Cold Drinks, Questions, and Christ

Here we are: we have reached the climax of our celebration. For the past seven days, we have journeyed from the Lord Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem, to the final hours of His life, His death on the Cross, to this: the glory of the Resurrection. The glory of the Resurrection that it so beautifully described in the Easter Exsultet as “the night that even now, throughout the world, sets Christian believers apart from worldly vices and from the gloom of sin, leading them to grace and joining them to his holy ones.”

Resurrection is so often described as the goal of Christian life, the promise made by Christ to all Christians. I dare say, though, that we might not fully grasp the meaning and the significance of the Resurrection of Christ or what it offers to us; actually, I don’t think it takes too much boldness to say because to grasp the fullness of the Resurrection is to grasp the fullness of God, and what we must constantly remember is that pursuit is beyond our reach. The human family has been given a mediator to the inaccessible God, His Son, Jesus Christ, and to know the Church and the breadth of its gifts is to know Him, but I don’t think even the boldest of Christians would claim to know Christ, His Church, His will for them, or the meaning of the Resurrection fully.

We live in that in between time where the victory of life over death, good over evil, Christ over sin has already been accomplished, but in the in between time we still don’t see Christ fully in the great beatific vision that we have been promised—that is to say, that great heavenly splendour that awaits us.

As we have done throughout this Holy Week, it would be useful to turn again to the symbols that our faith offers us to understand the great mystery of God in our life. On Palm Sunday, we saw how even of deepest despair could be a proclamation of faith; on Holy Thursday, we saw how service and love of our neighbour brings God even more fully into the world; and on Good Friday, the symbol of suffering was made manifest in the example of Mary who herself is a symbol of perfect discipleship. At this most ancient celebration, the clearest and most distinct symbol offered to us is the contrast between light and darkness, especially as it’s made manifest in the Easter fire that continues to burn in our Easter Candle.

Rightly, the Easter Vigil begins with this holy fire because, unlike how fire is often a symbol for the Holy Spirit at times like Pentecost, it is a symbol for Christ. The fire burns greatly in the beginning of time and indeed even before time when all that existed was God. In the time before time, before space, God lived in perfect relationship with Himself, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Creation happens, and this is the very first scripture we hear proclaimed: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth,” but if there is a beginning, there must have been something before that beginning. That something before the beginning is what we call God; St Thomas Aquinas might call it the unmoved mover. The point is that God was before there was. 

His first creation, while “the earth was [still] a formless void” was light. But for a time, human life still seemed to be in darkness. God had not vanished, but His light was that of a candle in the darkness, and the people He chose to reveal that light to most clearly were the Jewish people. Why God chose particularly the Jewish people will always remain for us here a mystery, but certainly the faith of men and women like Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Moses, Aaron, and Miriam were part of that choice. Their great example of faith, of encountering God in profound ways, anticipates the faith we are called to emulate and the deep relationship with God that we are similarly offered. 

The people in these ancient times, the Jewish people included, did not know God as we know God; we must uphold their great dignity and uniqueness while acknowledging that to know Christ is something different, and indeed, something better. That doesn’t mean that Christians themselves are necessarily better; we need only to look at history recent or long ago to know that with certainty. But that knowing Christ is objectively something different and better is what the Lord reveals to us in the great prophecies of Isaiah and Baruch that we hear tonight—the promise that the Lord will not abandon Israel, and how that promise is manifest in His messiah, His messiah who is the manifestation, in fact the Incarnation, of law and prophet, of God Himself. This promise is what Baruch and Israel are anticipating.

Turning back to the Exsultet, we hear proclaimed, the great petition:

            “We pray you that this candle,

             hallowed to the honour of your name,

             may persevere undimmed,

             to overcome the darkness of this night.

             Receive it as a pleasing fragrance,

             and let it mingle with the lights of heaven.”

The undimmed candle that Christ, and its mingling with the light of heaven, is the promise we live in now. The promise of living with Christ in the time of victory is the promise we are given and the time we live in now. It is the death that we share with Him when we are baptized, but also the resurrected glory we share and anticipate, as St Paul says in his letter to the Romans. 

