Month: March 2018

Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the “Synoptic” Gospels–it means something like “look-alike”–because they are so similar, mostly word-for-word, that it is obvious they are copying from one another.  

Luke says in his introduction that he is working from previous versions, but we don’t know the relationship between Matthew and Mark.  I like to think of Mark as Peter’s revision of Matthew, though most modern scholars think Mark came first.

Acknowledging that we don’t know the exact relationships between them, it can still be fruitful to approach these three similar documents by digging into what is distinctive in each.  This year, the year of Mark in the Lectionary, I took this approach to my meditation on Palm Sunday, digging into the differences between Mark and Matthew.

***

There are some details of personal recollection.  If the ancient legends are true, Matthew was written by one of the Twelve, and Mark by the disciple of one of the Twelve, so both have inside information.  But it is touching to see the details Peter passes on.

Mark’s gospel tells us that Matthew’s “very expensive ointment” was spikenard–maybe Peter can remember the smell.  When the two disciples go to find the upper room for the Passover, Mark tells us the man they spoke to was carrying a pitcher of water. Matthew tells us only that the room is in a “house,” Mark adds that it is a “guest room,” a “large upper room, furnished and ready.”  

Matthew has the rooster crow once, all that is necessary for the story.  Peter remembers the detail that it was twice.

In the garden in Matthew, Jesus cries out to his Father–but Peter remembers that he used the Aramaic term, “Abba.”  (There’s a legend, started around the year 1900, that Abba means daddy, and we’re supposed to see something sentimental in it.  But it seems just to have been the word for father in Jesus’s language. So too Mark remembers Judas using the Hebrew title “Rabbi,” the places were called Gethsemane and Golgotha, and on the cross Jesus quotes Psalm 22 in Hebrew: Eloi, eloi, lama sabachani.)  Peter remembers the exact words.

Matthew tells us Peter was standing in the courtyard when he denied Jesus.  Mark knows that he was warming his hands by the fire. And he tells us that Peter was recognized by his accent as a Galillean.  

Mark has the weird detail of the young man running away naked.  Many scholars think that’s Mark’s own cameo appearance.

And Mark tells us that Joseph of Armimathea was the father of Alexander and Rufus–people he knows.  

Maybe there is symbolism here, I don’t know.  I just like the picturesque details, the personal touch.

***

And then there are the things Mark leaves out.  Mark’s gospel always cuts to the chase.

The central point in Mark’s gospel is that no one knows who Jesus is until he dies on the Cross.  Peter doesn’t deny that he had said, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God,” and that Jesus had named him Peter, the rock on whom he would build his Church.  But Peter leaves it out of his version of the story, because Peter knows that whatever he said way back then, he didn’t really understand, didn’t know Jesus’s identity well enough to stay with him at the Cross.  

Only at the Cross is Jesus truly revealed.

So in the Garden, Mark has the poignant line, “He said to Peter, ‘Simon’.”  Not such a rock that night. How that old name rings in Peter’s ears.

The characteristic word in Mark is “immediately”: always racing toward the Cross.  And Mark’s account of the Passion skips several details from Matthew’s.

When the soldiers come, Matthew tells us Jesus said he could call on angels, and tells his disciples to put their sword back.  Mark leaves out these details, so that Jesus’ words, “Have you come out as against a robber?” stand in all their starkness.

Mark leaves out the story of Judas hanging himself, Pilate’s wife’s dream, and Pilate washing his hands.  Nice details–but Mark is focused on Jesus headed to the Cross, and he does not want to distract us.

They both say the veil was torn when Jesus died–but Mark leaves out the distracting detail of people rising from the dead, and Matthew’s detail about Pilate guarding against a resurrection hoax.  

Christ is on the Cross, that is all that matters.

It’s not that Matthew’s details didn’t happen.  It’s that Mark wants us to focus, and adds only the details that make the scene real.

***

Finally, a series of details focus on Christ the King.  When the soldiers beat him, Matthew has them asking him to prophesy who did it.  By taking out that detail, Mark lets us focus us how they mock him as messiah-king.  He adds the detail that the mockers “knelt down in homage.”

Matthew says Barabbas was a “notorious prisoner.”  Mark focuses on kingship: “among the rebels in prison, who had committed murder in the insurrection.”  In Matthew, Pilate offers to release “the Christ.” In Mark it is “the King of the Jews.”

In Matthew, they offer Christ on the Cross gall, just something nasty.  But in Mark it is myrrh, a royal embalming spice.

