This man God raised on the third day and granted that He be made manifest,
not to all the people, but to us
the witness chosen by God in advance,
who ate and drank with Him after He rose from the dead.
He commissioned us to preach to the people 
and testify that He is the one appointed by God
as judge of the living and the dead

                            Acts 10:42-43

       The resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth was a one-time event that altered the horizons of human possibility forever.  God’s witness that Jesus was alive in glory after being put to death was an event that occurred over many days.  The first witnesses were women, some of whose names Luke carefully remembered, Mary Magdalene, Jo-Anna, and Mary the mother of James (24:1–10); He then appeared to Peter, to James, and once to over five hundred people (I Corinthians 15:6).    His standing again, for that is the meaning of the Greek, being present once again to his disciples after being crucified under Pontius Pilate was not a sign given with great power as at Pentecost, seen by all Jerusalem, nor was it a wonder done before the crowd in the marketplace or the forum.  God’s purpose in raising Jesus from death was not to convert the unbelieving but to confirm His disciples.  His appearance before the world in glory, when every knee shall bow and every tongue confess His lordship (Philippians 2:10–11), an event reserved for His appearing at the fulfillment of the ages, would have violated the divinely appointed limitation:  He would not use the obvious and the incontrovertible to elicit faith.   So His appearance was not to all the people but to the witnesses He had chosen beforehand.  To them it gave great assurance, validating everything He had taught, while it convinced the doubtful (John 20:24-29).   

       The forty days between Jesus’ resurrection and His ascension to the right hand of the Father saw the completion of His work.  During those days He appeared to  the twelve to command them to forgive sins (John 20:19-24).  He explained the Scriptures on the road to Emmaus to His disciples:  “O foolish men,  slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken” (Luke 24:25).    And afterward they knew Him in the breaking of bread;   they recognized him, He ate and drank with them, first having blessed bread and broken it in anticipation of the sacrament of His body and blood (Luke 24: 31-35).  He spoke to the Twelve of the Kingdom of God (Acts 1:3).  His resurrection was the sign that in Him that last enemy death had been defeated.   In His appearing to His chosen witnesses He  gave His disciples a foretaste of the world to come, for He appeared bearing the sign of God’s glory.  John wrote: “We beheld His glory, the glory belonging to the only Son of the Father” (John 1:14 ), a glory predicting for the faithful their future life with Him in glory.  

       But none of these good things was the one thing that the apostles remembered as the result of Jesus’ resurrection.  What the appearance of the living Lord to His followers but not to the world did was to set the apostolic ministry on the road with this message:  “He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that He is the one ordained by God to be the judge of the living and the dead.”   And the Gospel of John assures us that it is  not the Father but the Risen Christ, He who knows intimately the human nature He has taken to Himself who will be our judge:  “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgement to the Son” (5:22).   That this is the divine witness given in Jesus’ resurrection  from death is reiterated later in Acts:  Paul ends his apology to the council of the Areopagus with these words:  “In the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent:   Because He hath appointed a day, in that He hath raised Him from the dead” (17:30–31). 

       The resurrection is God’s promise that Christ will judge the living and the dead, which is to say that, among other great realities established by Jesus’ vindication, life has moral meaning assigned it by God who created it, that in the end goodness will be established and rewarded and evil done away and punished.   This truth, that God will judge in the end, is a theme reiterated in the Psalms, whose authors do not envision a world uncorrected.   It was prophesied by Christ himself: “When the Son of man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne.  Before Him will be gathered all the nations, and He will separate them one from another. . . .  Then He will say to those on His left hand, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire, . . . but the righteous into eternal life” (Matthew 25:31–32. 46).    

       This Easter the world will celebrate the resurrection as the sign of Christ’s triumph over death, and rightly so.  Not so much attention will be paid the truth that the apostles considered of first importance:  Jesus’ vindication by the Father makes Him the King Eternal to whom it belongs to judge the world and its people, the living and the dead.   Judgement is not a popular topic in a world in flight from God; being judgmental, which is often simply calling evil by its proper name, is now a secular sin, but that does not change the good news that God’s “justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24). 

           Every Christian should anticipate his or her judgement with profound and holy fear.   But also with confidence.  The world we see in which evil seems omnipresent if not triumphant , and every soul who has ever lived and acted for good or evil in it, all will be judged so that goodness will be established.   This is a cause for Easter joy.  We would not be happy in a world in which water ran uphill, in which we were constantly vexed with having to pry our chairs off the ceiling.  These laws of nature are dim reflections of  the divinely appointed order of the world called divine justice, seemingly trivial in the light of the great truth that no good will go unrewarded, no evil unpunished.  Because Christ resurrected is the judge eternal we  need not concern ourselves more than prudence demands that evil seems so persistent, with defeating evil in the world.  We know because we are Christians that the theory of German philosophers and progressive politicians that human nature is inevitably improving is a lie.   One of the great marks of human equality is the fact that we all, each of us,  have an opportunity to do good or evil.  The Lord himself (Matthew 25), Saint Paul (II Thessalonians 2:3–10), and the Apocalypse of the prophet John tell us that the world and its inhabitants will become worse at the end, when God will at last set all  things right. And remember; that judgment means vindication for those who love His coming (II Timothy 4:8).   To them He will say, “Well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your Lord” (Matthew 25:21).  And says the Apostle James: “Behold, the Judge is standing right at the door” (5:9).  

