The Last Sunday after Pentecost, Christ the King - November 26, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve OHC

The Last Sunday after Pentecost, Christ the King, November 26, 2023

Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24
Ephesians 1:15-23
Matthew 25:31-46

 

Click here for an audio of the sermon

 

Recent American history has evoked a reckoning. Movements such as #metoo, the facing of past and present racism, even in the church, and the dismantling of many Confederate statues and symbols are but a few of the shifts in these years.  This reckoning is an unveiling of the patterns of denial and privilege that is leading us to a deeper awareness of our collective unfinished business of creating a society with liberty and justice for all.  Yet as our heightened commitment to justice comes as grace-filled liberation for many, for others the present moment is a threat to previous ways of organizing power and has inspired an equally intense resistance that seeks to preserve racial, gender, sexual, and other barriers and prejudices.  Those empowered by the ways of denial are not happy about this reckoning.  
In her book, The Great Emergence, Phyllis Tickle describes this reckoning as a once every five hundred year rummage sale during which the political and religious foundations shift and crack and institutions go from chaos to realignment in ways that are both hopeful and dangerous, exciting and disorienting.  She writes that the central question during the transition is, “Who is in charge?”  Who has power and how is it being used?  The deepening levels of political and religious polarization and partisan strife in our culture points back to Tickle’s question.  In his last book, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes about this phenomenon; “Something new is happening: the sense that the other side is less than fully human, that its supporters are not part of the same moral community as us, that somehow their sensibilities are alien and threatening, as if they were not the opposition within a political arena, but the enemy, full stop.”  We are in the midst of the cracking and do not know the extent or the duration.  The desire after the worst of the pandemic to “return to normal” has confronted the undeniable reality that whatever that “normal” was way back in February 2020 is not coming back while what will be is not yet fully known.  As old structures of power are questioned and critiqued, but before new ones have coalesced, we are at an impasse that invites careful reflection and mindful discernment as to the faithful response of word and deed.  
 

If we are paying attention, we come around to the seasons of the Church year and her feasts over and over again yet as if meeting them for the first time.  The collects and readings are the same, but the moment, the “now” of each feast and season is unrepeatable. The reckoning of Christ’s life and work among us takes on ever more urgent importance and is an ever more vital source of unshakable hope amidst the disorientation.  It is good to celebrate Christ the King.  Necessary to that celebration is to take seriously the claim of Christ the King for today, among us, within the changes and chances that 2023 have brought us.  
 

Christ the King disorients and reorients, evokes frustration and hope.  Perhaps only Trinity Sunday is a rival in the admonition to the preacher - “just don’t say anything heretical!”  It is a truth claim and title that by itself evokes a range of reactions about spiritual power and authority.  Can the eternal identity of Christ meet our present honest struggles and longings, our unknowing and fear, and still be affirmed?  Christian disorientation is creating two main reactions: on one hand when theology is doubted, just double down - vigorously preserve the tribal dogma against its critics and enemies.  On the other side are those who have been harmed by abuse in the name of Christ and who struggle to preserve faith when the voices and models have acted contrary to the Christ they proclaim. They see no way to integrate the claims of faith with their emotional experience.  
 

I suggest Christ the King gives us a third way - not a Christ who is tyrannically demanding conformity, yet a Christ whose rule is necessary to fulfill my human dignity and freedom.  Let’s start with the obvious. Christ is King. I am not king. You are not king. The judgment scene in St. Matthew gives sole rule and reign to the one who gathers and knows and who pronounces what might be called a verdict on our behavior’s compassion or lack thereof.  Note carefully how nowhere does Christ the king ask my opinion, solicit my help, or seek my advice about how to be king - there is no committee. The only thing that humans do in the scene is ask “when did we see…?” Christ, we may affirm from the text, is not a mascot for my side over the other. Christ is not King in such a way that aligns him with those who believe they are right, who hold power, who claim superiority simply by the fact of those beliefs or powers.  No persons or groups get a free pass, special status, or exemption from the standard of judgment.  Christ is not a means to gaining power for myself.  Christ is not available to be weaponized into a sword with which I smite the infidels.  What we would need to know if we were going to construct a theology of power based on knowing, exclusion, absolute answers, and fixed boundaries is missing.  Such as…
When will the final judgment come? We don’t know because the story does not say when the final judgment will come.
    How can we know with certainty who are sheep and goats? We cannot. The story identifies what sheep and goats do, not who they are. Christ knows.
    Do we help Christ execute judgment against our enemies? We do not.
Has much energy been spent by Christians seeking to answer these questions and who believe that answers are attainable? Yes. Are the answers any of our business? No.
 

