April 23, 2008
I had the opportunity to celebrate the
Eucharist at St. Joseph’s last Saturday and at the North Campus with the
candidates for the Diaconate on Sunday.
Initially, I was tempted to focus my homily on Peter’s reference to
Christians as a royal priesthood in the second reading, as a means to celebrate
the priesthood of the faithful. But I
was also intrigued by Jesus’ description of himself as the way, the truth and
the life in the Gospel. In the end, I
tried to weave both passages into a coherent homily.
When I prepare a homily, I usually begin by
seeing if I can identify with individuals in the Gospel stories. As usual, my identification with Thomas’s
confusion concerning “the way” was magnified by an habitual use of Jesus’
command, “Love one another as I have loved you,” to process my responses to
individuals who enter my life. That call
points the way to a life in Christ, but I am sometimes overwhelmed by the
invitation to discern how the Father’s providence, Jesus’ intensely personal
involvement and the urgings of the indwelling Spirit are at work in these
interactions.
Two biblical themes which lend coherence to
often diverging stories in the Old and New Testaments challenged me to
integrate the call to embrace Jesus as the way, the truth and the life with the
call to love others as Jesus loves them.
The first, the Exodus-theme, depicts human existence as a perpetual
journey into the unknown. (As a
narrative-structure, this theme gives form and direction to stories of the
expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden, the call to Abram, the passage of
Jacob’s offspring to Egypt, the liberating deliverance from Egypt, and the
Exiles. In expanded form, it is echoed
by the description of marriage and by Jesus’ insistence that we must lose our lives
in order to find them, and by the Cross-Resurrection theme. The second, the Covenant-theme, entered the
biblical tradition through the promise added to the words that sent Abram forth
on his journey into the unknown: “I will
be your God; you will be my people.” In this early story, however, the fullness
of life promised by this categorical form of the covenant between God and
Abraham was expressed in concrete terms, as a promise of land, prosperity and
innumerable offspring. Consequently,
when the fulfillment of these promises seemed endlessly deferred, storytellers
in the Deuteronomic tradition countered fears that Israel’s God lacked the
power to fulfill his promises by attributing the crisis to Israel’s failure to
observe the Mosaic Law. In so doing,
however, they substituted the conditional formulation of the covenant found in Exodus,
19 for the words which irrevocably transformed Abram, son of Terah, into
Abraham of Yahweh.
(A SUPPLEMENTARY ASIDE: The reading of the Judaic-Christian
Scriptures which informs my Christian
Ethics: An Ethics of Intimacy
highlights an unruptured continuity between the Covenant with Abraham and the
Covenant revealed in the Incarnation.
This reading was governed by a code indebted (1) to Ong’s work on transition
from orality to literacy as the foundation of the narrative tradition in
ancient Israel, (2) to Robert Alter’s The
Art of Biblical Narrative, and (3) to biblical scholars who produce works
exposing the textualization of Israel’s understanding of her role as God’s
Chosen People, a process which led to the characterization of Israel as the
People of the Book. It laid bare the
literary conventions woven into the early stories of the Yahwist and Elohist
and exposed their role in the generation of a vision of an incomprehensible God
who interacts in intensely personal ways with unique individuals endowed with
unfathomable depths and a mysterious freedom.
In this regard, Ong’s Orality and Literacy lays bare the
radical restructuring of thought (and existence) produced by the
interiorization of literacy’s rupture of the illusory sense of immediate
presence, fullness and totality fostered by orality. In the Hellenic tradition, that restructuring
enshrined the rule of the One, while the biblical tradition restructured
inquiries in a very different way. The
rule of the One promises closure on endless questioning. In sum, it promises definitive judgments and
objective knowledge which can be inscribed in an autonomous text. In marked contrast, the narrative structure
of the biblical tradition renders any imposition of closure suspect. It allowed writers to process Israel’s
historical experience through stories which told of interactions between an
incomprehensible God and unique individuals who interiorized literacy as an
eruptive self-consciousness. Indeed,
since it guaranteed that any story could generate endless re-tellings designed
to process any event in different ways, its use resulted in a distinctive literary
form, the prose narrative, which still enables individuals who seek
ever-deepening person-to-person involvements to process their interactions with
one another in ever-greater depth, yet ensures that no story can be consigned
to an autonomous text.
