Temptation

Taking him to a very high mountain, the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour. ‘I will give you all these’, he said, ‘if you fall at my feet and worship me.’ Then Jesus replied, ‘Be off, Satan! For scripture says:

You must worship the Lord your God, and serve him alone.’

Matthew 4:8 - 10

'Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely' wrote Lord Acton in one of his pithy, well-quoted axioms. The context may well have been the absolute monarchies of continental Europe, but there are more than sufficient contemporary examples: Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Kim Jong-Il of North Korea, Bashar al-Assad of Syria, perhaps Vladimir Putin of Russia. But to a greater or lesser degree there are those in every community, even of our western democracies, for whom the pursuit of power over others is their primary driving force. It happens in an office, workshop, factory, restaurant, fishing boat or indeed - a family - near you.

We all have our temptations. Yet there is a very thin line between achieving your best and doing so by disadvantaging others. Acquiring wealth, fame, qualifications, particular relationships are put forward as goals to be achieved if you value success for yourself or for your children. And yet, claiming them aggressively and selfishly succumbs to four of the seven deadly sins: pride, lust, envy and greed. What each of these deadly sins has in common in the misuse of power. The autocrats mentioned above all began small and by luck, birth, opportunity, alliances, strength of personality and often, great intelligence, they forged their power blocs.

Jesus, in every possible way, presents a model of leadership and life that totally and utterly contradicts what the world proposes: it is a life of service, powerlessness, poverty, generosity, fellowship, compassion, healing, hope, renewal, forgiveness, gratefulness, grace and mercy. In order that his own life is lived to the full, Jesus freely gives of his own life.

If I were to emulate Jesus in my daily life, how would I navigate that thin line - is it greed to want to prepare adequately for a long retirement? How many degrees do I need to do my job efficiently and effectively? Do I use my relationships for my own ends? Do I choose tourist destinations where the local inhabitants are not patronised and economically enslaved? Do I avoid buying products that are the result of animal cruelty, created from unrenewable resources, made by child labour?

We stand on that same mountain as Jesus and we face the temptations he faced. Is the world a more complex place than Palestine in the first century AD? Maybe. Maybe not. The Gospels reveal a highly sophisticated religious society under Roman overlords. There are spies abroad. There are rebels (Zealots), terrorists (sicarii), Pharisees and Sadducees. Such countries still exist.

You and I may not carry the weight of the world on our every decision, but we must accept that we do carry a responsibility to choose well. We must never allow our classrooms or schools to become places where the exercise of power is for personal gain. When we see it misused, be aware that silence is a decision. Choose good. Choose Jesus.

Peter Douglas

Fr. James Martin: Hate confession? Here’s why you should reconsider.

I have a Catholic friend who hates confession. I am not going to break any confidences, but my friend despises confession so much that he hasn’t gone for a decade. He has offered several reasons why he doesn’t go to what is formally called the sacrament of reconciliation. He is afraid that his sins are now too much to confess all at once; he is frightened of what the priest might say (he’s had a few bad experiences); and he is too busy.

My friend is not the only person I’ve met who feels this way. Several years ago, while directing a retreat, I met a woman who said that she hadn’t gone for 20 years. Her reason was also an unpleasant experience with a priest during the sacrament. As I recall, he berated her for not coming in more frequently.

In response, I asked her: “If you had a bad experience with a physician, would you would never see a physician again?” However, even after we talked about her experiences, she was hesitant to return. Our spiritual direction session was brief, and by the time our 20 minutes was up it was time for another retreatant. So, I have no idea if she ever returned to the confessional.

Sometimes I feel nearly tongue-tied in these situations. Not because I judge people in these situations to be bad Catholics, or because I don’t know any helpful responses to these common roadblocks. Rather, it’s because I go to confession frequently. Very frequently. And I like it.

Admittedly, it’s easier for me to do when I live in a house filled with priests, and especially when my spiritual director is a member of my community. If I ever feel burdened by sin, or even a sin, all I need to do is knock on someone’s door and ask.

On the other hand, it’s arguably harder, since these are men with whom I live and, in many instances, work. After confessing your sins to someone, you may see the fellow at breakfast the next morning. Or at an editorial meeting. But that has never bothered me, because I figure that anyone who lives or works with me already knows I am not perfect.

I often ponder what makes me more inclined to go than the people I mentioned. I am certainly not any holier than anyone else—not by a long shot. It’s not that I have fewer sins.

