He opens with some basics about the Synoptic Gospels and their relationships to each other:
Most scholars posit Mark’s Gospel as coming first, with the evangelist writing to a non-Jewish community around AD 70. Matthew’s Gospel, written around 85 or 90 and addressed to a primarily Jewish audience, is an expanded and revised version of Mark, supplemented with other stories, including, for example, the narratives about the birth of Jesus. Luke, though most likely a Gentile (or non-Jew), nonetheless knew something about Jewish traditions when he wrote his Gospel roughly around the same time as Matthew; he also drew on Mark, and also supplemented his narrative with other stories. Both Matthew and Luke also relied heavily on an independent source of sayings—nicknamed “Q” by scholars after the German Quelle, meaning “source.”Fr. Martin concedes that we struggle now with the more paranormal stories such as the Annunciation, and he surmises that Christians always have. Other stories, though, while still miraculous, had witnesses, perhaps too many of them to dismiss them as tall tales or metaphors.
Other stories in Jesus’s life may seem easier to accept, and this may have been true for the early church as well. Why? Because, unlike with the Annunciation, there were witnesses, sometimes one or two people, sometimes dozens, to report what happened. And sometimes, as in the case of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, there were, well, five thousand to attest to what they had seen. That particular miracle is sufficiently astounding to be included in all four Gospels.Again and again, Martin reminds us that perfect faith is rare, if not impossible. Maybe "a certain understanding, even if it remains incomplete" is the best we can hope for.
Recently I read a series of meditations by Adrienne von Speyr, a twentieth-century Swiss mystic, in which she describes insights into the lives of the saints that came to her in prayer. Although she was obviously not in Bethlehem at the time, and although the Catholic Church is notoriously reluctant to pronounce on “private revelations” (experiences in private prayer), what von Speyr wrote about St. Joseph seemed sensible: “Joseph, the righteous man, is involved in something that at first frightens him; he does not understand it. But then grace brings him a certain understanding, even if it remains incomplete.”Writing about the Church of the Nativity, ostensibly built on the spot of Jesus' birth in Bethlehem, Martin focuses on the entryway, a mere four feet high and two feet wide, known now as the Door of Humility. As another blogger notes: "...the tiny doors still help to keep something else from entering the spot where Jesus was born: our own pride and egos."
As I mentioned, you have to kneel to pass through the Door of Humility. That action is a striking image of the life of belief. For humility is the gateway to faith. Without it, we rely simply on our own efforts, without recognizing our dependence on God. Without it, we rely simply on our own reason, without opening ourselves up to the possibility of the miraculous. Without it, we cannot fully enter into the world that God has in store for us.Martin talks about the relentless awareness that, no matter how hard we try not to, we still sin. Some smaller sins, some larger ones, but we continue to do wrong. He doesn't suggest that we flagellate ourselves constantly, though, but rather see it as a prompt for humility.
The early church fathers called this “compunction,” the recognition of one’s sinful tendencies. The love of God pierces the heart (compunctio in Latin means “puncture”) and helps us to recognize our need for conversion. Every day our human nature humbles but does not humiliate us, gently and naturally. No effort or great penances are required for us to experience our limitations and taste our sinfulness, both of which lead us to recognize our constant need for God. Thus it is a grace to know one’s sinfulness.So if Jesus was sinless, he asks, why did he need to be baptized in the Jordan?
Theologians often speak of Jesus as “taking on” the sins of humanity. In his book on baptism, Everything Is Sacred, Thomas J. Scirghi, a Jesuit theologian, compares Jesus’s sense of sin to the shame that parents might feel if their child were guilty of criminal behavior. There is no sin on the parents’ part, but they often feel the weight of the suffering that was caused by their child. As the Protestant theologian Karl Barth wrote, perhaps no one was in greater need of baptism than Jesus, because of this “bearing” of our sins.Shortly after I read The Seven-Storey Mountain (with awe), I heard an interview with James Martin, in which he described how the book had led him from his life in corporate finance to the priesthood. This comment about pre- and post-conversion also affected me deeply.
