In Illo Tempore: 5th Sunday after Easter

For this 5th Sunday after Easter we are still moving through John 16, Our Lord’s Last Supper Discourse, as well as the Letter of James. Liturgically, we are close to the Ascension of the Lord, when the High Priest, the Risen Savior, entered the heavenly temple where He continuously renews His once-for-all Sacrifice to the Father. Holy Church gives us these passages so that our eyes, minds, and hearts are drawn upward. The Lord assures His Apostles and us of the Father’s love. He teaches us to ask in His Name so that our joy may be full. Surely this joy, Greek chará, is joy brought about by the Holy Spirit, joy that seeks what is above, joy of the Lord Himself: “enter into the joy of your lord” (Matthew 25:21 RSV).

Our Gospel readings always have manifold treasures to unlock. We can entrust ourselves to the clarity of Christ’s own words when the Apostles exclaimed, “Ah, now you are speaking plainly, not in any figure!” (John 16:29 RSV). That “speaking plainly” is expressed by the Greek parrhésia, which here means speech without ambiguity or circumlocution, without figures and comparisons. Parrhésia also means freedom in speaking, unreservedness in speech. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 2778 gives us this definition: “straightforward simplicity, filial trust, joyous assurance, humble boldness, the certainty of being loved”.

Especially earlier during his time in Rome Francis urged people to speak with parrhésia, even to “make a mess”. He seemed to see this as a positive, though rocky, road toward working things out eventually for the better. I am sure that the two surviving Dubia Cardinals have felt filial trust for having submitted their questions in straightforward simplicity. Surely Cardinal Zen, who addressed Francis about the plight of Catholics in China, felt much the same, especially after his arrest and the lack of comment from the Holy See. I am pretty sure that those whom Traditionis custodes was aimed at are still basking in “the certainty of being loved”.

Yet a Christian word remains Christian even when used selectively. Parrhésia belongs to children who know the Father loves them. It is direct and humble, confident without presumption. It is the manner of speech we should have in prayer, and especially in the confessional. It may be that some chief pastors are uninterested in our parrhésia. Our confessors, 99.99 percent of them, surely are. Speak with parrhésia in the confessional. That means good preparation. Good preparation means daily examination of conscience. Before confession, start with James’s question in your own form: Does God see in me “religion that is pure and undefiled”?

Before going fully into James, let us listen to the Collect, which mirrors the structure of the Epistle. In the ancient Gelasian Sacramentary today’s Collect was sung for the Fourth Sunday after the close of the Easter Octave, in other words today. The Gelasian, or Liber sacramentorum Romanae ecclesiae, the Book of Sacraments of the Church of Rome, was assembled from older material in Paris around 750. It has elements of both the Roman and Gallican liturgies of the Merovingian period.

Deus, a quo bona cuncta procedunt,
largire supplicibus tuis:
ut cogitemus, te inspirante, quae recta sunt;
et, te gubernante, eadem faciamus.

O God, from whom all good things come forth,
lavishly give to Your praying suppliants:
so that, You inspiring, we may think things which are right;
and, You governing, we may carry out the same.

This Collect survived the cutters and snippers who pasted the Novus Ordo together on their desks. Those who attend the Novus Ordo will hear it on the 10th Sunday of Ordinary Time, with a slightly rearranged word order. There is first an address to God, followed by a statement of fact about God, and then a petition. In the apodosis there is lovely parallelism in the ablative absolutes and a chiasmus with the verbs cogitemus and faciamus, let us think and let us do. We ask to discern under God’s inspiration and then carry out under His governance the good things He gives.

Bl. Ildefonso Schuster remarked of this Collect:

In the Collect we are reminded that God is the origin of our being, therefore we implore him first of all to inspire us with just and holy thoughts, and then to give us strength to put them into practice. Here we see how little credit we can take to ourselves for the small amount of good that we do. The first impulse, the determination of our free will, the carrying out of the good resolution, all come from God, and we as reasonable creatures contribute only the bare co-operation of our wills with grace, and this, too, emanates from God. This truth which we learn in our Catholic catechism should fill us with humble submission to God and distrust of ourselves, for humility is the foundation of all our relations with God.