Maybe it’s the frequency. I go to confession once a month, if not more. I’m used to it. Consequently, it ceases to hold any conceivable fear. Something like a person who has a fear of flying taking 50 flights in one year, and then suddenly realizing that he’s comfortable on a plane. He knows there will inevitably be turbulence and can say, “I’m used to this. And it is not as bad as I thought it would be.”

Sometimes I tell skittish Catholics how wonderful it feels to be honest with God in the sacrament. The old argument against confession that you can always tell God your sins is a good one. Of course you can. But often you don’t. Moreover, it helps to verbalize your sins with another person. And hearing the words of absolution, viva voce, is a lot more powerful than intuiting them in prayer. At least for me.

My comfort level may also stem from experiences with confession from the other side. When hearing confessions, and offering absolution, I can see how people feel unburdened. They exhale. They relax. They smile. And I can feel how grateful they are to be forgiven for something they thought was unforgivable. All that makes confession precious to me.

But mainly I like the way I feel afterward, as if God had given me another chance—which, of course, God has. And no matter if I’m hearing confessions or going to confession, I always think of what my theology professor, Peter Fink, S.J., told our class, “Confession isn’t about how bad you are, but how good God is.”

I wish I could invite everyone who has stayed away to come back. And for returnees, I hope you hear some form of what I say to people who haven’t been to confession for years: “Welcome back.”

This article also appeared in print, under the headline "Hate confession? Here’s why you should reconsider," in the 6 March 2017 issue of America. Click here.

 

The span of life

‘That is why I am telling you not to worry about your life and what you are to eat, nor about your body and how you are to clothe it. Surely life means more than food, and the body more than clothing! Look at the birds in the sky. They do not sow or reap or gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they are? Can any of you, for all his worrying, add one single cubit to his span of life?

Matthew 6:25 - 27

Kinder teachers start the year with a class full of quite ego-centric, sometimes impulsive young charges and their role is to draw their students into a sense of community beyond their immediate family. Ultimately, the skills of a lifetime of learning are required before finding your place: at school, for some - at home, at work, at university, at play, at church, and with yourself.

You have to know your place in the universe [check out this clip]. We know the ancients had various understandings of what lay beyond the earthbound world they experienced. For some there existed a great dome, for some the heavens were layered, and for others the worlds of the gods mingled with the daily lives of humankind. Even we postmoderns who struggle with reason and faith, raise our eyes and hands to the unseen God and from our thuribles emit and propel towards the heavens our prayers upon the smoke and smells that please the Divine.

Our place is found in the stories we write with our lives, our reflected lives. There is the story of how atheist CS Lewis, found God in his life, through literature and conversation – including his friendship with JRR Tolkien. There is the journey of Richard Holloway, the Scottish Episcopalian Bishop of Edinburgh who lost faith, and has become an ardent atheist. Then there is Bishop John Shelby Spong whose whole life has been a constant cycle of re-conversion. There is my story and your story. In these stories is the search for meaning, the discovery, the joy, the pain, the suffering and the loss.

It was Benjamin Franklin who, in corresponding with Jean-Baptiste Leroy in 1789, wrote: "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." So whether you live a fleetingly brief or very long life, our earthly lives are terminal. And so we must make the most of our time between being born and dying. Our stories must be complete. Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl believed there was meaning in every moment of life, in suffering and in death. Indeed for Frankl, love was the ultimate truth and the highest goal to which man can aspire.

It is at the essence of our nature to seek understanding, create or make meaning. Blind faith, uncritical religiosity, slavish devotion is not what God is asking of you. You are alive just to find yourself, make sense of who you are and what you called to be and do, and in doing so find the one who created you and who will walk with you in every step you take. We then respond to this extraordinary and lavish generosity by caring and loving those who cross our paths, and give thanks and praise for the gift of our lives.

Peter Douglas

A Muslim scholar sets out to investigate Jesus Christ

by Thomas P. Rausch

First published in America February 16, 2017

Fr Rausch

Mustafa Aykol, a practicing Muslim who writes a column for The International New York Times, begins his book by relating how one day in Istanbul he received a copy of the New Testament from a Christian missionary. Before going to sleep he opened it to the Gospel of Matthew and quickly became fascinated. Within a couple of weeks he had finished the entire New Testament. While there were parts of it he as a Muslim could not accept, much was not contradictory to his own faith, and parts were strikingly similar to the Quran. Like a good investigative journalist, he began a study of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim sources that come together in the story of Jesus of Nazareth. This book is the result.

