The Tomb Proclaims: an Easter Reflection

This reflection was published in Give Us This Day, April, 2015.  Reprinted with permission of The Liturgical Press

On that first morning of the week, day breaks into chaos. Sorrow, joy, disbelief, and hope fight out rival claims to the first disciples’ hearts as rumors and stories chase one another through the community. No wonder the accounts clash! Amid the confusion, though, one irrefutable fact stands out: The tomb is open. And it is empty.

Explanations spring up like weeds. The ubiquitous “they” have carried Jesus off, says Mary Magdalene to a doubtless amused “gardener.” Not any “they,” claim the guards assigned to prevent that very thing. His own disciples stole the body away in the night, they say, their employers’ bribe jingling in their pockets. But no, counter some of the women. He met us. He talked to us on the road. He’s alive. As more and more voices add to their chorus, and tales of Jesus’ appearances multiply, the tomb begins to fade into the background of this week’s Gospels, and the witnesses move elsewhere.

But still the tomb stands open. And still it is empty.

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem contains an empty spot venerated as its very site since the fourth century. But the point is not a place back then or over there somewhere. The point is the tomb’s proclamation of Easter here and now.

From the Israelites in the desert to the Pharisees in Jerusalem, God has lamented our human habit of burying ourselves not in the ground but in the stone caskets of hardened hearts. God calls to us still today in Psalm 95, often prayed at the beginning of the Church’s Morning Prayer: Don’t do it again! “Harden not your hearts as at Meribah, as on that day at Massah in the desert . . .” when Israel, fresh out of Egypt, refused to trust that God would do anything about the hunger and thirst that were killing them. They could not imagine that God would summon a future for them out of the desert wastelands, even though they had seen the sea open at their feet. And where imagination is locked in a box, hope suffocates and dies.

In the Gospels, Jesus grieves over the Pharisees. Their hearts have hardened into whitewashed sepulchers, filled with the bones of their dead forebears’ hopes. The prophets had fueled those hopes with the promise of a new covenant. Its laws would be written not on stone tablets but in human hearts. But Jesus’ present hearers have shut their eyes, ears, and hearts to any possibility that God might break out of their own stone-carved rules, even when the new law made flesh in their midst raises the dead to life before their very eyes.

We know them, the Israelites and the Pharisees. We know what it is to seal ourselves into stubborn refusal of Christ’s invitation to come out of the habits of mind and spirit that are slowly destroying us. We are afraid, as the disciples were afraid behind their locked doors on Easter night. We dare not hope any more than they did that God will overcome the invisible enemies threatening us with suffering and death.

Yet still the tomb stands open. And still it is empty. It announces that no tomb can hold us now, not even our selfmade sepulchers, unless we choose to stay. When our imagination fails and hope withers, the tomb proclaims in silent boldness that all things are possible with God.

Alleluia!

Sister Genevieve Glen, OSB

Oblate Director

To the End: a Reflection for Holy Week

Crucifix in Abbey Refectory

 [Jesus] loved his own in the world and he loved them to the end. (John 13:).

Nice thought, true of many good people, we might say.  Until we pay attention to the whole story.

No one questions that Jesus loved his own in the world.  Where matters get tangled is when we turn “his own” into a neat box with the disciples, and by extension all disciples, ourselves safely inside and everyone else locked out.  

Jesus did love his disciples.  The warmth and intimacy of John 13-15 make that very clear.  But he didn’t stop at the boundaries marking off the twelve, or the seventy-two, or even the hangers on.  Jesus loved them all.  He loved the friends who accompanied him, the crowds who drained him, the suffering who counted on his power to save them from their plight.  And he didn’t stop with those who needed him.  He loved Jerusalem and wept over those of its people who refused all his efforts to gather them in as a hen gathers her chicks.  That startlingly tender image makes it clear that his love was always deeply personal,  even when it was not returned.  And he didn’t stop with the anonymous populations of the city.  

