Once it is clear that Jesus is on a path that will lead to his own death, he begins preparing his disciples for the inevitable. He begins fortifying them for not only the event of his death, but what is to come afterward. The disciples are fearful of this eventuality. Jesus stands at odds with all the leaders and authorities of the day: the scribes, the Pharisees, the high priests. All these revered and wise people who the disciples had looked up to their entire lives, and they all stand against the man the disciples follow. That in itself is enough cause for worry and internal conflict, but it’s worse than that. Sure, their attention is focused on Jesus right now. But what about when Jesus is gone? Surely their focus will shift to his followers. The disciples stand to lose everything. They are afraid, and it’s easy to understand why.
Jesus knows of their fear, and he responds “Be not afraid!” The authorities you know are not authorities at all. God is the only authority. You will face persecution and perhaps even die at their hands, but your judge is the Most High, and it is He who has the power to welcome you into the Kingdom or to cast you into Hell. If you are going to fear anything, fear Him, and hold to His commands and to he whom the Father sent. The authorities of the world mean nothing. But it’s not only the authorities who claim things that are not their own. Recall the parable of the unjust steward (Luke 16:1-13), whose master heard he had been mishandling and wasting his master’s possessions. The master demands the steward bring forth all his accounts for review. The steward is fearful for his life. He knows nobody will ever hire him again if he is found guilty, that he is not fit enough to toil in the fields, and he is too proud to become a beggar. So he calls all his master’s debtors, and reduces the debt they owe one by one, to earn their favor. His master, learning of this, commends the steward’s shrewdness. So who are we in this parable? Are we the steward? “Am I in a similar situation with no way out but to secure my future as the steward did?” Guardini says “Yes.” Not only do the earthly wise men claim authority which is not truly theirs, we all claim things which are not ours. That is, we all claim possessions. We all claim wealth. Jesus loudly proclaims, with no quibbling about economic or social systems or redistribution of wealth, “No one really owns anything.” The wealth you have, the things you possess, they are not yours. “Sin has destroyed the possibility of natural ownership without fetters upon the owner or injustice to others. In the sight of God even the most innocent ownership is unjust.” That’s the level to which sin has already destroyed the world. The things the disciples fear to lose are not theirs to begin with, indeed not even their own lives. “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). Hate. The things that matter most to us on this earth, our parents, our siblings, our children, even our own lives. We are to hate them. And why? Because in all of them, just as in our earthly possessions, lurks the enemy—that which pulls our wills away from the will to true life, away from God. Every earthly thing has the potential to pull us off that narrow path to true holiness. Indeed this urge to leap off the path within us as well. And so we are to focus on the one thing that matters: our eternal souls. This is the way Jesus prepares his disciples for what is to come. You are afraid because you are attached to the things of the world. Don’t be. You will be hated, you will be persecuted, and you may be killed. But the only thing that matters is the eternal. Guardini finishes this thought with the story of the merchant in Matthew 13:45-46, who spent his whole life buying and selling and amassing great wealth on his many travels. Then one day, he sees a great pearl. He is so astounded by it, he sells everything he has in order to have the pearl. That is how we should respond to the kingdom of heaven. It should shake us, upend everything we know and love about the world, and we should yearn for it with all of our being.
