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Exploring the word

07 Apr 2019 - Fifth Sunday of Lent, Cycle C

In this day and age, some will think it “reasonable” or simply realistic to admit that some things can’t be done and some divides will never be bridged. The goal of world peace, mouthed by every beauty pageant winner, or the eradication of poverty may just be pipe dreams. Republicans and Democrats may never shake hands and get along, much less communists and capitalists. Rich people will probably never “feel the pain” of poor people, which means the developed and developing worlds will remain in violent conflict. Universal health care, honest politicians, and preachers who practice what they preach may well be among the things the world has to do without. World-weary “reasonable” people are willing to accept the world as it is and make their peace with reality. Didn’t Jesus with all of his idealism say, “There will be poor always”? If even Jesus couldn’t see past the inequality and inherent corruption of the world, how can we be expected to? Of course, Jesus also taught that the poor are particularly blessed with no less than the inheritance of God’s kingdom. He preached that God’s special providence was available to them as it is to sparrows and lilies. Jesus insisted that the last would get first place and those who mourn would one day laugh. Though Jesus knew quite well the condition of the human heart, he also knew the heart of God. The worldly might cling to systems of inequality forever, but God’s will and purpose is to restore justice once and for all. The way through In the stories of salvation, we hear how God is constantly opening a way where there is none. After the first couple unleashed the powers of hell into creation and were expelled from paradise, God clothed them with infinite care for the difficult road ahead. When Cain resorted to murder and feared his own death, God set a mark of protection on him. Noah was set afloat on a destroyed world with the seeds of a new creation on board. And the most famous path through certain destruction that God plowed was at the shore of the Red Sea, when a nation was led from slavery to freedom against all odds. Whenever human beings are tempted to say, “No way,” God resolutely creates a way. In order to keep this truth fresh in our collective memory, the story of the Red Sea becomes the most retold tale in scripture. Isaiah offers a reprise today to a people struggling with the reality of exile. Would they ever return to the land they lost? Remember the Lord who opens a way in the sea! Remember the twisted wreck of enemy chariots and armies on the opposite shore! But then Isaiah does a double take: Don’t just remember the events of the past. See what new thing God is doing right now! If God can make a dry path through the sea, God can likewise create a spring of water in a desert wilderness. God can create freedom out of slavery and homecoming from the elements of exile. God’s way is to transfigure the consequences of human sin into the possibility of grace. God’s way is through death If anyone understood that God was always doing “something new,” it was Paul of Tarsus. He’d been through the kingdom turnaround personally, transformed from a Pharisee of the law into an apostle of grace. He had gained moral perfection under the law but later considered it “so much rubbish” compared with what he gained in Christ. For him, the ultimate proof that God was doing something mightily new in the world, right now, was the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead. If suffering and death could be transformed into new life, then all bets about what reasonable people find plausible are off. For Paul, the Resurrection made faith a reasonable proposition. Without the Resurrection, the story of Jesus was a tragedy, even an absurdity, and anyone who followed him for the sake of his unreasonable teachings about the meek inheriting the earth was the worst sort of fool. The powerful were grabbing the earth with both hands; everybody can see that. The only thing that made Jesus at all credible was Easter Sunday. If that wasn’t true, then the rest was a terrible piece of fiction. “Has no one condemned you?” Jesus poses a trick question to the woman who stood before him, accused of adultery. The short answer to the question was yes. Everyone had condemned her: the scribes, the Pharisees, the court of common opinion, even the law of Moses. If the man who had been “caught in adultery” with her had pulled on his clothes and followed the crowds, he could well have stood there condemning her, too. After all, had she not tempted him to this sin? There was no way out of this condemnation and no way through the destruction that was coming. She would be stoned. It was the law. It was what everyone wanted. She had no champion and there was no dissenting opinion. The mistake everyone made, of course, was to bring her before Jesus. Perhaps they were absent on the day Jesus taught that he was “The Way.” Theologically speaking, we might say Jesus is the way out. He gets us out past sin, out beyond death, opens the door to alternate possibilities in a world that says, “No way.” Jesus is such an infallible way through impossible circumstances and hopeless odds that when he asked the woman who was left to condemn her, the only answer she could give in bald astonishment was, “No one, sir.” Applying the word No reason to be reasonable Jesus is the proven way of his Father, whose will it is to create a way where there is none. Jesus gets us through ocean and desert, past guilt and culpability, past the wage of sin itself in all its brutal finality. At the end of the road, we find, there is more road. Up against the wall, we discover the door that gets us beyond. So if there’s one word that does not belong in the Christian vocabulary, it’s impossible. World peace? The end of poverty? Liberty and justice for all? Why not? Related scripture links The last, the lilies, the poor: Matt. 18:4, 19:30; Luke 9:48, 13:30; Matt. 6:25-34, 5:3-12; Luke 6:20-23 Jesus knows the human heart: John 2:24-25 God’s way is now: 2 Cor. 6:1-2 If Christ is not raised, your faith is in vain: 1 Cor. 15:12-20

Authors Alice Camille

impossibility Transformation Let the one without sin cast the first stone moses parting the red sea passing judgment

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10 Mar 2024 - Fourth Sunday of Lent, Cycle B

Twelve-year-old me didn’t get it. I remember sitting in Mrs. Agar’s sixth-grade religion class at St. Monica’s Elementary School, listening to her teach us the story about how the Israelites were being bitten by poisonous snakes in the desert and God instructed Moses to mount an image of a snake on a pole and any Israelites who looked upon it would be healed—and how it foreshadowed the cross of Christ. I understood the foreshadowing part, but why would a snake be healing? And why would something I associated with evil be a stand-in for Jesus? Forty-three-year-old me still didn’t get it when I visited Mount Nebo in Jordan, the spot where Moses saw the Promised Land and died. Atop the mount is a beautiful serpentine cross sculpture, which symbolizes Moses’ bronze serpent. So I asked the Franciscan priest who was heading archaeological excavation there what it was all about. Surely, he asked me, I’d seen the caduceus, the medical symbol used by many healthcare associations of a staff entwined by two serpents and topped with wings. Yes, I answered. Well, that has nothing to do with Moses, he said, because the Greek mythology of the caduceus came 1,000 years after Moses. However, he explained, in ancient times, a snake’s ability to shed its skin symbolized transformation and eternal life. Mystery—of faith!—solved.

Authors Jennifer Tomshack

snakes Transformation Eternal life caduceus

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25 Jan 2026 - Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A

Most of us can probably count among our friends or acquaintances the professional job-hopper. That's the person who moves from one good job to another, always open to the next offer that promises more. It's most likely that nothing will ever satisfy these wanderers. If the cause of justice were their motivation, that would be a different story, but usually job-hoppers are acting under the assumption that their happiness lies outside themselves in some mystical alignment of the heavens that will put them in the perfect place, at the perfect time, with the perfect people. If that had been what Jesus' disciples were expecting, they would have been sorely disappointed. When Jesus called them to be fishers of men, he wasn't leading them to some far-off place to proclaim the Good News. He asked his followers to carry his message of love and renewal to the people they each saw every day in the towns and villages where they lived and worked. The disciples' challenge was to see their daily lives through a different lens. Jesus offered no escape, only transformation. That continues to be what Jesus proposes for each of us. Take it, and live in gratitude and joy; refuse it, and live in anxiety and discontent. That's your only real choice. And it's Jesus' final offer.

Authors Patrice J. Tuohy

fishers of men Transformation

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