paschal mystery
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The Paschal Mystery And Divine Failure

 Failure.  Suffering.  Defeat.  Loss.

We work so hard to avoid these things.  We’re pushed to achieve and succeed in a world that seems divided between winners and losers.  We internalize these messages when we do not measure up to society’s expectations, or worse, our own expectations for ourselves.

Defeat and failure is where we find the prophet Jeremiah in today’s first reading.  Jeremiah is having an interior crisis.  We often think of the prophets as those who have the fixed vison of God before them always.  Sometimes they are granted this vision, such as Isaiah’s mystical revelation of God’s glorious throne. (Is 6)  But often, their vision is obscured and they are plunged down into the discouragement and despondency of failure.  Read Jeremiah’s entire prayer in chapter 20, where his suffering has reached the point that he rues the day of his birth and wishes that he had been aborted in his mother’s womb.  His is deep spiritual anguish.

Failure. Over and Over.

We see this pattern often in scripture.  John the Baptist is given vision, “Behold the Lamb of God . . . I saw the Spirit come down.” (Jn 1:29-34)  Later, jailed facing death, he is denied this vision and sends his disciples to Jesus to ask if he is indeed the One or should they look for another. (Mt 11:2-6)  At Caesarea Philippi, Peter proclaims Jesus, “The Christ, the Son of the living God.”   He immediately followed this divinely-given insight by tempting Jesus to turn away from the road of suffering and death. (Mt 16:13-23)  Many of the same people who chanted “Hosanna to the Son of David!” on Palm Sunday roared “Crucify him!” only days later.  Even Christ himself, the quintessential Prophet was not spared.  On the road to Jerusalem to face his destiny, Jesus is transfigured and hears the words every son longs to hear, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”  In Gethsemane and on the Cross, he feels the full weight of divine abandonment: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Hearts of Stone

In today’s Gospel, Jesus is confronted by his ministry’s failure to penetrate the hearts of his own people.  Their hearts have become as hardened stone, and now they physically pick up rocks to violently stone him.  It seems strange to call Jesus’ ministry a failure, but what else could we call it from a worldly perspective?

After a promising beginning, full of signs and wonders, Jesus loses followers, from the rich young man through those who could not accept his Eucharistic teaching.  One of his inner circle betrays him, and his chosen leader and Rock, Peter, denies him.  Only a handful had the devotion to stand at the foot of his cross.  In the eyes of the world, Jesus and his ministry are a failure.

But this is our entrance into the heart of Christ’s Paschal Mystery.  Why do we call it a mystery?  God is Life. He is the Source and Ground of all Being.  God cannot die.  Yet God does die on Calvary’s Cross.  God is All-Powerful.  He has no weakness. Yet he is delivered up, defenseless, to the politically and religiously powerful to be scourged, mocked, abused, killed.  The ultimate sin, human beings murdering their God, becomes the act of ultimate love and redemption.  Defeat and death become the triumph of eternal life. We cannot intellectually reconcile these things.  We can only enter into the Paschal Mystery sacramentally.  Theologian Romano Guardini: “There are profound questions that return after every proposed solution, mysteries whose intrinsic meanings, not solved but lived, increasingly clarify the faith of those who live them.”

Success Is Not a Gospel Category

Perhaps your Lent has been like mine.  A failure.  Scuttled, intermittent prayers.  Lost opportunities to generously give, serve, and stand in solidarity with the poor and vulnerable.  Self-indulgent in food and drink.  Broken promises to God and those close to me.  Still struggling and committing the same sins that I repented of on Ash Wednesday.

Fortunately, success is not a Gospel category.  In light of Christ Crucified, failure may be more beneficial to our spiritual growth than success. We can see ourselves as we truly are, wounded and in need of a Redeemer.  As C.S. Lewis wrote, “How can we meet (the divine) face to face till we have faces?”  All false fronts must drop before God if we are to enter into a real, holy, intimate relationship.  He desires hearts to become fruitful, not paragons of individual achievement, even spiritual achievement, not “self-made” women and men.

We approach God through the liturgies Holy Week as St. Therese of Lisieux did, “with hands emptied for your love . . . more and more emptied that they may be filled with You.”  Our own successes and achievements (which we owe to God anyway,) our own failures and defeats, mean little standing within the Paschal Mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection.

God’s forgiveness, grace, peace, and love are abundantly available to be received this blessed week, if we only die to our obsessions with success and failure, winning and losing, and enter the divine mystery of our redemption.  If we open ourselves up to filled with the love flowing from the heart of God, he will accomplish his saving work through us, making us fruitful beyond our imagining.