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There are times when sitting down to do my daily reading and writing these reflections can feel like a chore. However, there are days like today when we encounter rich chapters from Guardini. Chapters three and four of Part 3 of The Lord focus primarily on “The Law,” but also on how those under the Law, the Jews, received Jesus compared to those who were not under the Law, the pagans. He starts by setting the context in which the Law was received. If we are ever to understand the purpose of the Law and its role in salvation history, we must attempt to understand what led to its coming. The chosen people of God who came after Abraham were meant to live under the terms of the covenant set forth with him: “loyalty for loyalty,” as Guardini puts it. Remain faithful to God, and God’s blessings will be upon you. This, however, does not happen. The people make their way to Egypt, under Joseph, where they prosper so much that Egypt determines them to be a threat. They are therefore put to slavery. At the same time, perhaps due to a laziness and pride arising from a long period of prosperity, they have hardened themselves to God. “We have only to see how they treated the man sent by God, Moses. Thus begins a new chapter in sacred history. The possibility of serving God in free faith is gradually lost.” A new covenant is struck through Moses, a covenant of Law. Even just a casual reading through of Leviticus shows this Law to be incredibly demanding. It seems impossible for man to obey everything within it all the time. And indeed, it is impossible (without divine help). That’s the point. The people have completely lost their consciousness of God. The Law’s intense focus on ritual and cult in every single aspect of human life is there to force the people to be conscious of God in everything they do. Even when doing things as simple as eating dinner, they are meant to feel the touch of God. This “stiff-necked” people are to gradually realize the state of things—they are in need of God. “Thus slowly, the Messianic people was to be stripped of its illusions and prepared for the fullness of time and the advent of the Messiah.” But the people fail again. Instead of allowing the Law of God to master them, they instead attempt to find ways to master it. They turned it into a measuring stick. The scribes and the Pharisees used the Law to judge every minute detail of people’s lives, and condemn them for it, while holding themselves to be the masters, and thus attempting to make themselves equal to God. Guardini calls it a “protective fence of orthodox rules and regulations” rather than the transformative guide it was meant to be. The people had become so arrogant, so determined to declare themselves the gatekeepers of salvation and holiness, that the very Law God had given to them was instead used to put God to death. Jesus came to the Jews. He makes that quite clear. They are the chosen people of God, and the offer of salvation was to be made first of all to them. Their prideful perversion of the Law caused them to reject him outright. But what’s interesting is when we look at those who were not under the Law. What of the pagans? We see Jesus have encounters with pagans a few times in the Gospels. In Mark 7:24-30, he encounters a Phoenician woman who “begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.” He responds harshly. “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” In other words, I am here for Israel, not for the Gentiles. But she understands his meaning, saying “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Jesus is clearly moved by this, as he then immediately drove out the demon. Even though she was not of the people of God, he saw her faith, and he responded. The second example Guardini gives is the centurion in Matthew 8:5-13. He asks for help for his servant. When Jesus offers to return to the centurion’s home to heal him, the centurion utters the words we are so very familiar with: “Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; but only speak the word, and my servant will be healed.” He realizes that Jesus commands power over all things, and he recognizes his own lowly state in contrast. Jesus is so moved as to proclaim: “Truly I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from east and west and will eat with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the heirs of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” “Jesus loved the pagans. Humanly speaking one might even say that he longed for them; obedience alone (that is, obedience to the Father’s will) held him within the close boundaries of his mission.” Jesus himself says it plainly. Those under the Law have blinded themselves to the Messiah who has come. The Gentiles are far more prepared to receive him, and will do so eventually. But Jesus remains in Israel, rather than venturing out to Rome or Assyria or Greece, where he would surely be better received. For the time being, Jesus is still there for the Jews, and his obedience to the Father compels him to maintain that course. “God’s word cannot be shelved to wait until we have leisure for it. It is a living, challenging call, worker of destinies, and makes its own time. The hour in which the word is offered to the people of the covenant draws to a close; soon it will pass to others. The result is not only that those who have refused to hear no longer have the opportunity of doing so, but they no longer can hear; they have closed their hearts.” This is not only true of the keepers of the Law who so completely rejected Christ, but it’s true of us as well. Christ has made his call: “Follow me.” We are to respond, and our non-response is a response in itself—a spiritual apathy which hardens us to the possibility of responding positively. If our ears do not hear, the word will pass to ears that will.
We’re now into Part 3 of the The Lord, titled “The Decision.” It’s an apt title, as in the first two chapters Guardini discusses the resistance we all feel to Christ, and our simultaneous need for him.