In Thomas Merton’s biography The Seven Storey Mountain, the former dissolute student turned Trappist monk largely characterizes his former life as bad, and his life in the monastery as good. Of the “old” Thomas Merton, he said ruefully, “I can’t get rid of him.” In time Merton would realize how misguided a quest that is: there is no post-conversion person and pre-conversion person. There is one person in a variety of times, the past informing and forming the present. God is at work at all times.The three Synoptic Gospels tell the story of Jesus being rejected by the people of Nazareth. I like Martin's frequent return to the Greek, which in this case introduces the images of stumbling and being scandalized. (What a stumble!)
...in Luke the mood suddenly shifts without explanation. Matthew and Mark, however, say, “And they took offense at him.” The Greek is eskandalizonto: literally, they stumbled on this. The root word is skandalon, a stone that one trips over, from which we get the word “scandal.” They cannot get over the fact that someone from their hometown is saying and doing these things. They move quickly from amazement to anger. Jealousy may have played a role as well...
Mark’s earlier version is more poignant—you can almost feel Jesus’s sorrow in having to say what he is about to say. In Greek his words could be translated as “A prophet is not without honor except in his native land (patridi), and among his relatives, and in his own house (oikia).” Imagine the combination of sadness and pity he must have felt uttering those words before his closest friends and his family...
Imagine planning to speak to a group of friends or family—people you’ve known your whole life. Now imagine that you’re going to tell them something alarming. Let’s say you’re dropping out of college, you’re moving across the country, or you’re breaking off an engagement. If you know them well, you probably know how they’re going to respond. You can anticipate how each person will react. Walking into that synagogue, the perceptive tektōn [woodworker] probably could predict how people would respond when he declared himself the Messiah. He knew that he would be rejected and even attacked, but he did it anyway. Jesus must have expected that his controversial statement would engender strong, angry, and even violent reactions. But he seemed unbothered by the prospect of controversy. Why? Because he was fearless, independent, and free.
I read this book while I was doing the year-long version of St Ignatius' spiritual exercises, which required me to contemplate an assigned passage of the Gospels for an hour a day. That's one way to come face to face with the strangeness of these stories!
Speaking of surprises, here’s a problem with the Gospels: We’ve heard the stories so many times that it’s easy to overlook their overriding strangeness...
The Call of the First Disciples is one such story. But if you read it with fresh eyes, it reveals itself as an unsettling tale. How could four men walk away from everything—their jobs, their families, their entire way of life—to follow a carpenter who says only a few words to them?Again, Martin's excursion into the Greek enlightens this passage.
The master also makes. The second part of the Greek, “And I will make you to become fishers of people,” shows what Jesus has in mind for these fishermen. The verb poieō (“to make or do”) is the root of the words “poem” and “poetry,” and this passage beautifully conveys a sense of creation.4 After calling them into relationship with him, Jesus will “make” or fashion his disciples into something new and beautiful. John Meier in A Marginal Jew calls it a “command-plus-promise.”It's hardly a modern-day job offer, though. It requires a leap of (or into?) faith.
No. Jesus’s call is—like many calls—appealing but also confusing. As the angel asks of Mary at the Annunciation, Jesus asks the disciples to assent to something mysterious.Indeed, Mark's stories do have a breathless urgency, which is quite palpable during contemplative prayer.
The expression kai euthus—“and immediately”—will occur many times in Mark’s Gospel, giving everything a sense of urgency in his fast-paced tale of Jesus. Decisions need to be made immediately.And this... for those days when we struggle with the idea that the deity considers us as individuals.
And while Jesus calls them together, he does not call them as an unindividuated mob: “Hey, all you anonymous fishermen working on the shore—come with me!” These are individual calls.The concept of personal invitation, personal interaction, even when we think ourselves unworthy, is central.
...the fishermen may have wanted to join Jesus, but did not feel worthy of the task. They may have been attracted to Jesus’s message, but unsure if he would accept them as followers. Perhaps each felt that someone who was “just a fisherman” wouldn’t be welcome. Jesus gave them the chance with his personal invitation.Again, the strangeness of these stories is amplified when we learn of the Jewish culture in that time and place.
