers are just projecting their neuroses.” OK, keep on doing your philosophy you philosopher Nietzsche. No wonder the poor fellow died insane.

Sheep. All sheep. “Baaaa.”

And there’s no escaping being sheep. The Shepherd doesn’t turn the sheep into eagles. Yet how often to people turn Christianity into a self-empowerment spirituality, or Christ into some sort of self help guru. As if Christ came to turn the sheep into something they’re not. No, there’s no suggestion of that in this week’s Gospel.

There’s only the Shepherd, and following Him. Which in a way suggests we should embrace our identity as sheep. Why not? Do you have a better explanation for why you keep on committing the sin you do? Do you have a better explanation for why every generation thinks they’ll make the world a better place, but the world keeps on going as it always has?

Sheep. All sheep. “Baaaa.”

There’s only the Shepherd, and following Him. To embrace ourselves as sheep is to embrace our Lord as our Good Shepherd. It’s to be tunnel visioned as far as the world goes. Lots of voices out there, from hirelings and wolves. These are they who take advantage of the sheep. But the sheep hears only the Good Shepherd.

Why? Because He is the one person in all of history who went to the grave and back and told us the ultimate truth about things. So we care about what He has to say. Everything else is “baaaa.”

I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives His life for the sheep.

There’s a lot going on in this little sentence. Perhaps we could stop at face value and embrace the meaning every child would understand: Jesus died for me. But this is the glory of St. John’s Gospel. You can start with the simple – and John’s Gospel is so very simple – dive into the depths of its mysteries, and end up where you started, blessed every step of the way.

So let’s dive into the depths for a bit.

Of course, in John, any statement of “I am” is more than meets the eye, referencing as it does God’s divine name: “I am that I am.” So when we see “I am,” we should hear “God,” and not just any God, but the God of Israel, the God that appeared to Israel, the God that revealed Himself repeatedly in the Old Testament as Israel’s shepherd.

The fact that Jesus applies the “I am” to Himself substantiates the entire claim of the Gospel, that Jesus is the “Word made flesh and dwelling among us.”

So right off the bat, Jesus is saying something about God, as revealed in Himself. God is good, a good shepherd. Let’s look at how God was a shepherd for Israel in the Old Testament. What freight is loaded onto this term from the Scriptures? A good summary of the many verses is this one from Ezekiel: “I will establish one shepherd over them, and he shall feed them – My servant David. He shall feed them and be their shepherd.”

The image of God shepherding Israel is founded in Israel’s wandering in the wilderness, where the Lord guided them, protected them, and most importantly, fed them with their daily bread and manna. (Again we see here – given the “daily bread” petition of the Lord’s Prayer – how essential the image of Jesus as our shepherd is, why it preceded even the cross historically.)

Jesus too feeds us with manna, as He showed in the feeding of the 5,000 in the beginning of John 6. But as He strenuously pointed out for the remainder of John 6, the true bread He gives us to eat is His flesh and blood, which gives us eternal life. Jesus thus feeds us with the flesh and blood in which He (drum roll)…gives His life for the sheep.  (Recall the pastoral context of the feeding of the 5,000.)

So let’s do some “find and replace.” I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives His life for the sheep. “God is the one who feeds us with the flesh and blood He gave in His death, which gives us life.”

Ah, but what of the “good”? Now we get back to our problem of evil, and the introit for this past Sunday, that the earth is full of the goodness of the Lord.

How about this: “In Christ, the I Am, God is good, and this goodness is demonstrated in how He shepherds us, by giving His body and blood for us to eat and drink, in which we have eternal life.”

Now let’s put it simply: “In Holy Communion, we see how the earth is full of the goodness of the Lord.” Yes! Of course, this is why Holy Communion is also a “thanksgiving,” a Eucharist. Because through it we receive all the creation as good and something to give thanks for, first in the liturgy, then throughout our days. “Oh give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good, and His mercy endures forever.” When do we pray this prayer? After communion. And this founds St. Paul’s comment that we should give thanks at all times for everything in the name of Christ.

Yet, we’re still a bit in theoretical territory. Tell someone who just lost his child that all will make sense if he just goes to communion, that properly understood, they can give thanks for what happened. How can this even be?

Here’s another way to look at it. What’s the alternative? If not faith in the good God who gave eternal life in His body and blood (and in which our hearts are lifted to the place where the child lives and where eternal joys are to be found), then what?

I recently read an article talking about how the loss of active faith (meaning, going to church) has corresponded to the rise in suicide and depression. The article mentioned that compared to the general population, Roman Catholic women who attended mass once a week committed suicide at half the rate of the general population. And of the 7,000 women surveyed over years who attended mass more than weekly? Not a one of them committed suicide.

Is it possible to have your very vision of the cosmos re-ordered in such a way, that you see God’s goodness even where others see death, hopelessness, and darkness? Is it possible that Holy Communion can have this effect, to reboot the soul in such a manner?

Is it possible to walk in the valley of the shadow of death and fear no evil, because God is present there, preparing a table for us in the presence of our enemies?

Again, without faith in a positive answer, what’s the alternative? Thankfully, our faith is grounded in this season of resurrection. Jesus is risen. Many witnesses saw it. He is the I Am. He is the Good Shepherd. And He most certainly prepares that table.

I am the good shepherd; and I know My sheep, and am known by My own.

The goodness of the Lord seems to be an important theme this week. On “Good Shepherd” Sunday we tend to focus on the wonderful, pastoral metaphor of Jesus as a Shepherd. But the qualifier that He’s the “good” Shepherd can sometimes be overlooked. Or, it gets glossed over quickly as, “Jesus is the good shepherd because He dies for the sheep,” the implication being, unlike other shepherds who raise the sheep to slaughter them

All too true. But there’s another context of the “good” shepherd, and there’s also a reason the Church chose to focus on the “goodness of the Lord” as it settled on an introit for this week’s Gospel. What’s that other context? It’s “I am the good shepherd; and I know My sheep, and am known by My own.”

The sheep know God not simply as shepherd, but as good. Hence the appropriateness of the introit corresponding to this Gospel: “The earth is full of the goodness of the LORD.
By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, And all the host of them by the breath | of His mouth.”

Incidentally, this is the exact theme brought up in the Venite (Psalm 95) sung at each Matins. Look at select words: “Oh come, let us sing to the LORD! …For the LORD is the great God, …In His hand are the deep places of the earth; …Oh come, let us worship and bow down; Let us kneel before the LORD our Maker. For He is our God, And we are the people of His pasture, And the sheep of His hand.”

The fact that the Venite is chanted daily in a service that goes far back in history, coupled with the fact that the earliest depiction of Christ in Christian art is as the good Shepherd, tells us something important about this theology: a central component of our faith is “knowing” God as a good God, the Good Shepherd, who holds all things in His hands. And keep this in mind in the context of the early church’s martyrdoms – they were the sheep led to the slaughter!