Jesus heals a blind man by making clay and rubbing it on his eyes and asking him to wash in the “pool of Siloam,” after which the blind man is able to see for the first time in his life. The story unfolds in John 9 with the Pharisees investigating this miraculous cure and exiling the formerly-blind man. Jesus hears about this and responds: “I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” This isn’t just Jesus saying literally “I will heal blind people,” though in this case I guess it kind of is. He’s speaking of the readiness of man to accept the truth. The blind walk through the world unable to fully perceive the things around them. Thus they are constantly on alert, and open to anything which will assist their understanding. When someone comes by who offers a way for them to perceive more fully, they embrace him. But there are those among us who “see,” or fashion ourselves as sighted. We are overconfident in our perception, in our wisdom, in our learning, in our mastery of spiritual matters. Thus when Jesus comes and challenges what we presume to know, offering a more perfect perception, we recoil. We cling to what we already have. “I know the ways of the world. Who is this who presumes to teach me, a master?” This is the state the Pharisees are in. They hold themselves as masters of the Law, and therefore as masters of spiritual matters, for the Law is all there is, in their mind. They are closed to any other possibility. The unlearned and the lesser folk, like the blind man, are open to receiving Christ and kneeling at his feet. The Light they encounter opens their eyes, and they can now see. But those who “see” are made blind by the Light. They turn away, and instead seek to extinguish the flame. Perhaps it’s easiest to think of this in the context of a shepherd and his sheep. Or perhaps that’s just my lazy segue into chapter two, as it’s the “Good Shepherd” narrative in John 10 that Guardini looks at next. The shepherd lives amongst his sheep. He cares for them, leads them, and is constantly on the lookout for dangers in order to keep them safe from harm. The sheep trust the shepherd with their lives, and follow him wherever he leads. We are to be as sheep, with Jesus as our shepherd. But the state of man is such that we resist our shepherd. We defiantly seek to establish our own self-determination, to be the masters of our own fate. “Who is this shepherd to tell me what to do, when I know these lands just as well as he does?” We are like a flock of wild sheep, which the Good Shepherd tries to bring into his flock. He calls us, he tries to herd us, but we flee. We prefer to wallow in the mud and the muck, for the mud we know and in the mud we feel safe. Little to we realize that the mud has encrusted over our eyes. We are blind to the truth of the offer that is being made—the offer of salvation. We cling to the world out of selfish greed and pride, when it is the world that is actually enslaving us. True freedom lies in the care of the Good Shepherd. It’s easy to look at the Pharisees in Scripture and say that it’s the powerful among us, the learned, and the rich who will be blind in the end. Surely they are most like the Pharisees, who reject Jesus so easily. And it’s certainly true that power, riches, and the haughtiness that can often result from great learning are strong dangers in this case. Those with those things, perhaps, have the most to lose by accepting their true place as sheep and Jesus as their shepherd—by realizing that the world in which they have placed all their faith can never be enough. But the fact is we all have this reaction to Christ. We all resist. We all feel the urge to scamper off away from the flock and wallow in the mud and muck. The challenge is allowing ourselves to trust our shepherd, and that he will lead us to perfect freedom. Closing out Part 2 of The Lord, we come to a reflection on this seemingly dual Christ that we get from the Gospels. On the one hand we have the Jesus of the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke). This Jesus is placed firmly in history as an ancient Jew, even if the actual order of some of the events in each of the Synoptics may differ. It’s easy to read the Synoptics and imagine a man living at that time, named Jesus, who behaved the way Jesus did and said the things Jesus did, miracles notwithstanding. But John’s Gospel portrays a different Jesus—the Son of God. John opens his Gospel with a new Creation account, firmly establishing his Jesus as first and foremost the eternal God who “without him not one thing came into being.” While the Synoptics flow more from the perspective of Jesus the man, John takes every event in Jesus’s life from the top down—that is, first and foremost from the perspective that this is God incarnate.
The question that immediately pops up, then, is “Which is really Jesus?” Is it the Jesus of the Synoptics, or the Jesus of John? The answer, of course, is “both of them.” But to make sense of that answer, we have to return to an idea we hit upon when we started this book. We discussed Jesus being the turning point of history and everything that occurred before him, including all the events of the Old Testament, acting as a sort of preparation for his arrival. That’s why we get Matthew and Luke taking the time to write down the ancestry of Jesus for us, to illustrate the connectedness of Jesus into the entirety of all human history, not simply the period into which he was born. This idea of preparation is also echoed in the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus continually takes what the people know, the Law, and elevates the demands to a higher level. A repeated patter of “You have heard it said . . . but I say to you . . .” All this preparation