His failure to stop becomes more and more incomprehensible to us as the story unfolds. He loved even those who fought him tooth and nail over his upsetting message.  He loved the angry little knot of leaders who condemned him, men who could have held such promise.  He loved Pilate, who had a glimmer of the truth and refused it for his own political safety.  He loved the crowds who hollered for his crucifixion, though they were mostly his own people, and crucifixion was an alien barbarity imported by the Romans.  He loved the soldiers who whipped him, forced rough thorns onto his head, mocked him, and led him pitilessly to the place of execution under the weight of an unbearably heavy cross.  They were doubtless all strong men, but it was a bystander they forced into helping him.  He loved the crowds assembled for the spectacle of crucifixion.  He loved the soldiers who threw him down on the ground, the men who drove nails into his hands and feet, the none-to-gentle crew that hauled the cross upright and set it in its place.  They were not ghouls, though they seem so to us.  They were soldiers just doing their job, hardened by years of violence.  They even took the trouble to offer him a bit of wine on a sponge when he was thirsty.   He didn’t love them in the abstract, after the fact.  He loved them, all of them, even at the very moment they went about their terrible task.  He loved them not as an aggregate—“the Romans,” “the Sanhedrin,” “the soldiers.”  He loved them personally one by one.

You see, they were all his own, because they were all the works of God’s hands, all part of the distorted human race God set out so resolutely over centuries and millennia to retrieve from their selfish choices, all potential members of Christ’s body crucified and risen and, in a way we will never comprehend, opened out to gather all human beings into his own being, except those who refuse.  And even those, he loves enough to let them make their own choices, though he did and does go to unimaginable lengths to convince them otherwise. 

Love, said St. Thomas Aquinas, is not about fuzzy feelings.  Love is willing the good of the other.  To will a good means to go to every length possible to bring it about.  And Jesus did. And does.

As we read the Passion accounts this week, and remember the events they recount, we may ourselves think ill of the “enemies,” from the relative safety of our assurance that we belong to “his own,” and they, of course, do not.  What is nearly impossible for us to imagine is that they do.  From our perspective, what they did gave him every reason to strike them all down in retaliatory rage.  We would have found it satisfying if he had.  We like to see the good win and the villains come to grief at the end of the story.  But Jesus did them no harm at all.  No doubt the evil at work everywhere in the story did its best to tempt him to hate them enough to wreak havoc on them.  Perhaps that was his final temptation.  If so, he refused it to the end.  “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

We cannot even stand back in remote admiration at so remarkable  a choice.  That’s a luxury he denied us himself.  “Love your enemies,” he says, “and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44).  And, this week, shows us what he meant.

Some days, I wish he hadn’t.

Note:  St. Benedict articulates all the demands of love, mostly through extensive Scripture quotations, in Chapter 4 of the Rule, “The Tools of Good Works.”

Copyright 2015 Abbey of St. Walburga

Sheep, Goats and Shepherd: Monday of the First Week of Lent

Today's Gospel is a familiar but scary story from Matthew 25.  The scene is set for the Last Judgment.  A throne is set center stage.   To a fanfare of trumpets (Matthew forgets to mention that), the Son of Man arrives bathed in the living fire the bible calls "glory."  Angels accompany him, all looking stern for the occasion.  The nations are all gathered before the throne for judgment.  You know this isn't going to be fun.  Roll is called.  The final sorting begins.  With no explanations, the Judge divides the vast flock into sheep and goats, like a Shepherd.  The mention of a Shepherd gives us hope--the Shepherd is a good guy in Psalm 23 and in John's Gospel.  We calm down a little.  The sheep are gathered over on the right, and the goats are sent to the left.  The sheep are given a push toward the gate over which the sign says, "Blessed."  The goats begin to get excited.  "Wonder what our gate will say?  "Rewarded?"  "Best?"  After all, goats are very useful creatures. 