Indeed, that may not simply be a central component of faith, but the very structure of it! Let us consider the so-called “problem of evil” again. The problem only exists if evil exists. This is the problem for those who claim they gave up on God because they couldn’t fathom a world created by God with all the evils in it. The paradox they end up in is, now that they’ve gotten rid of God, they have no basis for saying anything is good or evil at all! If it’s all just survival of the fittest – T Rex chomping on some poor, hapless baby dinosaur – then evil might be relative to the baby dinosaur and its family, but in the big picture the action can be indifferent or even good (for T Rex).

The gnostic approach would be to single out evil as a “thing” with its own independent force – Satan, Yaldabaoth, the Demiurge – working against God and His aims. And then, the more practical gnostics will discern a good that is separate from the evil, and believe it their ordained mission to institute “good” in the world, usually through mass action, or politics. Or, as some of the evolutionary biologists put it, in their desperate attempt to re-establish Christian ethics in the moral vacuum they created, we have to transcend what our survival-of-the-fittest DNA has fated us to be, and so bring about good.

Because, good is what? Evolution establishes what used to be called sin and death. The strong survive over others until they don’t; that’s the rule. There is no “good” in that, because evolution prescribes nothing; it runs by an almost mathematical law. Is 2+2 good? The question is ridiculous.

So, what of the problem of evil? It’s not a problem of evil, it’s a problem of “I don’t have what I want. And what I want is not to be in pain from this alligator chomping on me because I accidentally wandered in a pond in Florida.” But the alligator is quite happy, as happy as we are eating our Big Macs!

And what of the Hitlers and sadists of the world who inflict unspeakable evils on the innocent? How much of that is a matter of sentiment and style as opposed to real evil, and by real I mean what ends up happening in reality. A young girl starves to death at Krakow after being beaten and forced to work in labor camps. King Herod kills the innocent with the sword. Heart-breaking. But in terms of real evil (and I’m still working things out according to the evolutionary world view), these are simply flourishes to the cold calculations of evolution’s march, flourishes unique to the human species – hey, T Rex has his flourishes and we have ours.

Ugly things happen every day. Right now an elderly woman lies starving in bed, dying, because her children are busy with their lives. The sentiment level is different, but the coldness of evolution’s calculations remains the same. The children are adding more net value to the improvement of the species by what they’re doing than by giving comfort to some random “animal” going off in the corner to die.

How many old squirrels are in the same situation as the woman, off in some lonely hole dying? How many young rabbits are in the same situation as the girl at Krakow, starving and at the mercy of some predator? Maybe the predator isn’t a jerk about it – again, humans add their own little flourishes unique to our species – but certainly ripping off the flesh from a live animal is kind of…jerky.

So, the only way we can lift these sad situations up to the level of evil is to have such a notion as evil in the first place. And the only way this can happen is to get out of the materialist cosmic order, which is to say, to introduce God into the equation.

The Gnostics introduce God as completely outside this material realm (which is, incidentally, one of the reasons why Gnosticism is so popular today, because science has declared the entire material realm off limits to God, so people are forced to hunt for him in transcendent realms, which is exactly as the Gnostics believed). Good, according to this, is in this transcendent realm; evil is what our material world has resulted in. Hence the problem of evil.

Christianity, and this week’s Gospel, introduces something completely, actually mind-blowingly different. Christianity looks at this world with all its evils and says, “The earth is full of the goodness of the Lord.” The sheep “know” the Lord as good. How can this be, accept by faith. Which is why, again, this is so structural for faith. It’s why St. Paul says we should give thanks at all times for everything in the name of Christ. By faith the Christian’s soul is full of God’s goodness in everything that happens, and he can’t help but be thankful at all times for everything…in the name of Christ.

This faith looks above and ahead, to where Christ is sitting and to when Christ will return, and knows He will rule in righteousness, our Good Shepherd making everything right. He’ll remove everything that causes sin and take tears away.

Again, with this faith the problem of evil melts away. What’s evil that God isn’t turning into good, something He demonstrated when the Shepherd became the slaughtered sheep, out of which eternal life flows?

It’s either that, or we look at the evils of the world and howl into the silence about it. Or does anyone know another way?

Misericordia Domini. “The Goodness of the Lord.” All the earth is full of the goodness of the Lord. And then the next verse says, “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made,
And all the host of them by the breath of His mouth.” Misericordia Domini is the older, fancier way of referencing what is now dubbed, “Good Shepherd Sunday.”

It’s a Sunday of seeming paradoxes. What’s good about being compared to a sheep? Sheep are slaughtered. As St. Paul says, describing the Christian life, “For Your sake we are killed all day long; We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.”

Wow! Killed all day long? And yet this same St. Paul can later write how Christians should always be “speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

And that corresponds to the rest of the introit for Misericordia Domini, which says “Praise the LORD with the harp; Make melody to Him with an instrument of ten strings. Sing to Him a new song; Play skillfully with a shout of joy.”

Yes, you’re a lamb led to the slaughter…so praise God! And apparently Christians have taken this seriously, as we hear reports that early martyrs sang hymns when they were the little lambs thrown to the lions. What a paradox!

But it’s the same paradox as our Psalm: all the earth is full of the goodness of the Lord. Really? Hurricanes, tornadoes, crime, famine, war, Hitler, Stalin, Nero…the earth is full of the goodness of the Lord? How can this be stated?

I’ve tried to emphasize that Gnosticism, as well as today’s Neo-gnosticism, has always been an attempt to resolve the riddle of how to explain evil if we claim there’s a God. How can the world have so many evils if God is the Creator? Reason dictates only two possible answers: either God is not Almighty, or God Himself is the author of evil.

Let’s deal with the second answer to the paradox, that God Himself is the author of evil. This is the Deistic and Stoic answer, as well as the one embraced by our scientific world view. The world is just the way it is. Evils happen. This answer runs the “It is what it is” sentiments you often hear people say. Evil is baked into “this world’s god.”

That cannot be our God, because our God is good, merciful, and life-giving.

The first answer to the paradox gets into more historically Christian territory, but here’s where the Gnosticism comes in. God is good, but the forces of evil have an independent life of their own. God is not wholly almighty. Various Gnostic sects embraced this view to varying degrees. Some cleaved the world into two black/white principles (Manichaeism); while others saw the rise of “this world’s god” as resulting from the fall of an aspect of God, and the restoration of this aspect of God constitutes the cosmic drama, which culminates in God restoring to himself the “fallen sparks” from the material world, after which that world and its god are destroyed.