was done so that people would be ready to receive more. That is, more of the truth. This is what we’re seeing in the Gospels themselves. The Synoptics were written early on in the history of the Church. John was written later. In the Synoptics, we read what we would expect from people recounting what they remember about this incredible God-man. In John, we see a more mature Christian recounting of this same story—a recounting which has had decades of living and growing in faith, under the guidance and help of the Holy Spirit given to it by Christ. John’s Jesus is the same Jesus, but John’s account has the benefit of years of prayer and living the Christian life at its back to bring that image of Jesus into a more complete picture. We could point to several examples in the Early Church for this maturing in faith bringing us to a fuller understanding of what is revealed. The hypostatic union or the establishment of the Nicene Creed we recite every mass would be two such examples. But we see an example of this in the Gospels themselves, as Guardini points out in the story of Nicodemus in John’s Gospel. Nicodemus comes to Jesus as one who is, perhaps, merely curious (John 3:1-21). He’s open to what Jesus has to say, but he’s too afraid and cautious about him to approach openly. So he comes in the night. This is where Jesus tells Nicodemus (and, by extension, us) that one must be born of “water and spirit.” One must literally be born again. Nicodemus doesn’t understand, and takes it literally, thinking that Jesus is suggesting a man must revert to infancy and return to his mother’s womb. Jesus merely restates the point: one must be reborn if he is to see the Kingdom of God. He then emphasizes the importance his testimony, and his mission. Jesus ought to be believed because he has seen the things he speaks of, which man has never seen. Nicodemus goes silent, not understanding but still intrigued. He will reflect on what Jesus has said. He is at least shaken by the thought that Jesus may be who he says he is. We see Nicodemus return in John 7:45-52, where he comes to Jesus’s defense against the chief priests: don’t judge him until you have heard what he has to say. It seems that having spent some time reflecting on what Jesus had to teach him, Nicodemus is beginning to realize the innocence of the man, and perhaps to accept the truth of his claim to divinity. We finally see him bringing “a hundred pounds” of myrrh and aloes to bury Jesus (John 19:38-42). The quantity here is significant, as it indicates to us that this is a royal burial. The preparation that was done, the initial teaching of Nicodemus by Jesus himself, and all the time Nicodemus spent maturing and reflecting and praying upon what he had been told, has now led Nicodemus to accept the truth: Jesus is King, and as such deserves a royal burial. If I were a conspiracy-minded person, I would say John included the story of Nicodemus precisely as an illustration of why his Gospel is so different and so “top-down” compared to the Synoptics. We don’t see Nicodemus anywhere but in John’s Gospel, after all. But the tale of Nicodemus shows us how spending time reflecting on what has been revealed, and with a little divine help (which Nicodemus received directly from Christ himself!), we begin to understand more of that revelation, and thus to accept more of the truth revealed in it. In the same way, the Jesus of John is not someone different, to be held up against the Synoptic Jesus. The Jesus of John is the Synoptic Jesus, recounted after many years of praying, communing, and living with the Church—after many years of the Holy Spirit’s assistance in the development of the evangelist’s faith. Progressing through Part 2 of The Lord, Guardini moved into meditations on sin and death. More specifically, he focuses on Christ’s mission to forgive sins and to conquer death. We see Jesus several times throughout the Gospels telling people their sins are forgiven. Often it will occur right before a healing. When the paralytic is lowered through the roof to Jesus so that he might be healed, Jesus doesn’t start with the physical healing. He starts with “Son, your sins are forgiven” (Mark 2:5). It’s only after Jesus senses the skepticism of the scribes that he tells the man to take up his mat and walk.
This story is interesting most, perhaps, because of the scribes. A miracle healer is easy to believe in. You can see the effects of a healer quite easily and clearly. But one who forgives sin? Not only does it seem absurd and even blasphemous, for only God can forgive sins, but also it is not observable. How can anyone know whether their own sins are forgiven, let alone the sins of someone else, except by faith? I wager any one of us in the room that day would have been just as skeptical as the scribes. Here is a man saying “your sins are forgiven” in a way that makes it seem like that’s supposed to be significant and efficacious in some way. But it doesn’t appear significant at all to them. They just see a man saying words, blasphemous words, even, seeing as they do not believe. Either he is a blasphemer, or perhaps he is mad. It’s only after they see Jesus heal the paralytic man with a single command, “I say to you, stand up, take your mat and go to your home” that they begin to believe (though in Matthew’s account of this miracle, the evangelist points out that they did not believe, but rather thought Jesus was a mere man to whom God had gifted this power). It’s also interesting that Jesus appears to heal the man of his physical malady primarily as a sign for others. Indeed, he also says that it is good he was not present when Lazarus died, as now Lazarus will be a sign for people to believe when Jesus raises him from the dead. Jesus