 

Some scribes who were Pharisees saw that Jesus was eating with  
sinners and tax collectors and said to His disciples, 
“Why does He eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
Jesus heard this and said to them, 
“Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do. 
I do not come to call the righteous but sinners.”

                            Mark 2:16-17

To be called by Jesus is to know oneself as a sinner.  The standard He sets is high:  “Be perfect as Our Father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:45).  In the light of this high expectation every person who will enter Christ’s kingdom of the new heart knows himself to be a sinner.”  Saint Paul writes, “ For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).  And  Saint John the Evangelist: “If we say that we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us;  If we confess our sins He is faithful and true to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (I John 1:8–9).     

       The first proposition of Christian theology is the assertion that nature and man, being the creatures of a good God, are themselves good.  “Behold it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). The second is the assertion that man and nature are fallen from that state of original righteousness in which they were created.  So the first work of the apostolic mission and therefore of the Church is to convince the world and every person in it that we are sinners, coming into this world separated  from God by  our rebellion and neglect of our duties to the Divine Majesty.  The word righteous in the superscript describes a person who believes that without God he is good, or as good as he should be, when in fact he is a sinner, and the  worse for not  recognizing the fact,   The first word in the Gospel story, spoken by John the Baptist, is “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”    The burden of the first chapter of Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans is found in two revelations.  The Gospel is the power of God to reveal the righteousness of God, with this followed immediately by the revelation that the wrath of God is revealed against all unrighteousness and the wickedness of men.   

       The foundation of the Kingdom is the realization of the righteousness and glory of God and of our sinfulness.   If we do not see ourselves as sinners we cannot hear the invitation of Jesus to enter His kingdom.   Our sinfulness is twofold.  First, there is the burden of original sin which teaches us that by our very condition as recent representatives of a rebellious race we too are with our first parents afflicted with the results of disobedience:  rebellion ending in disease, disorder, and death. Chesterton once observed that of all the Christian doctrines, the doctrine of original sin is most obviously true, for which see the front page of any newspaper, with its predictable tale of political incompetence, cupidity, greed, and the ravages of lust upon respectability.    

       This great doctrine of original sin has been in retreat in our culture since, taking  the eyes of our hearts off the righteousness of God, we took up various forms, hard and soft,  of the secular utopianism that characterizes the modern world.  We hear daily that the imperfections of the human condition, poverty and disease and ignorance are due not to the malevolence of weak and fallen wills but to the material environment.  Criminals are exonerated from responsibility by the fact of their imperfect childhoods and faulty education.  Given such presuppositions, the healing of the heart lies not in repentance but with the counselor or psychiatrist, and while such engagements may be beneficial, until human souls can see ourselves for what we are in the light of the Divine goodness and majesty, the rebellious will cannot be healed.   Thousands are exonerated from a duty to obey the laws of the United States by the poor conditions, poverty and unemployment, rampant in their biographies. Education has failed because it lacks the resources, a claim made in the face of the fact that the United States spends more per student on education than any other country in the world.   And through it all, increasingly, there is no cause for repentance because persons are not thought to be active in the formation of their own characters.

        This is a moral world that fosters grievance—someone must be responsible for the evil I see and experience—and moral incompetence.  The Christian doctrine that formed the soul of the pre-Enlightenment world does not require anyone to claim responsibility for original sin; it does require admitting that we are justly afflicted by and with it.   And this means looking at the world with a forgiving eye; for those around us share the weakness and ignorance and rebelliousness that is rooted in our common fallen nature.

       The other kind of sin belongs to us alone; the actual sins we commit, encouraged by the weakness inherent in original sin but consummated by our consent.   Satan encourages but he cannot cause wickedness in us.   “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am tempted by God, for God cannot be tempted, for God cannot be tempted with evil and He himself tempts no one’”(James 1:31).  Our sins are caused by our cooperation, sometimes by a casual neglect of our duty to God, sometimes by enthusiastic participation in evil.   And the acknowledgement of this fact is the sticking point for modernity.   Utopians may tell us that many things are wrong with the world.  While capitalist greed and cultural selfishness may, sometimes justly, be abundantly denounced, repentance is personal, depending upon the awakening of conscience by the Church’s call to repentance.  

       This failure is in significant part the result of the abandonment by the Church of its mission to the world in the attempt not to be seen as judgmental or unkind.   The Church offers comfort to those who, touched by the Holy Spirit, remaining faithful to Christ, confess their sins and their sinfulness, but, seemingly,  it has largely abandoned its prior duty:  the call to repentance  of everyman in  the face of the glory, magnificence, and righteousness of God.  Those who neglect God because  they see themselves as, well, perhaps not righteous but surely good enough, are not only making a theoretical mistake, they are risking what Jesus called the eternal fire and the outer darkness (Matthew 8:12; 13:42, 50).  They will not be called into His Kingdom by Christ because they  believe the lie that they are not sinners.  Along the way they will make life hell on earth because, believing in their own goodness, they will assume that those who differ from them are not, like themselves, weak and sometimes silly sinners,  but will assumes that such contrary opinions are the result of an evil will, a will that can never be accommodated but must be defeated.  

       Lay persons are not commissioned to call the world to repentance,  but can play a part by resolutely refusing to cooperate with evil or to make terms with the world.  A Christian who will not bend to the ways of the world is an ever-effectual witness.  And we can enjoy the peace of not believing a lie, for the lie that we  are good enough is at the heart of the discomfort and irascibility that is part of the curse of secular modernity.