This view isn’t satisfying because it weakens the confession that God is truly “almighty.” God is absolutely, fully in complete control and management of every single action and event that happens in His universe. He’s not the “author” of every act – He doesn’t author sin. But nothing happens without His complete knowledge and will. It’s never as if He “lets things get out of control.” He’s always in control.

So then, why does the evil happen?

The introit poses the paradox this way: “All the earth is full of the goodness of the Lord. By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, And all the host of them by the breath of His mouth.”

First, the earth is full of the goodness of the Lord: God is an utterly good God and all His creation is good (just as He declared after each day). Second, by the Lord’s breath the heavens and all their host was made. He is almighty.

Again, if God is almighty, and the earth is full of His goodness, why do evils happen?

Jesus the Good Shepherd helps us understand what’s going on, as do those soon-to-be slaughtered sheep singing hymns. Jesus is the Almighty God – the Shepherd of the entire cosmos – submitting to the supposed “evils” of the world and making Himself the source of its eternal life.

When the Christian faces the lion, he doesn’t see death – Jesus says those who believe in Him will never taste or see death – but he sees goodness and abundant life forever and ever! I’d sing too if that were the case! But isn’t that what Jesus’ cross has done with evil? Jesus took the most evil moment in history – the murder of God – and turned it into the source of eternal life, the best moment in history. This is why, for St. John’s Gospel, the cross is Jesus’ glory. He sees the cross and sees Himself being “lifted up” and glorified.

And Jesus runs every evil through that dynamic. It’s why the martyrs are identified with their means of torture and death. It’s why St. Paul says we can be thankful at all times for everything through the name of Christ. It’s because Christ has revealed evil to be not something working against God, but for Him.

What can evil do to us, then? If God is for us, who can be against us? God is working all things for our good, including the evils. And all these ideas (from Romans 8) culminate in St. Paul’s words, “We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Why do evils happen? There are two ways to deal with this question. The first way is to pose it as a problem, to deal with it as if something got out of control in the cosmic order. But going this way ends up with dialogue Job had with the Lord: “Where were you when I set up the rules? Don’t even try to understand.” But the Lord didn’t leave it at that. What He did do was take the “evil” out of the equation. In Christ, evil doesn’t really happen, but is used by God to lead to good. Take evil out of the equation…and the paradox disappears.  Turn the lion into my doorway into eternal life, and I can’t wait to be that slaughtered lamb.  How thankful I can be for that lion!  What goodness I find in it!

What’s going on with faith?

Last meditation was a bit of a dive in what I like to sometimes call “quantum theology,” only because “quantum” sounds cool and mind-warpingly complex, and every now and then we need to probe into aspects of God that simply take us down some rabbit holes. Why did God create the world as He did?

And so, we contemplated why God worked the coming of Christ and crucifixion into the very DNA of His creation. We pondered why He added “evil” to a creation which knew only good, when He told Adam of a “Tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Without those words Adam could have no ability to know of such a thing as “evil.” Same with Satan. Why did God do this? It must have something to do with the fact that yes, He did work the crucifixion – for sins, against Satan and his works – into the entire plan. Jesus was not Plan B, but Plan A.

But why?

Finally, we contemplated how the alternative “Paradise Lost” version of the story is that God created everything blissful and good, but then man chose against God, and now God has to come up with a Plan B, the Jesus plan. God is constantly cleaning up after man’s bad choices. In this “universe,” choice plays a huge rule. Jesus is the second Adam who chose properly, and so could be the source of new life, a second birth, a second chance to make good choices.

But if we go with the first “Plan A” version of the story – that the entire history of our universe has at its heart and center the crucifixion of Christ as the completion and fulfillment of things – then a new faculty other than choice is required. And that is faith. In fact, by this interpretation, faith is truly the completion of man. Faith is what God was working in man from the beginning. Faith is why God added evil and Satan, and anticipated the fall.

Consider that. All of history has simply been God’s sixth day perfecting of the creature made in His image. It was finished when Jesus breathed His last; the thing perfected in us is faith.

The witnesses of the resurrection were needed, to verify truth, but ultimately, the blessed are they who believe without seeing. And faith in Jesus’ resurrection is the only faith. “One sign will be given this evil generation, the sign of Jonah [the resurrection].” An evil generation looks to perfect their faith with more than faith in the resurrection.

Consider that again. The sixth day completion and perfection of man is (a) belief in the pierced one, (b) that He is resurrected, and (c) receiving His Spirit of absolution. That is what man is about. That is the purpose of man.

Again, what’s going on with this? Why is faith such a big deal? Why does Jesus leave us for so long, with no proofs save witness of the resurrection? What is it about the perfection and creation of man that requires this? And not just in that Plan B sense, like, “We really wish you would have made good choices, but now that you’ve screwed up, we’ll save you, and now you believe in us until we return and set up the new world.” But rather, in the Plan A sense of, “Come, let us perfect our creation by working in its very DNA evil, a Satan, a fall, sin, death, the coming of Christ, His death, and His resurrection. Why? So that the man in our image would have faith.” Wow!

What’s the blessedness about believing, especially believing without seeing?

And what sort of faith is that intended to be? A faith thankful for all things at all times, a thankfulness worked into its very worship life, the eucharist. This is a faith that looks in the face of seeming evil and says, “Nope. Thanks for that!” Again, wow!

Is it so that we’re led to understand that God is almighty and in control of everything? Is the evil of our world specifically to teach us that it’s not something we can solve or triumph over, but that ultimately God is behind it, working it according to His good plan, and we should respond with a thankful “amen”? Were Adam and his children not fully formed until he learned the way of evil led to no place good? Did God create Adam to first go the way of evil, and then end up with faith?

Against those who would say, “Yeah, but Adam was fully formed, for God declared all things good after the completion of creation,” are forgetting that God’s creation wasn’t finished until Jesus’ death – “It is finished.” In other words, Adam wasn’t fully completed until Jesus began breathing on disciples and showing His pierced Person.

So, the mud from which God was forming Adam was a mud drawn from the mud that Adam was to become after the fall, the dust to which he returned. And the breath He breathed into Adam was the same breath Jesus breathed upon the disciples. That was the completion of Adam, but not quite, no, not until there arose that first believer arose who believed without seeing.

That puts the supposed question of “why allow Adam to fall into evil” into a new perspective. Adam wasn’t completed anyways. It would be like saying to God, “Why is there such a sludgy area in that place where you haven’t fully divided the land from the seas? That doesn’t seem helpful for anyone!” And God says, “Give me some time; I work during the day. I’m not done yet.” Now think of Jesus’ words, “I must work the works of Him who sent Me while it is day.”

He wasn’t done yet! Not until He said, “It is finished.” In His creative wisdom, part of the creation of Adam involved including whatever it was in him that led to him choosing to sin. All this to lead to the perfection of Adam through faith in Christ.