seems only secondarily focused on physical healing here. He is primarily focused on forgiving sins. This seems fitting, as Christ knows that the true source of all the problems in the world, the true ultimate disease of man, is not some physical affliction, but sin itself. We saw a couple days ago how we are called in the Sermon on the Mount to attack the root of our sinful behavior, our disposition toward it, rather than the behavior itself. Here we see Jesus not focused on the symptoms of a world full of sin, but on the root of it all—on the sin that flung the world into such disarray. And why is this? Because the one thing Jesus came to do, above all, was to conquer death—to offer eternal life to all who believe. Adam brought death into the world, by his sin, and now Jesus, the Second Adam, comes to defeat it. Jesus attacks the very source of death by forgiving our sins. This doesn’t mean our sins no longer exist, as if they never occurred. They did, and we did them. It also doesn’t mean that we will never sin again, nor that God merely looks away from our sin and ignores it. “Through God’s forgiveness, in the eyes of his sacred truth I am no longer a sinner; in the profoundest depths of my conscience I am no longer guilty.” We still must contend with the consequences of the sins for which we have been forgiven, by reconciling ourselves with those we have wronged, but our guilt is truly removed through forgiveness. And in that forgiveness, so too opens for us the narrow gate that leads to eternal life. What is evil? Is it simply the absence of good, the void which lacks the presence of God? Or is it a particular thing in itself, to be held up in contrast to good? A thing which can be positively willed and worked toward, and a thing that can drive and motivate us, as good can? In other words, are good and evil just two sides of the same coin, where one cannot exist without the other? Nowadays, we often don’t even bother thinking about it. We live in a sea of relativity, where everything is permissible and acceptable, and to say otherwise is derided as insensitivity. That’s not to say we don’t have room in ourselves to be more sensitive. Of course we do. It’s purely to say that we seem to have lost the sense that there is a “the good” which ought to be willed, and against which all ethics and morality ought to be judged. This sense of “the good” is certainly present in Scripture. Reading the Gospels, we are made acutely aware that there is a war at place—there is an ongoing spiritual battle between God and His enemy. In the desert, Jesus faces this enemy directly. Psychology tells us that no man actually wills evil. Man wills good, or whatever distorted or selfish idea of “good” he has at the time. But here stands The Enemy, who wills evil with every fiber of his being. Not just a distorted “good”, but literally wills the destruction of “good” itself, the destruction of all that is—the overthrow of God. This is who Jesus came to do battle with, for our sake. This war is easy to dismiss as pure folklore and fairy tale. The incidents we see in the Gospels of Christ casting out demons are discarded as simply ancient ignorance—as a lack of modern medical knowledge. Had Jesus lived in the present day, he would have reacted quite differently to these people who were clearly ill, and not possessed at all. Guardini tells us this attitude is ultimately driven by the very same enemy that Christ wages battle against. Unable to defeat God in direct conflict, the enemy turns to us and sows doubts hostility toward the very idea that God is on our side—to the very idea that there could be an enemy who stands against all that is. Like he tempted Jesus in the desert, the enemy whispers in our ear that there is no “good” at all. And by tearing down our conception of “good,” by turning us away from “The Good,” which is God, the enemy moves closer to his goal of total destruction. Only having failed to bring about that destruction on his own, this time he uses man as the agents of that destruction. “Jesus brought Satan to a standstill. He alone was able to stare him down. To the extent that we succeed in looking with Christ’s eyes, we too shall see him; to the extent that Christ’s heart and spirit become alive in us, we shall dominate him.”
-Romano Guardini ("The Lord") What are miracles? Why does Jesus perform them, like the raising of Lazarus, and why does God perform them through the prophets, like Moses parting the seas? These may seem to be simple questions, on the face of it. For the first, you might say miracles are “a suspension of the natural order,” or perhaps “an overriding of the natural order.” More generally you might just say a miracle is some manner of extraordinary act or event that occurs by divine power. But none of these seem very satisfying an answer. Why would God create the natural order and then go about violating the very thing He just created? It seems more than a little contradictive. It’s hard to consider these things an “answer” at all. How do we reconcile the fact that miracles occur with the equal fact that the natural order of things was divinely ordained? In Part 2, chapter five of The Lord, Guardini gets us closer to an answer. He calls miracles not a suspension of natural order, but a fulfillment of natural order. That is, he views miracles as an elevation of the natural order to something greater than it is presently. “For when a miracle takes place, natural law is not ‘interrupted,’ but rather, at a given moment forced to obey a higher law, a law that is absolutely realistic and significant . . . Logic and natural science rest on the assumption that the world comprises an entity, complete in itself, in which other than natural factors have no place. To