 

Jesus said to his disciples:
“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, 
and on earth nations will be in dismay, 
perplexed by the roaring of the sea and the waves.
People will die of fright 
in anticipation of what is coming upon the world, 
for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.
And then they will see the Son of Man 
coming in a cloud with power and great glory.
But when these signs begin to happen, 
stand erect and raise your heads 
because your redemption is at hand.

                            Luke 21:25-28

 

According to the progressive account the world we know will get better and better, climate controlled by man, the goods of the earth equitably distributed.  Iphones and electric vehicles will have been perfected,  there will be a world government.  Heaven will have arrived on earth; Christ’s prayer that the Kingdom would come will have been realized.   But human nature will be unchanged.  The selfishness, greed, and lust that characterizes human behavior, always frustrating our desire to do good and be good, although perhaps contained with pharmaceuticals will still be rampant.  

            But what if the history of the world is not a tale of technical progress and political pacification; what if this giant whirling cosmos is no larger than  a grain of sand in the hand of God omnipotent who made it and who will in due time call it home?     What if the quality of life that matters is the quality of our relation to Him and to our neighbor, not the sum of our achievements and possessions?     What if it is not the outside of man and of history that matters but the inside, the will and the heart?  What if the real you is not the self who moves easily through the world but that self who is with you when you lay your head on the pillow in the quiet of night? 

       That is always the question: are we things of stuff, bound in a cycle of endless birth that ends in death, or are we sons of Our Father in heaven,  making our way through time, enjoying a created order that is a sacrament of something better that is coming?     And when we look at the world through which we move, can we believe that the promise of the rose and the sunrise, the promise of every heart’s hope,  is a political settlement or a government program or the advance of science?  For in this world the highest thing we know is persons.  And if it were not revealed by God it might still be urged on the basis of insight that the end of life and history must be a person, for there is nothing in creation greater than a person.    And the Church teaches as truth revealed in Scripture and Tradition that the person who is coming, in whom all things are redeemed, is not a political person or a poet but Jesus, a divine human person who was once among us but who now reigns in heaven, 

“the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation, in whom all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible. . . .  All things were created through Him and for Him.  He is before all things and in Him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:15-20).

His second coming—for He has been among us once—is promised in the words of the New Testament, better New Covenant.  In John:  

“When I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself” (14:3) .    Luke: “At that time you will see the Son of Man coming in  clouds with power and great glory” (21:27) .  

Paul in Thessalonians: “The Lord himself will descend from heaven, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God.  And the dead in Christ will rise first” (4:16).  

And from John’s prophecy:  “I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away . . . And I heard a great voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold the dwelling of God is with men’” (21:1, 3).   

And again John says, “When he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (I John 3:2).

       Of course the thought that this person who is the meaning of life and history will appear in clouds of glory from the sky is considered by a materialist, secularist culture to be an impossible fancy, having no claim to reality.  This will be said because they believe there is nothing in the world but its outside in all its obviousness.   They forget that this cosmos that seems so solid is a thought in the mind of God and a creature of His will, so that at any moment He may choose to perfect it by bringing this fallen world order to an end at Christ’s return, renewing it and remaking it under the power of His eternal purpose into the new creation he willed in the beginning.   “For as the lightning comes from the east and shines as far as the west, so will be the coming of the  Son of Man” (Matthew 24:27).    It will always be difficult for secularists to believe that Jesus will appear in the clouds with glory because they forget that the sky is His, it was made through Him.

       The world has been taught by secularist  modernity that “all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation” (II Peter 3:4) that progress will continue, there will be peace and finally world government   The text superscript tells us that Christ’s return will be accompanied by disturbances in the sky and sea, by great fear among those who do not believe.  This truth, that after a time of crisis, nature released from its sin-afflicted pattern to be remade anew, Christ will return.  This is a time for Christians to stand tall, for Christ’s return  is our redemption.  Meanwhile, the fact of Jesus’ return may give us occasion to reflect upon the false finality proposed by the secular lie that this world is all there is, that what you see is what you get, that there is no meaning beyond the progress proposed by the secularist project.  “Come, Lord Jesus”  is the prayer of the Church (Revelation 22:20).

 

“Hear me, all of you and understand.
Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person;
but the things that come out from within are what defile.

“From within people, from their hearts,
come evil thoughts, unchastity theft, murder,
adultery, greed, malice, deceit,
licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly.
All these evils come from within and they defile.”

Mark 7:14-15

 

With these words Jesus challenged the Pharisees claim that holiness consisted in strict obedience to the propositions of the Law, 613 in all according to later tradition, that included not only the Great Commandments:  You shall love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself, but also minute rules about  the washing of hands and the company one kept.    Our Lord’s point in this exchange was simply that it was damaging to the soul to insist on the small things that affected the outside, our behavior in the world, while ignoring what was going on within.    And what was going on within Jesus described graphically, from evil  thoughts and unchastity to blasphemy and folly, in short the catalog of human failure when the human heart is unhealed.   This will create a situation in which law will  be used to blot out charity and duty, as, for example, when one refuses to support aged parents on the grounds that the money is already corban or promised to the Temple treasury, a practice not uncommon among the Pharisees, who used the law to avoid true righteousness.    