But while the mingling of the light produces the same perfect illumination, it is not the same perfect light in which we will live in heaven. We can know this by turning, at last, to the Gospel tonight. This great account of the third morning after Christ’s death. St Luke describes how Jesus’ friends Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and other women went to prepare Jesus’ body for its permanent rest, but instead, they are greeted by “two men in dazzling clothes” who St Luke will later call angels. These angels reveal the light; they point the women to understand that Jesus has risen from the dead, and these women in turn take the news to the eleven remaining Apostles. For the Apostles, this seemed “an idle tale, and they did not believe the women,” but perhaps out of the desperation because of the shame he still felt for denying Jesus three times, St Peter goes to the to the tomb, and is amazed to see just the linen cloths of Jesus and not His body.

More events after the resurrection of Jesus will be revealed in the weeks to come, but what stands revealed to us now is that those who experience the light hand on the light, and without the handing on of the light, there is no faith. Without the Marys, Joanna, and the other women, the Apostles might not have heard of the Resurrected Christ; they were called to reveal the light of God, and so they did. And in doing so, God’s light defeated darkness.

Good Friday looks a lot different than most of the days when we gather as a community. Most of the time when we gather as a Catholic community, we gather to celebrate the Mass, to celebrate the great event when through the power of prayer, God transforms bread and wine into the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ. This great transformation is the presence of God in the world, the Eucharist, the reason Catholics gather. We call it, and I repeat over and over again, the source and summit of our faith, the origin and destination—where our faith comes from and where our faith is going.

This great mystery of our faith is removed from us on Good Friday. We don’t celebrate Mass on Good Friday. We still receive Communion; indeed, that the Communion we share today was consecrated last night at the Holy Thursday Mass is a great symbol of the continuation that exists between the two celebration and the celebration that we look forward to in our Easter celebrations tomorrow night and Sunday Morning. But the absence of a Mass today is a unique thing; in fact, Good Friday and Holy Saturday are the only two days of the year that there is not a Catholic Mass. Sometimes, Priests need days off or communities can’t gather, but always, every day, somewhere in the world, at all times except Good Friday and Holy Saturday, there is a Mass being celebrated. The great absence of this prayer, of this celebration, of this opportunity for our community to gather is minimized by what we do here, in this unique way that we gather, this unique way we manifest our prayer and raise our intentions to God.

We gather in memorial, in commemoration, of Jesus’ death, this very sad moment in our salvation history. The man Jesus is stripped, beaten, and the crucified beside two criminals, where our Lord who did nothing wrong is treated with such contempt and violence and evil. Yet in the last moments of Jesus’ life, as we hear in the Gospel of St John today, His focus is not on His suffering; His focus is not on His impending death, but indeed, it is on the Church, the community of believer that He will leave behind.

So, in this great action of prayer and this great sacrifice, He also takes this great action of entrusting the Church in the Grace and Providence of His Mother, Mary, who will be there for a time to journey with the Church as a guide, as a leader, as an example of what it is and how it is to follow Christ. Mary, we know, followed Christ Her whole life perfectly, from the moments before His birth and beyond the moments after His death. Mary is a perfect example of what Christian faith is and how Christian faith should be lived out. 

Faced with the death of her son, she provides for us a model of how to deal with suffering, how to deal with sadness: meeting and encountering her son who has been beaten and flogged and is now crucified, there is no description of a profound change in Mary; she continues along in her mission, ministry, and prayer as a mother, disciple, and lover of Jesus. This reveals to us a great acceptance, and in the great acceptance of her suffering, Mary makes Christ present by bearing suffering beside Him. She carries out her daily duties, but there could be no denial that suffering carries tangibly in her life. Indeed, the great tradition of the Church gives Mary the Crown of Martyrdom not because she was killed violently as the rest of the other martyrs in our tradition have but because of the great suffering she endured seeing her Son crucified and die on the Cross. 