this faith replies: The world lies in God’s hand. He is Power, Creator in the pure and infinite sense of the word, and when he commands, the ordered world obediently and constructively submits to his will.” -Romano Guardini ("The Lord") The miraculous event is not God pressing “pause” on nature at a given moment. Nature does not exist independent of God. He did not merely hit the “create” button and step back to observe, to occasionally inject Himself when He felt the need. Everything in the natural world, everything that is, only is because God wills it to be, in a very literal sense. God is the source of all being, continuously willing that all that is participates in His being, so that it can be as well. His will is the foundation on which everything relies. Without it, nothing would be at all. It continually sustains everything in existence. If He were to cease willing, everything would cease along with it. Only within this context can we begin to consider the “what” of miracles. If the divine will is what sustains everything in existence at any given moment, then it’s easy to see what Guardini is saying. God wills that things are the way they are, and at certain points in human history God wills that things be greater. And nature, being utterly dependent on God, obeys. That obedience and submission to the divine will is what Guardini means when he says “What then occurs is a miracle in which natural law is not suspended but fulfilled on a higher level.” But what about the second question? Why do miracles occur? Meaning for what purpose, not simply “because God wills them to occur.” It also doesn’t seem enough to say that miracles occur to act as a sign, though that is certainly true. A sign of what? To get to that answer, Guardini takes us to the realm of the astronomer. To the astronomer, the world is an insignificant speck. The blue dot whirling in an infinite expanse of uncountable other worlds, only significant to us because we happen to live here, but otherwise utterly uncompelling. But the fact that God chooses to perform miracles here, on this tiny blue dot in the infinite universe, tells us that this world may not be so insignificant after all. “It becomes evident that for God those mites on the grain of sand lost in immeasurable space are more important than the Milky Way or the whole universe; that the short span of time in which life endures on earth is more important than all the light years of astronomy. The few years of human existence, the ten years of solitude that a widow perhaps has before her, weigh more in God’s eyes than all the aeons that solar systems require to evolve and decline. God would never sacrifice a single human heart for the preservation of Sirius or Andromadae, yet when his holy omniscience confronts human suffering incapable of recognizing its hidden significant any other way, he commands natural law to a higher service . . .” -Romano Guardini ("The Lord") It is in miracles that we see the kind of God that God is. God performs miracles because of His love. He is not merely the god of the philosophers, the First Cause that kicked off a causal chain. God is love, and His love overflows, and sometimes manifests itself to us as miracles. Miracles reveal God as a personal God, as a God who cares and as a God whom we can love back. The god of the philosophers is remote, cold, and uncaring. But God is ever near, holding us in His hand. He is moved by our struggles and our suffering, and every so often He commands the natural order to become more than itself, so that we might be reminded of this fact: God is love.
We’re moving along in Part 2 of The Lord to chapters three and four. I will say up front that this reflection will be almost entirely on chapter three, as there is much to say there. But chapter four does have a very important meditation from Guardini on how we, in the modern day, have lost the sense of horror that we ought to feel with regard to the rejection and execution of Jesus. If you haven’t read it yet, do yourself a favor and pick it up. Chapter three focuses on the impossibility of the demands of the Sermon on the Mount. Christ asks us to do things that seem completely beyond human strength. How are we to meet hatred with love? To meet violence with compassion? To completely cast out all our temptations to sin that seem to come so naturally to us? It is not an easy thing, nor does Jesus present it as such. He frames it all in the context of the Law. “You have heard it said . . . but I say to you.” The Law was demanding already, and the Sermon on the Mount even more so. How are we to reconcile ourselves with the impossibility of the task set before us? Firstly, what needs to happen is a shifting of perspective. The Sermon ought not to be seen as prescriptive commands to be obeyed—as an “all or nothing” set of precepts. “No, what the Sermon on the Mount demands is not everything or nothing, but a beginning and a continuing, a rising again and plodding on after every fall. What then is the main thing? That we accept the Sermon on the Mount not as a fixed, inflexible decree to be carried out to the letter, but as a living challenge and activating force. It aims at establishing a contact between the believer and his God that is gradually to become effective; at instigating action geared to continual progress.” -Romano Guardini ("The Lord") We started to get around to this yesterday, with regard to how our love for God grows the more we reach out in love, and how as our love for God grows so too does our ability to be truly just. By approaching the Sermon on the Mount, with its impossible demands, as an “activating force” to spur us on in the right direction, we will find that the impossible seems to become more possible.