When the human heart, which is born in slavery that is original  sin, is unhealed, unrighteousness will reign; human cleverness will think of a way to seem righteous while in fact assiduously achieving the projects of a fallen will.   Throughout the long years catalogued in Hebrew Scripture, Israel had been moving ever closer to the moral fulfillment anticipated in this text, the day when God would give not only commandments but a new heart.    The Pharisaic movement was the project of the best and the brightest, and it was woefully incomplete at its heart.   The prophets had always known that God would not accept the sacrifices of any save those of humble and broken heart, who, following the great example of Job, would finally cease arguing their own righteousness and accept the truth that God was the potter, they the clay.  It was not news in Israel that God would put down the mighty and lift up the lowly and meek.  But the entire Pharisaic tradition was devoted to what Newman called making a fair outside, which made Jesus say that the Pharisees were like whitewashed tombs, clean and bright on the outside, while within there were dead men’s bones (Matthew 23:27).  

There is something here about the order of men’s loves and the order that is in their lives.   If one wishes to have a clean outside, this project, the project of having a clean outside cannot be pursued directly with authenticity.  But if one puts first things first; namely love of God and neighbor, the world of smaller things may very well order itself aright.     In the long run one cannot have good manners without good morals. While always recognizing that the claims of God are not to be met on utilitarian grounds; we cannot with success teach Christianity to have a safe society, there is a reason why convents usually have a lovely and evident order, and it is not because religious women are better at house cleaning.

Given that Jesus was right and just in his condemnation of Pharisaic morality, given that His catalogue of the contents of the un-graced human heart is correct, the only cure for humanity is not the cure proposed by the philosophers, which, although it had a certain truth lacked power to make holy, pleasing to God, and pure in conscience.   The only cure that would suffice would be the gift of a new heart.  This was the promise of the great prophets; that God would establish His reign by giving a new covenant, “not like the covenant he made with their fathers when he brought them out of Egypt,” but one under which he promises those He calls into His kingdom new hearts.  It is Jeremah who promises in God’s name:  I will put my law within them and I will write it on their hearts (31:31-34).    Christ’s death on the cross was the blood of the new covenant that purchased the forgiveness of our sins (Matthew 26:27).  His resurrection foretells the life of Glory.  His promise was that He would send His Spirit, so that He would be in us and we in Him (John 14:11, 20).   The analysis Jesus gave the Pharisees, His awareness that the human heart left to itself is desperately wicked, is background for the miracle effected at baptism and in the sacraments through which those whom He calls  are made holy so that our will may be His will; as Dante wrote, in His will is our peace, and our joy and above all the possibility of being pleasing to our Creator, who is also our Father.  

Modernity, the harsh period through which we live, makes two mistakes.    It often assumes that as we are found in the world we are good, a theory urged by Jean-Jacques Rousseau at the end of the eighteenth century and since taken into the cloying moral environmentalism which assumes that were it not for poverty and poor education every person would be good.   This popular theory is self-evidently false and to its falsity every newspaper witnesses daily as it catalogs our follies.  CEO runs off with secretary; banker absconds with funds; woman beaten, child abandoned, etc., etc.   In fact we are not good as we come into the world; we are liable to the catalog of sins with which Jesus confronted the Pharisees, but we can be made good by the grace of God the Holy Spirit, so that Jesus’ catalog  of what lives in the human heart is not the final report.  

And then modernity, while proclaiming the essential sinlessness of the human race, simultaneously denies the possibility of holiness because it denies the very possibility of the restraint that lifts the human person into the company of the saints.  The line from the country music song, “If it feels so good it can’t be wrong,”  does not, as a moral theory, do much to elevate the human soul above the terrain we as animals share with our cats and dogs, but it is the thesis of a good deal of the moral chaos Jesus described in the superscript above.                 

Thoughts on the Gospel
for
the Third Sunday In Easter

                                                   But if anyone does sin,
                                                         we have an Advocate with the Father,
                                                  Jesus Christ the righteous one.
                                                         He is expiation for our sins,
                                                  and not for our sins only
                                                         but for those of the whole world.
                                                                                                 I John 2:1

Christians know that Jesus is the Lamb sacrificed, the one full perfect sacrifice offered by the Son of God Incarnate in order to purchase forgiveness of our sins and to send the Holy Spirit of God into the world, creating the kingdom of the new heart.  The text superscript, which assumes that we may sin, tells us that  His work of expiation for our sins continues throughout time. 

Here is a great mystery.  The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that Christ is always able throughout all time “to save those who draw near to God through  Him, since  He always lives to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25).  The Prophet John, through the open door into heaven, saw the Lamb standing as though He had been slain, the seven-fold Holy Spirit proceeding from His eyes into the world.     Christ’s work of offering Himself “not for our sins only but for the sins of the whole world,” even as  He lives in glory “between the throne, the four great living creatures, and the elders, eternally praised in creation’s new song.

                             Worthy art thou to take the scroll and to open its seals,
                                    For thou wast slain and by thy blood
                                         didst ransom men for God
                             From every tribe and tongue and people and nation,
                                       And hast made them a kingdom and priests to our God
                                      And they shall reign on earth
                                                                                            (Revelation 5:9–10)

The sacrifice of Jesus fills all of time, and when we are forgiven we are forgiven not only and essentially through the cross of Golgotha, which planted Christ’s sacrifice in time, but through the eternal sacrifice of the Son of God which is ever present.  Our faith is not only a religion of what happened but of what is happening always.   Christ will make intercession for us until He comes in glory.  