In this great example of what it is to suffer, we see what it is to bear the wounds of Christ without actually physically bearing the wounds of Christ. We see in this a model of discipleship, an invitation and a reminder that our suffering, although it is not physically on the Cross with Christ, it is similarly offered to the Lord and with the Lord. Our suffering has the opportunity to be a great prayer of supplication to the Lord, an opportunity to bring our suffering as prayer to the Lord as Mary did and as Isaiah describes when he anticipates how the Messiah will bear “our infirmities and carry our diseases” in the first reading.

Even if all we can do is suffer beside the Lord, He will use that suffering as a great prayer, as a great invitation to draw deeper and deeper into relationship with Him and deeper and deeper into imitation of Him. Suffering can and indeed does become the holiest part of our lives. Sometimes, I think we would like to imagine that holiness is pious things we do like kneeling in the Church or doing great acts of service, but what the Gospel reveals to us today, what the model of Mary shows us today, is that the greatest act of Christian Faith is suffering. When we see the hurt and the brokenness of the world, but we choose to worship God anyway, that is great Christian faith. When we act not in absence or ignorance of that suffering, nor when we expect to see some miraculous removal of that suffering, we truly see that at the base of the Cross, God’s action is made manifest in the world. Somehow we see through that suffering to anticipate the great glory which is to come, the great glory of removal of suffering, the great glory that is the plan of our salvation. 

Somehow the sufferings we endure become the wounds not just of the Crucified Christ, but the Risen Christ as well—the Risen Christ who still bears the wounds of His crucifixion, the Risen Christ who still manifests this suffering. Christ is made manifest, the Glory of God is made manifest, in the sacrificial action that exists beyond His actual Resurrection. In our own lives when we bear suffering, and maybe especially when it never seems to go away, somehow God uses that for his glory and goodness and when we arrive into the Kingdom of Heaven and celebrate the great wedding feast He promises, the great banquet which is foreshadowed when Christ receives wine on the Cross in the Gospel today and proclaims that “it is finished.”

In the Letter to the Hebrews, it says that “we have a great high Priest who is able to sympathize with our weaknesses and has been tested as we are,” who knows our human experience. God who is made man endures the difficulty of human life with us and for us, to show us that His glory can be revealed despite the brokenness and hurt of the world. Christ is somehow always there, and perhaps most profoundly, in the midst of suffering, hurt, in the midst of His Crucifixion.

Before diving deeply into the heart of tonight’s homily, I want to ensure that we all share an understanding of an important concept. A symbol is something that points to something else of much deeper or more abstract meaning than the initial symbol itself could contain. A stop sign, for example, is a symbol for the instruction to stop; the sign itself cannot make us stop, but our shared knowledge of what it stands for, makes us stop. The Sacraments are symbols—not simply symbols, but symbols nonetheless. Baptism points us to a much deeper understanding of eternal life than simply being washed in water could do alone. The Eucharist points us to Christ’s salvific actions, on the Cross, to His Resurrection, and even more. Baptism and Eucharist are much more than symbols, of course; beyond pointing to it, Baptism is the entry into eternal life in the here and now; Eucharist points to Christ’s salvific actions because it is truly the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ. But the symbolic action of the sacraments is crucial to understand because it allows us to enter more deeply into the mystery—that is to say, to enter more deeply into that which is beyond the human experience: the divine experience. The eternal life offered in baptism is a good thing, indeed a very good thing, but by understanding the symbolic value of the sacrament, we are invited to enter more deeply into the mystery, to ponder what it means that are sins are forgiven and to embrace salvation it offers in the here and now—to be changed by God not just in eternal life but in our present life. Every time we receive the Eucharist, we receive the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ, even if we don’t understand what it is or what it points to, but when we fully participate in the great mystery by understanding what the symbol points to, we even more fully embrace the Grace that God gives us, allowing a more profound change in us through God’s action in the world.