In Matthew, they say to him, “He trusts in God; let him deliver him now, if he desires him; for he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’”  But Mark stays away from calling him Son of God until he is dead, and changes it to, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross.”  It makes less sense–Matthew’s God can get you down from the Cross better than Mark’s kingship–but Mark keeps us focused on this royal title.

And finally, the great hero of Mark’s gospel, the one who finally recognizes Christ, is no one but the centurion, the captain over a hundred soldiers, who then appears again, only in Mark, as the one who delivers the news to Pilate.  

Mark keeps directing our attention back to Christ as king.

***

And so he directs us back, too, to the triumphal entry with palms.  Matthew is focused on the fulfillment of prophecy, even to adding the weird detail that there were two animals, a colt and an ass.  Mark focuses us on the image of Christ riding in as a humble king, a different kind of king.

Matthew’s crowd acknowledges him as Son of David–fulfiller of the prophecy–but Mark again adds the detail of him being king, so that they say, “Hosanna!  Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is coming! Hosanna in the highest!”

He leads us to our own profession at every Mass: “Hosanna in the highest!  Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” (Hosanna appears in the Bible only in this scene; it means something like, “come save us!”)  

Mark makes it a little ironic.  Like the crowds, we may call this king-who-comes blessed because we seek an earthly kingdom.  Or we may have found the true kingship of Christ, a totally different kind of kingship, crowned with thorns and hanging on the Cross.

At every Mass, as we say those words, may Mark’s challenge ring in our ears: do we seek the king apart from the Cross, or the king who hangs on the Cross?  What salvation, and savior, do we profess?

A very late publication for last Sunday’s readings.

We are getting close, entering the last two weeks before Easter.

The Gospel for this Year B is a reading from John that concludes, “He said this indicating the kind of death he would die.”  What is this death—both the death of Lent that we have been experiencing, and the death of Christ we are about to celebrate?  What do we gain from dying?

***

The beginning of the answer is in our Prophet, Jeremiah.  “The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant.”  Covenant theology became very hip among conservative Catholics, perhaps through Evangelical influences, in the late twentieth century.  I confess I don’t understand what this is about.  But I think it’s important to challenge one idea about covenants: most covenants are two way, but our relationship with God is not one among equals.  More important—and I think this is the central point of the readings this week—it is not the case that God “does his part” and then passively waits for our response.  Our God is living and active.

“This is the covenant that I will make,” he says.  “I will place my law within them. . . . All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says the Lord.”  This is not like a two-way agreement.  It is a promise that God will act—will act within our very hearts, stirring the sources of our action.

***

Our Epistle, from Hebrews, says of Jesus, “Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered.”  (Hold this word “obedience” loosely—wait to see what he’s saying about it.)  He learned to offer “prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death.”

The suffering of Christ is about begging God to act, and trusting that even if God leads us to death, he will give us life.  It is entering into the purest passivity—nothing is more passive than being dead—and trusting that God will act to save us.

And so “he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.”  We enter into this pattern of trusting God to act—and just as Jesus in his humanity was saved from death by God, so Jesus who is God will himself save us from death.  It is about learning to trust God to act.

***

Our Gospel, from John, not a famous passage, is a telling illustration of two approaches to religion.

Jesus has gone up to Jerusalem for Passover, the feast where he will die.  This is the story immediately after the Triumphal Entry.

In Jerusalem are “some Greeks.”  They tell the Apostle Philip, “who was from Bethsaida in Galilee,” a more Greek part of Israel, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.”  Maybe I’m wrong, but this request sounds . . . tourist-y.  We’re seeing the religious sights, let’s see Jesus too.  They’re like tourists who don’t genuflect in a church, or gawking at the pope in St. Peter’s.  There’s no indication of reverence.  They don’t approach Jesus with faith, they don’t fall down in worship.  Instead, they go to their ‘connection,’ Philip—who himself goes to his connection, Andrew, a more central apostle. (John 1 tells us, “Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter.”)

And how tourist-y is our faith?  How much are we looking for an ‘in,’ instead of putting our hope in God?

When Philip and Andrew go to Jesus, he changes the subject—John never mentions those Greeks again.

Instead, Jesus says, “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies. . . . Whoever loves his life loses it. . . . Whoever serves me must follow me”—to death—“The Father will honor whoever serves me.”

“I am troubled now.”  Literally, he says, “my soul is stirred up”—and he has just said, “whoever loves his soul will lose it.”  Yes, he is afraid of death—and he says, “damn the torpedoes,” forget the fear, full steam ahead.