This is precisely, in Guardini’s view, the role of the Church. The Church exists to bridge the gap between the impossibility of the Christian life and what man is capable of accomplishing in the here and now. The Church, the Bride of Christ, is to act as a mother. It is her role to raise them, to teach them right from wrong, to pick them up when they fall, and to push them to be more than they ever thought they could be. She is what Christ has given to us, so that we might become what he desires for us. This isn’t to say the Church doesn’t have limitations. Certainly she does. All kinds of evils can be found within the Church: tyranny, greed, intolerance, or any other manner of evil. “All these are simply improper, and we shall have to answer for them before God.” Her mission is clear: to act as the mediator between the possible and the impossible. That fact alone has dangers. Man could begin to elevate the mediator to the level of God—that is, man could begin mistaking, for example, practical guidance from the Church to be prescriptive divine command. As Catholics we are all too familiar with this danger, as there is no shortage of confusion amongst the laity regarding the levels of magisterial teaching. The dangers are clearly on both fronts here, both on the side of the individual and on the side of the Church. Nevertheless, Christ has given us the Church, and has sent the Holy Spirit to guide her and us. We should be conscious of the dangers, certainly. But if we approach the tasks set forth to us in faith, and if we truly have faith that the Holy Spirit does, indeed, act as our advocate and helper in all things, we will find that despite all our failings the impossible can become the possible. We’re now into Part 2 of The Lord. We finished Part 1 with the Beatitudes, and now Guardini begins this next section by looking at the rest of the Sermon on the Mount. Specifically, he has a two chapter reflection on what true justice and true love are, and how we are possibly going to live up to what is demanded of us. We know what these things are. Don’t be like the hypocrites who do things only to be seen. Pray in secret (Matthew 6:5-6), fast in secret (Matthew 6:16-18), give alms in secret and don’t even let your left hand know what the right hand is doing (Matthew 6:2-4)! All of these seem to be warnings against our own egos—against the tendency of man to be incredibly vain. Indeed, even in doing a good act, like giving to a charitable cause, we feel an immediate sense of our own goodness. I think there are few people who would say they don’t enjoy that feeling. And yet Jesus tells us to do these things without our left hand even knowing what the right hand has done. Perhaps that means “Do things not for the reward, even the rewarding feeling you give yourself, but do them because the act is good to do.” However, I think that misses the mark, and this is where I think Guardini is really helpful. But I’ll come back to that in a moment, because in order to talk about reward we need to talk about justice. You have heard it said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, right? We know the line, we know Jesus says that’s not enough, et cetera. The Sermon on the Mount is a long speech where Jesus tries to drive home that our sense of justice is skewed. We tried to mete out justice, but every time we did we were not being truly just at all. Jesus tries to shift us into thinking not about the acts we do, like committing adultery, but the root of the act: the disposition. “So if thy right eye is an occasion of sin to thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee” (Matthew 5:27-30). The root of the problem can be found not in the act, but in the mere glance of the eye. And if the eye remains to go about its glancing, the act will follow. Therefore, pluck out the eye, pluck out the root of the problem, the occasion of sin. “From the disposition comes the deed; thus a glance, an unspoken thought can profane a marriage. As long as you judge behavior solely by the presence or absence of the actual evil deed, you will be unable to avoid that deed. You cannot cope successfully with the evil act until you tackle it as the root of all action: the attitude of the heart as expressed in glance and word. What is really demanded is not superficial order, but intrinsic purity and respect. These in their turn require spiritual self-control and careful guarding of the natural reactions.” -Romano Guardini ("The Lord") God gave the Commandments to Moses for this purpose—to turn the heart of man and “awaken the whole human being as God meant him to be.” But man started making distinctions. Man separated the disposition from the act. The obedience asked of us was too daunting, and so we found a way to make it easier. Jesus spends this entire Sermon trying to correct us, and get us to focus on the true source of our unholiness, the true source of our injustice to each other and to ourselves. We give to others as they give to us, and treat others as they treat us, because we see that as just. If someone is violent to us, we are violent to them. In geopolitical terms, we call it a “proportional response.” But we are called to something beyond simple “justice.” We are called to love. “To desire no more than justice, ‘Do not even the Gentiles do that?’ That is ethics. You, though, have been summoned by the living God. With ethics alone you will neither satisfy God nor fulfill your intrinsic possibilities. He wants you to risk love and the new existence which springs from it. Only in love is genuine fulfillment of the ethical possible. Love is the New Testament!” -Romano Guardini ("The Lord") Love is the calling, love beyond justice. Only through love can we truly be just. And this is what brings us back around to the question of reward, about doing things for the reward or doing them for the act. The interesting thing here is that Jesus speaks over and over again of a promise of reward. Pray in secret, fast in secret, give alms in secret, and the Father, who is in secret, will reward you.
