At the beginning of 2020 as the number of the first Covid cases increased, the demand for high-end exercise bikes spiked. I imagine you’ve seen one of the Peloton commercials on TV or via social media. Every time I see that commercial of people on that high-end bike with sweats and satisfying smiles and hear the word “peloton” whose literal meaning in French, I learn, is a ball but is used as a group or cluster of bicyclists, I’m reminded of another word, “eschaton.” I had two simple reasons for this Greek term to be evoked. Not only did these words rhyme but also witnessing countless deaths of people due to Covid triggered the thought of the end time. Perhaps my third reason would be that I watched too many end-time movies.
In today’s gospel, Jesus talks about the end time. His friends always seem to raise the question we would like to ask: “When will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?” We all want to know in advance if something bad will happen to the world. We want to be prepared. We can recall shortages of water bottles and toilet paper at the beginning of the pandemic. Money matters less than material things that are closely linked to our survival and quality of life. Jesus neither teaches us what items to stock up with nor informs us exactly when the end time will take place. His concern is that in the end time his followers will be hated by all because of his name. While Jesus’ description of warnings that might be signs of the end times resonates with our current political situations, the type of persecution due to his name doesn’t sound too relevant to our North American context. This gospel lesson would’ve been read differently after Christianity became the state religion under the reign of Constantine in the 4th century. Those who took Jesus’ teaching of living their lives worthy of his name sought spiritual persecution in the desert rather than religiopolitical persecution. Desert Mothers and Fathers in their spiritual writings talk much about how they win over temptations and persecutions from the devil. For us living in the 21st century, Jesus’ teaching and Desert Mothers and Fathers’ commitment to his teaching regarding the end times challenge us to reimagine and contextualize how we willingly apply the teaching and their examples to our reality. As we see and hear signs of the end times too often, I would like us to focus on the world itself. What is the world that you’re living in with your life? How do you make sense of the world you perceive with your five senses and reasoning? This question is crucial since this is the world that ends eventually. The end of the world at the most personal level is the end of our individual lives. Then let’s look into this process of making sense of our own world more specifically. We fabricate the world based on various information we receive through our senses. This can be easily demonstrated if we consider how differently we remember things even when we look at, say, the same painting. About seven years ago, there was a heated debate over the colors of the dress. For some, it was blue with black lace fringe whereas, for others like me, it definitely was white with gold lace fringe. What this debate reveals to us is how our perceptual boundaries differ. The reason for the difference is which side of the brain is more developed: for those who see it in blue and black, it’s their right side of the brain is more developed while for those who perceive it in white and gold it’s their left side of the brain. We take all this information through our senses for granted and believe (or trick ourselves) without knowing what we’re doing that the world we perceive is the world as it is. But the truth is that we don’t have sense organs that can see the world as it is. For example, in our conversation with others, what we feel like hearing right now is already passed. Think about thunder. We can see lightning immediately but it takes the sound of thunder about 5 seconds to travel a mile. By the time we hear its sound, it’s all gone in the past. There’s a cognitive gap. This cognitive limitation that we don’t usually pay attention to gives us a new insight into how we create our own world(s). To see through this fabrication of the world we constantly take for granted as though it is the actual world out there is a way to end that world. No reason to be afraid of the end time. This cognitive and also spiritual recognition of how we create our worlds helps us see how our world begins and ends. We are then humbled to embrace that what we think the world is isn’t everything. We may be very wrong about many things in the world we live in together as well as many issues we are fixated on. What this also allows us to do is to see things, people, and ourselves anew. If we hold onto living in our fixated version of the world, we will always have to make up our minds to prepare our defense. This isn’t what Jesus tells us in the lesson. Instead, he directs us to “make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.” The end time or the end of the world may be not something that we are to fear and prepare for the worst. Instead, practicing to end a world may be our Christian attitude to the world. Keeping in mind that we make sense of the world as we perceive and fabricate, we make ourselves constantly open to the vision of God who is ever present and is the very source of goodness itself. Our spiritual practice of ending a world is in other words our yes to the Kingdom of God in our hearts and our no to the world that is filled with suffering and pain. The Sadducees were local religious authorities in Jesus’ time. In the gospel lesson today, they have at least two clear intentions for questioning Jesus about the resurrection. They aim to publicly embarrass Jesus and deny the teaching of the resurrection. The Sadducees only accept the Torah, the first five books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) to be authoritative. This belief in the resurrection is nowhere mentioned in the Torah. They do consider it to be invalid teaching. So, they come up with the Mosaic Levirate law on marriage from the Torah in which a man ought to marry his brother’s wife, if he dies without children, to give descendants to his brother. They want to show how this whole idea of the resurrection doesn’t make sense when they ask, “Whose wife is she going to be after all these brothers who she had been married to are resurrected?”
