It's (Not) Always Sunny in the New Jerusalem

True reverence for the Lord’s passion means fixing the eyes of our heart on Jesus crucified and recognizing in him our own humanity.

The earth – our earthly nature – should tremble at the suffering of its Redeemer. The rocks – the hearts of unbelievers – should burst asunder. The dead, imprisoned in the tombs of their mortality, should come forth, the massive stones now ripped apart. Foreshadowings of the future resurrection should appear in the holy city, the Church of God: what is to happen to our bodies should now take place in our hearts.

No one, however weak, is denied a share in the victory of the cross. No one is beyond the help of the prayer of Christ. His prayer brought benefit to the multitude that raged against him. How much more does it bring to those who turn to him in repentance.

Ignorance has been destroyed, obstinacy has been overcome. The sacred blood of Christ has quenched the flaming sword that barred access to the tree of life. The age-old night of sin has given place to the true light.

The Christian people are invited to share the riches of paradise. All who have been reborn have the way open before them to return to their native land, from which they had been exiled. Unless indeed they close off for themselves the path that could be opened before the faith of a thief.

Saint Leo the Great, pope

Reflection – More great stuff from the fathers of the Church, courtesy of the Office of Readings. It really does get beautiful this time of year.

Note St. Leo’s emphasis in the first paragraph the importance of recognizing our humanity in Christ crucified. Leo the Great was instrumental in combatting the monophysite heresy which denied a true human nature to Christ. The authentic Christian dogma of Jesus as the one Divine Person of the Son with two natures, divine and human, ‘true God and true man’, can be attributed to a great extent to Leo’s intervention at the council of Chalcedon.

Anyhow – enough with the history of theology. But you can see here what is at stake in those theological debates, the nuances of which may seem a bit abstruse. ‘What has not been assumed, cannot be redeemed,’ is the patristic formula. Whatever Christ who is God did not truly take to Himself, remains outside the realm of divine grace.

So that Christ has embraced our full humanity in every dimension—body, soul, mind, will—and in a sense even has embraced our sin—not that he has sinned, which is impossible, but that he accepted the full weight and consequence of sin in our lives—means that every aspect of our humanity is now flooded with the grace of divine love and redemption and life.

And it is the totality of this redemption that is important. Nobody is beyond it, nobody outside it. There is no dimension, no expression of human sin and brokenness, of human wretchedness and tragedy, that Christ cannot reach, and reaching, save. We are not stuck, we very simply and basically are not stuck in whatever morass of sin and awfulness we may find ourselves in.

Now, most of us moderns (at least of the North American variety) hear that, and immediately we go into a sort of prosperity Gospel mode. ‘Well, then, so if I follow Jesus, my emotional wounds will all clear up, my life will go from strength to strength, and everything will just be sunny and warm and loverly every day.’ And then, when it turns out that’s not quite the deal God is offering us, ‘Well, it’s all just nonsense, then – religion – what a con!’

The truth of the redemption and the hope Jesus offers us is much deeper than a sort of ‘It’s always sunny in the new Jerusalem’ apple pie optimism. In this life, for a variety of reasons usually too complex for us to fully grasp, we carry the burden of our humanity and its broken condition. Problems don’t just clear up with the application of ‘Jesus juice’ three times a day for a week. Sin and its effects in our life remain, a sharp goad towards humility and repentance, for a very long time in all of our lives.

But what Jesus does is give us a way through. We are not there yet, we are not home free, but we are not stuck, either. God always opens a path, a way forward, a little stretch of road, maybe just one or two steps, towards the new Jerusalem, towards the fullness of life in Christ. The path is open, for everyone, and no one is left outside, unless that is the choice they themselves make. And this is the great hope and joy and beauty of our Easter faith, even in the midst of the great Lent of the world when it is so often obscured in us by our own weakness of faith and inconstancy of prayer and vision.

By the Whites of His Knuckles

 “You can be sure there is joy in heaven’, he said, over one sinner who repents.

To give the same lesson he revived the man who, having fallen into the hands of the brigands, had been left stripped and half-dead from his wounds; he poured wine and oil on the wounds, bandaged them, placed the man on his own mule and brought him to an inn, where he left sufficient money to have him cared for, and promised to repay any further expense on his return.

Again, he told of how that Father, who is goodness itself, was moved with pity for his profligate son who returned and made amends by repentance; how he embraced him, dressed him once more in the fine garments that befitted his own dignity, and did not reproach him for any of his sins.

So too, when he found wandering in the mountains and hills the one sheep that had strayed from God’s flock of a hundred, he brought it back to the fold, but he did not exhaust it by driving it ahead of him. Instead, he placed it on his own shoulders and so, compassionately, he restored it safely to the flock.