...many sources note that in Jesus’s time it was unusual for a rabbi to seek out disciples. John Donahue told me, “In the rabbinic tradition, a student approaches a rabbi and asks to become a disciple. In the Greco-Roman world also potential students sought out a teacher.” But here the teacher does the inviting. And it is much more than a call; it is close to a command, brooking no dissent. Jesus doesn’t say, “Would you like to follow me?” but “Follow me.” And he offers them a tantalizing and mysterious promise—to “fish for people.”So why on earth would they leave their boats, nets, and family to follow a stranger who said merely, "Follow me"?
Why did they say yes? Perhaps because they were ready. Jesus of Nazareth may have come at a time when each was ready for something new. Peter, Andrew, James, and John may all have known that it was the right time to begin a new chapter in their lives. The ancient Greeks had two words for time: chronos, the tick-tock chronological time that we are more familiar with; and kairos, the right or opportune moment.Each chapter of this book starts with the travelogue aspect, goes on to discuss the scriptural connection, and ends by asking effectively, So what does this mean to me today?
There are many ways of being “called.” Many people think that being called means hearing voices. Or they feel that since they have never had a knocked-me-off-my-feet spiritual experience that they have not been called. But often being called, as my friend from the financial-services industry discovered, can be more subtle, manifesting itself as a strong desire, a fierce attraction, or even an impulse to leave something behind.Again, Merton converted who-knows-how-many by his writing and indeed his mere bearing.
When I was working for General Electric, after having graduated from the Wharton School of Business, I gradually found myself growing more dissatisfied with my work. One night after a long day, I saw a television documentary about the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Something in that documentary—especially the look of contentment on Merton’s face—spoke to a deep part of me, a part that had never been spoken to.Martin displays the self-knowledge that I've seen in other Jesuits. It's not merciless, but it's clear. His call for patience also hit a nerve.
For many years I’ve struggled with a variety of sinful patterns and selfish attitudes: pride, ambition, and a selfishness that is masked as self-care. And I’ve worked hard—through prayer, spiritual direction, and even therapy—to rid myself of, or at least to lessen, these “demons.” But moving away from deeply rooted tendencies is a long process that takes work and requires patience. Conversion takes time.But we are not patient.
A few months later, I was speaking to a spiritual director, lamenting this. Why wouldn’t God heal me as quickly as Jesus had healed the man in the synagogue? Who was God to me, if God couldn’t do this? The spiritual director pointed to a tree outside his window. “See that tree?” he said. I nodded. “What color is it?” I knew he was leading me to an obvious answer that I couldn’t yet see. “Green,” I said. “It’s a green tree.” “In the fall it will be red,” he said. And I knew this. I had seen that very tree in the middle of a New England autumn. It was a glorious scarlet. “And no one sees it change,” he said.I know these feelings all too well too...
Peter’s response is deeply moving. He falls to his knees and says, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” ...
First, unworthiness. Many people struggle with feelings of inadequacy or shame. “Why would God want to be in a relationship with me?” they ask.The issue of conflating God with human authority figures is no joke. I still struggle with it, with the concept of God the Father. Slowly, slowly, I find different images, different words. A spiritual rebranding exercise of sorts.
People starting out in the spiritual life often share a common image of God: the Evil Trickster. Some young adults, for example, have said to me, “Well, I feel God is inviting me to be more loving, forgiving, and open. But I fear what will happen if I say yes.” They worry that they will be taken advantage of by others or that they’ll be labeled as doormats. Or they fear that once they let go of their old ways—whether or not those ways have been effective or healthy—they will be lost. Basically, they fear that by following God’s invitation, things will go wrong. Often this image results from envisioning God the way we see other authority figures. If your father or mother was a demanding taskmaster, you may unintentionally ascribe some of those attributes to God. Likewise, if you have experienced authorities as untrustworthy, you may have a hard time trusting God.Who makes up the crowd(s) in my life that keep me away from God, and how do they do so?
The four men have a problem. They are unable to get near Jesus because of the crowd. This may simply reflect the crush of people. But, as we will see later with the story of Zacchaeus, a short man who must climb a tree to see Jesus “because of the crowd,” the phrase may serve to remind us that the “crowd” can prevent us from getting close to God in a variety of ways.Then there's Matthew 25's parable of the three servants who are instructed to guard their master's money. The third servant, who hides it, claiming to be fearful of his "harsh" master, gets soundly abused when the master comes home. Martin gave me a new perspective on this parable. How often do I "create a master"?