Faith. Again, why faith? Why “if you have the faith of a mustard seed you can move mountains”? Why is faith so essential to the perfection of man?

You can almost get Sci Fi here, as if faith were some component of the human person that can lift us into a higher way of being. This could get mystical and new agey, but only when faith is seen as power, like the force of Star Wars.

Here’s one way to look at it. Faith looks forward to what Adam had in the Garden of Eden, eternal life to the full in the new world. Faith refills the human person with what Adam emptied himself of when he decided for “beyond good, that is, evil” when he took of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In other words, if choice is by its very nature evil; faith is by its very nature good, trusting that the creation is being worked by an Almighty God for our good.

But why must we only have the witnesses of apostles to base our faith on? Why must faith have this quality of not seeing?

Did Adam see? Did he have faith? Did He see God? What did He see? He certainly saw a beautiful creation. He also heard the voice of God, heard His sound.

Hmmm, how is any of that different than what we have? Are we in Eden? That’s an interesting question, because if St. Paul is to be believed, we are in a situation where we can give thanks for all things at all times. And that sounds an awful lot like Eden! Is faith that faculty in us that makes every moment an Eden? Is that why the one who believes without seeing is blessed?

And Thomas answered and said to Him, “My Lord and my God!”

If ever Thomas should get a pass on his so-called “doubting” (see previous post), it should be because of how God worked his lack of faith into one of the most powerful and clear statements of Jesus’ divinity in Scripture. “Don’t be a doubting Thomas,” say the finger waggers and scolds. But were there not a “doubting Thomas,” we’d be denied that powerful confession, “My Lord and My God.”

Let’s dive a bit deeper on that.

How tempting it is to look at the Scriptures as a series of bungling behaviors on the part of man, followed by God’s need to have to “fix the mess” His people have made. He makes Adam and Eve, but they fall into sin. He gives the seed promise, but then the line of Cain begins leading to the flood. God saves Noah and begins anew; his descendants build the Tower of Babel. God calls Abraham; Egypt enslaves them. The nation of Israel is founded; they fall into periodic exiles. Indeed, the whole Bible seems to be a tale of God cleaning up after the messes man made. And here, Thomas bungles with his non-belief, and Jesus has to come and turn that into something greater. (As if Jesus came among the disciples the first time unaware Thomas wasn’t there, and that He forgot the purpose of an apostle was to be a witness.)

And this, in turn, founds St. Paul’s statement that God works all things for the good of those who love Him. We have a God who works our evil into good. The posture assumed here, if we might add some shades and hues of a certain mood, is of a God always playing catch up, like the harried mom of a three year old: “What have you gotten yourself into now!”

This understanding of God would go hand in hand with a specific understanding of man as well. God created the world perfect, intending man to be in obedience to Him, intending the creation to live in bliss forever, and then everything fell to pieces. God had to come out with “Plan B,” the Jesus plan.

The understanding of man going with this view is that man is created with the capacity of human choice, and when he made the wrong choice plunging the world into corruption, God had to work within the “universe” of man’s choices and work those choices to the best outcome. Hence Jesus, and why Jesus had to be a man. He had to be a second Adam, to do Adam correctly, the way he was supposed to be done in the first place. This is the universe of Paradise Lost.

Now, while for the most part there’s obviously a lot of truths to this way of looking at Scriptural theology, let’s change those shades and hues a bit. Let’s change them by introducing a postulate that’s actually extremely difficult to disprove: Jesus was no “Plan B,” because something that big wouldn’t ever be a “Plan B,” that is, if God is truly Almighty.

Jesus was always Plan A, which means God created the world with the advent and incarnation of Christ in mind. Furthermore, in the Gospel of John we’ve been contemplating how the entire Gospel is about the New Creation, culminating at the moment when Jesus said, “It is finished.”

So, by this perspective, When Genesis 2: 1 said, “Thus the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them, were finished,” it was with Christ’s cross in mind. Not, as in, “OK, guys, I said I was finished, but you screwed everything up, so now, I’m really really finished.” But rather, as in, “It is finished, on this the sixth day, the culmination of the world’s creation. Jesus’ death was the “dotted ‘i’” and “crossed ‘t’” of Genesis 2: 1. God wrote into the DNA of the sixth day the death of Christ.

Does this mean God orchestrated and planned man to sin? No. He planned man, and man sins, and that was Plan A. When man sins, he is doing exactly what God anticipated already, insofar as He worked the death of Christ into the sixth day, and had His death planned from eternity.

Why did He do this? Gosh, who knows? We’re talking about a God who energetically names every star in the universe. Imagine how many consonants would be needed to get enough possible combinations of sounds to name every star in the universe. The size of the universe is staggering to contemplate, and yet our Lord made it in an instance, putting material stuff to His thoughts as simply as I’m typing out these letters and words. Ask Job to explain why God does what He does.

What does this mean for us? It means exactly what Thomas’ witness lays down for us. Our Lord and our God – that very God full of power and might – is… “mine.” “My Lord and my God.” He is God for us. Meaning, He is a good God. He is almighty and beyond our comprehension, and He is also a good God, who is indeed working all things for the good.

But I would argue it’s way more than a situation of, “Don’t worry about the evil in your life; God’s got this.” Rather, it’s more like, “The evil in your life is part of the grand plan of a good God, Who’s working on behalf of those who love Him.”

On these terms, we can try reading St. Paul’s words again, but backwards. We typically follow his words chronologically: (1) first something bad happens, (2) God works that bad thing for good, (3) and this is true for those who love Him. Our challenge, then, is to stay loving Him, lest we unravel the whole dynamic, and to see how evil can end up working good.

Let’s read them again, but backwards, as it were: (1) There are lovers of God (believers); (2) the universe in which they live has been perfected in God’s goodness from the beginning; (3) this includes all things, among which are evils. Only by this dynamic can St. Paul say that we should be thankful at all times for everything. Only in a world where everything is seen as good can we be thankful for everything.

Is this saying that evil doesn’t really exist? In a sense, it is (and we might note that St. Paul never brings up the idea of evil, but simply talks of “all things”) but only because our understanding of evil has been Gnostic. That is, we give evil an independent, anti-God existence and power, a force working against God. We look at the world as a battle between good and evil, and we see our God as one step ahead of the devil, always turning his evil work into something good for mankind.

On these terms, yes, I’d say evil doesn’t exist…in that way.

What then? I guess it boils down to whether you say Christ crucified is good or evil. See the point? Is confession of sins good or evil? Is praying “forgive us our trespasses” good or evil? Are sinners drawing near to Christ’s cross good or evil?  And here’s the real intriguing question:  Is the fact that situations developed requiring the inauguration of the Gospel and faith a good thing or a bad thing?  Is faith the supreme purpose of God’s creation, or a contingency plan due to man’s fall?  I think we’d have to go with the former.