I find I would much rather be a helper than a subject.  I would like to serve on Christ’s staff.  Wise understanding is not rightly oriented toward inventing what the text does not provide, but first taking as given that we are not mini-kings who must rule over those in error, but limited and imperfect humans in fellowship with other equally limited and imperfect humans. The story purely distilled is reinforcing the differences between the divine vocation and the human vocation and pointing toward how these separate powers interact.  When we aspire to divine acts, Christ is giving us back the gift of our human creatureliness with all its glory and honor, all its passing-breath mortality. Part of the gift and glory of being human is what we do not know, cannot know, what is hidden from us, what is of an altogether different order of reality from our ways of understanding. Our vocation is to let the unknowns be unknown so that we can attend to the human quest of love for our neighbor.
 

Christ the King asks us to awaken to being human not as a problem to be overcome, but as a gift to be received and shared.  What is not said, what is kept in God’s own being, what is missing, is information that also makes the story formative in that our attention is pointed toward seeing and doing what we can, not what we cannot - that is where our power resides.  Our deepest search is for Christ, but Christ the King himself declares that our search is not fulfilled in esoteric theories and speculation, not in power over others, but presence with and service to others.  The place to find Christ is in the other. There is a theme in scripture of God appearing in the stranger. Christ is always coming to me in the other person.  By grace I am Christ going to my brother or sister.  To locate Christ as the One encountered in the other puts me in an open, expectant, and generous posture - in other words, makes me human.
 

Aware of what we do not know, but on the last day will know because we will be fully known, our power is liberated toward human flourishing in this our waiting-time before the setting right of the world.  In our care of the least of these, we discover a reality bigger than our unknowing - that Christ the King is present to us through them and that we are present as Christ to them.  That is the reckoning to which we are called.  In the moments of seeing and responding, we are choosing to be counted among the blessed inheritors of the kingdom.  That compassion participates in and adds to what foretells the end of violence and exploitation, the end of greed and idolatry, the end of division and ingratitude. Amen.

James Otis Sargent Huntington OHC, Founder - November 25, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Josep Martinez-Cubero OHC

The Feast of James Otis Sargent Huntington OHC, Founder, November 25, 2023

 

Galatians 6:14–18

Psalm 34:1-8

John 6:34–38

 

Click here for an audio of the sermon

 

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
                              Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
                             From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
                             If I lacked any thing.
 
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
                             Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
                             I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
                             Who made the eyes but I?
 
Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
                             Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
                             My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
                             So I did sit and eat.   ~George Herbert


This poem by 17th century English poet George Herbert is one of my favorites because to me, it most beautifully and clearly characterizes the intimate mystical relationship God so desperately desires with us. The scene is a banquet, a feast, a celebration of life, joy, freedom and belonging to which each of us is intimately invited. But we hold back, afraid of going in. It is Love who invites us, Love with capital L, that is, because love is what is most essentially true of God. The invitation is profoundly personal. It is to me, as I am, unconditionally. It is to you, as you are, unconditionally.

One of the great mystics of our Order, Fr. Whittemore, described Religious Life as a “love affair”. Like Jeremiah, we have heard in our hearts what Fr. Whittemore called “the whispering of the perfect lover”: “O LORD, you have enticed me, and I was enticed; you have overpowered me, and I have prevailed”.

Becoming a Religious begins with the experience of what, theologically, is called a “vocation” or call to the life. It is exemplified by biblical stories such as the one from the Book of Genesis we just heard. God calls Abram, a wealthy man from a great patriarchal lineage, to leave the security of everything he knew and loved, and to follow God’s guidance and promise. In the Holy Scriptures God also calls Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, the Virgin Mary, Paul, and many others. In the Religious tradition God has called Antony, Benedict, Francis, Clare and many others, including our Father Founder, James Otis Sargent Huntington.