While my personal response to the Sadducees would be, “Let HER choose”, Jesus cuts through their trap and sees right through their intentions. The resurrection is not like this earthly life. Thus says Jesus, “...those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage.” The &Sadducees’ perception of the resurrection is just another life here. In that version, no wonder they have no high expectations. They already have power and resources. They don’t need a resurrection to get what they want. How about you? What version of the resurrection do you have or not? Jesus’ understanding of it is quite clear: “…Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection…Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.” The resurrection is deathless. It is beyond death. Yet, how is Jesus able to say all this about the nature of the resurrection? His discourse on the resurrection is not a theory. It has no scientific evidence that one can experiment and test on. This logic of questioning applies to all of us. When we talk about the resurrection, what exactly are we referring to? There are many ideas about it. The resurrection for some can be a life after death, which is designated to either heaven or hell or purgatory. For others, the resurrection will take place all at once when the second coming of Christ occurs. Since the bodily resurrection is mentioned in the Creed, some Christian traditions discourage cremation while those of modern Christians are concerned with the overpopulation of the resurrected bodies. These are all intriguing hypotheses that Jesus never mentions throughout the gospels. Instead, I would like us to imagine deeper into how Jesus would’ve experienced the resurrection even before his own resurrection. As he reflects on Moses’ encounter with God in the burning bush or unburnt bush, he discovers how Moses speaks of “the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” He might’ve just understood these expressions as Moses’ way of connecting himself to all the ancient figures like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that he’s historically related to them and that he professes his belief in the God they believed. Yet this interpretation merely means, “I believe in the same God that all these dead people believed in.” There’s a sense of comfort that he’s following the path of his ancestors yet with a smear of spiritual complacency. Jesus suggests a different approach. He directs us to focus on God, not those who are already dead. What then matters is not that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses believed in God but how God is to them and you. God was and is and will be God of the present, of life, of eternity. There’s no end to God. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses are all dead apart from God, yet to God they are deathless. If and only if they are in God, they are not dead. I imagine Jesus must’ve experienced that he’s able to connect with all these dead folks through God, not the other way around that he somehow experiences God through the dead. In Jesus’ experience of the divine, God is the source of the resurrection in which one is linked to both the living and the dead. One doesn’t have to die to experience the resurrection. Let’s be bold by asking, “Why don’t we have this experience that Jesus had?” Yes, we can in our practice of silent prayer or prayer through the breath of God. We connect with God’s breath through our own breath. In the beginning, we simply pay attention to how we breathe. In doing so, our thoughts and feelings gradually dissipate. (This process of concentrating our breathing may feel like a struggle since our minds are constantly looking for new distractions.) When all we do is this act of breathing, ask ourselves, “Where does this breath come from and where does it go?” Our lives here on earth come and go yet the source of breath, which we may call the Breath of God, remains. This is the Breath that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses were breathed in. This is the Breath that all our deceased ones were breathed in. This is the Breath that the risen Christ breathed on the disciples and is breathing into our hearts. As our breath is transformed into the Breath of God that is deathless, we can have a glimpse of the resurrection here on earth. The Beatitudes we hear this morning may be considered a recipe for Christians to become a saint or Christlike. So, here’s the recipe: be poor, hungry, weep, and be hated, excluded, reviled, or defamed. The saintly ingredients may be poverty, hunger, sorrow, and persecution. Here’s what to avoid: be full, rich, laugh, and have an impeccable reputation. Now, would you apply this recipe to your life? Probably not. Who wants to be poor and hungry? Who wants to be in sorrow? Who wants to be hated and excluded?
