St. John Chrysostom on Good Friday

Today's second reading from the Office of Readings:

From the Catecheses by Saint John Chrysostom, bishop

The power of Christ’s blood

If we wish to understand the power of Christ’s blood, we should go back to the ancient account of its prefiguration in Egypt. Sacrifice a lamb without blemish, commanded Moses, and sprinkle its blood on your doors. If we were to ask him what he meant, and how the blood of an irrational beast could possibly save men endowed with reason, his answer would be that the saving power lies not in the blood itself, but in the fact that it is a sign of the Lord’s blood. In those days, when the destroying angel saw the blood on the doors he did not dare to enter, so how much less will the devil approach now when he sees, not that figurative blood on the doors, but the true blood on the lips of believers, the doors of the temple of Christ.

If you desire further proof of the power of this blood, remember where it came from, how it ran down from the cross, flowing from the Master’s side. The gospel records that when Christ was dead, but still hung on the cross, a soldier came and pierced his side with a lance and immediately there poured out water and blood. Now the water was a symbol of baptism and the blood, of the holy eucharist. The soldier pierced the Lord’s side, he breached the wall of the sacred temple, and I have found the treasure and made it my own. So also with the lamb: the Jews sacrificed the victim and I have been saved by it.

There flowed from his side water and blood. Beloved, do not pass over this mystery without thought; it has yet another hidden meaning, which I will explain to you. I said that water and blood symbolized baptism and the holy eucharist. From these two sacraments the Church is born: from baptism, the cleansing water that gives rebirth and renewal through the Holy Spirit, and from the holy eucharist. Since the symbols of baptism and the eucharist flowed from his side, it was from his side that Christ fashioned the Church, as he had fashioned Eve from the side of Adam. Moses gives a hint of this when he tells the story of the first man and makes him exclaim: Bone from my bones and flesh from my flesh! As God then took a rib from Adam’s side to fashion a woman, so Christ has given us blood and water from his side to fashion the Church. God took the rib when Adam was in a deep sleep, and in the same way Christ gave us the blood and the water after his own death.

Do you understand, then, how Christ has united his bride to himself and what food he gives us all to eat? By one and the same food we are both brought into being and nourished. As a woman nourishes her child with her own blood and milk, so does Christ unceasingly nourish with his own blood those to whom he himself has given life.

History and the Christian

One of my growing convictions is that we, as human beings, are undeniably historically contingent: what has come before us—culture, language, philosophy, etc.—has contributed to us—to the very makeup of who we are.

My time in Evangelicalism had a strange interaction with this assertion. On the one hand, it stressed the absolute necessity for faith of the historical Jesus: his life, death, and resurrection. And rightly so, as orthodox Christianity is unabashedly forthright about the necessity of the historicity of its claims, as in the ancient creeds. But what Evangelicalism failed to convey, and only rarely acknowledged, was the ongoing influence of history on and within the life of the Church, and how that influence affected the faith. In lauding the Bible alone (rather than the alongside the Tradition of the Church) as the only reliable authority on divine revelation, Evangelicalism tenaciously clings to a strange and extreme interpretation of that medieval humanist cry, “Ad fontes!” (“To the sources!”) Rather than looking to Scripture and the early Fathers to correct and guide the admittedly sometimes far-reaching speculation of Scholastic theology, contemporary Evangelicalism, like its neighbor, Fundamentalism, can often rest content with only chapter-and-verse for a bed. Of course, while exegesis is often seen as necessary, there is little admission of the continuing historical role of hermeneutics, except insofar as the individual student of the Bible arrives at the “correct” interpretation of the Scriptures through prayer and diligence. As the bumper sticker read, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

The beauty I’ve found in embracing a sacramental practice of the Christian faith is that history becomes the ally to faith it is intended to be, without diminishing the centrality of the Scriptures. The Eucharist which shapes our very being, for example, is resolutely tied to history: it is at once linked with Calvary and the Parousia, but inasmuch as it is entrusted to the historical Church, it also ministers throughout the ages, and that ministry shapes what it is today. Moreover, the whole Church is present at each Eucharist: the Church Triumphant (those in heaven, as signified by the censing of the altar), the Church Suffering (the souls being made ready for heaven in Purgatory), and the Church Militant (the Church of our day, fighting the good fight). The historicity of St. Paul, St. Perpetua, St. Augustine, St. Anselm, St. Francis, St. Thérèse, Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, and Blessed Teresa of Calcutta has played—and still plays—a part in how they now celebrate the Mass, present with us. Far from being historically selective, and not at all denying history, the Eucharist converges and manifests the historicity of Christianity in our very midst. And we, as historical beings, partake!