In the post-modern world, this call is still heard as a convergence of interior factors such as attraction, desires, and even awareness of personal limitations, with exterior factors such as people we admire, a lifestyle that seems attractive to us, or even opportunity presenting itself. God works with everything and transforms it into something new. Those of us who remain in Religious Life know that the other motivations that were there all along, perhaps less clear, but ultimately, more powerful, begin to surface: love for Christ, a desire for union with God in prayer, zeal to proclaim the Gospel, and desire to be part of a community centered on the spiritual life and committed to looking for the riches of God as it depends less on the riches of the world.

Sister Sandra Schneiders describes Religious Life as a “prophetic lifeform in the Church whose prophetic character is rooted in and derives from the celibate solitude that unites contemplative immediacy to God and solidarity with the marginalized of society and expresses itself in the vows that address to the world the challenge of the Reign of God”. Religious Life is a mystery but requires no justification to those who embrace it and can provide no defense to those who challenge it. It was to this mystery that James Otis Sargent Huntington was called. We are here today because Love bade him welcome, and he sat and ate. He stayed. Like Abram, he heard the call of God and walked away from an upper-class lifestyle to live as a monk at a time when monks were held in derision by many in the Episcopal Church.

The founding of what came to be the Order of the Holy Cross was born out of a conversation between Father Huntington and Father Robert Stockton Dod. It was Father Dod who led Father Huntington and Father James Cameron, who joined them soon after, in the formation of community life beginning in the autumn of 1881. But both Dod, and Cameron left within the next two years. Father Huntington chose to stay the course, and that’s why we are here today. He persevered after both his companions had left. He persevered through what must have seemed like a failure. He was not the more dominant character of the three, but the stronger. As Br. Adam McCoy states in his history of our Order: “It is in this sense that Fr. Huntington became Father Founder: not that he had the founding vision, but that he had the founding strength to remain faithful, and his faithfulness raised up a mighty work.”

His decision was undoubtedly fueled by his conviction that the virtues of monastic life- humility, obedience, love- could serve as an example for all Christian life. The distinction lies in that, in monastic life the individual relinquishes independence in order to become part of a unified body, guided by the Holy Spirit. In his letter to the Galatians, Saint Paul gives us an account of some traits that characterize a Spirit-led community. It begins with the understanding that life according to the Spirit is not something that can simply be structured according to human expectations. It is a counter-cultural orientation of the heart especially in western culture, which places a great deal of emphasis on independence and self-sufficiency.

On the Vow of Obedience in his Rule for the Order, Father Huntington wrote: “We are to die to our isolation and separateness as individuals, that we may live in the energies of a mystical body wherein the life is one, and that the life of Jesus, our Head. The community is thus our means of entrance into union with our ascended Lord.” So, for Father Huntington, monastic life is characterized by the interdependence of its members. That means that we support one another in times of need, encourage each other to flourish, and are even willing to challenge one another when necessary. Our common welfare depends on the spiritual health of each member. There is no room in a Spirit-led community for domination, manipulation, bullying, controlling others, competition which says that you must lose so that I can win, resentment, envy, or revenge. On the other hand, Saint Paul tells us that spiritual health is characterized by love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. We all have a stake in helping one another achieve these fruits of the Spirit and to walk faithfully in Jesus’ way.

This was Father Huntington’s vision for the monastic life, a vision that serves as an example to the entire human enterprise of what is possible when we accept Love’s welcome. A community of monks devoted to imitating the crucified Christ who bore the cross for love of the world. A community that keeps its vision focused on Jesus and sees the depth of God's forgiveness, grace and love. A community that keeps its vision focused on Jesus as the ultimate example of a life of service and sacrifice that reflects the Reign of God here on earth.
 
It was this vision which carried Father Huntington, who in his rule for our Order wrote that “love must act as light must shine and fire must burn.” It was this love that carried him through a life full of struggles: periods of depression, burnout, temptations to escape, and disappointments. Yet, his faith never seemed to have wavered. He stayed the course. He followed the path. Love bade him welcome, and James Huntington did love. Indeed, at his deathbed, he made sure that the message to his brothers was that he wanted them to have joy, and that he loved them. He seems to have been the embodiment of the imperative of Saint John’s Gospel, that it is by our love for one another that we will be known as followers of Jesus.

