Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Robert James Magliula, OHC
Some of Christianity’s harshest critics accuse it of focusing too much on suffering, death, and the next life, destroying our capacity to enjoy this one. This isn’t totally wrong. A lot of fear and anxiety has been generated by the Church through the centuries, but it’s naïve to think that human beings are naturally content, or that suffering and death don’t make us anxious. No spirituality can pretend to be mature without grappling with the haunting questions of suffering and death. This was certainly raised for us this week with our brother Tom’s death.
Christianity does not apologize for the fact that within it, the most central of all mysteries is the Paschal Mystery, the mystery of suffering, death, and transformation. Christ is central, and central to Christ is his death and rising to new life so as to send us a new spirit. This is central but misunderstood and often ignored. We pay lip service but seldom try to understand what it means and how we might appropriate it within our own experience. Most human beings flourish on condition that they do not think of dying. We collude with one another in denying our mortality even in the midst of a pandemic. Spiritual teachers, including Benedict, are unanimous in telling us that freedom depends on overcoming our forgetfulness of death. Yet we fill our lives with preoccupations in order to not face death. We all have our drugs of choice in attaining this end. If we are free to look in the face of our death in the midst of life our energy can be released for trusting, hoping, and loving. In a state of denial, we postpone doing the unfinished business we need to do, thinking we have all the time in the world. When we give voice to the self that has the courage to break silence about death, it will change our life. Ultimately, I think our happiness depends on it.
“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” These words of Jesus define the Paschal mystery. In order to come to fuller life and spirit we must constantly be letting go of present life and spirit. Grains of wheat must in a sense die to what they are if they are not to remain alone and fruitless. Humans must die to their love for their own lives, lest loving themselves above all else, they lose their lives and destroy themselves. Jesus both taught and illustrated this in his own life.
In our Gospel today, Jesus anticipating his death, says that his very soul is troubled, yet he does not ask to be spared, but sees in it the reason for his life. His surrender to God invites us to live in that precarious day to day dependence on God. This surrender is not the surrender of submission to an enemy, but the laying down of resistance to the One who loves infinitely more than we can imagine, the One who is more on our side than we are ourselves.
Jeremiah’s prophesy of God’s new covenant is a harbinger for us of the good news of Jesus Christ. When the Babylonians razed the Temple and dragged King Zedekiah off in chains, the twin symbols of God’s covenantal fidelity were destroyed. Not only did the people lose power and prestige, freedom and security, they also lost the assurance of God’s faithfulness in the devastation of destruction. The prophet assures the exiled Israelites and us that our God will bring newness out of destruction and give hope where there was none. God offers us the means from within to be faithful by removing distinctions of class and privilege and writing on our heart the capacity for keeping the new covenant. With the Greek Gentile seekers who request to see Jesus, all will be drawn to him. In him we see the vulnerability of the God who meets us in our trials, ultimately liberating and redeeming us.
This paradox of the cross is also on display in the Letter to the Hebrews which portrays Jesus and his redemptive work using the extended metaphor of the Jewish High Priest in the Yom Kippur liturgy. Jesus as high priest stands before God on behalf of humanity. His obedience in suffering leads to new life and makes him the source of salvation to those who trust in him. He stands with us not over us. He bears in his person all the cries, tears, and supplications of the people.
If we are to follow where he leads, it’s important to distinguish and choose between two kinds of death and life. There is terminal death and paschal death. The first ends life and all possibilities. The latter ends one kind of life and opens a person to receive a deeper richer form of life. The image of a grain of wheat falling into the ground and dying so as to produce new life is an image of paschal death. There is also resuscitated life and resurrected life. The first is when one is restored to one’s former life and health. The latter is not a restoration of one’s old life but the reception of a radically new life.
The Paschal mystery is about paschal death and resurrected life. It begins with suffering and death and moves on to the reception of new life and spirit. It is a process of transformation. Only after the old is grieved and let go of is the new spirit given. Jesus’ great Passover from death to life is our model, and we will soon to re-enact it liturgically from Holy Week to Pentecost. Death is marked on Good Friday, new life on Easter, grieving the old and adjusting to the new in the forty days of Easter, refusing to cling, letting go, and letting the old bless us on Ascension, and finally accepting new Spirit on Pentecost.
We observe the paschal cycle liturgically once a year, but in fact it is a daily re-enactment since we experience many deaths in our lives. There’s the death of our youth, our wholeness, our dreams, our honeymoons, our health, our ideas of God, of monastic life, of the Church. Unless we mourn properly our hurts, our loses, life’s unfairness, our shattered dreams, and all the life we once had, we will live either in an unhealthy fantasy or an ever-intensifying bitterness. Grieving is key but unfortunately our tolerance for it is limited. It consists not only of letting go of the old, but of letting it bless us as well. It’s necessary to let our roots bless us whether they were healthy or not. We face many deaths daily and the choice is ours whether those deaths will be terminal----snuffing out life and spirit, or paschal---opening us to new life and new spirit.
The essence of freedom is to act without fear to be who we truly are, knowing that is what is most pleasing to God, and knowing that our actions reflect what fills our hearts. Those who would see, serve, and follow Jesus will recognize him even in the weariness and worry of their paschal journey, letting go, trusting, and surrendering ourselves to the Spirit.
+Amen.
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