I preface tonight’s homily be ensuring an understanding of symbols because tonight’s Mass has a symbol that is only seen once a year, and sometimes, as has been the case in the last two years, and I gather even longer in this Parish community, even more rarely. The Washing of the Feet is a unique symbol in tonight’s Mass. The Gospel assures us that this important symbol is not an arbitrary decision, but an imitation of the last moments of the life of Jesus. Describing this important event in the last hour of Jesus’ life, Pope Emeritus Benedict says that:

“Jesus represents the whole of his saving ministry in one symbolic act. He divests himself of his divine splendour; he, as it were, kneels down before us; he washes and dries our soiled feet, in order to make us fit to sit at the table for God’s wedding feast. …[T]he meaning is that Jesus’ love ‘to the end’ is what cleans us, washes us. The gesture of washing feet expresses precisely this: it is the servant-love of Jesus that draws us out of our pride and makes us fit for God, makes us ‘clean.’”

There is such profound theological meaning in the Washing of the Feet. It reveals even more clearly how the ministry of Jesus is about the emptying of Himself, the willingness to be the servant instead of the served, and it points to how Christ’s salvific act will wash us of our sins and make us prepared to share in His great heavenly wedding feast.

Long before I knew about this great theological meaning, and indeed, long before I knew much about Christianity at all, I shared with a friend about my desire to know more about the Christian faith. Growing up, her Christian faith was important to her, and one particular moment stood out. As I remember her telling me, near the end of a retreat opportunity, the small group of young Christians she spent much of her time with were gathered together and told that they were going to have an opportunity to wash one another’s feet. There was much trepidation in this small group about what that would mean. The Washing of Feet is such a unique thing that there isn’t really any contemporary equivalent, but in Jesus’ day, it really was just a sign of power; the master would have his dirty feet washed by his slave who was understood by all to be beneath the master. In her group, my friend was uncomfortable as they were all instructed to take off their shoes and socks, and sitting around nervously with her peers, she was very unsure what to do next. The leaders in the group took the initiative, though, and one leader in particular made a bee-line to her, a leader whom she thought never really liked her and with whom there had even been some conflict. The leader poured warm water over her feet and smiled awkwardly at her as he wiped the water away, and my friend described how in that moment, all the awkwardness washed away, all the tension between the two of them washed way, and she knew that she was loved. In this great act of service, in this willingness for both to be vulnerable and awkward and uncomfortable, love was brought even more fully into the world—the love of God, the love of neighbour which is the love of God, love! Eventually, my friend washed her leader’s feet, too, and while the two were still the same people after, the same people with their own flaws and wounds, their own victories and defeats, the Washing of the Feet revealed to them so much more about themselves, their relationship, and the great invitation that the Lord was and is constantly giving them.

My friend’s story has really made me excited to wash feet. It feels strange to say that. Again, we don’t really have a contemporary equivalent to this action, so saying that “I’m really excited to wash feet” might sound very strange. But I love the symbol, and I love that I’ll get to participate in the symbol. I’ve been eager for my whole Priesthood, and then some, to share in this awkwardness, to be made uncomfortable and to make uncomfortable, to share in this action that so radically contrasts how we act and believe and behave by the standards of the world. 

This invitation to act differently than how the world acts has been part of God’s tool box from the very beginning. In our first reading today, we hear the Exodus story that is so familiar to us that we might forget how radical it is that God had the Jewish people identify their unique role in His saving plan by killing the false idols of Egypt—making their neighbour look at them strangely but ultimately saving their life. The reason that St Paul emphasizes the Eucharistic action over and over again to the Corinthians and the other communities he serves is because it’s so different than how the Jewish people and the Gentile people worshipped before. Eat the body and drink the blood of your God Man, proclaim the death of your saviour who was killed like a criminal, but in doing so, know that your faith points to the fact that He has come again and will continue to come again over and over again in His perpetual presence in the world. As Christians, we are called to act in the world as symbols that point to something well beyond the world’s understanding—that leaders are called to serve, that the rich are those who give away their wealth, that the powerful are those who hang on the Cross. Or perhaps most simply, in the words of Jesus Himself, “I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” The Paschal Triduum which we begin to celebrate today points out and celebrates the most radical things in the life and death of Jesus that we are called not simply to accept and worship but to be transformed by and imitate.