Blessed James Huntington, intercede for us. ¡Que así sea, en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espíritu Santo! ~Amen+

Proper 28 A - November 19, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen OHC

The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 28 A, November 19, 2023

 

Zephaniah 1:7,12-18
1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Matthew 25:14-30

 

Click here for an audio of the sermon

The poet Scott Cairns writes “I love the Word’s ability to rise again / from chronic homiletic burial.” No parable in all the gospels is in greater need of such resurrection than this morning’s, which has been used as fodder for stewardship sermons for generations. This is not such a sermon, though you should feel free to make a donation by check, cash, or Venmo at the church door. Let’s get this out of the way at the beginning. This parable is not about using your God-
given talents for personal fulfillment or societal improvement. Although our addiction to power often leads us to find God in the kings, landowners, and masters of Jesus’ parables, we need only examine the behavior of the master here to realize that he does
not represent God. He yells at his slave “You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest.” By the way, violating Jewish laws against usury. He then orders the slave to be thrown into the outer darkness, because, as he says, “to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even
what they have will be taken away.”

If the master corresponds to your image of God—and let’s be honest, he might. Many of us still carry around a vindictive and violent God image—I suggest you find a good spiritual director. And I’m not kidding here. Jesus is the antidote to the toxic God-image so many of us carry. Jesus, who heals all who come to him. Jesus, who eats with those on the margins. Jesus, who pours out his life in self-sacrificing love on the Cross, forgiving his murderers. The God we know as self-giving love in Jesus is nothing like the master in this morning’s parable. Rather, the master, and the system he represents, shows us the cruel reality of the world in which we are still living today. The world in which our corporate overlords goad us into frantic activity for their own enrichment. The world in which we are complicit in the devastation of the natural world in order to extract enough so-called resources to maintain our lives of privileged excess. The world in which we judge ourselves and one another based on what and how much we can produce. Our world, the world we live in and the one we help to prop up, is a place where those who have get more and those who have practically nothing, lose even what little they have. But what if, instead of giving the spotlight to the master and his atrocities, we follow Jesus to the margins? For if the Gospel is to be our guide, it is not in the centers of well- lit power that we will find him, but with the outcast slave, in the darkness, with all that weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Following the exiled slave into the outer darkness, stripped of even the nothing he has, we find that God has preceded us there. Jesus, who took the form of just such a slave, as scripture tells us, has already made a place in that darkness to welcome those who have been exiled there. In proceeding us, and all who choose or are forced into the dark, Jesus makes a way out of no way. As Psalm 139 puts it, darkness is not dark to him; the night is as bright as the day. And even when the darkness threatens to shut down around us, we cannot be lost, not because we know the way (small w) ourselves, but because the Way (capital
W) is closer to us than our own heartbeat. The God who fearfully and wonderfully made
us will not—cannot—let us go.

We are living today in a world threatened by the darkness of annihilation. I don’t need to give you the rundown. You all already know it too well. Our systems of domination and control are collapsing, and those who steer them only tighten their grip and increase their pressure on us. These peddlers of power offer us their well-lit certainties and fundamentalisms. They assure us that they know who is to blame and that they have the power to return us to a fabled golden age. Really, they seek to return us not to the
paradise of the garden but to the unthinking sleep of the automaton in a neon-lit nightmare. One of Teilhard de Chardin’s great insights is that God is not a god of the past, but of the future. God draws us out of the well-lit cities into the dark margins of the cosmos, into the unknown future where greater and deeper wholeness awaits us—the fullness of love in the heart of God.

Writer and activist Rebecca Solnit reminds us that the future is always dark, but that it is a darkness as much of the womb as of the grave. That is not to say that we should give thanks for the metaphorical and literal hurricanes and earthquakes. But it is to say that, given the context in which we are living, we can choose to seek the oblivion of the shopping mall or we can move out into the night, where the stars can be our guide. If God seems to be absent or aloof, it may be that our world is too polluted with certainty and light to see the outline of the hidden one. 

Scott Cairns again: 

Suppose the Holy One Whose Face We Seek
is not so much invisible as we are ill equipped to apprehend His grave proximity. 

Say the One is not so hidden as we are kept by our own conjuncture blinking, puzzled, leaning in without result. 

Let’s say the meek, the poor, the merciful all suspect His hand despite the evidence. 

As for those rarest folk, the pure in heart? 

Intent on what they touch, they see Him now.
 