For his part, Donahue surmises that the problem with the third servant is the way he reflexively judges his master, assuming he is a “hard” man, when the master has done nothing to justify this charge. Indeed, to entrust such a large sum demonstrates an almost exorbitant level of generosity and trust. Additionally, the third servant names his motivation for hiding the talent as fear. “It was timidity that spelled his downfall,” writes Donahue in The Gospel in Parable, “which was not warranted by anything known directly about the master.” The servant views his master as “hard” though he had been treated fairly. Falsely imagining himself as a victim, the servant created a situation in which he became “with tragic irony” a real victim. In a sense, the man created a “master” of his own making, rather than letting the master be himself. Perhaps we are to take from this story not the idea that we are to “use our own talents,” but rather the idea that we are to let God be God.And how often do I grumble at the injustice in the world (based upon my own sense of fairness)?
That same lesson can be drawn from a similar parable, in which a master pays laborers who have worked only one hour the same wage that he pays to those who have worked a full day. Many current-day readers also find this parable, usually called the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard, nearly scandalous. That someone working for just an hour would be paid the same as someone working many hours more seems unjust. The story never fails to annoy the capitalist mind. But the master has an answer to those who question him: “Are you envious because I am generous?” The lesson here may be: Let God be generous.
Which leads us to the Prodigal Son. Oh my, how I relate to that elder son! Hey, what about meeeee?
Even devout Christians fall into the elder son’s trap: we do our work but secretly harbor resentment that we are not rewarded the way we should be treated. This point is expertly drawn out in Henri Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal Son, a book-length meditation on this parable. Nouwen, a twentieth-century Dutch Catholic priest, often drew on his own experiences to illustrate a complex Gospel passage or other Christian themes. In his chapter on the elder son comes this frank confession: Often I catch myself complaining about little rejections, little impolitenesses, little negligences. Time and again I discover within me that murmuring, whining, grumbling, lamenting, and griping that go on and on even against my will. The more I dwell on the matters in question, the worse my state becomes. The more I analyze it, the more reason I see for complaint. And the more deeply I enter it, the more complicated it gets. There is an enormous, dark drawing power to this inner complaint. Condemnation of others and self-condemnation, self-righteousness and self-rejection keep reinforcing each other in an ever more vicious way...
Sometimes our inability to accept another’s good fortune comes from denigrating our own lives. We focus not on what we already have, but on what another person seemingly has. And usually our perceptions of another’s good fortune are dangerously skewed: we tend to magnify another’s blessings while minimizing our own, and we ignore someone else’s struggles while exaggerating ours. Thus, as in the case of the elder son, we cannot see clearly. Envy masks ingratitude.Although I'm new to contemplative prayer (hell, let's face it... I'm new to prayer), I've experienced periods of drought and desolation. I've seen myself and others asking, Where are You?
One of the most common struggles in the spiritual life is a feeling of God’s absence during painful times. Even some of the saints report this. Why is this so common? Perhaps because when we are struggling, we tend to focus on the area of pain. It’s natural, but it makes it more difficult to see where God might be at work in other places, where God is not asleep.How do we deal with the more supernatural aspects of the Gospels? Deny them? Rationalize them? Take them at face value, as metaphors, as educational tales?
As Lohfink writes, these types of explanations, which seek to make things credible for modern audiences, reflect a desire to explain away all that we cannot understand. The principle can be summarized as follows: “What does not happen now did not happen then either. If no one today can walk on a lake, Jesus did not walk on water.” Harrington suggests that such an attitude also assumes that historical events can and should be interpreted only through the realm of earthly cause and effect, with no supernatural explanation, and that there are no unique historical figures. When we take this approach, we are in danger of reducing Jesus to the status of everyone else, when in fact he was, as Lohfink says, “irritatingly unique.” It is the discomfort with Jesus’s divinity that I mentioned in the introduction.Jesus likens the kingdom of God to a mustard seed, one of the tiniest seeds there is. But Martin suggests that we need to participate in God's activity in our lives.
