The Cave Dwellers

Gospel: John 3: 16-21

Audiences are shocked to hear Jesus say that people prefer darkness to light.  Surely this cannot be true.  Readers have the same reaction when they read Plato's Allegory of the Cave.  How could those people in the cave prefer their existence in darkness and chains to the world of freedom and light?  Jesus and Plato must be absolute pessimists about human beings to believe and assert that the majority of us prefer darkness and chains to light and freedom.

Yet, how do people accustomed to darkness react when they are brought outside into the light? Their entire body revolts at the experience.  The pain and length of time it takes to adjust is just too much.  We like our violence, our hatred of the foreigner and outsider.  We love those who hold us in captivity, giving them our money for sports stadiums and entertainment venues while we neglect the needs of the poor and uneducated and sick.  

We forget that the world executed both Socrates and Jesus, those who would hold up the light and lead us to freedom.  We forget how often the Israelites wanted to return to Egypt, how often they fell away from the commands of justice from God.  We create illusions on the cave wall to convince us we are good people who are heroes in the story, all while sitting in the darkness.  This Easter season, may we rise from our tombs and follow the Light of the World, the Prince of Peace. 

What is Belief?

Gospel: John 3: 7-15

Modern American Christianity has attempted to convince us that belief is merely the acceptance of the idea that Jesus is our personal Lord and Savior. Or, it is the acceptance by the intellect of certain propositions regarding God and Jesus, or the recitation of some credal formula.  Apparently, we can then go about with our adultery, human sex trafficking, abuse of immigrants, and the mass bombing of children and other acts of genocide around the world.

But belief in the sense Jesus intends it incorporates one's entire life and being.  Belief is not about abstract ideas to which we give assent.  It is an entire way of living.  To believe is to live in hope and charity.  It is to extend mercy and love to others in the same way that it has been extended to us by God.  To believe is to live as Jesus lived as one who healed, liberated, and fed others, in living the Beatitudes of mercy, meekness, purity of heart, peacemaking, and empathy.  

It is much easier to create vicarious practices of ritual that memorialize what Jesus did than to actually practice in our lives what Jesus did.  How often have we made the life of faith more about these vicarious practices than about the actual work of mercy that defined Jesus' life and death! The challenge of faith today is this: will we be instruments of peace and mercy in the world, or will we be apologists for violence, war, and animus toward the poor and marginalized?  

Following the Spirit

Gospel: John 3: 1-8

In today's Gospel portion Jesus states that those born from above recognize the presence of the Spirit and follow where the Spirit urges them to go.  Like the wind, we can hear its sound, but we do not know from where it comes and we do not know where it goes.  We do not even know for certain where the Spirit is moving us entirely.  The life of the Spirit and for those guided by it are ones of complete and utter trust and surrender to its promptings.  

We must beware of those who will claim to know definitively where the Spirit is leading and definitively where it arose in the world.  Such claims arise from all sorts of theological places and camps.  Not surprisingly, they often are aligned with political movements and interpretations of the Gospel that seek only to exploit it in order to maintain and expand political power, influence, and wealth.  These spirits are to be avoided and cast back into the depths of hell from which they arise.

Over the next six weeks the Church has us enter into an extended meditation on the Spirit of God in order that we might listen for its voice in our lives so that we might be guided by it.  It is the Spirit of peace and joy, the spirit of patience and kindness.  It is not the spirit of war and vitriol, nor animosity or self-interest.  In these weeks leading to the great feast of Pentecost, let us seek to be led by the Spirit of God and to invite others to seek that Spirit of peace and joy as well.  Come Holy Spirit!