One might ask, “But does Christ need to make intercession for us since we are justified by faith, by baptism, justified in God’s sight anyhow.    And to this there must be a resounding yes.  Sin is an action which we may hope by grace to avoid, but sinfulness is a weakness of human nature that guides us away from the cross of Christ, into reliance upon ourselves.  The best of us is imperfect.   Oh God cleanse me from my secret faults, sometimes faults so secret that we do not recognize them in ourselves.    And in any event our relation to God is not exhausted in our avoiding sin, for there is an arid sinlessness, opening upon pride, that can be worse than sin itself.      Christ’s intercession is not only a rescue mission; it is an external relation of love which means that we live within a forgiven and grace filled life during which Jesus eternally pleads before the Father for us.    

Is this pleading, represented so  graphically by the image of Christ sanding as though slain seen by the prophet John, an eternal crucifixion for the Son of God Incarnate?   The answer must be no.  Saint Paul says truly in Romans 6:9:  “Christ having died dieth no more.”   Yet we know that Christ resurrected in glory still displayed the wounds in His hands and in His side.   We know from the prophet John that He bears them eternally.  But now they are not signs of His suffering but of His triumph.    Were Jesus not to bear them in glory we might assume that the work of the cross is done, but it goes on forever.  Just as the sacrifice offered at the Christian altar does not imply a new and painful death but brings into the present and makes efficacious the one full perfect sacrifice, just so the appeal for forgiveness is addressed to Christ in glory whose hands and side still bear the marks of the nails and lance of Golgotha, without which sacrifice in time sins cannot be forgiven.

In the Middle Ages a great devotion to the Five Holy Wounds developed, Many medieval prayers in honour of the Sacred Wounds, including some attributed to Clare of Assisi,  have been preserved; St. Mettled and St. Gertrude of Hefts were especially devoted to the Holy Wounds. In the nineteenth century the Passionist Fathers encouraged the Chaplet of the Five Wounds, as a means of promoting devotion to the Sacred Passion of Christ in the hearts of the faithful. For students of English history it cannot be forgotten that the rising in the north in 1534 against Henry VIII’s destruction made its way toward London to petition the king for the restoration of the Mass under the banner of the Five Holy Wounds of  Jesus.   It would be an oddity of the new English religion that reminders of the suffering of Jesus were not popular with the government, the crucifix being forbidden in parish churches.

                            When the great crowd that had come to the feast heard 
                            that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, 
                           they took palm branches and went out to meet him, and cried out:
                              “Hosanna!
                             “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord,
                                 even the king of Israel.”
                          Jesus found an ass and sat upon it, as is written:
                              Fear no more, O daughter Zion;
                              see, your king comes, seated upon an ass’s colt.
                         His disciples did not understand this at first, 
                         but when Jesus had been glorified 
                         they remembered that these things were written about him 
                        and  what they had done to him. 

                                                                                                           John  12:12-16

Every Gospel, every account of what Jesus had done, lived  in memory, often finding its place in prophetic tradition before it was written down.  This is especially true of the Gospel of John.   After Jesus had cleansed the temple the disciples remembered that  Psalm 68:10 prophesied:  “Zeal for your house will consume me.”  After He had risen His disciples remembered that He had identified His body as the true temple of God’s presence (John 2:22).  After Jesus prophesied that His disciples would be forbidden the synagogue, indeed sought out and killed, Jesus reminds the disciples that He has told them these things so that “when the time comes for them to happen, you will remember that I told you of it” (John  16:4).   

It is characteristic of life that we often do not know what is happening while it is going on, and this is especially true of the apostolic memory, that the apostles did not know what was happening until after the coming of the Holy Spirit, after Pentecost they were able to see the import of the moments they had shared with Jesus.   They had not understood the meaning of Jesus’ life in the context of the Scriptures until on the road to Emmaus, in the very face of His resurrection, Jesus told them, “O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken.  Was it not necessary that Christ should suffer thee things and enter into His glory.  And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, He interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.”    

In the text superscript the Johannine author or authors are remembering the day Jesus entered Jerusalem mounted on a lowly donkey to the acclaim of the Jerusalem crowd, some enthusiastic because He had raised Lazarus, but among whom there must have been those who hours later would shout, “Crucify him” before the Roman procurator.  Jesus’ entry into David’s city was to be located in the context of Zechariah 9:9: 

Your king comes to you. 
Triumphant and victorious is He,
humble and riding on an ass
on a colt the foal of an ass.,

The authors might have cited the Angel’s promise to Mary:  “God will give Him the throne of His father David, and He will reign  over the house of Jacob forever” (Luke 1:32). Yet there is no doubt that the Johannine author, looking back, now understood that  what happened, remembered through the lens of Zechariah’s prophecy, made Jesus the heir to David’s throne and His entrance into Jerusalem an event pregnant with meaning for the future.  

Jesus must have known that it would end well only in terms of the divine promise, while seeming to human eyes an abject failure, the death of another revolutionary prophet.   But Jesus could not make the great sacrifice before staking His claim to be the King of Israel.  His success, especially His raising of Lazarus from death, had inspired the crowd and infuriated the Pharisees.    The end was now near, the hour toward which His life had been moving,   it remained only to assure the reader that the Greeks would be included in the great apostolic mission:   “Among those who went up to worship at the feast were some Greeks.  So these came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to Him, Sir we wish to see Jesus. Philip went and told Andrew; Andrew went with Phillip and they told Jesus.  And Jesus answered them, “The hour has come  for the Son of Man to be Glorified.”     Then follows the passion narrative that occupies the last half of the book of John.