Prayer, grace, thought, action, humility. This is the program. Our works are truly ours, because our will really cooperates. Yet every good impulse, every good determination, every good execution comes under grace. Since we are made in God’s image and likeness, our reception of what God wants us to think and do places us within that process of divinization of which the Fathers wrote so eloquently, preparing us for the Beatific Vision.

Now James pulls the same thread tight. “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.” We are not “faith alone” Christians, as formed by the erroneous teachings of Martin Luther and the other reformers. Christians must live an action-informed faith. “Doing” the received Word is the path to authenticity. Hearing and then leaving one’s life unaltered makes us false. The dedicated, self-reflective Christian does not let the Word, Christ, go in one ear and out the other. He strives to take firm hold of the Word and make Him his own. We eat the bread from the good crops God protects and transform it into our bone and flesh. On a deeper level, the Word, Christ, is the change agent who transforms us more and more into what He is, more manifest images of God in whose likeness we are made. This is true of the Word in Holy Scripture as it is true of the Word in the Eucharist.

James uses the image of an image. Ancient mirrors were less clear than modern mirrors. In James’s time, there would be distortions in the uneven polished surface. In our time, mirrors show the distortions that are really there. Holding up a mirror to ourselves remains a powerful way of getting across the daily process of self-examination. We see defects that others see. We are thereby prompted to find defects less easily discerned. God sees them all. God can neither deceive nor be deceived, as we state in the classic Act of Faith. God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. We cannot hide anything from Him.

James says: “If any one thinks he is religious, and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this man’s religion is vain.” The Greek for “bridle” is the fun-to-say χαλιναγωγέω, chalinagōgéō, to lead by a bridle, as with the contraption by which a horse is guided now here, now there, now nowhere. Bridling the tongue requires regulated movement. We need words that are well-reasoned, well-timed, and spoken with the proper tone. Sometimes we must backtrack to correct errors or to say we are sorry. Certainly, we could avoid a lot of problems by tying up our tongues in more situations than we are perhaps willing to admit.

The Apostle then speaks of threskeía, which Jerome rendered into Latin as religio. There is a vast body of reflection in the Church’s treasury about the virtue of religion. Briefly, we are bound to render unto persons what is due to them. When this is applied to human persons, the virtue is justice. Since the divine Persons of the Trinity are qualitatively different from us, we have a distinct virtue by which we render to God what is due to God: religion. The chief outward expression of this virtue is proper worship, as individuals and collectively as the Church. If we get this wrong, our individual lives and collective lives are going to get deeply screwed up. This is what we are seeing in our times in the Church. We have not been fulfilling well, to any great extent, the virtue of religion through sound liturgical worship pleasing to God. Sound worship is a sine qua non for a healthy spiritual life, both for individuals and for the Church.

James then takes us to the other side of the coin. Religion that is pure and undefiled involves works of mercy. He names orphans and widows, among the most vulnerable in ancient society, without income and protection. He fuses the vertical worship owed to God with care for the powerless and vulnerable. You have, of course, memorized the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy. The failure to perform them can have a bad outcome. Do not believe me? Talk with Jesus by reading Matthew 25:41.

James adds that we are to keep ourselves “áspilov apò tou kósmou… unstained from the world”. As you sit with your Bible open to James before Sunday Mass, mark with your finger also 1 John 2:

“Do not love the world or the things in the world. If any one loves the world, love for the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world. And the world passes away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides for ever.”

Religion involves a way of life, leaving that which defiles and embracing that which purifies. Any created thing can become “the world” when we place it on the throne of the heart. The created universe in itself is good, as God the Father said at the Creation. Created things are good. That matter is evil was at the heart of various heresies in the early Church, and traces of that error remain today in certain sects and communities. The danger lies in disordered attachment. The Lord warns us to lay up treasures in Heaven, “for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:21 RSV).

