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Reflection for April 2, 2006

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Back in the early 1960's during the 2nd Vatican Council there was an air of excitement spreading across the campus of Catholic University in Washington, D.C. Indeed it was influencing Catholic campuses, seminaries, convents and parishes nationwide. For suddenly, thanks to a fresh Catholic appreciation of the Bible and specifically of the New Testament and the courageously intelligent writings of current theologians plus the statements coming out of the Council itself, Catholics were waking up to the fact that the Gospel is about "good news", that the culminating event of our scriptural heritage was Christ's resurrection, his breaking out of the sepulcher imposed on us by lugubrious scribes and inviting us to embrace a less worried, more exuberant faith - to give up feeling continually brow-beaten by an austere and remote God and to revel in the intimacy and graciousness of the God revealed in the healing touch of Jesus.

After so many centuries of worrying about hell as our likely destination, we came to rediscover God as forgiving and the realization of this let loose in us a sense of relief that made us buoyant with graciousness ourselves - grace begetting grace where once worry simply begot worry. The age of our Catholic siege mentality gave way to an age of - well - Catholic toddlers learning (sometimes awkwardly) to walk instead of crawl. Easter Sunday had arrived! But my wise old mentor of those days, Fr. Gerry Sloyan, used to say amid all the excitement: "Let's not forget that Easter Sunday is seamlessly linked to a Good Friday "

St. Paul was among the first to get that message. When he met the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, he was overjoyed. As a strict Pharisee who feared breaking the least of a stern Old Testament God's laws, he now knew God to be a God of absolute grace who had loved us unto death. And the experience of such personal love made Paul not only a better man than he was as a Pharisee but an enthusiast. He wanted to tell the world about this God and free them from the terrors (religious, political, mental) under which they labored. And he expected everyone to become as enthusiastic, as free as he.

But here's where he ran right into his own requirement to experience Christ's agony as well as his resurrection - because people didn't want to hear his good news or trust his experience. Scribes followed him around badmouthing him as a traitor to the "well-founded" image of God as someone to be feared. Even Christians were nostalgic for "credentials" over grace, wanting to control their destiny rather than trust themselves to the mercy of God. Roman governors didn't want a citizenry that no longer feared the Emperor because (for some crazy reason called grace) they no longer feared Someone Higher than the Emperor. Government by fear was the only recipe they knew.

So Paul began to suffer. He spells out a litany of what he had to go through to preach the gospel of grace: beatings, imprisonment, shipwreck, the lash, flight along dangerous highways, criticism from pursuing scribes, criticism from rival preachers. Paul began to realize that he must identify not only with the risen Christ but Christ on the cross if he were to continue to reveal God as a God of grace - that the cross is as much a consequence of as a prelude to the good news of resurrection.

I experience that agony myself sometimes when, enthusiastic over such good news, I go somewhere and find only 10 people (in this 21st century!) ready to listen. It's at moments like this that I experience the agony of Good Friday all over again and find myself identifying with the Jesus described by e. e. cummings: "no time ago / or else a life / walking in the dark / I met christ // jesus) my heart / flopped over / and lay still / while he passed (as // close as i'm to you / yes closer / made of nothing / except loneliness".

-- Geoff Wood