Evil is a tool God has worked into the creation in His wisdom, part of the reason He also worked Christ’s crucifixion into the creation. Similarly Satan is but a tool of His work; as is death.  And that universe described above in which human choice plays such a big role?  Maybe with this alternative view the whole issue of choice sort of vanishes.  What is choice, after all?  Perhaps the evil is the choice, or the idea that choice means something.  We’ve worked with these themes before, how evil was introduced into the account only as everything the creation was not, and the desire for that.  Is choice simply another way of saying “the desire for not God”?  Well, for whatever reason, God is the one who added evil to the creation when He uttered the word “Tree of the Knowledge of  Good and Evil.”  The only thing Adam knew about evil was, “everything other than what God created.”  But here, now, is evil, along with Satan.  What are they doing there?  Why the option to choose against God, a choice worked into the very DNA of mankind, into all of us?  Mind-blowing.

What was He perfecting by working these things into His overall plan? Again, who knows, but perhaps we get a hint of it in His words to Thomas, “ Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”  Faith trumps choice.

But let’s close the loop of today’s meditation. Thomas is compelled to say “My Lord and My God” in a situation created by Jesus’ coming to the apostles at a time He knew Thomas wasn’t there, to draw out this beautiful confession. The takeaway shouldn’t be “naughty, naughty Thomas” but rather, what does it mean that Jesus – His incarnation, death, and resurrection – is an essential aspect of the nature of God Himself. No one but Thomas looked at the pierced one, in flesh, just risen, and said, “My Lord and My God.”  No one but Thomas set up the context for Jesus to give us the blessings of believing without seeing.

We shouldn’t condemn Thomas. We should thank God for him. For again, as St. Paul said, “Be thankful at all times for all things.”

Now Thomas, called the Twin, one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 The other disciples therefore said to him, “We have seen the Lord.” So he said to them, “Unless I see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe.”

Doubting Thomas. Or so he has been dubbed. Why? Because he wanted visual proof?  But wasn’t one of the jobs of an apostle to be someone who witnessed the Lord? St. John made an explicit point how he had witnessed the events of the crucifixion, and St. Paul justified his status as an apostle: “Have I not seen the Lord?” What good is a witness if he doesn’t actually see what he’s supposed to be a witness of?

Furthermore, and this gets to a deeper point, but nothing in the text says he “doubted.” Here is exactly what Jesus said, “Do not be unbelieving, but believing. …Thomas, because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

Jesus just states facts. The first time Jesus appeared to the disciples, Thomas wasn’t present. By one interpretation, this was a problem. You can almost hear Jesus saying, “I really wish you were here. Part of your job is to witness me. What’s on your schedule for next Sunday? I know what’s on my schedule for every next Sunday til the end of time.”

When Thomas was present the next Sunday, Jesus didn’t leave Thomas to rely on the witness of others. No, again, his job as an apostle was to witness the resurrected Lord. So Jesus appears to Thomas again. And He says, “Do not be unbelieving, but believing.” We hear that as a scolding, but is it? Maybe Jesus is just saying it factually, as in, “Thomas, you no longer need to be in a state of non-belief due to the fact you never saw me. You see me here, right? In fact, you can do more than see me. Check out the wounds. Now you can be believing.”

And then, when Jesus makes the statement, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed,” why do we see this as scolding? Again, is Jesus not simply laying down a truth? “You, Thomas, believe because that is your job as an apostle, to witness me. From now on, people will believe without seeing me, based on your witness. Blessed are they.”

Why do we always want to turn Jesus’ words into these little do-goodery, finger-wagging nags? “Don’t be a doubting Thomas!”

Far better, how about, “Thanks be to God that Jesus came when He knew Thomas wasn’t there, to substantiate the witness, that it was truly Him in the flesh, the crucified one, that witnessing the pierced one was not just a one time, one Sunday, event, but something that carried on the next Sunday, and now by implication, every Sunday after that, for those who believe not by sight, but by faith alone.”

But again, why do we want to turn Jesus into a scold or a nag who makes us feel insufficient all the time? This interpretation of the Gospel – the “doubting Thomas interpretation” – allows me to bring up another bugaboo. The Mary and Martha Gospel from Luke.

Here again, the common interpretation is, “Here you see two examples of how to behave. Mary does better than Martha. You should be like her.” And we’re all supposed to feel guilty because we don’t spend every spare minute sitting at Jesus’ feet hearing His Word.

Here is exactly what Jesus said to Martha, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her.”  This is very true to the Greek (being the New King James Version).

Notice how the NIV translates it, “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed – or indeed only one.  Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

Notice the change in tone, from one in which Jesus simply states truths and facts, to one in which Jesus is making a comparison. “Mary has chosen that good part” to “Mary has chosen what is better.”

Is it “better” to focus on God’s Word rather than work and do one’s vocation? Jesus in fact doesn’t address the issue because in the original Greek He doesn’t use the comparative. And remember the context of Him defending Mary. The context isn’t that Martha should be “better” like Mary, but that Martha should get off Mary’s case, because she’s chosen something good.

Jesus deals in truths. Much like His teaching on the Sower, where there are different yields of fruit, He doesn’t deal in comparisons. “One seed yielded thirty, but how much better to yield sixty!” Nope, that’s not how Jesus works.

And nor does He get on Thomas’ case in this week’s Gospel for doing his job of witnessing. He merely says that those who believe without witnessing will be blessed.

And here’s the really big point. We often need to be careful with our reading of the Gospel. We very often read into the text assumptions that are not necessarily there, we read our own assumptions into the text.  When we read Scriptures, it’s important we let the words stand on their own. The more we read ourselves into the text, the less effective they will be.

This week’s Gospel isn’t a “don’t be a doubting Thomas” text. Rather, it’s a text that says, “How awesome that we will be blessed even though we don’t have the witness, and how thankful we can be to Thomas that he wasn’t gullible, but substantiated the sureness of his witness, and so laid down a solid apostolic foundation.”

So Jesus said to them again, “Peace to you! As the Father has sent Me, I also send you.” And when He had said this, He breathed on them, and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

Take a look at the above verse and the following verses here, and see what they all have in common:

“He who receives you receives Me, and he who receives Me receives Him who sent Me.”

“He who hears you hears Me, he who rejects you rejects Me, and he who rejects Me rejects Him who sent Me.”

“Whoever receives this little child in My name receives Me; and whoever receives Me receives Him who sent Me.”

“Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.”

“…tell it to the church. …Assuredly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again I say to you that if two of you agree on earth concerning anything that they ask, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven.”

“And my trial which was in my flesh you did not despise or reject, but you received me as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus.”