We wouldn’t and shouldn’t blindly take this recipe at face value. To cook this recipe, we first need to learn how to cook and we learn it by doing it as Julia Child once said, “...no one is born a great cook, one learns by doing.” I would suggest Dorothy Day as our cooking instructor who can certainly cook this saintly recipe well. Dorothy Day (1897-1980) was an American social activist. She’s mostly known as the one who established the Catholic Worker movement that focuses on aiding the poor and homeless. She can be a great cooking instructor for us not simply because her life committed to the poor and homeless is saintly but she candidly talks about how sentimental hagiography or the “pious pap” describes saints as less attractive for us to imitate and follow. If you look at any icon or painting of a Christian saint, there’s at least one thing in common. No one smiles. They look rather melancholy. Dorothy Day points out something similar: “Blessed de Montfort sometimes shed tears and sobbed bitterly when sitting at a table to eat…no wonder no one wants to be a saint.” This explains her famous saying about herself being called a saint, “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” She suggests a different depiction of a saint: “We are all called to be saints, and we might as well get over our bourgeois fear of the name. We might also get used to recognizing the fact that there is some of the saint in all of us. Inasmuch as we are growing, putting off the old man and putting on Christ, there is some of the saint, the holy, the divine right there…most people nowadays, if they were asked, would say diffidently that they do not profess to be saints, indeed they do not want to be saints. And yet the saint is the holy man, the ‘whole man,’ the integrated man. We all wish to be that…the significance of our smallest acts! The significance of the little things we leave undone! The protests we do not make, the stands we do not take, we who are living in the world.” (All of Dorothy Day’s quotes are from Robert Ellsberg’s wonderful essay from catholicworker.org/pages/ellsberg-called-saints.html, which I highly recommend all of us to read.) Now returning to the Beatitudes, Dorothy Day’s hopeful perspective on “some of the saint in all of us” seems to be the key. Before getting stressed about being poor and hungry, defamed, and weeping, our own recognition and acceptance of this “some of the saint in all of us” makes our process of being holy, whole, and integrated rather easier and seamless. This “some of the t in all of us” is nothing unfamiliar to us. It is “God’s presence” in all of us. The presence of the Spirit enables, empowers, and equips us to follow the recipe of sainthood. God’s presence when contemplatively simmered produces a flavor of goodwill for all including those we like and dislike as well as those we don’t even know. This goodwill when meditatively caramelized gives a taste of generosity. I suggest all of us remember the three G’s to cook it just right: God’s presence, goodwill, and generosity. These are the skillful means of sainthood. We don’t want to be poor out of deprivation. We choose to be poor and hungry out of abundance. With a sense of fullness, poverty and hunger are not a state of depravity or deficiency. There’s no need to possess more than we need or to hoard. The more we give, the fuller we become. In giving, we become whole. Rooted in God’s presence, compassion is then another name for our goodwill for those who are suffering. In compassion, we weep with them and hope to lessen their suffering. All these actions patterned by the three G’s are the actions of love. When we’re committed to this practice of Christ’s love, we may be hated or excluded. Herbert McCabe, an Irish Dominican friar prophetically says, “If you do not love, you will not be alive; if you love effectively, you will be killed.” Jesus has contributed to the reputation that Christians have towards the Pharisees. It’s not a positive one as they are often considered hypocritical religious authorities who teamed up with the Sadducees and the Roman government to crucify Jesus. In today’s lesson, Jesus in his parable contrasts a Pharisee and a tax collector and looks into the contents of their prayers. While it is tempting and easy to pick on the Pharisees, let’s be mindful of Jesus’ good intention that he talks about them critically, hoping they would listen and change. Jesus gets on their nerves, yet he never ignores them. There’s no indifference in his attitude to the Pharisees.