Having spoken of the disciples’  understanding of Jesus’ triumphal entry as the fulfilling of Zechariah, the text continues: they remembered what they had done with Him (or to Him). The exact meaning of these words  is difficult to capture.  The phrase might be translated idiomatically to refer to the things that had happened to Jesus but as the verb is plural and active it needs the disciples as its subject.  So this leaves the author reflecting on what the disciples had done at and after the triumphal entry:  Jesus ‘washing of the disciples’ feet, the last supper, the divine instruction to the apostles in chapter 14–17, the betrayal and trial and death.    If the phrase “what they had done” is taken extensively, it might refer to their role in the triumphal entry and in what followed, when the disciples played a less than noble part.   Jesus knew what would happen:  “The hour is coming  indeed it has come when you will be scattered, every man to his home, and will leave me alone” (John 16:31.)   From the time of His arrest, Jesus was left alone; there followed Jesus’ betrayal and trial,  and at the end, as far as we are told, only one disciple stood with His mother witnessing His death (John 19;26).  

A political failure: Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem signaled no successful revolution, and an eschatological disappointment as well; the Jewish expectation that the Messiah might suddenly inaugurate the supernatural end of history went unfulfilled, this event was still the greatest earthly, historical, representation of Christ’s eternal kingship, the sole occasion when Jesus, having previously counseled  his followers to tell no man, permitted publicity.  Jesus left this world in pain and shame, only to fulfill His promise by appearing in glory to Peter, Paul, John, and other disciples, sending His Spirit with life changing and confirming power at Pentecost.    

After the triumphal entry into Jerusalem there will be no other triumph in history until He returns in glory.    The spread of Christianity, the seeming triumph of the Church at times when it was culturally dominant, eucharistic congresses attended by tens of thousands, even the glory of the Eucharist when it is celebrated with extrinsic beauty, none of these, although they may sometimes reflect His glory,  is the triumph  of Christ, which is only realized perfectly in the lives of the saints.    Christ’s triumph will come when He returns in glory, bringing the saints with Him to live forever in His presence in the renewed creation, where, as Irenaeus says, we will ever have conversation with our Creator.   

For 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.
For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, 
but that the world might be saved through Him.
Whoever believes in Him will not be condemned, 
but whoever does not believe has already been condemned, 
because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.
                                                           John 3:16–18

John 3:16 is arguably the best known and best loved verse in the New Testament, expressing as it so beautifully does God’s overarching purpose in the creation of humankind, His patience through the long years of disobedience catalogued in the Sacred Scriptures, culminating in the gift of His only Son, whose death and resurrection brought salvation to the world.  “World” in this text is not the world organized against God, as in First John 2:16: “All that is in the world is not of the Father,”  but refers to the created order, declared good in the beginning, that has been the object of God’s love since creation.    

Yet there is more to the story than God’s great all-comprehending  love, for the text goes on to say that our appropriation of this great gift  of life and blessedness is by belief in the Son, adding the harsh word that lacking belief or faith in the Son of God means being condemned already. Souls are not in the first instance lost by falling into sin but by skepticism in the face of God’s revelation: “This is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness” (19).  Near the end of the Gospel of John the author will tell us that as well as dying on the cross for love of God and us,  the Son came to teach us what righteousness is and what sin is.  When He comes, He will convince the world of sin and of righteousness, of sin because they do not believe in me.   And belief in Jesus is the author’s purpose.   As he says at the end of the book, apologizing for  abbreviating the account of Jesus’ signs:  “Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples which are not written in this book, but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.”  

Belief, one of the too numerous capacities that distinguish the human person from our animal relatives. Every person lives within a texture of convictions that describe reality and informs behavior, a construct that is for that person reality.  This is as true for a skeptic as for a saint.  On a certain level these are assumptions born of day-to-day experience.  But beyond these lies faith, “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen” (Hebrews 11:1), the meaning of life in a future not yet known.  Belief that Jesus is the Son of God is the summary of that faith.  It affirms that there is one we know who the son of god in the loose sense is not that an emperor might have been so described but is rather the Son of the incomprehensible Glory who created this world, who rules nature and every heart through His divine providence, who condemned the world because of sin and saves it because of His indefeasible will that the conversation interrupted in the Garden may find fulfillment among His elect and in His coming kingdom.   

  It is not good works, not even fine character, but belief that Jesus is the Son of God that in the first and fundamental instance fulfills our duty toward God, being as it is the reality from which the actions that are our life flow.  The verb for “to believe”  in the present tense is found about seven times in Matthew, ten times in Mark, five times in Luke, and fifty-one times in John.  Unsurprisingly, we find in the Letters of Paul the reiterated claim that we are made right with God by faith, which means believing that God is who He is and that He will do what He has promised.   “Abraham believed the Lord, and He reckoned it to him as righteousness” Genesis 15:6.  As the lynchpin of his preaching this text is quoted by Saint Paul the Pharisee with the explanation, “Now to one who works, his wages are not reckoned as a gift but as his due.  And to one who does not work but trust in  Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is reckoned as righteousness” (Romans 4:4–5).   And  to this the Apostle James adds the example of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his only son at God’s command as proof that faith issues in obedience:  “Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered his son Isaac on the altar?  You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by works” (2:21-22).  And the apostle adds: As the body apart from the spirit is dead, so faith apart from works is dead.”   

From its birth Christianity fought persistently against the tendency of some to find a fulfilling peace in a certain intellectual apprehension that imitated the gift of faith. These were called gnostics, “the knowledgeable,” “the insightful,” who argued that the redemption Christ offered could be experienced through what was, to use Saint Irenaeus’ word, invisible, transforming the soul through union with God but having no ability to conform the human will to the will of God in witness and behavior.   But when faith is real, when love is real, it issues in a desire to please God our Father.  Saint John is speaking of the common Christian aspiration when he says:  “No one born of God commits sin; for God’s nature abides in him and he cannot sin because he is born of God” (I John 3:9).    