These verses all have in common a lightning strike against the popular notion that there is such thing as a Christianity apart from Christ’s body. The only way to have a Christianity apart from Christ’s body is to deny that He has come in the flesh, is still in the flesh, is still present with us in the flesh, and thus contact with Him draws us to His flesh and blood. And this is the Church, His Body, or as St. Paul puts it, “His flesh and bones.” Or as Jesus puts it(!), “My body…my blood.”

Yet, we live in an era where it’s popular to hear such things as, “I love Christ, just not His Church,” or “I believe in Christianity not Churchianity,” or “I don’t think you need a church to have a connection to God,” or “I believe you can just go directly to God without any middle man.” Or on and on. I’ve heard it repeatedly as a pastor. You’ve heard it. You may have expressed the sentiment. If so, you’re wrong.

The only way to have this understanding of Christ is to deny one part of those series of truths listed above: that Jesus did not ascend into heaven in the flesh, or that Jesus is not present with the Church today, or that Jesus’ flesh is in heaven, but He Himself is on earth as a disembodied spirit, something that denies that “Christ has come in the flesh,” a teaching St. John says is antichristian.

St. John was referring to the Gnostics, who taught this. Modern Neo-gnostics embrace the same teaching, believing “Jesus” is sort of like a radio wave, and anyone with the right spiritual antennae can tap into what He’s whispering to them. Or it’s to go with Carl Jung, who said, “Vocatus atque non vaocatus, Deus aderit.” (Invoked or not invoked, God is still present.)

True, but as Martin Luther said, “Yes, God is everywhere, but where is He for you?” And as we see in the above verses, where Jesus is invoked is in His name, there He is present in the flesh and blood. Flesh and blood sets up boundaries and borders around persons. And in the person of Jesus, you get “God for me.” You get God’s love and mercy.

Outside of Jesus you don’t know what you’ll get. You’ll get God according to His alien work, His wrath, His seemingly fickleness, the “God of nature.” Luther also said, “He who would seek God outside of Christ will get Satan.” Satan is a being worked by God’s alien work. It’s what you get outside of Christ.

Or did you get the forgiveness of sins leading to reconciliation and eternal life from that tree while out hunting, that sunset on the mountain, that beautiful fawn you saw…in the headlights before hitting it, that glorious mountain peak…that blew magma into the surrounding territory killing dozens, that warm sun…that parched the desert and caused a famine, or the innocence of children…who later in their lives waged wars that killed millions. Do you see the point? That’s all God, but God according to His alien work, God as He became after man made his decisions.

But where God is bounded by (a) flesh and blood, and (b) by words defining the contours of that flesh and blood (i.e., like the verses quoted above), you get God in His mercy, love, forgiveness, all centered in the flesh and blood Jesus Christ.

And that is the Church.

The two premier commandments are love God and love neighbor. Both God and neighbor are drawn together in Christ, where we love God and love neighbor by faith. You can’t claim to love God if you’re not drawn to the place where He says He will physically be. You can’t claim to love neighbor if you’re not drawn to where your neighbor will physically be. No voting, no writing checks for poor people in Timbuktu, no virtue signaling will substitute for “Love that person physically next to you,” for that is what a neighbor is. Jesus’s neighbors are those who are drawn to the “pierced one,” who come near Him, so He can grapple with their sins even as He’s pierced by them. How many do the opposite of Christ and run from sin?

Very often people reject the church because, “There’s only hypocrites there!” Or they feel they’ve been wronged by the Church.

Boo hoo. Seriously, BOO HOO. First off, I don’t buy it, because last I checked we don’t go to church to worship the other people in church – who are there, it bears mentioning, because they confess themselves to be, um, SINNERS. Or, perhaps you went because of some pastor who ended up hurting you. Well that was dumb! I see very few pastors hanging from crucifixes. We go to worship God. I may sound harsh here, but my years in the ministry have driven me to be cynical. People are looking for excuses not to go to church, and the whole “They’re just hypocrites there and I’ve been hurt at church” is so often used as an excuse.

Put simply, I’ve heard how you’ve been hurt. You’re overblowing the incident. Get over it, for the sake of your soul.

Second, whatever happened to forgiveness? Isn’t the church the place where forgiveness happens? It certainly is what Jesus established in the words for today, that if one he sends forgives you your sins, they are forgiven. Forgiveness is the driving engine of the Church. Perhaps you’ve been hunting the Holy Grail of that perfect church. Good luck with that. You’ll find that when you find the perfect spouse, the perfect neighbor, and the perfect political system. But keep on that hunt, because it certainly fuels the self-righteous energy you need to feel good about yourself.

There is no getting around the Church. Yes, I’m not denying there are reasons to leave a Church, if say, they make it not about Christ but about the person of the pastor, or about the happy faces and do-gooderism of the other members, or if they reject God’s Word regarding worship (which usually leads to the same problem, that it’s about the person of the pastor and do-gooderism of the other members). Nor am I denying there’s not real pain from members, ministers, or priests in the Church. Goodness, I can’t imagine the pain Roman Catholic parents of abused children feel.

But despite all that, there is no getting around the Church. And if faith calls us to grapple with the sins of others, including the minister, it will be because “if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves” and therefore need daily forgiveness, and therefore must learn forgiveness… “as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Did not Paul’s hearers have to bear with his fleshly trial, and yet receive him as Jesus?

Jesus sets up meditation points of contact with Him. To get forgiveness, life, and salvation, you must go through the doorway that is the Church. And even that’s a bit abstract. What are the defined flesh and blood boundaries that define that doorway? Water and the Word, by which you put on Christ and become part of His body. The flesh and blood minister sent by Christ to say, “Your sins are forgiven” and give you the words, which if you hear you hear Christ. The body and blood of Christ through bread and wine. The little child received at baptism in the name of Christ. The members gathered together in whose praises sits the God of Israel. The two or three invoking Christ, among whom He is present. The reception of others, all of who bear their crosses to varying degrees (leading to hunger, thirst, nakedness, imprisonment, etc), but the reception of whom is the reception of Christ.

There is no receiving Christ in the abstract, or in some wispy spiritual way where the boundaries between God and self are fuzzified. No, we receive Christ only in and through the Church, His Body.

And the words He laid down in this week’s Gospel could not make this more clear. “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

Take a look at those words again closely. What does it mean if one whom Christ sends does not forgive your sins?

There are two liturgical elements that often befuddle non-“small c”-catholics. One is the crucifix, the other is the making of the sign of the holy cross. Like all other liturgical elements, these things are reduced to “man’s traditions” and “rituals” which have nothing to do with the true faith of the heart. Passages like this are cited: “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”

Many churches remove all hints of the crucifix, or even the cross, and strip any and all symbology out of the church. The idea is such things smack of “churchiness,” which if you break down, comes back to the same supposed problem. Church, so the thinking goes, is not about externals, rituals, scripted speech (like the Lord’s Prayer, which, um, Jesus commanded), and any ordained thing or person.

