Jesus' Pharmacy

On the Cross, Jesus assumes the place of sinners.

     On the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, the liturgy focuses on this mystery, emphasizing how total is Jesus’ solidarity with us sinners: Jesus becomes a curse. The solidarity is at the level of being, not just of consciousness, so much so that later tradition will clarify that Jesus becomes like us “in all things but sin”: a jejune characterization if it were not for the fact that Jesus’ solidarity with us, in our state of waywardness, is total.

     At matins, we pray: “Christ has delivered us from the power of the law’s curse by Himself becoming a curse for us, as it is written: ‘Accursed is anyone who is hanged on a tree.’”

     Jesus becomes a curse. And the lectionary doubles down on this theme, by placing before our eyes the remedy God the Father provides to heal those who are bitten by the serpents sent as punishment for ingratitude and the failure to trust: “Moses accordingly made a bronze serpent and mounted it on a pole, and whenever anyone who had been bitten by a serpent looked at the bronze serpent, he lived.”

     In Greek, the word for drug, pharmakon, can mean both remedy and poison. What Jesus does is drain the chalice filled with the poison of all the world’s sin and transmutes it into His saving Blood.

     Jesus Himself points to the episode of the serpents in his dialogue with Nicodemus: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in Him may have eternal life.”

     Saint John explicates precisely that reference with the sublimest summation of the Gospel: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.”

     The Victim overcomes the darkness of the world by suffering all of it, including ignominy, and falling under it, accursed. Love does indeed conquer all, but only by going under. Yet the vindication is real. By the Cross, our falling is the path to our rising.

A Future Full of Hope

Gustav Klimt, Hope II (1907-08)

It is Mary’s birthday, and the world is soft with the lambency of dawn. Even nightfall cannot destroy this softness. The Sun of Justice rises, and our champion will not be overmastered as He runs His course.

        We recently prayed from the breviary the letter Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the exilic community in Babylon (29:1-14). Even in the unmaking of their communal existence, in the reversal of the Exodus, life must be lived, the divine commission to man and woman in the beginning (Genesis 1:28) carried out:

“Build houses to dwell in; plant gardens, and eat their fruits. Take wives and beget sons and daughters… Promote the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you.”

        So it must be for you and me. What antic styles of death-in-life do we undergo as the years toll on! Evading love, being denied love. How hard we are to each other, cutting off, tearing down with gossip. Yet, in the dark passages especially, we must be faithful.

        And then the monstrosities! What was done to the girls of Rotherham, the decapitations of James Foley and Steven Sotloff… These horrors epitomize untold others, under these terrorists, under the barbaric misogynies of ideologico-religious fanaticism or of radicalized consumerism, in the porn industry and sex trade. And, always, the babies destroyed in the safest place on earth. Remember the victims.  Pray for all the poor souls, crushed or dead!

        Today, and for the days following, there is a quiet light that promises:

“For I know well the plans I have in mind for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare, not for woe! Plans to give you a future full of hope. When you call Me, when you go to pray to Me, I will listen to you. When you look for Me, you will find Me. Yes, when you seek Me with all your heart, you will find Me with you, says the Lord, and I will change your lot.”

        Maternal flesh and divine flesh are touching the tortured flesh of humanity. Through His Mother, Jesus comes on and on, in the times of our breaking, the times of our rising.

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

Summer winds down with the feast of the Beheading of John the Baptist, who comes in the Spirit of Elijah. The prophetic mission is to disturb the complacencies of the world by the power of the Word, and the Baptizer epitomizes the whole prophetic lineage.

          What does it take to witness to truth and love when the world, and our hearts, close against the dawn from on high? Our predicament is mirrored in Elijah’s Israel. The people of God fell into an extremity of self-seeking, superstition, magical thinking, practical atheism, predation by the strong on the weak (in commerce, politics, worship).

          Then, “like a fire there appeared the prophet Elijah, whose words were as a flaming furnace.” (Sir 48:1) This was not a happy mission. Think of the father and son in the ruined world of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Xenophon with the Greek mercenaries fighting their way through Persian territory to reach the Black Sea. “I have grown old surrounded by my foes,” David sings. If you bear witness to the reality of divine truth and love, you will be reviled. If you are not reviled, you aren’t doing it right.