So also he cried out: Come to me, all you that toil and are heavy of heart. Accept my yoke’, he said, by which he meant his commands, or rather, the whole way of life that he taught us in the Gospel. He then speaks of a burden, but that is only because repentance seems difficult. In fact, however, my yoke is easy, he assures us, and my burden is light.

Then again he instructs us in divine justice and goodness, telling us to be like our heavenly Father, holy, perfect and merciful. Forgive, he says, and you will be forgiven. Behave toward other people as you would wish them to behave toward you.

Saint Maximus the Confessor

Reflection – I have on my desk a very precious gift from a directee. She is an iconographer, and wrote me an icon of Christ the Good Shepherd (an image of this icon is the image of Christ I use for this blog.

Christ is holding the sheep on his shoulders, as Maximus describes here. In this particular icon, he is gripping the feet of the sheep tight—so tight that the whites of his knuckles are showing. The sheep meanwhile has a most contented look on his face. Clearly, he is not going anywhere, and clearly, that is just fine with him.

His head is resting on the Lord’s shoulder, so that if Jesus has anything to say to him, he has only to turn his head and whisper into the ear of his lost sheep. And the Lord’s hands are pierced—it is the crucified and risen Jesus who is bearing the lost sheep home. The whole icon radiates tenderness, security, peace, strength, calm.

And this is the simple fact of Christian life in the world. We may have an ocean of raging emotions. We may have dozens if not hundreds of questions, things we don’t understand about our own lives or the life of the world. We may be deeply unhappy about all sorts of things: why the Church does this, why the world is like that, why this happened to me, why that happened to the person I love. On the level of worldly life, our future may be uncertain and our present most definitely disordered.

But the deeper truth is that we are the little sheep in the icon of Christ the Good Shepherd, the son returning home to the father’s house in the parable, the man who fell among robbers being tended to by the Good Samaritan who is the Lord Himself. Our emotions may tell us something quite different, but one of the key insights we have to learn in the spiritual life is that it is precisely here that our emotions most let us down. Emotions react and rise in us in response to direct sensory input; the deepest realities of God and us, the life of grace in the soul, and what Jesus is doing on our behalf and for our healing and salvation are all happening at a level far deeper than the senses.

And so we are left with the Word of God, as always the surest and truest revelation of the reality of things. And in connection with this whole business of mercy and grace, repentance and conversion, help and salvation coming to us by the tender love of the Father in Jesus, the Gospels have given us this string of images and parables that are unparalleled in beauty: the lost sheep, the lost son, the lost coin, the man beaten by robbers… all of which captivate our imagination with their loveliness, all of which are telling us the true story of our lives, hold up a mirror to us of our souls and the Soul of God, all of which is summed up in the loving shepherd carrying a little lamb on his shoulders back to the sheepfold, back home, back where we belong and where our happiness lies.

Creating Something New on Earth

God’s will is to save us, and nothing pleases him more than our coming back to him with true repentance. The heralds of truth and the ministers of divine grace have told us this from the beginning, repeating it in every age. Indeed, God’s desire for our salvation is the primary and pre-eminent sign of his infinite goodness.

Precisely in order to show that there is nothing closer to God’s heart than this, the divine Word of God the Father, with untold condescension, lived among us in the flesh, and did, suffered, and said all that was necessary to reconcile us to God the Father, when we were at enmity with him, and to restore us to the life of blessedness from which we had been exiled.

He healed our physical infirmities by miracles; he freed us from our sins, many and grievous as they were, by suffering and dying, taking them upon himself as if he were answerable for them, sinless though he was. He also taught us in many different ways that we should wish to imitate him by our own kindness and genuine love for one another.

So it was that Christ proclaimed that he had come to call sinners to repentance, not the righteous, and that it was not the healthy who required a doctor, but the sick. He declared that he had come to look for the sheep that was lost, and that it was to the lost sheep of the house of Israel that he had been sent.

Speaking more obscurely in the parable of the silver coin, he tells us that the purpose of his coming was to reclaim the royal image, which had been coated with the filth of sin. “You can be sure there is joy in heaven’, he said, over one sinner who repents.

Saint Maximus the Confessor, Letter

Reflection – I am sharing treasures from the Office of Readings this week on the blog. We have here a most beautiful Scriptural reflection on some pretty basic facts about human life and divine life, the relationship between God and us, what God has done and what we need to do.

We need to repent. God has done everything for us to make it possible for us to do this. The whole movement of God to us in Christ is to bring us to repentance, to have us return to him. Maximus the Confessor develops this along so many lines of Gospel imagery and narrative in this letter. Lost sheep, images on coins, healing miracles—all of this is to bring home to us the message that God has come to make our broken relationship with Him right.

We have a beautiful hymn here at MH that we sing in Lent. The text is from Jeremiah: Come O virgin Israel, come home to these towns of yours! How long will you hesitate, O faithless daughter? For the Lord is creating something new on earth, the Lord is creating something new on earth.