Rather, the idea is, the true, “authentic” stuff is going on in the heart. And each person has a “personal relationship” with the Lord. Externals get in the way and substitute for a “real faith.” They in fact become idols, things people place more divinity in than the Lord Himself. And this is what the “second command” rejects. What is the second commandment? “Make no graven images.” (Now you see why the evangelical tradition adds this commandment to the traditional numbering and combines the ninth and tenth commandments.)

Even the idea of “ordained minister” has to give way to something new, something akin to a guru or shaman who behaves more like a motivational speaker – someone to coach or encourage you on your personal walk with the Lord. Anything but the idea that the minister is an ordained “go between” between you and God.

We’ll deal with this “go between” idea in a later meditation. That, after all, is exactly what Jesus ordained in this week’s Gospel. But let’s deal with this idea of externals – like the crucifix or the sign of the cross – and whether they are appropriate for faith.

As long as we have an “external God,” having external symbology can and should be part of the church. It certainly was in the Old Testament, and the writer of Hebrews talks about “the copy and shadow of the heavenly things, as Moses was divinely instructed when he was about to make the tabernacle. For He said, ‘See that you make all things according to the pattern shown you on the mountain.’”

The Old Testament temple was a “copy and shadow” of heavenly things.  The temple was a physical manifestation of heavenly realities, something that was a consequence that the Lord certainly broke the barrier between transcendence and imminence with His people, appearing to them in “angelmorphic,” substantial forms, like the burning bush and other manifestations.

Now, the Hebrews writer has a “but” after this passage. He writes how Jesus is the fulfillment of the copy and shadow, so the copy and shadow have passed away. The prophecy of Jeremiah typifies what’s going on: “Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah – not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers …this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts…they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”

See? There it is! “Not according to” the religion of symbols, candles, incense, sacrifices, and written tablets – that’s the Old Testaement! Rather, “I will write it on their hearts.” Jesus and His Church represents a revolution from one mode of religiosity – of externals – to a new mode of religiosity – of the internal heart. That’s one of the main messages of the Gospel, and that’s also why Jesus was really against the Pharisees – they were stuck in their rules and rituals, their externals, and didn’t have an authentic, heart-felt faith.

The idea of revolutionary change in the mode of God’s being is actually one of the many Gnostic heresies, similar to that of Joachim of Fiore, whom we’ve discussed periodically. He believed in the revolutionary change of ages, from the Age of the Father to the Age of the Son, and then from the Age of thee Son to the Age of the Spirit. He divided up history into three ages, but today’s externality-rejecters divide history into two ages, the Age of the Old Testament God and the Age of the New Testament God. This latter breaking up of history is actually more true to original Gnosticism, which rejected the Old Testament God.

(And the biggest irony is those who hold to this in practice, often in theology are Old Testament atavists, wanting to re-introduce sabbatarian laws, hold to obscure Old Testament regulations, and make the heart of the Bible the land promise to Israel, as if Jesus didn’t already rebuilt the third temple!)

By huge contrast, Jesus did not come to revolutionarily change things, but to fulfill. And true, His new wine doesn’t fill old wine skins, which is precisely why the elements of the Old Testament fall away, the shadow replaced by the substance.

It’s the difference between seeing your wife on Facetime for a year (say, on a military deployment) – that’s the shadow of the substance – and then having her in the flesh. But that development doesn’t change the mode of her being. When she was a shadow, she was still flesh and blood, and in person she’s exactly the same.

The same is true with the Lord. He doesn’t change the mode of His being from the Old Testament to the New Testament. If in the Old Testament externals were essential to how He communicated Himself with His people, so also in the New Testament, even more so!  As Christ is the culmination of “God as an external, corporeal manifestation.”

If anything, if you could talk about a change in God’s being, it was from non-corporeality to corporeality! In other words, if the Old Testament dwelled on the promises and shadows of God’s future corporeality, the New Testament has the substance, and therefore in the New Testament age, we should have even more a focus on externals!

This was how the Church ended up a the point of embracing icons and pictures in the Church. Back then, there were people who used the “second commandment” against graven images to reject any sort of symbology in the church. At that time they were heavily influenced by Islam, which doesn’t have any depictions of God based on that “commandment.”

Islam essentially had a Gnostic understanding of God, that he transcends names, words, and images. Some Christians embraced this theology and rejected images – how can an image communicate anything about God? The orthodox Church stood strong on the central truth of the Christian faith. God broke the barrier between transcendence and corporeal imminence when He took on flesh and dwelt among us. If God is here physically, why would we not be able to depict Him? Could you have taken a picture of God with a camera when Jesus was around? Of course you could have! Because Jesus is God!

So here’s a better way to understand what’s going on in Christ, from St. Paul: “So let no one judge you in food or in drink, or regarding a festival or a new moon or sabbaths, which are a shadow of things to come, but the substance is of Christ.”

This strikes against both the atavists who can’t give up Old Testament theology, and also lays down the basis for New Testament externals and symbology. The substance is Christ!

Christ’s body, His Church, is that substance as much as Jesus Himself is that substance. Substance means “real stuff,” even physical stuff. There’s your basis for externals.

Where there is substance there is also form. What form? What informs those forms? I would say a safe answer is “faith.” Faith in Christ, the flesh and blood substance Who Himself is communicated to us through the ordained, “forming” words of Scripture. And here the heart comes in, for “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

And where is our treasure? In heaven. So St. Paul says, “If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth.”

Yet, Christ is present in the Church, where two or three are gathered in His name. And He is there physically, else we are antichrists (for St. John defines the antichrist as one who denies that Christ “has come [and still is]” in the flesh). And we don’t want to be antichrist. Do we?

Jesus’ physical presence at the right hand of God in heaven runs the cosmic architecture of the physical time and space His body, the Church, fills up. Nothing in that time and space is arbitrary, and we see that the Lord’s obsession with detail in the building of the tabernacle and the externals of worship – how much of the Torah is devoted to it? – absolutely translates into the New Testament. How can it not, unless we deny that Jesus is physically present in the Church, or that the Church is truly His body, or that He’s still flesh and blood. But again, this is what antichrist believes, so we don’t want to be him.

On these terms, the church that deliberately (not because of lack of funds) makes a church look like an auditorium devoid of any sense of sacred space and time is actually confessing an absent Christ, or a Christ only present internally, non-corporeally. That’s the Antichrist Church.

Rather, a Church would be careful that its cosmic architecture – the elements manifested in space and time – reflect hearts anchored in the one sitting in heaven who also happens to be present physically in and through His body, the Church.