The promise of reward is always there. And why? Because to do good for good’s own sake, to be so completely magnanimous and free that the pleasure of doing good with no thought of reward, that is something only God is capable of. Man feels self-denial. “I will give to this charity with the money I earned, and I won’t buy something I want later, because I have denied myself for the sake of this charity.” At the end of the day, we are still created beings. We are not God. To think that we can be entirely virtuous for virtue’s sake alone, absent grace, is to try make God of ourselves. Grace is the reason for the reward. Love is the reason. The reward is there for us to grow, so that in our imperfect state, we see the reward from the Father. Namely, His love. For by seeking His love, our love for Him grows, and as our love grows, so too our disposition and sense of justice improves. Until eventually, the thought of reward is gone. It’s still there, “but vanished as a direct motive.” We do good because we love God. We love Him “because he is worthy to be who he is. I wish my act to affirm him to whom the multitudes of the angels cry: ‘Worthy is the Lamb who was slain to receive power and divinity and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing” (Revelation 5:12). We close of Part 1 of The Lord with chapters on the apostles and the beatitudes. He discusses how completely ordinary the disciples were. How these are not great intellectual minds, or great religious leaders. These were, by all accounts, supremely unqualified men for the role of leading the Church in her first days after the Ascension. We have only to look at the Gospels to realize this fact. At every turn, the disciples are clueless. They never seem to understand a word Jesus says. He has to constantly remind them, teach them, and reteach them. “Do you still not understand?” (Matthew 16:9) “You faithless generation, how much longer must I be among you? How much longer must I put up with you?” (Mark 9:19) “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” (Matthew 14:31) They are stuck thinking that Jesus is a Messiah like the conquering king the Pharisees told them about. They can’t even begin to comprehend who Jesus is. To be fair, we can’t really blame them. Nobody can ever truly comprehend the divine mystery. But the interesting thing here is that the Gospels seem to very intentionally tell us that the disciples were clueless. And yet Jesus chose them anyway. Jesus chose them to spread his message after his ascension. Jesus chose them to act as his representatives, to speak in his stead. “You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name.” (John 15:16) Despite all of their faults, these are his chosen apostles. “What is an apostle really? Frankly, the impression we get from the New Testament hardly permits us to claim that these men were great or ingenious . . . An apostle then is one who is sent. It is not he who speaks, but Christ in him. The apostle is filled with Christ, saturated with thought of Christ; the Lord, whom he represents, is the substance of his life. What he teaches is not what he has learned from personal ‘experience’ or ‘revelation,’ it is God’s word, uttered upon God’s command: ‘Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations . . . teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.’ (Matthew 28:19)” -Romano Guardini ("The Lord") These men were not born or bred for this, or even suited for it. They were chosen. God chose them to be the ones through whom He speaks. They are, as Paul puts it, “fools for the sake of Christ.” (1 Corinthians 4:10) They are to be persecuted and despised as Jesus was, for his sake, and not because of their merit but because they were chosen for it. This idea is echoed right after we heard the Beatitudes in Luke’s Gospel. “Bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.” (Luke 6:28-30) By any worldly standard of justice or even simple self-preservation, that is foolishness. And yet, we’re called to do it. Like the apostles, we are called to be fools for Christ. I will end today’s reflection with a quote from the end of Part 1: Chapter XII: “This most certainly does not mean that one must behave like a weakling or surrender oneself to force. Rather, that man should extricate himself from the whole earthly business of defense and aggression, of blow and counterblow, of right and usurpation. He should emerge from the hue-and-cry of terrestrial forces and affiliations to share in the freedom that God alone has to give. The gist of the message lies in the words: “. . . and you shall be children of the Most High, for he is kind towards the ungrateful and evil.”
Now we begin to see what Jesus is driving at: a bearing in our relationship to others that is no less than divinely free—not what law and order demand, but what true liberty gives. The measure of that liberty is love, the love of God.” -Romano Guardini ("The Lord") |
Series Info
Every day of Lent, I am writing a reflection piece on two chapters of "The Lord" by Romano Guardini. If you'd like to read or follow along, you can find the full calendar of where we're at below, or Click Here for the main landing page. Archives
April 2020
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