***

Then comes one of the weirdest moments in John’s Gospel.  Here, in the middle of Jerusalem, the Father speaks.  Jesus says, “Father, glorify your name,” and a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it and will glorify it again.”  It’s a bizarre experience for the crowd, who then debate whether it was thunder or an angel or what—because they don’t expect God to speak.

But the God of Jesus Christ is alive, he acts.  He speaks.  He glorifies his name.  And he will glorify it—by raising Christ from the dead.  It’s not that we glorify him with our goodness—it’s that he shows his goodness through our weakness.

This is not the god of tourism, not a god in the zoo, or a dead idol whom we check out at our convenience.  This is a God who speaks into our lives and raises us from the dead.  That’s the kind of death Jesus will die: a way of living that stakes everything on God’s promise to act.

“Pray as if everything depends on God, but act as if everything depends on you”?  No.  That’s the opposite of what Jesus does at the cross.  Stake everything on the power and promise of God!  Act like you believe God is alive.

How would you behave differently if you were confident that God will even raise you from the dead?

The fourth Sunday of Lent is Laetare Sunday, rose-vestments, a moment to rejoice in the midst of Lent.  For Year B (unless your parish uses Year A, the readings for catechumens), our Gospel gives a sort of stylized vision of the Cross: Jesus is “lifted up,” the light of the world, so that we are not condemned but saved: “for God so loved the world.”  It is another image of the joy of the Lenten desert.

On our way to that Gospel, the Lectionary gives us an astoundingly rich Old Testament reading, from Second Chronicles, of all places.  (The little tastes we get from the Old Testament should set you on alert: these books are more wonderful than we could ever imagine.)

It is the story, told many places, of how God allowed first the ten tribes of the North, then even Jerusalem and the two tribes of the South, to be conquered by the Assyrians and the Babylonians.  Even here there is Good News—rejoicing, even in the Cross and the Desert of Lent.

***

The reading is hard because it is full of Hebrew puns.  “The anger of the Lord against his people was so inflamed.”  Now, the Bible uses metaphors—in the very first question of the Summa, Thomas Aquinas talks about how the Bible uses metaphors both to make divine realities accessible in human language and to remind us how far we are from full knowledge of God.  Of course, the Tradition says, God doesn’t literally get angry.

The Burning Bush

But here it’s not even a metaphor—not that metaphor, anyway.  The Hebrew word for anger really means “heat.”  God is a consuming fire.  He doesn’t have to get worked up, and it’s not about emotion.  It’s about the reality of God, which our sin runs against like a car racing into a brick wall.  God isn’t angry, he is fire.

The result is that “their enemies burnt the house of God”: his flame consumes them.

Then, in that opening statement, his anger isn’t “inflamed,” as in our translation.  In the Hebrew, it “ascends,” goes up.  Then the enemies “ascend” against them.  And at the end, God’s people “ascend” back to Jerusalem.

And in the middle, God says that by letting his people be deported, he will enforce on the land the sabbath rest that they refused to take: “during all the time it lies waste is shall have rest”: sabbath.

The punishments fit the crime.  God isn’t randomly lashing out in anger.  He is—albeit through created causes—bringing his fire and rest and rising up into his people.  At first it hurts—but then it becomes joy, transfiguration.

***

Our Epistle, from Ephesians, gives a very gentle spin to the Cross.  “We are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for good works.”  God is at work in us, he has “raised us up with him.”  Our Epistle says this is about “God, who is rich in mercy,” “great love,” “by grace,” “immeasurable riches,” “kindness,” “the gift of God,” “that we should live.”  Very positive.

But let’s not forget, what he means is that we are being converted, and it is by passing through the Cross of Christ.  On one level, this is very painful.  He is not leaving us as we were, “dead in our transgressions.”  Conversion hurts.  But on the deepest level, our mid-Lenten Epistle reminds us, it is pure joy.

***

Our Gospel is the second half of the Baptism discourse to Nicodemus, “unless you be born again,” though now Christ talks and Nicodemus disappears from the story.

“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up”—lifted up on the Cross.  The comparison is striking: Moses’ serpent is the one who bit them, killed them, punished them for their sins.  Again, Jesus puts it in a positive way, but we are reminded that the Cross is the sign of our sin.

“God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.”  The word for “perish” is the strongest one possible, with a preposition added to strenghten it.  We are on the road to destruction—and Christ, Christ on the Cross, pulls us out.

“Everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come toward the light, so that his works might not be exposed.  But whoever lives the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.”  The Cross reveals our sin: our violence, our hatred, our sensuality, our negligence, our rebellion.  True life is in acknowledging our need for conversion—and letting God work that conversion in us, even through Lent and the Cross.  Staying in the dark means destruction.