Scott Cairns, “As We See,” in Pilokalia (2002)

There is no place that is separate or hidden or cut off from God’s merciful love. Though sometimes we must consent to our own stripping to stand naked before the one who beheld our limbs yet unfinished in the womb. Sometimes the choice for life is the choice of conscious darkness and unknowing. But the stars are there, even when the world is too bright for us to see them. And the outer and inner darkness shine, too, with God’s radiance, if we have the courage to consent to our own unblinding. Let the master rage. Give him back his talent and be gone. For when his breath his spent and all his worst is wrought, we will already be gone into the long and starlit night of Jesus’ loving Way. Love does not destroy the masters of the world. But love outlasts them. And hand in hand with love, we will do, too.

Proper 27 A - November 12, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Bernard Delcourt OHC

The Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 27 A, November 12, 2023

 

Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Matthew 25:1-13

 

Click here for an audio of the sermon

 

Today’s parable can be read as a metaphor for the end times. The message to God’s people seems to be: “Be prepared to wait. Don’t assume you have enough oil in your lamps. Take some rest if you must. Be prepared, be provident.”

In some religious traditions, Advent still begins on the sixth Sunday before Christmas, the Sunday after St. Martin's Day (November 11, yesterday). Advent was that long between the fifth and eighth centuries. You can still find traces of that in the readings of the few Sundays before our current four-week Advent.

The season of Advent in the Christian calendar anticipates the "coming of Christ" from three different perspectives: the physical nativity in Bethlehem, the reception of Christ in the heart of the believer, and the eschatological Second Coming.

Our parable today focuses on the third perspective, on the coming of Christ; His coming in glory at the end of times. The world today makes you hanker for the Second Coming, doesn’t it? Reading, listening and watching (as little as possible) about the world today, can indeed be more anxiety-producing than the end of time. Can all this be over yet, Jesus? But more on that later.

This parable stresses the importance of constant personal spiritual preparedness. Are we always willing to say yes to God’s grace and face the consequences? If you are like me, there are days that your preparedness is wavering.

But in my understanding of God as manifested to us in Jesus, God’s grace is like the sun and the rain. They fall on everyone, the good and the challenging, regardless of merit.

The evangelist Matthew was very concerned with encouraging his community of believers to endure and persevere in the faith.

Matthew is clearly writing for a Jewish Christian audience living within the immediate proximity of the homeland itself. Matthew's is the most Jewish of all the gospels.

At the time of Matthew’s writing, this community was going through incredibly challenging times for their faith. The temple at Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Romans and the population of Jerusalem scattered to the winds.

Many were hoping for Jesus to return very soon and get everyone home safe and sound in the Kingdom of God.

With the parable of the ten virgins, Matthew is saying “not so fast, folks!” And we still need to hear that message today when it would be so nice to have the Second Coming of Christ take us out of wars and climate change disruptions right about now.

Matthew is suggesting that we will need to wait and that we will have to be prepared for a long wait. Our energy for the wait may be flagging at times. Indeed both the wise and the foolish will fall asleep at times. But in the end, the Bridegroom will be coming in a glorious wedding procession to start times of feasting and revelry in togetherness.

So it seems the point of this parable for the people of God is to live joyfully and expectantly for we are invited to the wedding feast. But we are to live prepared in Christian hope, attempting to discern the will of God and to do it as well as we can.

As Presbyterian pastor John M. Buchanan puts it: “Christian hope rest on trust that the God who created the world will continue to love the world with gentle providence, will continue the process of creation until the project is complete, and will continue to redeem and save the world by coming into it with love and grace, in Jesus Christ.”

In the meantime, there are faithful people genuinely frightened about where human history seems to be headed. Living in hope does not mean immunity to the harsh realities of history. We can’t hide from the realities of the world.

On the contrary, living in hope means living confidently and expectantly, trusting that the Lord of history continues to come into life with compassion and redemption and hope.

So, even in the face of awful trends in the world’s current affairs, we are not to lose hope. We are to trust that God is engaged with it all whether we discern it or not.

In Letters to a Young Poet, the poet being a 19 year-old officer cadet in the Austro-hungarian army, Rainer Maria Rilke writes:
“Why don’t you think of him as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity? … What keeps you from projecting his birth into the ages that are coming into existence, and living your life as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy?”

Are we, humanity, willing to be pregnant with the Savior once more? Can we accept to participate in this stupendous pregnancy?

On the one hand, we ought not to be lulled into thinking that there is no sense of urgency in preparing for the Lord’s coming. It is foolish to put off obtaining the oil of the “deeds of discipleship.”