But the sheep hold up the process.  They're confused.  "Why 'Blessed'," they ask. They don't remember ever doing anything particularly great. The answer surprises them. Apparently as human beings they fed the Judge when he was hungry, gave him a drink when they found him thirsty, clothed him when they saw him naked, visited him when he was sick or in prisone, and generally treated him kindness and generosity in his times of need.  They're a little confused.  They're murmuring behind their hands, "But I never saw this guy before in my life!"  And he explains that whatever they did for human beings in need, even street people and addicts and irritating neighbors and anyone else who seemed unimportant in life, they did for him.

At this point, the goats start to get a little nervous.  They've never seen the Judge before either, but they can't remember ever doing all those good works for which he praised the sheep.  Maybe they did something else just as good?  They certainly didn't treat anyone badly!  But sure enough, they get sent off into the neighborhood where the devil and his angels are already toasting in the fire.  Why?  Precisely because they didn't do the good works attributed to the sheep.  And the one they didn't do them for turns out to be the Judge.  

That's the parable's double punchline:  whatever we did or didn't do for "the least," we did or didn't do for Christ, and our deeds and neglects are what determine our future, not all the pious stuff we thought really counted.  The story is meant to scare us out of our complacency into paying attention what we have done for others and what we have neglected to do, especially to those we maybe thought didn't count for much.

But I can't help stopping to think about the Shepherd, the one left sitting on the throne when the flock is gone.  Surely the Shepherd cared about all those sheep and goats, tried to find them and rescue them when they were lost, hooked them back from cliff edges they wandered too close to, got them into green pastures beside fresh waters whenever he could, accompanied them safely through the valley of the shadow of death, protected them from wolves and lions.  He speaks to the goats sternly during the judgement scene, but when they're gone to their fate and he's left behind, does he sit on that throne grieving the ones he has lost?

That thought puts me in mind of St. Benedict.  In the Rule, he admonishes us pretty sternly at times about good behavior according to the gospel.  In the Prologue, he threatens us with a dark future if we don't get busy with the works of obedience:  "In his goodness, he has already counted us as his sons, and therefore we should never grieve him by our evil actions. With his good gifts which are in us, we must obey him at all times that he may never become the angry father who disinherits his sons, nor the dread lord, enraged by our sins, who punishes us forever as worthless servants for refusing to follow him to glory" (Prologue 5-7).  Throughout the Rule, he alternates between encouragement and dire warnings, with an obvious sense of urgency that surely reflects the great Shepherd. 

I don't like the grim bits.  I don't like being scared with the threat of a stern Judge--I'm pretty good at imagining that for myself.  I like the encouraging words, the images of hope, the pushes and tugs with which Christ's love moves me somehow toward what St. Benedict calls the tent of his kingdom, at the top of that mountain that the Book of Revelation makes look so inviting.  But sometimes, from stories like this one about the sheep and the goats,  I get a glimpse of how much love it takes for the Shepherd, whether Benedict or Christ himself, to try to shake me out of my invariable tendency to choose that broad straight flat road that does NOT lead to the mountaintop, even if his urgency makes him sound harsh.  In the Shepherd's book, harshness now isn't attractive even to him, but it sure beats the grief that awaits him if even one goat has to walk off through that second gate, tail down, feet dragging, misery engulfing every fiber of his being.  After all, the Cross was a pretty harsh measure, especially for him.  But that didn't stop him.

Copyright  2015, Abbey of St. Walburga

Thursday after Ash Wednesday (Short Reflection)

 During Lent, watch the blog for occasional short reflections.  The easiest way to do that is to sign up for email notification of changes to the blog (see side panel).  These are fairly spontaneous, so be kind to mistakes!