          The world is dark; our own hearts are dark. We have but one task: let the Light penetrate us more deeply, and show that the Light is flowing down in starry cataracts. “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” (Mt 3:11) The fire of true and divine love. This love never ceases to bleed for the powerless, for the nameless victims of abortion and euthanasia, for the Iraqi Christians and Yazidis and females and others brutalized by the terrorist state of ISIS, for James Foley and those who lose their lives to report the truth, for all the poor being ground down by daily abjection.

          Christian witness is not bourgeois comfort. John fearlessly tells the powerful what the truth of marriage is. He gets beheaded. But I promise you, as we decline and fall, bearing witness to that limitless love that Jesus wishes to give, the fire of the Spirit will burn more intensely: “O Elijah, enveloped in the whirlwind!” The falling is a rising.

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In Your Light, We See Light

“Late have I loved You, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved You!” Saint Augustine’s poignant exclamation rings out on his feast day (from the second reading of matins).

                The Trinity is primeval-modern, the pulsating Source of the pageantry of the visible world and of the intricacies of personal interiority. The intellectual conversion that was such a crucial stage on Augustine’s way to Christianity involved his insight that, on the one hand, there really is an invisible world, the world of spirit (that of knowing and loving, of personal interiority); and, on the other hand, that created/finite spirit is qualitatively different from uncreated/infinite Spirit. This difference we can call the analogy of spirit. (Hegel fails to recognize this analogical difference in his philosophical pneumatology, which is nevertheless staggering in its power as a tool of social analysis).

                My dissertation director, Father Matthew Lamb, provides the best definition of God I know of: God is the infinite act of loving understanding. That is, God is infinite spirit. Where is life the richest? In knowing and loving. Why are our deepest drives the desire to know and the desire for intimacy? Because God is God, and because God is an infinite communion of love. (The Trinitarian doubling of the invisible vitality of spirit, I must leave to another post…)

                When Augustine attends to his interiority, what does he find? The immutable light of God, the light of intelligibility and love and reality. Here he recognizes the analogy of spirit: what gives life to his spirit, is a higher Spirit: 

“It was not the ordinary light perceptible to all flesh, nor was it merely something of greater magnitude but still essentially akin, shining more clearly and diffusing itself everywhere by its intensity. No, it was something entirely distinct, something altogether different from all these things.”

                He gets it. The “height” of God is real, but it is no mere spatial factor. In fact, the verticality of sky or mountain is the manifestation of an invisible supremacy: 

“…and [your immutable light] did not rest above my mind as oil on the surface of water, nor was it above me as heaven is above earth. This light was above me because it had made me; I was below it because I was created by it.”

The Queen Stands in Gold

Sixty years ago, Pope Pius XII instituted a feast in honor of the Queenship of Mary. Eventually, this feast would be celebrated on the octave of the Assumption. And it is this heavenly Marian glory, following upon the Transfiguration, that lights up these august but waning days of summer, transforming melancholy into the determined initiative to be about the Father’s business of reconciliation.

            My favorite apse mosaic is in Rome’s Santa Maria Maggiore, a depiction of Jesus sitting side-by-side with His Mother on a royal bench, reaching over to crown her. It is different from most depictions of the coronation in that Mary and Jesus sit on the same level. This indicates how humble the divine love is. All Jesus wants to do is share His heavenly glory.

            When the Word, God the Son, becomes flesh, He undertakes all of the tensions that mark human existence. In the social order, the most basic such polarity is that of man and woman. The Incarnation is not sufficiently honored if we do not recognize that in becoming a male, Jesus took to Himself a partner, an associate, for His mission: the Woman, Mary.

            And the point of recognizing Mary’s preeminence amongst created persons is, in the end, to recognize our own calling to participate in the mission, the ministry of reconciliation, to bind hearts together in true love and solidarity. Looking to Mary as Queen, we are comforted, even under the blows that we suffer in life. For all of that wasting away, that seems so characteristic of human existence, the Father allows, and sometimes commands, for one reason only: to try our hearts in the crucible, so that only love remains. Love transcends time; it is eternal:

“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” (2 Cor 4:16-18)

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