OK, is that enough set up for the punch line?

“And I will pour on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem the Spirit of grace and supplication; then they will look on Me whom they pierced.”

Our hearts are ever looking upon the one whom we have pierced. This is because we are in the post-Pentecostal time after which the Spirit of grace and supplication has been poured out. To look is to use one’s eyes. Eyes are physical things that witness things. How cannot the crucifix arise from this reality? The crucifix of course is a symbol, but so much more than a symbol, representing in physicality what our hearts are centered in. It’s not worship to reverence the crucifix. Nor is it an idol.

An idol is a projection of the Self’s desires. Projecting on a screen some poetic or culturally “relevant” idea of Christ the pastor dredged up while he thought God was talking to him through the inner whispers of his Self, that’s an idol. Setting up in physical form a central truth of our faith – that we present Christ crucified, that we look on Him whom we have pierced – is hardly an idol, but rather a reminder that the heart of the Gospel is centered in exactly what Jesus did when He presented Himself to the disciples as the pierced one: giving out the Spirit of absolution and ordaining the authority of the Church to forgive sins.

It’s no coincidence that churches without the crucifix are often devoid of the teaching of the cross, devoid of giving forgiveness (moving on to bigger and better things), and very often devoid of that other gift of the crucifix, the name of our Lord. And this leads to making the sign of the cross “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

That of course is the baptismal name, so making the sign of the cross is a reminder of our baptism. But why the action of making the sign? And why is that sign connected to the name? Well, on purely theological grounds, there’s an easy answer to that question. We are baptized into Christ’s death even as we’re baptized in His name. Name and cross go together. Again, what faith anchors in manifests in physical signs.

But there’s a biblical basis as well. The sign of the cross goes way back, and even precedes the New Testament. At a point of pending judgment, God had told the prophet Ezekiel, “Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and put a mark on the foreheads of the men who sigh and cry over all the abominations that are done within it.”  This mark protected them from judgment.

Revelation draws from this (and here’s where the name comes in) when it talks about the 144,000 with the name of the Lord on their foreheads, and says later, “They shall see His face, and His name shall be on their foreheads.” This name on their foreheads spares them from pending judgment.

But what was that “mark” God told Ezekiel to put on their foreheads? It was the Hebrew letter Tau, which, before you get excited, doesn’t look at all like a “T.” Now you can actually get more excited, because in the cursive Hebrew current at the time – the sort of Hebrew Ezekiel would have been writing on their foreheads – the shape of the Tau is not only cruciform, but cruciform in a “one stroke” manner! Exactly like making the sign of the holy cross.

Very early on, making the sign of the holy cross on the forehead and on the breast of the candidate for baptism was part of the baptismal liturgy. It confesses in physical form what the Lord Himself had Ezekiel physically do, and which the New Testament most certainly continues in the baptismal theology.

If our faith is grounded in a physical – and physically present – Lord Jesus who is sitting at God’s right hand, then there are cosmic realities faith will express in the architecture, space, time, and actions going on where faith is lived out in the Church. Nothing is arbitrary. Everything is informed by this faith. How can it not be?

 

Then, the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the midst, and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When He had said this, He showed them His hands and His side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord.

The Lord through the prophet Zechariah promised a day when “I will pour on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem the Spirit of grace and supplication; then they will look on Me whom they pierced.”

Here, the disciples look upon Him whom they had pierced. And just as the prophecy says, this vision of the pierced one goes hand in hand with the pouring out of the “Spirit of grace and supplication.”

Like all prophecies, they get fulfilled in installments. There’s not necessarily one fulfillment, but like ripples out from a rock dropped into a pond, the effects of a prophecy endure to all eternity.

Jesus first fulfilled this prophecy at the moment of His death, as St. John testifies to, when He was pierced, and water and blood poured out. At this moment also, Jesus “gave up His spirit.” So there you have the giving of the spirit, along with the piercing, going on. You might say this was the literal fulfillment of the prophecy.

And in this week’s Gospel, you might say you have the applicative fulfillment of the prophecy. Jesus again displays His crucified Person, and again breathed out His spirit, but this time He teaches what’s going on.

With His pierced Person comes peace in the midst of fear. And with the breathing out of His spirit comes forgiveness of sins.

Both these gifts, worked by the Spirit He poured out, deliver the “spirit of grace and supplication.”

The theme of this week is “as newborn babes,” or quasimodo geniti. As we meditated on in the previous post, just as babes receive the gifts of their mothers, so also do we. Babies do nothing but receive. There’s no conscious activity or functioning of the emotion, will, or intellect for them to suckle on the breast. It almost comes naturally.

The gift of the breast dictates the terms of the reception of that gift. That’s the grace.

And the driver is the hunger. Or, the spirit of supplication.

So also with that moment in the liturgy when, after the consecration, the minister turns toward us and says, “The Peace of the Lord be with you always.” In some traditions, the pastor presents the pierced one, the body and blood of our Lord, as the congregation sings the Agnus Dei, proclaiming the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

Right there is your spirit of grace and supplication at work. The gift itself fulfills the hunger we have, and it dictates the terms of our reception of it.

Now, here’s a rather significant point. It’s what’s written after Jesus shows the disciples His pierced Person. “When He had said this, He showed them His hands and His side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord.”

Do we see the Lord? Last week we meditated that John has subtle material answering this question. On one hand, we are among they who, having not seen, yet believe. On the other hand, in the resurrection accounts, we learn there is a witness of Christ through the breaking of bread, in His calling of our names, and here, in the place where the “products of His piercing” or presented to us.

Furthermore, we must confess that Christ is truly present in Church, and that presence is in the flesh and blood. For, He promises to be present wherever two or three are gathered in His name, and St. John warns against denying that Jesus “has come” in the flesh, meaning He remains in the flesh. So, if we would say Jesus is present, it must be in flesh and blood.

So, Jesus is present, of course, mysteriously, but still in flesh and blood.

And with the presentation of the body and blood of the Lord, we get an absolute replay of exactly what He did as His disciples sat in fear! It’s not really a replay, it’s exactly what we said before about the prophecies and the Word of God, how it is fulfilled. Time sort of compresses with God’s Word, so that, like looking at a mountain range from a distance, it all looks as one scene even though one peak may be miles from the other.

“They will look on him whom they pierced” is the Word. The disciples looking and our looking are the mountain peaks. But the event is the same. We are given the spirit of grace and supplication. The gift of forgiveness and life, as well as the prayerful desire for it. Indeed, the liturgy works all this out. This week, we open the hood and see what’s going on under the words of the liturgy, “The peace of the Lord be with you alway.”

And the people said “Amen.” (Not, “back at you” or “and also with you.” It’s the Lord, not the minister, giving the peace.)