 

John Graveline, MTS, is a husband and father of three small children.  He has worked for almost twenty-five years as a catechist and ministry coordinator specializing in the evangelization of young adults, adults, and families.  He is currently on the pastoral staff of St. Luke University Parish at Grand Valley State University as the Faith Formation Director.  

 

sorrowful mysteries
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The Rosary: The Sorrowful Mysteries

Continuing our discussion of the Rosary, today we ponder the Sorrowful Mysteries. These are typically prayed on Tuesdays and Fridays. Let us begin with this reflection from Romano Guardini’s The Rosary of Our Lady:

The essence of the Rosary is a steady incitement to holy sympathy. If a person becomes very important to us, we are happy to meet someone who is attached to him. We see his image mirrored in another life and we see it anew. Our eyes meet two eyes that also love and see. Those eyes add their range of vision to ours, and our gaze may now go beyond the narrowness of our own ego and embrace the beloved being, previously seen only from one side. The joys that the other person experienced, and also the pains he suffered, become so many strings whose vibrations draw from our heart new notes, new understanding, and new responses.

It is intrinsic in the virtue of sympathy that the other person puts his life at our disposal, which enables us to see and to love not only with our own senses but also with his. Something of this sort, only on a higher plane, happens with the Rosary.

This perhaps explains the Sorrowful Mysteries best of all: to see the suffering of Christ through the eyes of his mother.

The Sorrowful Mysteries are:

  • The Agony in the Garden: Christ contemplates his suffering and death, along with Judas’ betrayal. His suffering causes Him to cry out to His Father: “Let this cup pass over Me.” In the end, He assents to His Father’s will.
  • The Scourging at the Pillar: After being taken to the High Priest, Jesus is handed over to Pilate. Pilate sentences Him to be scourged, and to death.
  • The Crowning of Thorns: In a cruel mockery of Christ’s true priesthood, the Roman guards force a crown of thorns on Jesus’ head. He is spat upon, while the soldiers cry out with derision, “Hail, King of the Jews.”
  • Jesus Carries His Cross: After being whipped and beaten, Jesus must now carry His own cross, the instrument of His death. The cross is made all the heavier by our sins, which He gladly bears.
  • Jesus is Crucified: “It is finished.” With his mother, Mary Magdalen, and John, the beloved Apostle looking on, Jesus is nailed to the cross and dies a painful death. His affliction is our salvation.

St. John Paul II writes:

Ecce homo: the meaning, origin and fulfilment of man is to be found in Christ, the God who humbles himself out of love “even unto death, death on a cross” (Phil 2:8). The sorrowful mysteries help the believer to relive the death of Jesus, to stand at the foot of the Cross beside Mary, to enter with her into the depths of God’s love for man and to experience all its life-giving power.

In praying and pondering over Christ’s suffering, we come to realize our own sinfulness and the misery it causes. The fact that Christ died for our salvation is truly a mystery, but one for which we must feel both sorrow and joy. It is a mystery that we can pray over our entire lives and yet never plumb its depth.

 

Ascension
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The Ascension Of The Lord: Signpost Of Faith

Today marks the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord. In many U.S. dioceses, the celebration of the Ascension is moved to the Seventh Sunday of Easter, but today marks the traditional celebration. Forty days after the Resurrection, the Lord gathers His Apostles for one last bit of instruction: that He will send the Holy Spirit so that they can witness on behalf of Christ “to the ends of the earth.”

Then, as we are told in the Acts of the Apostles, Jesus is lifted up and vanishes from their sight in a cloud. Despite all the miracles that the Apostles had seen Christ perform, what must they have thought? How incredible! What could this possibly mean?

Monsignor Romano Guardini, a German priest born in Italy in 1885, has some thoughts on this. While Guardini is well-known in some circles, he still seems to be in the background in many places. This is too bad, as he had a profound impact on the spiritual formation of Pope-Emeritus Benedict XVI, and Guardini’s book, The Lord, is truly a classic of theological writings.

Guardini said this about today’s Solemnity:

Perhaps we will experience that the Ascension was not simply a unique occurrence in the life of Jesus, but rather above all, the manner in which He is given to us: as one vanishing into heaven, into the Unconditional which is God. However, if that is the case, then these bare sketches are most precious: They are sign-posts pointing us to the ‘stepping beyond’ of faith; and insofar as they go beyond our vision, in fact, precisely because they go beyond our vision, they teach us to worship.

What Guardini seems to be saying here is that in Christ’s last bodily act on Earth, He creates a situation where faith must be relied upon. He is now “beyond our vision” – returning to His Father. With that, we (along with the Apostles) must rely on faith. St. Paul would later write, Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1)

The Ascension is a reminder to us that we have a Heavenly home, one prepared for us by the Lord Himself. Today, of all days, we should acknowledge our longing to follow Christ, here and into eternity.