Of course Christians do sin, sometimes grievously, but faith is not stamped out and the claim God has upon the baptized is not obviated.  The same Saint John who says that if we are born of god we cannot sin, writes in the same letter, “If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.  If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (I John 1:9).   And this requires belief, believing in God’s mercy, believing that Christ gave the apostolic mission the power to forgive sins, saying to the frightened disciples on the evening of the first day of His life in glory: “As the Father has sent me, even so I send you.  And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.  If you forgive the sins of any they are forgiven.  If you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (John 20:21–23).

The star which they saw in the East went before them
til it came and stood over where the young child was.
When they saw the star they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.

                                                                           Matthew 2:9–10

The sixth of January, the twelfth day of Christmas, is the Feast of the Epiphany, when the recognition of Jesus as the Great King by the gentiles in the persons of the  wise men is celebrated. The wise men, magi as the Greek calls them, came seeking a king.  And this the Angel Gabriel had promised to Mary:  “The Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David, and He shall reign over the house of Jacob, and of His kingdom there will be no end”(Luke 1:33–34). The wise men had not come to discuss theology or to satisfy curiosity but to worship.   And their worship and their gifts represented the humble allegiance to truth of those we now call men of science, for the magi were the natural philosophers of the first century, men of the East, perhaps Persians, astronomers and perhaps astrologers, interested in understanding nature’s lessons, in this case, willing to follow a star, known to them as “His star,” the King’s star.  

It has ever been the intellectual habit of Christians to learn from nature.  We do not know much about Saint Paul’s education, beyond the fact that he studied with the great scholar Gamaliel in Jerusalem.   Then there is the hint in Romans 1, where he acknowledges his debt to the Greeks and to the Barbarians.   His debt to the Greeks is evident in his ability to quote the poets Epimenides and Aratus before the council of the Areopagus (Acts 17:28–29), as well as in his grasp of ideas such as the participation of Christians in Christ that might be shared with the Platonists and Stoics of his day.   Paul’s claim too, like that implicit in the magi’s journey, was that nature taught the most important thing, the existence and power of God; that nature, like the wise men’s star, would, if followed faithfully, lead us to our King.     

From Paul, through the great medievals, Aquinas and Bonaventure, to the nineteenth century, it has been the claim of Christian scholarship, and indeed of all Christian thought, that knowledge of nature would lead to God.  Perhaps this reached a popular apotheosis with the Romantic Poets of the nineteenth century.   And then, as though a door has been slammed in the face of the inquirer, it became philosophically unfashionable to see God’s mighty hand or the beauty of Christ’s face in nature.   Now it would not be easy to find a professional philosopher who  taught that St. Thomas’s Five Ways offered intellectually compelling reasons for belief in God.  

This is in some measure due to the circumstance that it is now the enemies of reason who define the reach of reason.  We owe to the eighteenth-century British philosopher David Hume the observation that treatises on divinity contain no knowable truth while impressions derived from the senses, call them matters of fact, may be considered true,  and analytical statements, statements in which the predicate is contained in the subject (unicorns are one-horned animals), may be considered if not true at least logically valid.  It may be admitted that speaking of God’s existence under these canons of reason is impossible.  There can be no empirical proof, for while God may make himself known to Moses, and while Christ might appear to the apostles, these events, like Pentecost itself, are not empirically knowable since they are the experiences that while they may be compelling are the consequence of faith and as such are not universally available as evidence of God’s existence.   And as for logical proof of God’s existence, the first premise in a deductive argument must always be question-begging, assuming what it seeks to prove. 

       What this canon of the knowable omits is the kind of knowledge that may be called historical, that kind of argument in which thought, presiding over a field of facts and experiences, draws a conclusion.   Several of the classical arguments have this kind of form, most notably the argument from design, the observation, based on our experience of a world of great complexity in which things have purposes and patterns, that where there is order and design there is a designer.  We see that a nation is experiencing an unprecedented military buildup, which is coupled with threats and bellicose speech.  We may conclude that war is likely, or very likely.   War may or may not come, but in a pale analogy to Pascal’s wager, better safe than sorry, we are probably best advised to be prepared for war.   Probability is, as Newman counseled, the guide of life. We  experience, often through long years, an ordered world in which some things go wrong, but more go right.  By calling the wrong things wrong, we acknowledge that they do not belong to the order of reality.   From this preponderance of evidence we may conclude or be led to believe that the world moves under the providence of a loving and beneficent God.  This is not a formal philosophical argument any more than was Paul’s observation in the first chapter of Romans that from the creation of the world the unseen things of God, his divinity and power, are clearly perceived. 

       The Psalmist knew this:
              The heavens declare the glory of God
              And the firmament showeth his handiwork

       For Dante, “Nature is the art of God,” an idea persisting even amid the pantheistic theology of the Enlightenment, in Alexander Pope’s words:
              All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
              Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.

William Paley’s Evidences of Christianity (1794), which remained an important collegiate text throughout the nineteenth century was the scholarly formulation of the common observation that the intricate regularity of nature attests the existence of its creator.  This idea is a perennial of human thought and imagination. That the glory of God my be perceived in the things that are made persisted into the foothills of modernity in sentimental ballads of the 1950s: 

              I believe above the storm the smallest prayer will still be heard
              I believe that someone in the great somewhere hears every word
              Every time I hear a newborn baby cry or touch a leaf or see the sky
              Then I know why I believe.