After a significant episode, Fr Parker is still sort of absent! But he plans to upload his homilies for Holy Week 2022, so that's a thing. Full text below!

There is so much of value in the readings from today’s Mass, but perhaps what has called to me the most is the Psalm Response, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” By the measure of the world, this response is sorrowful, dark, and maybe even seems evil, but our Christian imagination challenges us to read more deeply into this proclamation of faith, into the whole of the Psalm it points to, and how that relates to the whole of the Christian mystery which we celebrate today.

I call the response to today’s Psalm a proclamation of faith because people who do not believe in God do not think he forsakes them; people who do not believe in God simply fail to consider God at all. For a true atheist, God is not absent, dismissive, good or evil, but rather, God simply does not exist. Thus, the Psalm response is a proclamation of faith, even if it’s a proclamation of faith in a God who seems distant or even entirely absent.

In how the Psalm is presented in today’s liturgy, there are only four stanzas. The actual Psalm is much longer, but the Church presents this summarized version around the main themes of the full Psalm. This shortened version really emphasizes just how drastic the turn that occurs in the final stanza is. The speaker turns from describing the mockery of the crowd around him, the feebleness he feels, and the injustice he faces at the hands of those who have condemned him to a great proclamation of faith and desire to evangelize:

I will tell of your name to my brothers and sisters; 

 in the midst of the congregation I will praise you!

 You who [stand in awe of] the Lord, praise him!

 All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him!

 Stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel!

The world would tell us that those who feel forsaken by God should do their best to change their feelings; the world would tell those who feel forsaken by God to forsake Him back. “If your God is really a God of love, why would you feel forsaken?” “Your God has abandoned you because you don’t fit into some idealized and impossible mould that you are supposed to embrace.” “If you really feel forsaken, if you really feel sentenced to death and despair, isolation and loneliness, ‘let this God rescue the one in whom he supposedly delights!’”

In the world, even some of those who claim to have a faith in the same God might tell you to change your feelings if you feel forsaken by God. “God loves you, and that should be enough.” “God wouldn’t give you more than you can handle.” “You just need to deepen your faith so that you can know that this is all part of the great plan that God has for you.”

I’m here to tell you that these pieces of atheistic advice and pious platitudes are both equally wrong and equally dangerous—equally wrong and dangerous to a lived authentic faith because the God whose scripture proclaims professions of faith like “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” can handle your feelings. Like a mother who nurses a fussy baby, a father who does not abandon a teenager who spits hatred at him, a true friend who can handle absence, or like sons and daughters who still fall deeply in love with their moms and dads as their physical and mental health declines in old age, the God whose scripture proclaims “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” can handle your feelings, whatever they are. The God of the Old Testament and the New Testament, the God of the Jews, the God Incarnate in Christ, Jesus Himself, embraces and loves you no matter your feelings and patiently bears them out beside you, embracing you in suffering in the same way that any lover embraces his or her beloved. While feelings of abandonment or forsakenness are legitimate, they certainly do not reflect the reality of an always-present God who loves each and every one of us. God will patiently bear your feelings as feelings do what feelings do: change and adapt to the circumstance.

The circumstances of the Scriptures certainly point to the legitimacy of feelings that God has forsaken us. Isaiah speaks of the torment he endures for being a believer. He is beaten, his beard is pulled out, and he faces insults and is even spit at, but his faith endures, He knows the Lord helps him and he “shall not be put to shame.” St Paul’s great Philippian Hymn speaks of the humility of Christ, who is empty in the form of a slave and put to death on a Cross, yet “every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord.” The great Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ according to St Luke describes how Jesus’ suffering is so intense that “his sweat became like great drops of blood.” Even hanging on the Cross, Jesus is mocked by one of the criminals He is crucified beside. Our God can handle these feelings of forsakenness because He is a God who calls for forgiveness for those who have wronged Him. He is a God who embraces the conversion of the other criminal, who in just the last moments of his life seeks to meet and encounter the mercy of God. The power of God is manifested in this great show of mercy. This great show of mercy, love, and endurance that demands, as Jesus proclaims in our first Gospel today, “if we were silent about it, the stones would shout it out.” Christ’s kingship is manifest in moments where we might legitimately feel forsaken, and with the great love that His kingship contains, we need not worry about proclaiming it because even “the stones would shout out” if were unable to do it.