On the other hand, the prospect of the end should not produce panic and anxiety. Even the wise maidens were able to go to sleep.

So rest assured, God is coming. Or even, wake up and see that He is at hand.

Still, you may wonder this week, do I have enough oil in my lamp to welcome the Beloved, the Bridegroom. How am I doing the will of our Father in heaven?

In case you need a reminder, as Jesus says earlier in the gospel according to Matthew: “love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22:38-40)
And you may have to do this for quite a while. After all, we may be the early Church, the church of the first two millenaries of many more to come. Only God knows the time.

And finally, I think Matthew ended his parable with retribution for the foolish because that’s how he felt at the time about those who did not see God’s grace and respond to it readily. But I happen to be a universalist. I believe God’s grace and mercy are endless. Only those who will, to the bitter end, deliberately refuse to accept God’s grace and mercy will not enjoy God’s deepest embrace and love, but it will be self-inflicted pain.

I believe in a God whose invitation to love is always open even after the wedding party has started.

The Bridegroom is coming home. Let us rejoice and prepare for the feast! Amen.

 

Proper 26 A - November 5, 2023

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Leo Sevensky OHC

The Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 26 A, November 5, 2023

 

Micah 3:5-12
1 Thessalonians 2:9-13
Matthew 23:1-12

Click here for an audio of the sermon

 

I want to begin this morning by acknowledging the current situation in Israel, Gaza and that entire region that we often call the Holy Land. It is a situation marked by a complex history, competing claims, and horrendous human suffering. We must be careful in our Christian proclamation and preaching not to add to this fraught and heart-breaking situation through misinterpretation of our scriptures leading either to a fundamentalist Judeo-Christian political-religious dream on the one hand or to hateful anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism on the other.  And I say this with full knowledge that people—even us—differ regarding Zionism, Palestinian homelands, and the causes of and justifications for the terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7 and for the ongoing bombardment of Northern Gaza.  We plead: Lord, have mercy!

For the past several weeks and continuing through this month, we have been and shall be hearing passages from the gospel according to Matthew beginning in the middle of chapter 21 and continuing until chapter 25 with its Parable of the Sheep and the Goats that we will be read on the Sunday of Christ the King. These passages from Matthew’s gospel express a deep tension and conflict between Jesus and the Judean Temple authorities, sometimes so violently that I cringe when I hear them and say inwardly: “Jesus, couldn't you be a bit more diplomatic?” But we must remember that, at least according to Matthew’s timeline, these intense interactions take place in Jerusalem in the very last days before Jesus’ crucifixion. They follow on the heels of his triumphant entry into Jerusalem and his overturning of the tables of the money changers in the Temple with their implicit and not so implicit claim that he comes as the true Messiah, challenging both the dominant institutional expression of Judaism and Roman colonial oppression.

I quote, as I often do, Berkeley Divinity School Dean Andrew McGowan whose commentary offers us some helpful and necessary reminders. He writes of the “…need to contextualize the Gospels of these last two months of the liturgical year within the mounting drama of Jesus 's last days in Jerusalem. His conflict with the chief priest is not the basis for a theory of Christian-Jewish relations; it is an account, in what is arguably the most Jewish of the Gospels (Matthew), of the conflict between the Jewish Messiah and the authorities of the time.”

Again he writes: “…it is important—let's say crucial—to remember there is no conflict depicted here between Jesus and Judaism let alone between Christianity and Judaism. Jesus in this passage [Matt 22:34-46] is being presented as a paradigmatic Jew, both as a teacher of the law more effective than his interviewer, and also as the true Son of David, the Messianic King. Matthew also is clearly Jewish in belief and practice. These are conflicts within Judaism, at this point.”  It is important to stress those final words: at this point.  That will change over time, but not yet.

Verbal sparring, textual counter-interpretations, and linguistic challenges--at least those that are well-intentioned--were and remain a classic way of moving toward greater truth. This was true in Jesus’ day and remains true to this day in Talmudic studies in Judaism just as it is true in our courts of law where opposing legal teams try to uncover a fuller truth through sometimes difficult and challenging verbal engagement. We see a similar dynamic in so-called Buddhist Dharma combat where teacher and student spar with each other to uncover deficiencies or errors and to move to greater clarity.  And so it is, I believe, in these chapters of Matthew’s gospel.  Jesus respects Jewish law, and if anything, his teaching seeks to deepen and radicalize the law and its demands though a yet more demanding and interiorized command. And that is, of course, the command to love which is for Jesus at the heart of it all. It is the central and fundamental interpretative principle which governs his, and I hope our, understanding and approach.  But whatever else these passages may teach us, we must first acknowledge that they are a debate within first-century Judaism, though they often continue to echo into our own age and within our own hearts.