The first reading for Mass in the Roman Catholic Lectionary for today is from the Book of Deuteronomy 30:15-20  Here, Moses sets before us the essential choice we are asked to make for Lent:

  See, I have today set before you life and good, death and evil.   If you obey the commandments of the LORD, your God, which I am giving you today, loving the LORD, your God, and walking in his ways, and keeping his commandments, statutes and ordinances, you will live and grow numerous, and the LORD, your God, will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.   If, however, your heart turns away and you do not obey, but are led astray and bow down to other gods and serve them,   I tell you today that you will certainly perish; you will not have a long life on the land which you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.   I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live,   by loving the LORD, your God, obeying his voice, and holding fast to him. For that will mean life for you, a long life for you to live on the land which the LORD swore to your ancestors, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give to them.

Lent is the road we walk in Christ's footsteps through all the small deaths required to shed the less-than-useful habits we've acquired into at least a foretaste of the abundant life to come (cf. John 10:10).  Here, at the beginning of this season, we stand at a crossroads: the narrow road that leads to life or that nice, flat, wide, smooth road that has a different destination (Matthew 7:13-14).  Moses has pounded a signpost in front of us with two arrows: "This way life!" and "This way death!"  Pretty definite.

The road to life is laid out according to God's commandments, those itchy words of love that so easily chafe us when we would rather be doing one of the "thou shalt not's"--and how inviting they sometimes look!  But Moses begins with the First Commandment, which is not one of the ten carved on the stone tablets on Mount Sinai.  It is one of the most frequent commandments God gives in Scripture.  Benedictines recognize it immediately.  It is "Listen!"

Before we make all those choices Benedict lays out in Chapter 49 of the Rule about "devoting ourselves to prayer with tears, to reading, to compunction of heart and self-denial" and "we will add to the usual measure of our service something by way of private prayer and abstinence from food or drink.... let each one deny himself some food, drink, sleep, needless talking and idle jesting," let's spend time sitting down and listening.  

Listen to what experience has taught you since last Easter about which choices further the trip along the road to life and which ones don't.  Listen to your mistakes.  Listen to your good decisions.  Listen to what others have said to you when they didn't intend to be giving you directions.  Listen above all to the Voice of God threaded through all those experiences, helping you to sort them out.  You'll be much better able to decide then what to emphasize during Lent, what to drop from your life, what to throttle back and where to go full speed ahead, what baggage you can leave behind at the crossroad.

We often speak of Lent as a journey.  Benedict offers us some ideas about where we are headed, as Moses does.  

Blessed traveling!

Seasons of Hope

As January winds down toward February, we stand midway between New Year's Day and Ash Wednesday. Summer is a memory, spring a distant daydream. Is hope out of season amid the cold grays and browns of winter?

So accustomed have we become to labeling Advent "the season of hope" that we're unprepared to recognize other seasons that could claim the same title. What are New Year resolutions but acts of hope? Or Lenten resolutions?

Every year late December and early January bring us memory's roundup: best pictures of 2014, most significant events of…, most important people of.., top box office winners, Golden Globe nominees, Oscar contenders. We have our personal memory albums too, whether we assemble them consciously or not. Advent tried to teach us that hope builds on memory. Israel's hopes for the Messiah to come grew most eloquent when the great prophets stood in the ruins of a vanquished Jerusalem and remembered the glory days of King David-- then forged images of a new shoot sprung from the dead stump of Jesse, David's father, a new kingdom of peace and justice spread even beyond David's borders, a new and greater conqueror and ruler, anointed as David was, but this time one whose reign would bring peace and justice to those who had known neither. "Christ," as you may remember, means "anointed."

New Year's or Lenten resolutions almost always look back before taking a deep breath and pressing forward.  They look back to better days, when I was thinner, more faithful to my daily walk, more seriously committed to lectio divina.  Then, if they’re honest, they look back to the nearer days of failure, when I put on weight at Christmas or opted to stay inside because it was cold or found priorities more pressing than daily prayer.  Then they look forward to a thinner, fitter or more prayerful me, square their shoulders, and take practical steps to turn those wishes into reality.  Hope is far-seeing, unhampered by the boundaries of the present moment that blind us to past and future, but it lives and works in the here and now.

