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Month: October 2019

Warning Signs

Posted on by Tim Hinkle

By McLean Bennett, OFM Cap.

Major events in history are usually the culmination of a series of warning signs — signs that frequently have gone unheeded until it is too late.

That’s what was happening in Jerusalem at the time of Ezekiel, today’s prophet.

We’ve all heard about the “Babylonian exile” — a stretch of time when the people of Judah were taken out of Jerusalem and forced to live without their temple to God.

There were spiritual reasons for this exile, Ezekiel reminds us. People in Judah were worshiping idols and not God.

And this exile to Babylon did not begin all at once; it happened gradually. The Babylonians conquered Judah in a series of invasions, with Babylon only eventually taking over the Jewish kingdom, bit by bit.

Ezekiel was a victim of one of the first invasions, and so he began writing at a time when many of Judah’s citizens — but not all of them — were victims of war.

Importantly, the temple had not yet fallen in Jerusalem. But Ezekiel writes in warning about its impending destruction. That’s what today’s reading is all about.

Today’s first reading is filled with some doom and gloom — and Ezekiel wrote it that way on purpose. Jerusalem was guilty of serious sins against God, and therefore deserved its exile, Ezekiel is telling us.

But there are hints of hope and optimism in Ezekiel, too.

First, there is the promise of mercy for those marked with the “Thau,” or an x-shaped symbol, on their foreheads. This was the mark given in Ezekiel’s prophecy to those who had not participated in Judah’s idolatry, but who had wept over the condition of the temple.

Moreover, God’s departure from the temple and the city of Jerusalem is depicted in Ezekiel and elsewhere in the Old Testament as gradual — as if God was patiently waiting in hope to see whether the gathering storm clouds of exile would result in repentance.

And, if we were to keep reading from today’s section of Ezekiel, we’d see that shortly after today’s first reading, the prophet provides the assurance that the Babylonian exile will not last forever, but will end when God gathers together God’s people and brings them back to their homeland.

God has wounded his people, but will bind up again.

In a sense, that is also the message from the Gospel. The message from Jesus is all about repentance, a process that involves the relationship we have with others and with the church.

Sin and self-centeredness bring us outside of our communion with God, just as it brought about exile for the inhabitants of Jerusalem.

But this exile need not last forever. We can come back to God.

Today (and every day) represents another opportunity for our return to God. Jesus, who shows up every day on our altars, always offers the same invitation: Come back to him; come back to Jesus and find life and communion.

Scapegoating

Posted on by Tim Hinkle

By Br. McLean Bennett, OFM Cap.

There is something of a cottage industry on social media these days: The posting to the internet of videos of people doing bad or stupid things … and then getting their just deserts.

If I scroll through YouTube, I almost inevitably end up coming across a video titled something like: “Idiot driver crashes into semi.” What’s caught on camera is a video of someone driving too fast or too recklessly, and then slamming into a big truck. Viewers are encouraged to say things like: “Well, he had that coming!”

Or a person might be filmed in the midst of a tense conflict with someone else — sometimes with the person holding the camera — and we’re invited to watch their spectacular, public meltdown. “It’s OK,” we’re supposed to think. “They deserve to be called out and ridiculed!”

It’s easy to turn people into a meme, ridicule their actions and justify our pleasure in our doing so by insisting that it’s all simply a carriage of popular justice.

This isn’t a new phenomenon.

As a friend of mine pointed out to me a few years ago, what goes on in today’s world of social media is simply a modern variation of what we used to call “scapegoating.” We turn our enemies into objects of derision — and tell ourselves that we stand on the side of moral virtue.

Scholars would perhaps point out that this is what’s going on in today’s first reading, which is all about the Assyrians — or the “scoundrels,” as the prophet Nahum calls them.

The Assyrians were hated by just about everyone — and they might have deserved it. They were famously brutal, and had made a lot of enemies, including the Israelites of Nahum’s time.

About a century before he wrote, Assyria had conquered much of Israel, pressing many of Abraham’s descendants into a violent exile.

But by the time of today’s first reading, the Assyrians had fallen to the Babylonians — the Mediterranean world’s newest big empire.

Nahum’s whole purpose in writing was to point out that the Assyrians had finally eaten their humble pie, and that the whole world was taking note.

Today’s first reading seems to take a gleeful bit of pleasure in the Assyrians’ downfall.

There’s a different tone in today’s gospel, in which Jesus prescribes a different way of approaching our relationship to the world — even a world that wanted to crucify him.

“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.

“For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

There is nothing here about breaking one’s enemies. There is nothing here about humiliating one’s opponent — even if we’re sure our opponent deserves to be humiliated.

To be like Jesus, to follow him and be his disciple, is to carry a cross. And our cross, like Jesus’, is a cross that brings healing not only for us, but also for our enemies.