The circumstances of the world today, like the Scriptures, certainly point to the legitimacy of feelings that God has forsaken us. Two years of isolation, a new war filled with heinous crimes, and many of us are still reeling at the news we heard over the summer about Residential Schools. Yet the Lord is acting in all of this; the local Church is emerging and the universal Church has discovered new ways of reaching people; good people are still doing good things in Eastern Europe, and even doing good for those who would seem to not deserve it; the Residential School crisis has given the Church the invitation to live legitimately the call to reconciliation that it needs to embrace!

What Holy Week reveals to us, and what it is especially revealing as we celebrate Palm Sunday, is that God is bigger than our sorrow—that God is bigger than our expectations. Christ’s kingship is revealed today, but He doesn’t come as a figure of worldly power or prestige. He is finally ready to reveal his kingship and proclaim it with vigour, but His kingship is not what we would expect. His kingship hangs on the Cross and admits criminals who cry out to Him in need Like the stones, we too need to shout out, “Lord remember me when you come into your kingdom,” or “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” We need to cry out to our Lord the proclamation whatever state our faith finds itself, trusting that He can work with that, trusting that He is our God, beside us on the Cross.

One of Fr Parker's favourite authors, Michael O'Brien, has released a new novel, The Lighthouse: A Novel. It's novel, then, because Fr Parker has a good excuse to try to use the word novel again, except he used it as an adjective. The Lighthouse tells the story of Ethan McQuary a lighthouse keeper who encounters the world and encounters the Divine in the midst of it. Leaning on an interview by Michael O'Brien and recent words by Pope Francis, Fr Parker explores how this novel: A Lighthouse calls us each to community, belonging, and acknowledgement that his might make us uncomfortable.

The interview Fr Parker references is found here:

https://www.catholicweekly.com.au/qa-with-the-lighthouse-author-michael-d-obrien/

An article about the words of Pope Francis can be found here:

https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2021-03/pope-francis-iraq-interreligious-meeting-ur-chaldeans.html

Find the full text too!

Not Fr Parker! That is, he didn't really like the movie Greenland. And even though in the podcast he encourages people to not be negative to whole nations, it's true that he's ambivalent to the country as a whole, as he is to most countries. But be better than him! And be better than Greenland! From a quality perspective and an ethical perspective (in this case, better than refers specifically to better than the move).

Listen, Fr Parker is as surprised as you are that anything on Apple+ TV is entertaining enough to talk about on this podcast. In the midst of being overwhelmed by streaming options, this show came highly recommended, and Fr Parker was desperate for anything new to make me laugh. Ted Lasso makes me laugh and more. It's a heartfelt, realistic, and hilarious portrayal of a truly kind person. Give it a watch and learn some important lessons about kindness to others.

In the 34th episode, Fr Parker talks about Walt Whitman's amazing poem, "To You." It's a poem that Fr Parker interprets differently than most, but that's probably because he understands it better than the rest. At the very least, it changed his life and made him realize that God loved him, and that's a pretty big deal!

This episode of the Podcast features the first ever guest--not like, in Podcast history, obviously, but on this one. Fr Parker's dear friend, John Ottens joins him to talk about Kings, a great show that retells an Old Testament story in a modern society with relevant and important insights to our modern lives.

If you like what John has to say, visit his blog at https://johnottens.ca/ or buy his book, The Gentleman Athiest, from him or off Amazon!

In this week's episode, Fr Parker talks about the 2006 film, Children of Men, and the PD James novel that it is based upon. Using the dystopian elements of both, Fr Parker describes what is a warning for s in our world now and why, but he also talks about why there is much reason to hope. There is much reason to hope for the same reason that there is reason to have faith and love, and that reason is Christ!