New Year's resolutions might focus on physical betterment, social betterment (I will call my mother every week), work betterment (I'll make that planner I got for Christmas work) or any betterment that inspires us.  

Lenten resolutions, like Advent hope, wade deeper into our history and our future.  They look back at the story of our souls thus far, and they look forward to a two-chapter future lit by the presence of God.  

They look first toward the chapter that opens with Easter, toward the baptismal promises we will then renew, toward a life transformed by our own participation in the death and resurrection of Christ through deaths small or great to the bonds of our own selfish habits of being, mind, or behavior.  During Lent, we make choices now that will better fit us at Easter to claim the name of Christian fully immersed in Christ.  "Have this mind among yourselves, which was in Christ Jesus,” urges St. Paul (Philippians 2:5)--but that will require the same self-emptying, self-forgetful suffering and death that brought Christ to a life suffused and transformed by the Holy Spirit (cf. Philippians 2:6-11).

 

The trick is to recognize that his self-emptying wore no external drama till the very end.  Christmas is too recent for us to forget that Christ began as what looked to most people as an ordinary baby, unless they happened to hear angels sing differently or see exotic strangers present even more exotic gifts on bended knee.  “Amen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3), Jesus said to the disciples.  Later, he said, "“Amen, amen, I say to you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above,” (John 3:3), that is, without starting out all over again as a child with everything still to learn.  Lent is our classroom, the Scriptures and the Rule of St. Benedict our schoolbooks (cf. RB Prologue 45).

And our resurrections, through fidelity to wise Lenten resolutions inspired by our listening to the words of One who loves us (cf. RB Prologue 1), may be as ordinary as a little child tottering across the living room floor into the arms of an encouraging parent.  Ordinary, of course, except to the waiting parent!

Like Advent, which looks toward the arrival of the Child in Bethlehem, but then looks farther forward to the second coming of Christ in glory, Lenten resolutions also look toward the second chapter of our story, the farther future when the tottering child will finally run the road of the gospel in gladness of heart right into the bright glory of life everlasting (cf. RB Prologue 49).  A lifetime of Lents, or a life lived as a perennial Lent, that is a perennial work of conversion, will finally fit us to find ourselves at home in that glory (cf RB 49:1).

New Year hopes, written down in our journals or planners as resolutions toward health or work or relationships may or may not have much long-term impact on our lives or the lives of those around us.  The Lenten resolution, the one made concrete and specific in our yearly promises, is the resolution to grow in love of God and neighbor according to the image of Christ and with Christ's full collusion.  That resolution builds toward a future not only for us but for the entire world, a future that is "far more than all we ask or imagine” (Philippians 3:20) That is the ultimate hope driving all our true resolutions.  And it is God's own hope tugging us toward the fulfillment of God's great vision of a world where “Christ is all and in all” (Colossians 3:11).

Hope out of season in winter?  Never!

Copyright 2015, Abbey of St. Walburga

Christmas Reflection

Christmas Reflection

“Let there be light!”  You would think God would get tired of repeating the same command over and over.  The earth is shapeless, barren, wrapped in the darkness that veils the face of the abyss? “Let there be light!” (Genesis 1:2-3)  Night descends over Egypt at noon?  Over the spot allocated to the Hebrew slaves, “Let there be light!” (Exodus 10:21-23. Jerusalem is blind and drunk, sunk deep in the dark pit of wanton idolatry?  “Let there be light!” (Isaiah 9:1) Darkness and the shadow of death hang over the world? “Let there be light!” (Luke 1:76-79)  

The command never changes, but the light does. Its source remains the God who most often wears a robe of cloud and fire in Scriptures, but the quality of light shifts through the filters of changing circumstance. Into the primal darkness breaks the first light, as yet undivided into sun, moon and stars.  Through the night out of season that shrouds stubborn Egypt breaks the sun to warm and illumine the beleaguered Israelites.  Into Jerusalem’s long season of blindness breaks the light of God’s word to waken the slothful and light their way to life.  But when the entire world is shrouded in death’s dark shadow, God breaks through the clouds in person: not in sunlight, not in word, but in the Child who is the “sun of justice,” the Word who was from the beginning,  the law of love embodied as well as spoken, the light of the world. 