In this context, scholars who investigate
the textualization of Israel’s evolving existence show how storytellers used
the empty literary space framed by the prose narrative to discern the activity
of Israel’s God hidden in the contingent events in her history and the lives of
each and every human being. The
investigation recognizes that the stories of the Yahwist and Elohist inscribed
an Exodus-theme which depicted human existence as a perpetual journey into the
unknown and that the story in which God’s word sent Abram forth on such a journey
supplemented a call to trust God’s promise of land, prosperity and
offspring. It also reveals that
storytellers in the Deuteronomic strand of the narrative tradition and the
great prophets at the time of the Exiles responded to the seemingly endless
deferral of the fulfillment of the promise in very different ways.
To respond to crises in faith provoked by
the Exiles and to rescue individuals from the anxiety of authorship inherent in
a precarious existence, the Deuteronomic tradition insisted that the Mosaic Law
defined Israel’s positive and distinctive (indeed, exclusive) identity as God’s
Chosen People through laws and practices designed to relate the whole of
everyday life to God and to set Israel apart from her idolatrous
neighbors. To lend authority to a
codification of historically contingent practices, norms, prescriptions and
prohibitions, it attributed the Law to theophanies. But this effort to endow a conditional
version of the Covenant with timeless import (1) ignored the fact that those
who observed the Law religiously would never experience the call to Abraham,
Israel’s father in faith, and (2) did violence to the understanding of the
Covenant-theme encoded in the pregnant metaphors of intimacy projected by the
prophets. (Note the role of literary
conventions in the transition from face-to-face commands to universally and
timelessly applicable laws.)
To dramatize the difference between the
Deuteronomic and prophetic understandings of the Covenant, I framed my readings
of the Jewish Scriptures in Christian
Ethics: An Ethics of Intimacy with
the vision of intensely personal interactions between Israel’s God and her
patriarchs and matriarchs inscribed in the early stories. From this perspective, the Incarnation was
simply the fullest expression of the sort of personal involvement of the
Creator in the lives of all human beings envisioned by the Yahwist and Elohist
and by the prophets. Logically,
therefore, an incarnational theology erased the traditional suggestion that the
Old Testament was the history of an Old Covenant of Law which was both
fulfilled and abrogated by a New Covenant signed and sealed by the sacrificial
death of the Incarnate Word on the Cross.
By extension, it implies that Paul’s tortured distinctions reveal more
about Paul’s personal need to reconcile his commitment to Christ with his early
commitment to the Law than about the many versions of the covenant preserved in
the Jewish Scriptures (which Christians refer to as the Old Testament).
To support my reading of the tortured
arguments in Romans, 2-4, in particular, I attempted to show that Paul’s early
indoctrination in the Deuteronomic tradition’s definition of the relationship
between God and Israel as a covenant of Law trapped him in distinctions which
provided the stage for the misplaced debate between Catholic and Protestant
theologians that persists to this day.
Thus, at the dawn of the Modern Era, Luther situated his protest against
abuses perpetuated by a hierarchically structured Church in a doctrine
justification by faith alone abstracted from Romans. In effect, he used the emphasis on Law
(works) in the Deuteronomic version of God’s covenant with Israel as a way to
appropriate that tradition’s conditional version of God’s covenant with all
human beings. And in an attempt to erase
this tangled literary origin of the dispute, he carried the discontinuity
between the history of Israel and the history of Christianity to an extreme.