God has come to create something new on earth, and that something new is our restored and renewed communion with Him. It is a deeper communion than what was had before the fall, because in Christ we are not only restored to that original unity, but are drawn into the Triune communion and made sharers in it.

It is all mercy, all compassion, all the goodness of God to us. But He doesn’t force us to do anything we don’t want to do, and so the reality of repentance is still there. We think of repentance as a heavy, hard, sad thing. It has that dimension, for sure. But the deeper reality is not the hardness and the shamefulness of our need to make that act of repentance.

The deeper reality is the return, the destination, the restoration in Christ. The happy ending, and the great joy that awaits us and all of heaven in the one sinner who repents. We need to contemplate these matters, as we all have something, big or small, that is a repentance matter in our lives. We need to see it not as a burdensome sorrowful thing, but as the great invitation from God to enter into the joy of heaven, into the merciful love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This and this alone is the whole point of Jesus, the whole point and purpose of our Catholic faith, of the Gospel which has been proclaimed to us.

The One Thing That Can Conquer God

In the past prayer was able to bring down punishment, rout armies, withhold the blessing of rain. Now, however, the prayer of the just turns aside the whole anger of God, keeps vigil for its enemies, pleads for persecutors. Is it any wonder that it can call down water from heaven when it could obtain fire from heaven as well? Prayer is the one thing that can conquer God. But Christ has willed that it should work no evil, and has given it all power over good.

Its only art is to call back the souls of the dead from the very journey into death, to give strength to the weak, to heal the sick, to exorcise the possessed, to open prison cells, to free the innocent from their chains. Prayer cleanses from sin, drives away temptations, stamps out persecutions, comforts the fainthearted, gives new strength to the courageous, brings travellers safely home, calms the waves, confounds robbers, feeds the poor, overrules the rich, lifts up the fallen, supports those who are falling, sustains those who stand firm.

All the angels pray. Every creature prays. Cattle and wild beasts pray and bend the knee. As they come from their barns and caves they look out to heaven and call out, lifting up their spirit in their own fashion. The birds too rise and lift themselves up to heaven: they open out their wings, instead of hands, in the form of a cross, and give voice to what seems to be a prayer.

What more need be said on the duty of prayer? Even the Lord himself prayed. To him be honour and power for ever and ever. Amen.

Tertullian, Treatise on Prayer

Reflection – Well, this is just all so beautiful that I hardly know what to say about it. ‘Prayer is the one thing that can conquer God’—that is a magnificent turn of phrase right there.

This was in the office of readings last week, and it struck me so powerfully, not only because it is so very beautiful, but because it resonated so deeply with what I was teaching last week, namely, a course on liturgy and worship. I love especially Tertullian’s bit about the beasts of the field lifting their voices to heaven and the birds opening their wings like hands opened in prayer, in the form of the cross.

All creation is made for prayer, that is, for a radical openness to God. Creation is not a closed shop, a mute and isolated lump of matter. Creation is, in its true created nature, its deepest essence of being, an open space for God, a type of being conditioned utterly by its relationship to the Other who made it.

Prayer is the soul of creation, and the soul of humanity. We are made in a state of total dependence and receptivity to God, and when our life is not bound up in the action of prayer, in the lived out, fleshed-out, reality of prayer, our life is wrong at the most fundamental level it can be wrong at. If we are not praying, we have gone astray at the most serious and damaging point of our humanity.

But the last words of Tertullian are even more penetrating into this mystery. The Lord Himself prayed. He just leaves it there, but consider that. Jesus, who we believe to be God, prayed… to God. How can that be? God prays to God? A theologian being very precise and technical would say that this is the human nature of Christ, not the divine.

But pray is a personal act of the subject, and there is only one person here, the divine person of the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity. And that right there plunges us into the deepest level of this prayer business. The Son ‘prays’ to the Father, from all eternity. Not as we pray—God is God and we are not—but prayer nonetheless. Dialogue, communion, love, totality of gift and totality of reception, from all eternity.

So when I say that prayer is the radical nature of created human reality, what I really am saying is that the most radical nature of human reality is to enter the communion of the Trinity. We are made, not simply to live some sort of ‘good human life’ (whatever on earth that means), but rather to enter into the life of God. And we do this above all in our prayer, through prayer, by prayer.

That is, we do it by crying out to God continually. That which may seem like an act of weakness turns out to be our greatest strength, of servility turns out to be our glorification, of desperation turns out to be the one sure hope of our race, of futility and uselessness turns out to be the most powerful and effective path in life.

In short: pray. Pray badly, pray well, pray reluctantly, pray eagerly. It don’t matter. Pray, pray, pray—and in that prayer, enter into the very life of God.