...whatever there is, God can make more of it. But first we are asked to offer our loaves and fishes, no matter how inadequate they may seem.One of my favourite Gospel stories is that of Zacchaeus, a short, stout tax collector who shimmies up a tree (dignity? nah!) in order to catch sight of the approaching Jesus. Seek, and ye shall find.
The story began with the image of Zacchaeus seeking Jesus, but ends by saying that Jesus was seeking Zacchaeus. To find God is to be found by God, who has been looking for us all along.One spiritual director carped upon the numerous Gospel references to Jesus' intention to set us free, to help us become...
...the person we are meant to be: our true self, our best self. For some time I had thought about that person: independent, confident, loving, charitable, and not concerned about people’s approval—in a word, free. During my annual retreat one year, I mentioned all this to my retreat director, who recommended that I pray with the story of the Raising of Lazarus. That evening, I had a revealing dream. I met my best self, whom I recognized instantly, in a dream that was so vivid, so beautiful, and so obvious that it woke me up. Now, I don’t put stock in every dream, but sometimes, as in Scripture, dreams can be a privileged place where our consciousness relaxes and God is able to show us something in a fresh way. In my dream, my best self, oddly, looked like me, but wasn’t me. My double seemed looser, easier, more relaxed; he even dressed in a more relaxed way! I knew the direction I needed to travel to become a better person. But I was afraid of letting things go—a need to be liked, a propensity to focus on the negative, a desire to control things.Martin shares a wonderful detail about the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in Old Jerusalem, ostensibly on the site of Jesus' burial and resurrection.
From the modest plaza one cannot gauge the size of the church. On the morning of my first visit on my own, I stood outside and looked at the great door, which itself is an emblem of the contentiousness within the church. Every night at eight o’clock the door is locked by a Muslim guardian (apparently to prevent any of the Christian groups from squabbling) whose family has been entrusted with this job for thirteen hundred years."Father, why have you forsaken me?" This must be one of the most heartrending and troubling cries in the Gospels. But was it a cry of hopeless despair? Martin says not.
But there is another possibility: Jesus felt abandoned. This is not to say that he despaired. I don’t believe that someone with such an intimate relationship with the Father could have lost all belief in the presence of God in this dark moment. But it is not unreasonable to imagine his feeling as if the Father were absent. It is important to distinguish between a person’s believing that God is absent and feeling it.And then we come to Judas, another character I've contemplated intensely. One of the points Martin makes throughout this book is that the more embarrassing a detail, the likelier it is to be true, because the temptation to elide it would be strong. Some have said that Judas' betrayal was unlikely. After all, Jesus was not hard to locate. But, says Martin...
The ignominy of having Jesus betrayed by one of his closest friends is something the Gospel writers would have wanted to avoid, not invent.And why did he do it? Those thirty pieces of silver? Greed is a common conclusion, but flawed.
Overall, none of the Gospels provides a convincing reason for why one of the twelve apostles would betray the teacher he esteemed so highly. Greed fails as an explanation—why would someone who had traveled with the penniless rabbi for three years suddenly be consumed with greed? (Unless he was indeed stealing from the common purse.)Martin embraces this conclusion about Judas' motives.
William Barclay conjectures that the most compelling explanation is that by handing Jesus over to the Romans, Judas was trying to force Jesus’s hand, to get him to act in a decisive way. Perhaps Judas expected the arrest to prompt Jesus to reveal himself as the long-awaited Messiah by not only ushering in an era of peace, but overthrowing the Roman occupiers. Barclay notes that none of the other traditional explanations (greed, disillusionment, jealousy) explain why Judas would have been so shattered after the Crucifixion that, according to the Gospel of Matthew, he committed suicide; only if Judas had expected a measure of good to come from his actions would suicide make any sense. “That is in fact the view which best suits all the facts,” Barclay concludes.Martin invests a good amount of ink in the role of women in the Gospels.
Whereas according to Mark the leading male disciples do not understand this suffering messiahship of Jesus, reject it, and finally abandon him, the women disciples who have followed him from Galilee to Jerusalem suddenly emerge as the true disciples in the passion narrative. They are Jesus’s true followers (akolouthein) who have understood that his ministry was not rule and kingly glory but diakonia, “service” (Mark 15:41)...