Mustafa Aykol

The book traces the complex relations between the Gospels, Judaism and Islam. From the beginning the author contrasts Pauline Christianity, with its emphasis on the divinity of Jesus, with early Jewish Christianity, especially as it comes to expression in the “Q” sayings source, the Epistle of James and later Jewish-Christian sects like the Ebionites. How to explain the startling connections between the theology of the Jewish followers of Jesus who saw him as the promised messiah but not divine and the Arab followers of Muhammad?

Jesus is honored in the Quran as born of the Virgin Mary, the Messiah of the Jews and a reformer but not divine; he appears in 93 verses in 15 different Quranic chapters. Akyol shows parallels between a number of Quranic stories of Jesus and Mary with some of the apocryphal gospels, the Protoevangelium of James, the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, the Arabic Infancy Gospel and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas—for example, the story of Jesus making birds out of clay and then giving them life—imaginative stories rejected by mainstream Christianity. As a Muslim, Akyol believes in the Quran as divinely revealed, though he suggests that the similarities show that the Quran was in dialogue with various traditions present at its time of origin, both the apocryphal gospels and various Jewish-Christian sects, some of which believed in the virgin birth. He sees another parallel in the expression “Two Ways,” appearing in both the Didache, a late-first-century Christian text, and the Quran, which offers salvation to those who are devoted to God and benevolent toward other humans—in other words, salvation through faith and good works, not “faith alone,” as in the Protestant understanding of Pauline Christianity. This is the teaching of Jewish Christianity, reflected in the Epistle of James.

But his contrast of early Jewish and Pauline Christianity is much too facile. He falls into an approach first popularized by liberal Protestant theology of speaking of the “Platonization” (or Hellenization) of Christianity, making recognition of the divinity of Jesus a late development, an approach long since abandoned by mainstream scholars. The church’s high Christology is rooted in the Jesus of history, in his use, at the time unprecedented, of the familial term Abba in his prayer, the fact that he referred to himself as “Son” and in his claim to authority to interpret the Mosaic law and proclaim the forgiveness of sins, both of which scandalized his contemporaries. Theologians as critical as Walter Kasper and Edward Schillebeeckx find evidence that Jesus understood his death as tied in with his mission, promising his disciples a renewed fellowship beyond it.

Akyol does not seem to appreciate how the church’s Christological language developed slowly within the New Testament period as the early Christians reread their experience of Jesus against their Jewish tradition. For example, while Mark’s Christology is still inchoate and his use of “Son of God” did not mean what it would mean two decades later, there are clues that he is struggling to express a mystery that goes beyond the language available to him. His account of Jesus walking on the water is clearly a theophany, using the expression, “He meant to pass by them” (Mk 6:48), jarring in context, to echo a verse in the Book of Job where Yahweh walks on the “the crests of the sea” and might “pass by” (Job 9:8, 11).

From the beginning, both Jewish and gentile Christians used the divine title “Lord” (Mari or Maran in Aramaic, Kurios in Greek) for Jesus. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures (third to 2nd centuries B.C.E.), used  Kurios to translate the Hebrew Adonai, which took the place of the holy name Yahweh. Jewish Christians used Mar to avoid pronouncing the divine name. Even the Epistle of James refers to Jesus consistently as “Lord” or “the Lord Jesus Christ.” Larry Hurtado points out that Paul can use the Aramaic invocation Maranatha, “Our Lord, come” (1 Cor 16:22), to his largely Gentile church at Corinth without translating it, as it was certainly familiar to them. He notes that Jesus, from very early in the Christian movement, was the object of the prayer and worship ordinarily reserved for God and that there is evidence of pre-existence theology even prior to Paul. Akyol pays little attention to the Gospel of John beyond commenting on its high Christology. But John is a very Jewish Gospel; its Prologue, which most probably predates the Gospel, speaks of Jesus as the divine Word, active in creation, a recasting of the Wisdom theology that developed in the late Old Testament.

In spite of the author’s efforts to explain the church’s Christology in terms of an aberrant tradition, there is much to recommend in this study. Akyol writes with a clarity that is admirable, and the book is well researched. (The footnotes take up 55 pages.) He finds common themes within the Scriptures of the Abrahamic religions, the People of the Book, a term originating in the Quran. Both Muslims and Christians can learn from it. Muslims might see in the example of Jesus inspiration to focus on the spirit of their tradition rather than legalistic or fundamentalist interpretations, or his teaching that the law—whether Torah or Shariah—is for man rather than man (and woman) for the law, or his words in Lk 17:21, “The kingdom of God is within you,” for Akyol evidence that Jesus transformed the kingdom of God—which Muslims would call the caliphate—from a political kingdom into a spiritual one. Christians will be introduced to a more irenic vision of Islam, one that has come to terms with modernity. The fact that the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam have far more in common than is generally known should lead to greater mutual respect and to the reconciliation so needed today.

