Third Sunday of Easter
May 8, 2011
The Spirit of the Liturgy
In my youth–and we really did have radio and TV back then–there was a media hero named The Lone Ranger. Folks would get into unsolvable trouble, and then the man in the white hat and his faithful companion Tonto would show up and, about twenty minutes later, all would be well. As he rode off, someone always asked “who was that masked man?” And all of us kids would yell out the answer.
Jesus was such a person. He appeared, preached a doctrine of love and forgiveness, healed the sick in massive numbers, turned water into wine, fed several thousand people with less than an HEB red handbasket of food and raised the dead. He went up to Jerusalem, was arrested and tried and executed like a common criminal. A few days later the rumor began to surface that he was alive. He appeared to hundreds of people for forty days and then disappeared. The obvious question–who was that man?
The early Church, filled with His Spirit, told the Jesus stories all over the Roman Empire. And these disciples of Jesus did what Jesus did–they formed communities of prayer and good works, prayed over and healed the sick and even raised the dead. They wrote down and read the Jesus stories–with the Old Testament readings from the synagogue–in their eucharistic assemblies, the re-presentation of the Calvary sacrifice we eventually called the Mass. In this way they answered many of the questions summed up in the one–who was that man?
As an example, consider St. John’s telling of the Thomas and Jesus story from last week’s Mass: to the question, who was that man? Thomas gave the bold answer “He is my Lord and my God.” From the disciples on the road to Emmaus, to whom Jesus appeared and taught the greatest Bible lesson in history, we hear “He is the Suffering Messiah!” From Peter’s letter, we read “He is the one who redeemed us from futility, the Lamb of God who gives us confidence in God.” And, from Peter again, speaking at the first Pentecost, we hear that Jesus is the Lord who will never die, and who pours out the Holy Spirit into us so that we can do the same deeds Jesus did.
The question, who is that man? is ever relevant. We can learn a lot from the saints who answered that question, especially Athanasius, whose feast was last Monday. He can also help us know why the language of our worship is so important, why we have to be careful to listen to the Church’s words and make them our own. Athanasius was the greatest Catholic opponent of the popular heresy called Arianism. Arians were found among the rich and powerful, especially the Roman Imperial family. Remember that the emperors before Constantine were called “gods,” and received religious tithes and honors. It was really hard for these guys to say, “no, we’re not really gods, but this poor carpenter from backwoods Galilee was the true God.” So they liked Arianism. Arians believed that Jesus was a great man who was raised up to be “kind of like” God. It was a simple, appealing doctrine. Only a handful of folks like Athanasius kept it from destroying the Catholic faith.
You see, if Jesus was not God in the same sense as the Father, if there were no Blessed Trinity, then Jesus could not keep God’s part of the covenant with Abraham. God made an incredible deal with Abraham–if either He or Abraham broke the covenant, God Himself would pay the price for the rupture. God Himself would die. The only way that God could keep His part of the covenant was to become human and offer Himself as a sacrifice for sin. And then we could be restored to fellowship with God. As Athanasius told the story, “God became human so that humans could become divine.” We were made in the image and likeness of God and were always intended for union with God. The Incarnation and passion, death and resurrection of Jesus, son of God and son of Mary, was what made that possible. If Jesus were not God in the same sense as the Father, we could not become children of the Father. We could not attain the dignity that the Father intended for us all along. We would be stuck in our sinful state forever.
Athanasius was tenacious. Five times the Arians drove him into exile. His itinerary was like a map of the Roman empire. Even his supporters were amazed. The controversy, believe it or not, was about one Greek letter iota. The orthodox understanding of Jesus is that He is consubstantial with the Father–homoousious. The heretical position was that Jesus is of like substance to the Father–homoiousious. On such a tiny pivot, the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet, the history of the world turned.
Something not quite so momentous will happen in December, when we begin saying that Jesus is“consubstantial with the Father” instead of “of one substance” with the Father. In my view, the real problem with the current translation is that we moderns have a very materialistic view of the word “substance.” I teach chemistry and know that an immaterial substance is hard for me to get my mind around, let alone my teenagers. The word “consubstantial” is just foreign enough so that we have to consider its meaning. It points to the Father more than to itself.
Why quibble? Can’t we just all get along? After all, it’s just words. There are two big reasons to be careful with our language, and to think with the Church in these matters. The first is that when we start making up our own language, we start making up our own minds about God. In the weakness of our minds & wills, we become like Luther, pope unto ourself. We start with some little changes and soon enough we have a new church, a new theology, and we are out of communion with the One Church. Luther started off with 95 theses and, today, we have 40,000 different Protestant denominations.
But the big, personal reason to think with the Church about Jesus, to answer the question who is this man? as the Church does, is that this divine person is who you and I are supposed to become. When we come to communion today, we are, despite our weakness and venial sins that burden us, asking Jesus to make us like Himself. If we don’t believe He is fully human, then we can’t become like Him. If we don’t believe He is fully divine, then He does not have the power to make us like Him. Because Jesus is fully human and fully divine, then we who are totally human can aspire to become divine, truly like God, truly one with the Trinity.
When we mess up, what do we say? A lot of us say, well, I’m only human. In other words, we say, without realizing it, I should give up on this becoming like Jesus business. Don’t sell yourself short: You were ransomed from the futile ways of life you got from your ancestors not by silver or gold, but by the precious blood of Jesus Christ, true God and true man. Like the Blessed Virgin Mary, our Mother, we must claim our eternal inheritance of oneness with God.
On this Mother’s day, we should ask, “how did Mary become such a good Mom?” After all, she was “only human”? She lived with the Word of God, had conversations with the Word, pondered the Word in her heart. So if you want to honor a Mom, whether your mother, wife or daughter, help her claim her eternal inheritance of oneness with God. A few months ago, our eldest daughter, one of my heroes, came back from a retreat truly on fire with love for God and the Church. My wife purchased a one-year subscription to a monthly devotional magazine for her, a kind of daily prayer book. It may have been the greatest gift God and we ever gave her, after life and life in Christ. Think about doing something like that to honor your favorite Mom.