In the long run the only argument against the argument from design, the claim that there is no Great Designer, is naturalism, the assertion that nature is a self-explanatory  process.  And the only counter argument is wonder. Mankind, not educated to skepticism by the infernal knowingness of the fallen world, has always found nature, despite that side of things that is disordered,  wonderful and has moved in imagination to the conclusion that God is the Creator.  When told that the old proofs for the existence of God are invalid, pay no attention.   They are for the most part not formal deductions but common inferences.  Such knowledge is not of itself salvific, but it does provide the common insight that faith presupposes and without which faith cannot possess the human heart.  As Hebrews tells us, “Whoever would come to God must believe that he exists” (11:6).   

 Just how the wise men knew  that the star they followed was his star, the star of the great king,  is hidden in their science, but on they came o’er field and fountain, moor and mountain following the star, willing always to be led by nature to the King whom they had travelled far to worship. 

In times past, God spoke in partial and various ways
to our ancestors through the prophets;
in these last days, He has spoken to us through the Son,
whom He made heir of all things
and through whom He created the universe,
who is the refulgence of His glory,
the very imprint of His being,
and who sustains all things by His mighty word.

Hebrews 1:2–3

These words, in all their beauty and power describe the  glory of the child born in Bethlehem, who while he lay in Mary’s arms is the Word of the Father, the means through which creation exists, the refulgence of God’s glory, the very imprint of God’s being. The shepherds came from  the east not to satisfy curiosity or to discuss the theology; they sought the child but to lay their precious gifts before Him and to worship. And ever since, through long centuries, it has been the privilege of the apostolic mission to testify to the truth that the child born in Bethlehem, whose birth we celebrate at Christmas, was not an ordinary child who through grace would come to share in the life of God, but that the child born of Mary in Bethlehem is indeed the one through whom God created the Universe, reflecting always God’s glory, sustaining the world as the eternal Word of God.   The child is He “Through whom He created the  Universe,” as John says, “All things were made through Him and without Him was not anything made that was made” (1:3).  He is the eternal Son of God, God’s very speech, existing from all eternity.  He was the one in the beginning, the Word through whom God spoke the Spirit who hovered over the face of the deep to bring, order, light, and the fulness of being, and who at this time and in this place, in the principate of Augustus, took human nature to himself, healing the chasm torn across creation when our first parents chose the serpent’s way.  And like the Magi we worship Him. 

That one displaying the refulgence of the Father was born into our world tells us something about that world in which we live and also tells us something about the son of God in His relation to our world.  First, it tells us that every piece of creation, from our bodies to the trees and sky, while these do not  share in the life of the Blessed Trinity–only the eternal Son is of one glorious substance with the Father—are each gifts of God, bearing the impress of His mighty hand, and in that way enjoying a derivative holiness.   This intuition of  God’s ownership and authorship is the warrant claimed by the romantic poets,  evident in Wordsworth’s “Lines composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (122–128):

                 This prayer I make, the heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege,
                 Through all the years of this our life, to lead
                 From joy to joy: for she can so inform
                 Knowing that Nature never did betray
                 The mind that is within us, so impress
                 With quietness and beauty, and so feed
                 With lofty thoughts.

This is what Gerard Manley Hopkins knew when he wrote that for all the irreverent damage men might do to God’s nature:

And for all this, nature is never spent:

          There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.

Poets echo with imagination the fact that Christ the Word is present in everything the human hand touches and in our hands themselves.   The worship of nature is one of those great mistakes that attests to a great truth gone awry, for the object of our worship must always be not the creature but the Creator.  Yet the fact of the presence of Christ in everything natural is a clue to how we should treat nature.  Because we see the beauty and order God has put in the world, while knowing that victory cannot be perfect until Christ returns, we should strive to overcome the natural evil that has plagued us since Eden, the fruits of sin issuing in death.  This is the work of priests, physicians, and teachers, always striving to replace disease and ignorance with holiness, health, and knowledge.   But beyond this is the necessity always to touch nature with love, not viewing the natural world as a scene of blank potentiality but as a work of Christ through whom all things were made.  His work is perfect, but humankind has the power to perfect creation guiding it toward the glory that lies within it, or to degrade it. Anyone reading this essay could catalogue those things that should never have been made.  So those with the power to make should ask, “Does what I’m about to do reflect the reality that everything belongs to God, given to humankind as a gift, bearing the stamp of His almighty hand, and should therefore be touched only with reverence.” 

And second,  seeing Christ in nature enables us to see Christ as He is.  As Saint Paul wrote, what can be known about God is evident, for 

          “Ever since the creation of the world His invisible nature, namely His                eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that               have been made” (Romans 1:20).

And what we see in nature is the work of one possessed of all the power and gracious goodness of the Father.   Miracles in themselves, although they can be believed and their deep reasonableness appreciated,  cannot  be explained,  nor can the great mysteries of creation, salvation, and the new creation  be explained.  We do not know why Jesus heals this blind man and turns this water into wine,   but the predicate of every supernatural act of our Lord is the fact that  everything that exists was made by Him.  He is inside nature, and the laws and rules for nature that we confess are mere effective metaphors in comparison with the informing knowledge possessed by the Son.    This fact should warn every believer away from modern atheism, the work of Enlightenment philosophers, which includes among its founding principles the belief that nature is merely natural.