So what's the problem? Well, it's simple and is in no way unique to first-century Judean Pharisees, scribes or temple authorities.  It is that the controlling authorities--the teachers, the religious scholars, the experts--don't practice what they teach or preach or claim to believe. And frankly, this should not surprise us.  We are all familiar with this disconnect both within others and in ourselves.  But there is more to it than that. For the dissonance between what we say and what we do is complicated by the fact that others, society, the community honors these leaders as if this were not the case.  And these very leaders remain blind actors, wittingly or unwittingly playing the role to the hilt, including all the visible accoutrements: broad phylacteries, long fringes and ample robes. This is not a wholesale condemnation of first-century Judaism but rather a withering critique of a compromised institution (the Temple) and of many, though by no means all, of its leaders with their layers of political collaboration and moral accommodation.  And it can and does serve as a withering critique of our own institutions and our own characters.

I had to laugh when I saw that Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of today’s Gospel passage in “The Message.” He titled this section of Matthew's gospel “Religious Fashion Shows.” Listen to his, admittedly non-literal, take on the central part of today’s reading:
Now Jesus turned to address his disciples, along with the crowd that had gathered with them. “The religion scholars and Pharisees are competent teachers in God’s Law. You won’t go wrong in following their teachings on Moses. But be careful about following them. They talk a good line, but they don’t live it. They don’t take it into their hearts and live it out in their behavior. It’s all spit-and-polish veneer.
Their lives are perpetual fashion shows, embroidered prayer shawls one day and flowery prayers the next. They love to sit at the head table at church dinners, basking in the most prominent positions, preening in the radiance of public flattery, receiving honorary degrees, and getting called ‘Doctor’ and ‘Reverend.’
“Don’t let people do that to you, put you on a pedestal like that. You all have a single Teacher, and you are all classmates. Don’t set people up as experts over your life, letting them tell you what to do. Save that authority for God; let him tell you what to do. No one else should carry the title of ‘Father’; you have only one Father, and he’s in heaven. And don’t let people maneuver you into taking charge of them. There is only one Life-Leader for you and them—Christ.

The existential danger here, of course, is precisely hypocrisy, that lack of coherence between our teaching and our actions, between what we say and what we do, between who we think we are and who we truly are. That is a danger, yes, and one that applies to all of us at some level, probably at many levels. But there is an even greater danger here, one that's more insidious and damaging. And that is that we begin to believe the idealizations that others project on us and attempt to live into and serve their unexamined fantasies.  “Don't let them put you on that pedestal,” says Eugene Peterson. Don't believe and start living your life as if you were something you are not, namely, the unfulfilled and unfillable fantasies of others.  Don’t start living into their projections!  That, in my book, is the real danger.  And believe me, I speak from experience.

It's no accident that our gospel passage ends with an exhortation towards humility over against hypocrisy in both its senses, that disconnect between what we say or believe and what we do or are as well as in the sense of buying into the projections of others. Humility is the antidote to this poison.  And humility in our Christian, and particularly on our monastic, tradition is never understood as self-abasement. Rather it names the slow and sometimes painful process of growing into the truth about ourselves so that we can finally live who we are.

Trappist monk Michael Casey in his book “A Guide to Living in the Truth’ reminds us that hypocrisy is a word that refers to a play actor, a pretender, or dissembler. And humility means setting aside the mask. It is, he says: “…a kind of nakedness that allows us to be seen without the bulwarks of social conventions. We present ourselves to others transparently, in all our imperfection and vulnerability. We depend on their goodwill for acceptance and love, not on the success of our efforts at self-promotion. The fruit of humility… is naturalness. Being at home with ourselves. Being ourselves.”

It is this very naturalness, this coming home to ourselves, this liberation from the need to hide from others or from God or from ourselves behind some mask, which is, I believe, the great hope and promise of our faith.  And it is a freedom which is needed not just by scribes and Pharisees, but by all of us.  Could this be the salvation that Jesus brings?  Could it?