December 25: we are in the neighborhood of the longest night of the year.   The ancient Romans tried to break the iron fist of winter darkness with a festival in honor of the birth of the Unconquered Sun on December 25.  It is possible, though not definite, that the Christian community took their cue from the custom to celebrate the newborn light of Christ. 

At Mass during the Night, in the Roman Catholic liturgy, we hear: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom a light has shone” (Isaiah 9). In the service held at dawn, the proclamation is firmer:  “Today a light will shine upon us, for the Lord is born to us; and he will be called Wondrous God, Prince of Peace, Father of future ages, and his reign is without end” (Entrance Antiphon, cf. Isaiah 9:1, 5; Luke 1:33)  No need to attend Catholic services to have heard this declaration ring out over and over in the “Alleluia Chorus” of Handel’s Messiah!  On Christmas morning, the announcement takes on new majesty:  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be.  What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race.” And the final, ringing proclamation that we are not talking just about the past: even now, even today,  “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it!”  There, we may think, it’s done!  But no, there is a coda, a coda we want almost to whisper in awe:  “And the Word became flesh, and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:1-14). And this Light of the world is still here, Emmanuel, God with us.

How odd that St. Benedict never mentions Christmas.  The Church in Rome had celebrated the Nativity of Christ on this day as early as the fourth century.  Liturgical history for the regions outside Rome is sketchy for the period, but if Benedict himself had never experienced it, surely some of his monks had.  Yet the Rule says not a word about it.

Ah, but St. Benedict does indeed write of Christmas’s fallout: light. The Rule announces the light of Christ that felled Saul of Tarsus to the ground and raised him to become St. Paul.  It is the light that wakens us to the unremitting work of conversion. In the days after Christmas, when the adrenaline from the holiday rush subsides, the to-do list grows short, and the nights are still long, it might tempting to fall asleep amid comforting visions of a warm little stable dancing in our heads, until something new stirs our sense of purpose and energizes us to wake up and move forward.  St. Benedict cries out to us then:    “Let us get up then, at long last, for the Scriptures rouse us when they say: It is high time for us to arise from sleep [Rom 13:11]” (RB Prologue 8).  Look what awaits us! “ Let us open our eyes to the light that comes from God….(RB Prologue 9).

Christmas has reminded us forcefully that the light that comes from God appeared and still lives among us in the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ, as we have seen.  What does this living, vibrant, unquenchable light enable us to see?  As the gospels unfold, Christ lays a finger on every corner of our experience and shows us in action a new way to live where once shadows veiled our path.  Mind you, it’s not always as comforting as the Christmas crib can be when we see there only a harmless baby, sweetly devoted parents, nice clean attractive shepherds carrying cute little lambs, and some colorful strangers from the east bearing exotic gifts.  This light shakes us out of bed and onto our feet.

But we might already have been warned of that at Christmas, had we looked more carefully.  A harmless baby?  Really?  A Child who transforms human history, indeed human being, into the true image of God is harmless? Sweetly devoted parents?  Nothing sweet about what their devotion demanded.  They were ready to shelter the Child on cold winter’s night, to uproot themselves and flee into enemy territory to protect him from Herod’s ambition, to build and rebuild a home in which they won’t be able to keep him long.  The bland Virgin of the Christmas cards became the tower of strength who would let her son go when he must, who would challenge and support him when it was time, who would stand beneath the cross and watch him die.  Nice clean, attractive shepherds with little lambs?  Hard-working people, disdained by their society, they inspired the story of that good shepherd of whom St. Luke would write, the one who goes out into the wilds and looks everywhere to find one lost sheep, perhaps dirty and bedraggled under a thorn bush, and carry it home.  Colorful strangers bearing gifts?  Strangers certainly, prefiguring the races and cultures who would travel far from their native beliefs to follow the light that leads to Christ.  And those races and cultures prefigure all of us, when the light uproots us from the comforts of familiar thoughts and ways to follow the source of the Light.