The larger point is that the women are depicted as more faithful to Jesus as his death approaches. It is the difference between saying and doing. So it may not be surprising that Jesus appears first to the women.It seems like the first thing we do when suffering sets in is ask why God's forsaken us. Why doesn't God make it stop, end the pain? Wrong question, Martin says.
What does it mean, then, to accept our crosses? To begin with, it means understanding that suffering is part of everyone’s life. Accepting our cross means that at some point—after the shock, frustration, sadness, and even rage—we must accept that some things cannot be changed. That’s why acceptance is not a masochistic stance, but a realistic one... No, says Jesus from the Cross, suffering is part of the human reality. The disciples had a difficult time understanding this—they wanted a leader who would deliver them from pain, not one who would endure it himself. We often have a difficult time with this too. But acceptance is what Jesus invites us to on the Cross.Hopelessness and despair. I've been in that pit, and it's hardest then to call out for help.
Often we find ourselves incapable of believing that God might have new life in store for us. “Nothing can change,” we say. “There is no hope.” This is when we end up mired in despair, which can sometimes be a reflection of pride. That is, we think that we know better than God. It is a way of saying, “God does not have the power to change this situation.” What a dark and dangerous path is despair, far darker than death.Of all the paranormal miracles, the one that so many of us struggle with is the one that is the most pivotal: the resurrection. Was it a metaphor? Martin insists only that the disciples saw something that changed them profoundly.
Some of their reluctance might have stemmed from an inability to watch the agonizing death of their friend, but more likely it was out of fear of being identified as a follower of a condemned criminal, an enemy of Rome. (The women showed no such fear, though the situation may have posed less danger for them.) The disciples, then, were terrified. Does it seem credible that something as simple as sitting around and remembering Jesus would snap them out of this fear? Not to me. Something incontrovertible, something dramatic, something undeniable, something visible, something tangible was needed to transform them from fearful to fearless. To me, this is one of the strongest “proofs” for the Resurrection. The appearance of the Risen Christ was so dramatic, so unmistakable, so obvious—in a word, so real—that it transformed the formerly terrified disciples into courageous proclaimers of the message of Jesus...
In John’s Gospel, the disciples move from cowering behind locked doors to boldly preaching the Resurrection even in the face of their own death. To my mind, only a physical experience of the Risen Christ, something they could actually see and hear (and in the case of Thomas, touch) can possibly account for such a dramatic conversion.The Gospels do not spell out precisely what happened, and they often contradict each other. Martin has found a way to come to peace with the fuzziness.
For me, the seemingly contradictory descriptions (physical/spiritual, recognizable/unrecognizable, natural/supernatural) indicate two things: the difficulty of describing the most profound of all spiritual experiences and the unprecedented and non-repeatable quality of what the disciples witnessed...
Here, at least for me, is another sign of the authenticity of the Gospels. Had the evangelists been concerned with providing airtight evidence, rather than trying to report what the disciples saw, they would have paid more attention to ensuring that their stories matched. But the evangelists, as I see it, were more concerned with preserving the authentic experiences of those who saw the Risen Christ, confusing as they might sound to us.When I was contemplating the Passion and the disciples reactions to it, I could feel so clearly how crushed they must have been. After three years, it must all have seemed in ruins.
“We had hoped” are words of total dejection. Not only have things gone badly, but the months they spent with Jesus now seem a waste of time. The two disciples might be leaving Jerusalem because things turned out so disastrously. Barclay says, “They are the words of people whose hopes are dead and buried.”It's possible, Martin surmises, that Jesus may have thought the same thing on the cross.
It is quite possible that, as he died on the Cross, he thought, But Father, I had hoped that my ministry would be a success. I had hoped. After the Resurrection, Jesus does not forget his human experiences; he carries them with him. And he is still human.Peter, "that big oaf!" as my spiritual director says, is a wonderful illustration of transformation.
Notice how Peter has changed over the course of Jesus’s ministry. At the Miraculous Catch of Fish, recognizing his own sinfulness, he shrinks before Jesus. He cannot bear his own limitations. At the Breakfast by the Sea, he does not fail to rush to Jesus, even knowing his sinfulness. It is a transformation that has come from spending time with Jesus.This is one of those books I should add to a rotation, to be reread every so many years. (I first read it in the fall of 2016.)