In that same passage from Matthew 6, the Lord speaks about the sound eye: “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is not sound, your whole body will be full of darkness.” In the RSV we have “sound”. In the KJV and Douay-Rheims it reads, “if therefore thine eye be single”. What’s with “single”, háplous? Háplous means simple, single, in the sense that there is nothing complicated or confused in it. Its root suggests a fold. Something without folds is simpler. Complexity, in this sense, implies defect, even evil, as the parallel passage in Luke makes clear when it speaks of the eye as “evil”, poneròs.

In philosophical terms, God who is the greatest good is also the simplest being. Divine simplicity is the teaching that God has no parts, and that His being and His attributes are identical. His goodness, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, and the rest are not qualities that inhere in God. God is goodness. God is omnipotence. His essence and existence are one. We, having body and soul, take things in through our senses, compare them with what we have already received, and then our intellect acts. That is how we learn. It is important that what we are exposed to does not exclude what is good, true, and beautiful, the transcendentals, properties of being, which can lead us to God who is goodness, truth, and beauty in perfection.

If your eye, your means of interacting with the created universe, is simple, you are full of light. If your eye is unsimple, you are going to be besmirched, because created things can keep you from what is above. There is evil in the world. The physical universe has its “Prince”, the Enemy of the soul. It is the Enemy’s constant tactic to place before us that which can lure us away from Heaven, whether by immediate beauty, apparent goodness, or a subtle lie that seems true. False goodness, twisted truth, and ugly beauty are deadly traps. Once they have entered into our minds and hearts, we cannot unsee, unhear, unfeel them.

When we are given this image of the eye and of light, we should be reminded of what the Church, and ancient philosophers before her, advised about custodia occulorum, custody of the eyes.

I will be blunt.

Purgamentum init, exit purgamentum. Garbage in, garbage out.

We should not look at things that are evil or that arouse passions. Our vision is perhaps the most powerful of all the senses for shaping our inward selves. It is common in fallen human beings that we tend to desire what we see. Remember Eve: “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.” Exposure to evil can be a near occasion of sin.

Most of the time, custody of the eyes means willingly avoiding looking at other people and their attributes in a lustful way. Sexual desire can be properly ordered in marriage. We were created with these appetites by God. Because of the Fall they are now disordered. Hence, we must be careful about what we look at and why. Critics of the Church sometimes say that the Church has been obsessed with “pelvic issues”. They may twist the truth that there are more serious sins than sins of the flesh in such a way as to suggest that sins of the flesh are unimportant. See the work of the Devil? There are sins worse than sins of the flesh. Still, the Church and her ministers are right to warn constantly about dangerous sins of the flesh. If you are killed by a relatively small bullet rather than by a thermonuclear device, you are just as dead. Mortal sin kills the life of grace in the soul.

There is also liturgical or clerical custody of the eyes. In the rubrics of the Traditional Latin Mass, priests are instructed to keep their eyes lowered. When processing in, moving about, sitting, turning to say “Dominus vobiscum”, priestly eyes are cast down. This guards the priest’s eyes and yours. We priests guard our eyes from the distractions that a congregation can be for us because, face it, you are so amazing. Conversely, priests should avoid being a distraction for you. You have had enough of Father “Just Call Me Bill” grinning at you over a table altar while pivoting his head back and forth like an oscillating fan blowing hot air. Ad orientem worship directs our focus to the liturgical East, to the Lord who is returning, and fosters liturgical custody of the eyes so that we can focus on what is important.

Circle back to the Collect: largire supplicibus tuis. Lavishly grant to Your praying suppliants. Supplex is a humble petitioner, someone bent down, folded, low. The recipients of God’s largess are praying people. In today’s Gospel the Lord shows that He longs to lavish His goods and graces on His Apostles, yet He reproves them for failing to ask:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, if you ask anything of the Father, he will give it to you in my name. Hitherto you have asked nothing in my name; ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full.”

Prayer and prayerful grace-informed action, the humble performance of works of religion and mercy, the prudent avoidance of evil, the custody of tongue and eyes, the worship of God in purity and the love of neighbor in deeds: here is a program of life leading souls toward everlasting bliss. Ask. Receive. Think what is right. Do what is right. Speak plainly to God, especially in confession, from the certainty of being loved. Then, with the help of grace, live before God and neighbor a religion that is truly pure and undefiled.