With this in mind, the Pharisee in the parable can be called righteous and even holy in his actions if he really does what he says he does in his prayer. He’s certainly different from thieves, rogues, adulterers, and the tax collector standing next to him. He fasts twice a week and gives a tenth of all his income to the temple (or God). According to the list of things he says he does, he seriously keeps the commandments and precepts. No killing, no stealing, no lying, no committing adultery. These are the fundamental rules of life that any religion may share in common. He’s also religiously observant that he fasts twice a week and tithes. There’s no doubt that this Pharisee is morally and religiously superior to the tax collector. In Jesus’ eyes, however, the Pharisee is not “justified” but the tax collector who is morally and ethically unjust. This may have shocked his audience. These are people who “...trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.” (Luke 18:9) This also should surprise us because these people if they do what the Pharisee in the parable does, are indeed morally righteous and superior to the tax collector. What this means for us is that their righteousness is not enough for them to be justified in God’s eyes. Jesus concludes, “...this man [the tax collector] went down to his home justified rather than the other [the Pharisee]; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” He sounds as if any moral actions would matter at the end as long as one says “Sorry.” This type of interpretation of Jesus’ teaching this morning doesn’t serve justice, and it is a problem. In order to get to the core of this teaching, I suggest that we pay attention to Jesus’ expression of being “justified.” What does it mean for one to be justified? In a spiritual sense, it simply means one is right with God. So, the tax collector gets right with God, not the Pharisee in the parable. This self-righteous Pharisee stands before God, trying to be someone worthy who deserves God’s glory based on the fact that he keeps all the precepts. But he’s not getting the true purpose of keeping them. It is not to be morally superior to someone. It is not to be accepted by God. These precepts create a spiritually healthy environment to deepen our encounter with God and our neighbors. These are the boundaries that keep us from harming others and ourselves. These are not the ends but the means to love and serve deeper. The tax collector’s approach, on the other hand, isn’t just much about humility. Of course, there’s a bit of humility in his attitude but this sense of humility is with people, not with God. We don’t exercise humility before God. Rather, we’re humbled and awed in God’s presence. The tax collector hasn’t kept the fundamental precepts the Pharisee has followed. He’s very much aware of this as a fact. He has no masks to put on but is completely naked before God. There’s literally not a thing to cover up. The only thing he needs is God’s mercy just to stand in God’s presence. So, he asks, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” Now, does this mean that we have to follow the tax collector’s approach to God? Not always. What this tells us is not that we should always come to God with guilt as a sinner. This is more about being 100% candid before God. In the tax collector’s case, he is sinful indeed. There’s no virtue in how he earns profits. Yet, he is honest to God. Acknowledging his unskillful behavior of living is the very first step. The next step would be how he doesn’t get stuck in his self-image as a sinner and moves on to live and earn more skillfully without harming others. Jesus is not telling us to play the sinner role always. Would you be happy if the person you love comes to you as a sinner? Let’s then imagine what the Pharisee would’ve done differently in his prayer. I think he had his chance if he stopped at “God, I thank you.” Alas, he went much further, “...that I am not like other people…” His identity depends on those who he is not. His happiness depends on their unskillful actions. He can only feel good about himself in comparison to those who cannot keep the precepts. This unskillful behavior of the Pharisee is not something new to our contemporary human relationships. How often do we put down others to feel higher? How is our world so ready to criticize and push down to be better, higher, and greater? Yet, we remain in the same place without growth. In that instant moment of pushing down others, I might feel better about myself but that is a lie. It’s an illusion. In God’s presence, we don’t need to be someone. We don’t need to pretend at all. We look at our unskillful behaviors without relating them to who we really are. Our Christian call to be selfless is to lessen our obsession with self. Instead, we focus on our actions that are skillful, beneficial, loving, and compassionate. So, we might start our prayer with the words of the tax collector, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” and end it with “God, I thank you.” How we fill in between is whether we faithfully cultivate our act of love and compassion for our neighbors and ourselves. |
Paul"...life up your love to that cloud [of unknowing]...let God draw your love up to that cloud...through the help of his grace, to forget every other thing." Archives
January 2025
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