Laetare Sunday is still Lent, still the way of penance on the way to the Cross.  But in that penance is the joy of turning to the Lord.

Where do you need to be reminded of the joy of conversion?

I’m really trying to get these posts up before Sunday, but I have had one technical problem after another.  Sorry about that.

Lent is a time of spring cleaning.  We are called to prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.  Prayer and almsgiving fill us up (in relation to God and neighbor)—but there is something central about fasting, emptying ourselves out.

Thus it is appropriate that the revised Lectionary, after the traditional first two Sundays going into the desert to be tempted and going up to the mountaintop to see Christ, now (unless your parish, like mine, chooses to use the Year A readings because of catechumens) gives us John’s story of Jesus cleaning out the Temple.  To be filled up, we must also be emptied out.

***

The first reading is the Ten Commandments.  To keep things simple, the Lectionary gives the option of skipping the extra stuff (verses 4-6 and 9-11) and just getting the main points about the commandments.  But the rhetoric of Exodus is wonderful.  All the “Second Tablet” stuff, the stuff we think most about, honoring our parents, murder, adultery, theft, and coveting, gets said very quickly.  But Scripture takes its time with the First Tablet, idolatry, the name of the Lord, and the Sabbath.  The purpose of the commandments is to empty ourselves out—so that we can put our focus on God.  The First Commandment is the longest because it’s the main point.

Our Epistle, from First Corinthians, gives a Christ-centered spin on this emptying out.  “Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified.”  We have to be emptied out not only of mortal sin, but of all our distractions, all our earthly fascinations, and look to Christ alone.

***

And so we come to the cleansing of the Temple.  Jesus drives out the sellers of sheep and oxen and doves, and the money changers.

A little background is helpful.  In the last verses of Deuteronomy 14, for example, Scripture specifically says it is okay to buy your sacrifices when you get to Jerusalem.  The language there is nice: in your hometown, you “change” your sheep into money, which is easier to carry, and then change it back into the proper symbols of Old Testament worship when you get to Jerusalem.  As for money changing, I presume the point is that you get your local currency, whatever it is, turned into what can be used in Jerusalem, and pay your tithes.

All of this God has commanded.  And Jesus here calls the Temple his “Father’s house,” and John uses Old Testament Scripture—Psalm 69, “Zeal for your house will consume me”—to confirm him.  Jesus is in favor of the Temple worship.  It finds its perfection in his sacrifice, but here—in John 2, the very beginning of his ministry, first thing after the wedding feast of Cana—he defends the Temple.  The sheep and the money aren’t the problem, and the Temple isn’t the problem.

But Scripture also says, for example in those same verses of Deuteronomy 14, that the priests are supposed to live on the sacrifices and tithes.  Not all of the sheep and oxen get burned up, some of them are food for the priests.  And the people bring other things to the priests, including wheat and money.  So the question is: why are they selling things inside the temple area?  (In fact, the Greek calls it not “the temple area” but “the sacred place.”)  The whole city of Jerusalem is there to be the “marketplace” near the Temple.

The answer, I think, is that the priests are greedy.  They want not only their portion of the sacrifices, but also some profit off of selling the sacrifices (or rent from those who sell).  We are never satisfied with enough, and never satisfied with righteousness (for which we are supposed to hunger and thirst).  Always greedy.  That’s why we fast—to learn about enough, instead of greed.

***

Jesus “made a whip out of cords.”  People often remember the whip and cite this as an example of righteous anger.  But it doesn’t say he was angry, only that he was zealous.  The detailed list of how he dealt with each thing, including asking them to carry the pigeon cages, shows deliberation more than rage.

What is more fascinating is making the whip out of cords.  The word for cords, as best I can tell, refers to the kind of ropes that tied up the animals.  (I guess the ropes are cast aside once the animals are sacrificed.)

Far from an image of rage, this is an image of deliberation.  Jesus sat down and carefully wove his tool.  He thought this out.  Lent is a time for us to carefully weave the tools of our own cleansing.

***

In the next scene, they ask him what right he has to cleanse the temple.  He responds, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.”

They respond, “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years.”  No wonder they’re looking for money.

But Jesus is talking about the Resurrection—and the power and wisdom of God.  Our human calculations lead always to compromise, to set aside the primacy of God in the name of human prudence.  Jesus calls us to keep holy what is holy, trusting that he can build what needs to be built.

What human calculations are crowding your Temple?