At Christmas, we have a powerful preview of all those whose lives are transformed by the Light:  the faithful members of the household who obey when difficult circumstances don’t offer much in the way of understanding;  the workers who go wherever the Word takes them to do whatever love requires of them to bring the lost out of the darkness into the light;  the onetime strangers who see the light and follow it down highways and byways to a new way of life.  In other words, we see gathered in the light of the crib obedience, service, and conversion personified. 

None of these Christmas characters were Benedictines.  None of them had ever heard of St. Benedict and his Rule.  But they have something to teach us, during Christmas and afterwards about the Light who wakes us up daily, in every liturgical season, and transforms our hearts through the practice of those very Benedictine values, obedience, service and conversion. 

St. Benedict never mentions Christmas.  At least, not exactly.  But he offers us a way of life that unfolds from the great gift at the heart of Christmas:  “the light that comes from God.”

Copyright 2014, Abbey of St. Walburga

Advent Mountain Climbing

“Come, let us go up to the Lord’s!” (Isaiah 2:3)  Isaiah’s invitation sets our itinerary for the Advent season. Come along, we have someplace important to go!

Why the mountain of the Lord? Aren’t we supposed to be headed for Bethlehem? In the immediate future, of course: Christmas is less than weeks away. Stables large and small are coming out of attics, closets, basements and garages and getting dusted off. Shepherds and mangers and magi are being unwrapped. Lost sheep, lost camels, lost angels are being hunted out. We won’t even talk about the little town of Bethlehem already floating through the air at the grocery store. In Church, we pray, “Come, Lord, Jesus!” But wrapped deep in the memories of Christmases past, we know he is already here, has been for as long as we can remember and longer. It’s very comforting to say a prayer we know has already been answered. It may be the only prayer that carries with it no anxiety, no uncertainty, no bothersome questions. We speak of Bethlehem as if it lay in the future, but we firmly believe the great events that marked it out for its unforgettable place in world history took place long ago.

The mountain of the Lord, on the other hand, lies in the past and in the future. The mountain Isaiah is using as a visual aid for his prophecy is the mountain on which Jerusalem, and particularly the Jerusalem Temple, were built. That mountain is still there, but it has become both a holy relic of past greatness, the Old City at the heart of a thriving modern one,  the center for conflict among religions that Isaiah never knew, the stubborn foothold of belief with blood on its stones, dust in its streets, and merchants hawking tourist souvenirs in its bazaars. 

However, Isaiah takes off from the clamor of reality into poetic visions of the mountain of the Lord as it will be when all the promises have been fulfilled. He paints a memorable picture of predator and prey gathered together in peace: “Then the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat; The calf and the young lion shall browse together, with a little child to guide them. The cow and the bear shall graze, together their young shall lie down; the lion shall eat hay like the ox” (Isaiah 11:6-7)

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Lambs inviting wolves to dinner? Leopards and kid goats lying down together, neither one dead? Bears and lions grazing on grass and hay, with cattle as their table companions? Really? What has to happen for that dream to come true? Not surprisingly, what must happen is conversion. Surprisingly, the conversion doesn’t turn wolves into lambs (or lambs into wolves, for that matter), lions into calves, bears into cows. No one has to turn into what she or he is not. What changes is relationships: the animals remain the same animals, but the roles of predator and prey disappear. God, speaking through the prophet, sums it up succinctly: “They shall not harm or destroy on all my holy mountain” (Isaiah 9:9a).

Wolves, lions, and bears won’t starve on God’s mountain, mind you. No one will. God will provide a new menu: “On this mountain the LORD of hosts will provide for all peoples a feast of rich food and choice wines, juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines” (Isaiah 25:6).