Since a more lengthy discussion of this
issue would take me too far afield, I merely refer to the readings of the wild
and wonderful stories composed by the Yahwist and of the metaphors of intimacy
projected by Israel’s great prophets in my text. I suggest, however, that these readings show
that an Incarnational theology implies an ethics of intimacy that is
incompatible on every level with Paul’s distinction between faith and
works. To lend authority to the
readings, I note that they are guided by a hermeneutical code derived from (1)
Ong’s work on the transition from orality to literacy as the foundation of
western culture, (2) Wittgenstein’s insights into the workings of everyday
languages, (3) a postmodernist suspicion that distinctions which provoke a
polemical dialogue disguise a hidden will to power, and (4) a re-reading of the
Yahwist’s story of Adam and Eve.
(FN:
This re-reading plays a crucial role because it lays bare the way (1)
that the unfolding of this story yielded a narrative strategy capable of giving
form and direction to later stories of Abram and David and (2) that the use of
this narrative strategy in centuries to come generated a language designed to
discern the intensely personal activity of an incomprehensible God in human
history, to illuminate the tangled depths of human beings and to evoke their
deepest longings.)
From an analytic perspective, therefore, I
suggest that the proclamation of God’s ever-faithful love in the psalms and the
prophets echoed the earlier categorical formulation of the Covenant in the
Yahwist’s story of the call to Abram, not the conditional formulation invoked
by the Deuteronomic strand in Israel’s narrative tradition. I also suggest that the High Priestly Prayer
attributed to Jesus in the account of the Last Supper in John echoes the prophetic
vision in its clear formulation of Jesus’ passionate longing to be intimately
and ever-faithfully involved in our everyday lives.
In my homilies this week-end, however, I
moved immediately to the central points I wanted to make. () As
I prepared to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of my ordination as a priest,
I hoped that I would continue to be vulnerably and respectfully involved with
wounded individuals whenever I find myself in over my head. (2) I
saw, more clearly than ever before, that my involvement in sharing sacramental
encounters with Jesus with anyone who came constantly forced me to re-evaluate
my understanding of Jesus as the way, the truth and the life. (3)
And I was grateful for the graced moments when I allowed Jesus to come
to them through me. (The theme
here: Jesus comes to us through one
another.)
In sum, using the Exodus- and
Covenant-themes to process my experience as a priest helped me to understand
that the Sacraments are rituals designed to evoke a living encounter with
Jesus. Centered as they are in critical
junctures in our lives, they assure us that, as we enter a new phase in our
lives, Jesus accompanies us, and these encounters can evoke in us a commitment
to let Jesus, the Father and the Spirit speak to us in every event in our
personal histories. Then, as efforts to
live that commitment faithfully reveal to us the myriad ways that Jesus now
comes to us through one another, we begin to understand how passionately Jesus
longs to be intimately involved with us and with everyone.
As I developed the theme, I hoped to evoke
in them a willingness to learn this lesson the hard way, as I had done. Thus, in the homilies I delivered as a young
priest, I preached at people. And when I
was involved with wounded, angry or lost individuals in the Sacrament of
Reconciliation, I supposed that I was there as a representative of a God who is
Lord, Lawgiver and Judge. Now I realize
that what I say or do is a graced moment only if it brings Jesus’ healing love
to wounded individuals, including those who are not aware that they are
wounded. And I also realize that I let
the Spirit move in my own tangled depths only when I am present without
judgments or agendas. In such instances,
when the pain or shame poured forth by the penitent taps tangles in me that I
do not want to face and embrace, I now let the indwelling Spirit urge me to let
go and let God’s love work in me as well as in those who tap my tangles.
Then, to conclude the homilies, I referred
to a gimmick I use to console myself at times when I remembered with shame the
violence my judgments and agendas inflicted on others. To acquire a detached perspective, I compare
my journey as a priest to the journeys of parents. Thus, I hope that parents are always aware
that they are parents, but I also hope that they realize that they will not
always know how to parent the unique individuals God has entrusted to their
care on their distinctive journeys into the unknown. In this vein, I could never doubt that I was
a priest, but I had to learn that I must cultivate intensely personal
involvements with the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit if I was to be present
to others as a priest.
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