Thomas P. Rausch, S.J., is the T. Marie Chilton Professor Catholic Theology at Loyola Marymount University. His Systematic Theology: A Roman Catholic Approach (Liturgical Press) and Go Into the Streets: The Welcoming Church of Pope Francis, co-edited with Richard R. Gaillardetz, appeared last spring. The Slow Work of God: Living the Gospel Today (Paulist Press) will appear early in 2017.

The original article may be found here.

 Richard, Anita and Fiona at CEW celebrations 2014

Be perfect, be compassionate

'

For if you love those who love you, what right have you to claim any credit? Even the tax collectors do as much, do they not? And if you save your greetings for your brothers, are you doing anything exceptional? Even the pagans do as much, do they not? You must therefore be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect.’

Matthew 5:46-48

Which teacher among us has not had an aching heart when confronted with a child in our class who has been neglected, emotionally, physically or sexually abused (and the statistics themselves are numbingly appalling, see: Child abuse and neglect statistics). Who among us has not been shaken by the catalogue of crime and betrayal within our Church, our community and our families, nor felt the shame, the terror and helplessness as victim after victim dislodged the inexorable lifelong pain before courts, commissions, committees, bearing the brutality of their perpetrators, the cross examination and dismissal by administrators, bishops, principals, departmental heads, judges and politicians.

There can be no turning back, no consolation, no resolution that will undo a child's worst nightmare. The damage is done.

The statistics don't lie. In Australia in 2014-2015 there 56,423 substantiated cases of harm caused to children (there were 320,169 notifications). Despite the Royal Commission and universal public awareness the numbers grow year by year.

Jesus' review of the Levitical precept - You must love your neighbour as yourself (Leviticus 19:18) - is the most critical challenge for Christians, for all human beings everywhere. It is no hardship to love those who love you. And yet the 1.38 million notifications to child safety authorities over 5 years clearly indicate our failure to love our own children. Then we have elder abuse, abuse of those with disabilities, spousal abuse and the self-abuse of alcohol, drugs, self-harm. We struggle to love ourselves sometimes.

Has Jesus set the bar too high? Is our aim to be perfect like our heavenly Father unreachable? Much scholarship has been put into discerning Luke's compassionate and Matthew's perfect. To be perfect, is of course, to be like the Father, and that of course means to be compassionate. Is it so hard to love and care for those in our families? Is it really too much of an ask to expect us to be interested in or concerned about others without thinking we are being busybodies or is it too onerous a duty to speak up and speak out when we see or know cruelty being metered out to the vulnerable and voiceless.          

Australia's various parliaments have legislated teachers and others a mandatory responsibility to report, and while this is admirable, one could ask why giving a hoot about others had to be legislated for. The Church's failure to prevent, halt, fix and accept responsibility is symptomatic of our communal loss of humanity.

For those who stand before a classroom of students, the call to be perfect, to be compassionate, to be responsive to and sensitive to the pain these students may carry is truly loving one's neighbour. Don't for a second underestimate the impact you may have or the difference you might make.

Peter Douglas

   

 The horror of the past 

     

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

by Francis Sullivan, Truth Justice and Healing Council

The release of the data this week into the extent of clerical child sexual abuse in the Australian Catholic Church has been both a statistical and spiritual ground zero for millions of people around Australia and around the world.

It has had a devastating impact on the survivors of abuse, on ordinary Catholics and on the broader community.

As I said in my statement to the Commission on Monday the numbers are shocking, tragic, indefensible and an indictment on both the men who perpetrated the abuse and the leaders at the time who covered up these crimes and turned their heads.

Much has been said and written about the data since Monday so there is little I can add, but to reiterate the clear message that while words are important the commitment of the Catholic Church in Australia to correcting the appalling failures of the past can only be measured through actions and continued vigilance.

We must continue to acknowledge the past, to accept responsibility, to understand the damage that has been done to survivors, to make the changes and to work tirelessly to ensure the abuse never happens again.

10 February 2017

Click here to read to find the Church's response to the Royal Commission that was read to the Commission by Francis Sullivan on 6 February 2017.