This culinary imagery captures in a few words a radical shift in cosmic food service. The Second Letter of Peter describes evil as the fiercest of predators: “Your opponent the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion looking for [someone] to devour” (2 Peter 5:8).  C.S. Lewis expands this image into senior demon Screwtape’s description of the philosophy of hell to his nephew, junior demon Wormwood: “Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same. With beasts the absorption takes the form of eating; for us, it means the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a stronger.” In this context, “us” includes Satan and all his demonic minions. We, of course, would never do such a thing. But Screwtape sums up the demonic dietary philosophy in a single sentence that skewers us to the wall as we’re trying to disown the image: “To be is to be in competition.” Carol Flinders, author of several books on medieval women mystics, says she once caught herself trying to bolster up her sense of self by pointing out (to herself) those who didn't play tennis as well as she did, those who were shorter or fatter or otherwise didn’t measure up to her. Her summary is cuts close to home: “a sense of self is something you build and consolidate over time by defeating or disempowering other selves. … [S]omething very like religious faith is involved here—the faith that I will be confident and secure, and, by extension, more fully a subject and ‘human,’ in proportion to the number of individuals I have defeated and disempowered – or could if I wanted to.”

But on God’s holy mountain, this unholy competition of devourer and devoured, predator and prey, will vanish. Death will become an ancient chapter in a closed book: “[God] will destroy death forever” (Isaiah 25:8).  What will bring about this bright new world? “[T]he earth shall be filled with knowledge of the LORD, as water covers the sea” (Isaiah 11:9). God complains now that “my people do not know my ways,” (cf Psalm 95:10)  but when we reach the mountaintop, we will. Knowledge of God includes intimate knowledge of God’s ways. Remember that “knowledge” in the bible is not a phenomenon of the mind but a communion of being. We will know God and know God’s ways and recognize that they are our ways too, we who are made in the divine image. So we will no longer be driven by a twisted sense of survival to devour one another, because God doesn’t. On the contrary, God will feed us all on a menu that “rich food” and “fine wine” don’t really quite capture. Part of Jesus’ job is to reveal the Father to us not merely by speaking explanatory words but by doing as God does. And Jesus nourishes us with his own very life. (cf. John 6). Now there is a menu no cordon bleu can ever surpass!

But why is the prophet tickling our imagination with pretty pictures of idylls and feasts? What do lions and lambs and groaning festal tables have to do with your life and mine in the nitty gritty where we live? These passages from Isaiah, and more like them, are set before us during Advent to force noses from grindstones and eyes from the dirty sidewalk with stabs of hope that force us to look up and look ahead. These flashes are the carrot and stick that drive Advent hope: here is what awaits you; what are you doing now to make yourself and your world ready?

Hope is not an escape from today but the energy God gives us clamber up the mountain toward tomorrow. Most of humanity has a desire for peace tucked into pockets somewhere deep in the mind. Most of us yearn for what the prophet promises. We might have other pictures for it, we might be plagued with doubts about whether or not it can ever happen, we might struggle with temptations to sit down on the nearest rock and take a nap, but the prophet goads us: climb!

Wait a minute!  What about Bethlehem? The Christmas story-- an earthquake wrapped in yet other comforting images of a devoted couple beside a manger, angels caroling in winter skies, shepherds trudging in from the fields to see the sight--is base camp for our climb. Soon now, we will stop there for a week or two. We might think we’re taking time out from the arduous work of scaling that ever-inviting, ever-receding mountain, but Christmas is far more than a vacation from school and work, a truce in wars as small as the family and as large as the world. Christmas is where we meet once again the most important person in the whole story, the One who will lead and accompany us every inch of the way: Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, God-(climbing) with-us.

Notes

C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (HarperCollins e-books; © 1942, 1996, C . S. Lewis Pte. Ltd) 94.

Carol Lee Flinders, At the Root of This Longing (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998) 294.

©2014, Abbey of St. Walburga