Living the Truth

Fourth Sunday of Lent

I like to begin with the last sentence from the gospel of this Sunday and then move to the beginning two sentences of the same gospel.   The last sentence reads: ‘Whoever lives the truth comes to the light, so that his or her works may be clearly seen as done in God’ (John 3:21).  Is this not something we all aspire to, to live the truth?  This is what brings meaning to one’s life; this is what makes us free and joyful.  It is what reveals our true face and helps us glimpse the face of God.   But ‘living the truth’ is no small matter.  It involves I think what is said in the first two sentences of the gospel: ‘Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.  For God so loved the world that he gave us his only Son…’ (John 3:14-15).  Jesus offered his life totally and was raised up, and in his raising, he opened for us life, life that is divine and so ‘eternal’.  The image of ‘lifting up’ has a ‘saving effect’.  For us, living the truth involves surrender, dying to all that is not true, and is not giving life.  We die, like the seed falling into the ground, for more life, for more of the truth of God’s life and our lives to be revealed….As we surrender we are lifted up to a more profound level of seeing and believing: we see more the truth of our selves and one another….We are lifted up to see yet again the love God has for us.

The commentators that I read all refer to this gospel as revealing the immense love of God.  Von Balthasar says it the most clearly:  “The Gospel gives us a chance to revise our understanding of divine judgment during a time of repentance.  The decisive point is that whoever scorns God’s love condemns himself.  God is not at all eager to condemn people.  God is nothing but love, love that goes as far as his sacrificing his Son out of love for the world” (Light of the Word, p.177-178).  It seems to me that ‘living the truth’ is possible only so far as we know and receive this love that God has for us…and we know it most concretely through the self-offering of Jesus.  The closer we can come to Christ in his Word and through how he lived, the closer we are to experiencing and receiving God’s love.

The reality that Jesus became fully human says his humanity is bound up with ours, whether we are aware of it or not.  This is how close God’s love is.  To read again from von Balthasar’s commentary: “The whole question is whether we accept God’s love so that it can prove effective and fruitful in us, or whether we cower in our darkness in order to evade the light of love” (p.178).  These are powerful images:  our acceptance of God’s love makes this love ‘effective and fruitful in us’…imagine this!  Or, dear sisters, do we rather ‘cower in our darkness’ fearful of the truth of where we are in any given moment…forgetting that love encompasses any truth.  We are raised up to a deeper and fuller truth by love.

To summarize what I gleaned in my lectio on this gospel:  to live the truth involves dying, surrender, letting go and we will be raised up by love.  To live the truth pivots around our faith: do we accept God’s love for us moment within moment.  Our faith is not static; it needs to be renewed daily.  So we are ushered into the fourth Sunday and week of Lent remembering God’s great gift of love given to us in Jesus.

There is no Resurrection without the Cross - Reflections for the 2nd Sunday of Easter

“How do you know that Christ is risen in your individual life?  In the life of any kind of faith community to which you belong?  In your life with other people?  In your prayer?  Can it be in weakness, failure, confusion, messy and ambivalent situations, weariness and emptiness of spirit?” (p.8-9).  These questions are posed by Sr. Maria Boulding in her book, her final book before she died of cancer, titled Gateway To Resurrection.  Here is this amazing woman of Stanbrook Abbey, a monastic and theologian who translated St. Augustine’s Confessions and his exposition on the psalms posing these questions to us, questions that bring our head into our heart.  Her experiential and theological response to her own questions is that the Easter mystery is precisely experienced in ‘weakness, in failure, in confusion, messy, ambivalent situations, weariness, emptiness of spirit’.  Christ transforms, Christ rises right in these very human places of suffering.  There is no resurrection without the cross….the cross is the backdrop of the resurrection; resurrected life emerges out of the cross. 

What, then, does this tell us about ‘faith’, about our ‘believing’?  I know that when- ever I am faced with suffering situations, situations of turmoil or darkness that I immediately want to escape from it, and my faith begins to weaken, the waves of doubt begin to move in, questions of doubt prick at my mustard seed of faith.  And this is ok! It is so striking that we have on this Second Sunday of Easter this gospel passage of Jesus appearing to the disciples with his wounds in the upper room… Jesus’ first words are ‘Peace be with you’ and what immediately follows is that he shows the disciples his hands and side…he shows his wounds.  All this is saying, is it not, that Christ’s peace, resurrected life and love are not separate from suffering.   As a collective body, this time, the disciples recognize Jesus and he repeats again the words: ‘Peace be with you’.  Thomas is a helpful figure for us as we wrestle with believing…he is seeking some kind of proof or certainty and faith in this context will always elude him.  He refuses to believe the witness of his community insisting that he must see for himself…perhaps he is learning how to see…perhaps is learning how to recognize the Divine not on his terms but on God’s terms…And Thomas says he will only believe if he can touch the Divine wounds!

The wounds are reminder of what ushers forth the resurrection….out of his wounds come forth the spring of living water….if we interface this with our own lives we see that we are stamped with this paradigm.  No matter what our wounds are they are the place where Christ rises with healing love, with new life…In Christ these wounds are transformed into a new creation.  Failure, frailty in the words of Maria Boulding “is the place where the paschal mystery happens….where Christ’s Easter is experienced as power” (p.18-19).

Sandra Schneiders in her book on the gospel of John, Written That You May Believe, notes that the author stays away from using the noun ‘faith’ or ‘belief’.  What he does use over and over is the verb ‘believe’ and he uses this verb with varying grammatical constructions (p.52).  In one construction, which is used thirty-six times, the literal translation from the Greek is to ‘believe into’.  We would normally translate this as ‘believe in’.  ‘Believe into’: one can feel right away what this translation is doing: it is drawing us into the Divine mystery, ‘to believe into’ leads us ‘to live into’.  ‘To believe into’ invites us to lean into, to live into the life of the Risen One who is always coming towards us in love and mercy.  In using this construction, Schneiders says “the evangelist tries to capture the progressive entrance of the believer into the life of Jesus” (p.52).  We are those ‘who have not seen yet believe’, those who are living into, led by faith in the risen life, in the One who embodies the Love that is stronger than death.  The Risen One comes in different forms of grace…his Spirit is everywhere and ready to rise up in those vulnerable places of our hearts, of our communities, of our world.

To conclude: Fr. Jeremy Driscoll, wrote a series of essays titled “Monasticism and the New Evangelization”.  Essentially he is putting the resurrection front and center of any talk of evangelization.  For monastics he writes: “Monks need to be people who clearly live and witness to the fact that the Jesus who was is also the Jesus who is.  Jesus is because he is risen from the dead” (American Benedictine Review, December, 2014, p.404).  Our ordinary lives are to radiate the resurrected life, this life that pulsates within everything and that is not separate from the cross.

And Fr. Jeremy writes: “What ultimately preserves the world—that is, saves it—is precisely the fact that every piece of it shall have once been the particular place in terms of which the final message can be continually uttered: ‘He is not here, he is risen’” (p.410).  And this risen life now burns in our hearts and calls us to witness in our believing, to be this word of evangelization: that Love has been victorious over death…that what saves our world is that Christ’s Spirit is now everywhere, enveloping us with mercy, creating life out of suffering and death.