Praying for those we don’t like might not come naturally or by instinct. It’s easier to lash out and to scapegoat.

At Mass, we pray at the altar that in consuming Jesus’ body and blood, we ourselves might be made an eternal offering to God.

As we walk out of this chapel, the ground beneath our feet might well be thought of as the altar on which we make this offering — the place where we carry our own cross.

We might ask: For whom are we carrying that cross today?

Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Posted on by Tim Hinkle

By Br. McLean Bennett, OFM Cap.

I remember the gymnasium in which the ceremony was held. I remember my family visiting, and getting to show them around my college town — and finally getting to try eating at the nicest restaurant downtown. (Without my parents around, I’d never been able to afford it.)

Most of all, I remember this sensation that the hardest thing I’d worked for all my life was finally over. I had completed my 16th year of education. I had jumped through all the academic hoops that life had put in my way, and I was ready to coast through the rest of my life.

Or so I thought.

I had reached what I thought was the apex of my childhood ambitions, but found that life kept unfolding in front of me. I found out that work didn’t get easier with a college degree; it just kept coming.

The history of my life, you might say, didn’t end with what I’d expected would be its most climactic moment. Life had simply changed direction.

It’s taken me a while to find a way to connect my life to the feast that we celebrate this week: the Assumption of Mary.

For a long time, I simply approached this feast with the idea that here was an historical event from the life of Mary — Mary has gone to heaven — and we as a church were simply memorializing it.

In a certain sense, of course, that’s true. This is an important historical event, and we are memorializing it.

But does it have any connection to our lives today?

I suppose we might begin by meditating on what it means that history did not simply come to an end after Jesus’ death on the cross… or after his resurrection… or after his ascension into heaven.

Indeed, these moments were sort of like humanity’s “graduation ceremony” — the things we’d all been waiting for before the time of Christ.

And, yet, for Mary and for each one of us, life since the year 33 A.D. has kept on going. And we’re left to sort out for ourselves what Jesus’ life and ministry and death and resurrection all mean for us.

Mary’s life shows us that the redemption won on Calvary continues to unfold in time — it didn’t happen once and then the story of humanity was finished. Mary had to get to her assumption.

For Mary, whose relationship with her son was so special, hers was a special type of entry into eternal life. We’re called to the same heaven, though; the same eternity with Jesus.

And that means we still have our lives to live, too. Our own finishing lines to arrive at.

At every Mass, we commemorate once again the re-presentation of all that Jesus did for us at Calvary. This, we might say, is a bit like living, once again, our “graduation ceremony.” It’s the most important thing we’ve waited all our lives to experience — and we get to experience it anew every day.

And if we remain faithful to what the Eucharist calls us to, then we, like Mary, will be able someday to enter into eternal life. (Our “last” graduation ceremony.)

“When I found your words, I devoured them.” – Jeremiah 15:16

Posted on by Julius Milton

By Br. McLean Bennett, OFM Cap.

In the Old Testament, we are told about a king of Judah (one of King David’s descendants) who decided to repair and renovate the temple in Jerusalem, which at that time had fallen into some disrepair. In the midst of this renovation, workers stumbled upon the book of the law — a book of the Torah, scripture written by Moses — which had apparently been set aside and forgotten about for many years.

When the king read this re-discovered book, he was surprised to learn that his kingdom had been breaking its own laws for a very long time. All of this is what Jeremiah, the prophet, is referring to when he says: “When I found your words, I devoured them.” Jeremiah would have been alive at the time of the book’s re-discovery and the renovation of the temple. And, for him, this was a moment of profound joy.

And so, it is curious that this joy was so complicated. Jeremiah immediately notes that, despite his joy at having found God’s word, he was nevertheless in suffering.

And so, Jeremiah complains to God. He calls himself “a man of strife and contention,” and says that he regrets ever being born. It’s interesting to note that Jeremiah can feel, all at once, great joy in God’s word, and frustration with its consequences.

I suppose that we might be able to relate a little bit to this. Certainly, we have moments of joy in our relationship with God. And we probably relate to the phenomenon of feeling that the joy of being God’s disciple can become a bit sour when our Christian identity introduces some strife and contention in our lives. Living as a Christian requires our experiencing a real and authentic relationship with God. But this is not meant to make life easy.

The grace of a true relationship with God — the grace of true joy — usually comes wrapped in the mundane simplicity of daily life. It comes, usually, in our families, at our dining room tables, in the hours spent working behind the scenes for one’s children, spouses or aging loved ones. It’s a grace that we find working in ourselves when we keep coming back to Mass and back to prayer in the face of whatever challenges we encounter in our Christian lives.

May God bless you!

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