A Meditation for Holy Week: Love and Death

But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. - Romans 5:8

Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. - John 15:13

Christ on the Cross is the perfect sacrifice because he there embodies perfect love. The immense power of all the wickedness, scorn, and sin of the ages, when heaped upon his broken body, is met with a power infinitely greater: Love. Perfect love. And love covers all offenses. Christ’s death was not merely necessary to satisfy justice, but since only through death—a good, sacrificial death—is wickedness definitively undone, his perfect death provided true atonement for the wickedness of the ages: the sin of the world vanishes before the death of Christ as a wisp of smoke before a gale-force wind. In the beauty of God, Death, the last enemy, the wages of sin, is precisely the vehicle through which Death is overcome. Love is the giving of oneself for the sake of the other. Perfect love is giving all; perfect love is self death.

When we are baptized, we are incorporated into Christ’s death. It is no coincidence that water, the matter of baptism, is simultaneously a symbol of chaos and evil in ancient Hebrew thought and a sign of cleansing in the Law and the Prophets. Christ’s side would not have been pierced but for the evil of humanity, and yet evil is drowned in the flood which flows from him. It is no mistake that water both flooded the earth in God’s judgment and flowed from Christ’s side in God’s mercy. God’s great mercy could not have been fulfilled without God’s judgment upon the sin of the world, yet mercy triumphs over judgment. Perfect love undoes Death through Death.

What’s more, when we are joined to Christ’s death through baptism, we ourselves assume the character of perfect love, for he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. God’s righteousness is the victory of perfect love, which we cannot claim for ourselves unless it should become the character of our life. As Bonhoeffer said, "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” True love is death to self. Our Christian lives therefore evince the perfect love of God through the sacrificial nature of our deeds, empowered by our incorporation into Christ’s death through baptism, by the working of the Holy Spirit.

It should come as no surprise, either, that baptism is essentially a communal sacrifice: the one baptized is incorporated into Christ’s death and into his Mystical Body, the Church. Perfect love cannot exist with a subject alone. When we are incorporated into Christ’s death, and we assume the character of that death, it can mean nothing else that we assume his perfect love for the Father and for all of humanity. As his body breaks and blood flows to reconcile the world to himself, who lives in perfect love with the Father, we who are incorporated into his body through baptism are entrusted with the message of reconciliation.

And how do we manifest that message? No other way than always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. The Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life precisely in this way—it molds the Church, the Body of Christ, into a cruciform shape. As we are nourished by Christ’s body broken for us and his blood shed for us, our mortal bodies take on the essence of perfect love, of the death of the self for the sake of the other. Only this perfect love—but certainly this perfect love—is able to be the eternal unmaking of sin and death, and moreover, to restore to us our true and eternal self.

On Grandeur and Intimacy

My wife and I are parishioners at the Cathedral of Saint Paul in St. Paul, Minnesota. The building itself is a magnificent structure, filled with intricate and meaningful detail. The very grandeur that is so captivating, causing first time visitors to gasp when first stepping foot in the doors, suggests the surpassing majesty of the God who is worshipped therein. Statuary, stained glass, bronze grills, a towering baldakin set atop impossible marble monoliths, a grand dome, and so much more leave the visitor in little doubt about the lofty, sublime transcendence of God.

This is something my wife and I have come to appreciate highly. God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—is majestic (and so much more so than the lone word implies). God is sublimely transcendent. Even 21^st-century Americans, many of whom have never experienced an earthly royal court, are familiar enough with the marks of honor (say, at a wedding, where the bride is so honored; or at a funeral, where the deceased is) to understand that a certain regal formality is only fitting for a king or queen. Without it, the regent (or bride, or deceased) is robbed of honor that is due. How much more so for the King of kings!

“Ah,” might say some of my Protestant friends, “but it all makes God seem so high, so aloof, so distant, and not our closest friend.” True, there exists the possibility that one might think of the God of the Cathedral of Saint Paul as one who is unreachable in prayer, unattainable in relationship, ungraspable in comprehension…

…until Mass.

The fact is, God is exactly that to those who are strangers, aliens, enemies (as says Sacred Scripture), distanced by the willful fleeing of his creatures into their own, autopetal volition. But while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. And every day of the year (save one) the Catholic faithful around the world come to meet this high, majestic, transcendent God in the Way made present: the sacrifice of the Mass. And this sublime God who seems (and is) so far beyond our mental, physical, emotional, imaginational, spiritual grasp, comes to meet them through Jesus Christ’s real, sacramental presence, shared out in the most intimate way: through a union actualized by the eating of flesh and drinking of blood (which actually does happen every day), as prescribed by the Lord himself.

There is something so very right about this juxtaposition of sublime transcendence and deep intimacy. The closest friend—for indeed, He is—we receive in the Eucharist is unlike any other friend we’ve had, yet our closest friend He remains. The majestic grandeur of the Cathedral is centered around a genuflected tabernacle where He dwells and a bowed altar where He lays. Organs play, choirs sing, clergy process, incense rises, bells ring, people stand and bow and kneel, and in the center of all the ritualistic formalities and humble solemnity of the liturgy—crying out in prayer to this unfathomably great God—He comes. Not in thunder and lightning. Not in fire or wind. In bread and wine. In body and blood. In person.

…to love.