The Persecuted

~Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account… for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you~

The final two beatitudes roll together and are usually treated together. In general, talk of “the persecuted,” would have reminded Jesus’ Jewish listeners not just of “the prophets who were before you,” but also of the period of intense persecution the Jewish people had not long ago undergone. Only a few generations before Jesus arrived on the scene, the Israelites were ruled by the Seleucid Empire, who had initiated a gruesome policy of anti-Jewish persecution. Antiochus IV, the Seleucid king, insisted the Israelites worship his Hellenistic pagan religion. He wanted them to worship the Greek pantheon. The Temple was ransacked and an altar to Zeus was set up. Observation of the Sabbath was no longer permitted. Possessing a copy of the Hebrew scriptures or having one’s child circumcised made one a criminal. In the worst cases, failure to adhere to Antiochus’ paganism could make one liable to death. None of this was ancient history for Jesus’ listeners. This would have been their grandparents’ generation. The memory was fresh. And it was a memory, we’re told, of when “the land shook for its inhabitants” (1 Macc 1:28).

Above all, though, when Jesus spoke of those who “revile you and persecute you,” their memory would have been drawn to the martyrs of this period. Most famous was the account of seven brothers and their mother who were tortured and killed for refusing to eat pork (2 Macc 7). Each was slowly cut limb from limb and placed into a frying pan while their remaining family looked on. “The smoke from the pan spread widely” (2 Macc 7:5). 

This all took on a renewed meaning for the first Christians, those standing by as Jesus preached the beatitudes. Jesus later told those disciples that, just like the seven brothers and their mother, they too will be “sent like sheep in the midst of wolves.” Indeed, he insisted that they “will be hated because of [his] name,” (Mt 10:16, 22). Certainly this came to pass. 11 of the 12 apostles were martyred somewhere or another across the ancient world. Mark had a rope thrown around his neck and was dragged through the streets of Alexandria. Peter was crucified upside down in Rome. In total, across the next 200 or so years, some 60,000 Christians were killed by the Roman empire, often in stadiums for entertainment.

These wounds cut deep into Jewish and Christian history. The harsh experience of persecution marks their imagination. But there is something very strange about the Jewish-Christian understanding of all this. Jesus puts his finger directly on it: “Blessed are those who are persecuted.” Blessed. It is the same strange paradox that marks all of the beatitudes. How can we call these tortured and murdered people blessed? How is it that, on his way to be martyred in Rome’s Circus Maximus, Saint Ignatius of Antioch wrote a letter insisting that the Christians there avoid intervening to save his life: “The only thing I ask of you is to allow me to offer the libation of my blood to God. I am the wheat of the Lord; may I be ground by the teeth of the beasts to become the immaculate bread of Christ.” How does suffering persecution ― even death ― constitute blessing, something, as Ignatius frames it, to be desired?

Let’s think about it this way: In his first beatitude, Jesus calls the “poor in spirit” blessed. If you think about it, when we possess none of this world’s joys, we must turn to the next world. We must turn to God. In a paradoxical way, it is then ― completely void of this world’s goods ― that we are most blessed. We are now open to receiving the blessings of God. We can finally hear God’s voice which, more often than not, is muted in our lives by our attachment to this world’s goods. Jesus says it is then that we inherit “the kingdom of heaven.” The interesting thing is that Jesus says the exact same thing in this beatitude ― the final beatitude. He similarly insists of the persecuted that “theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” 

It is the exact same principle. Jesus is insisting upon the exact same idea, but in a more final way. When the Christian and Jewish martyrs were faced with a decision between death but faithfulness to God or a return to life and the goods of this world, they chose “the kingdom of heaven.” Martyrdom is the final, grand witness to the fact that it is better to have literally nothing, not even life, than it is to betray God.  

One of those seven Jewish brothers was offered riches and a position of envy in the kingdom. He was offered every earthly blessing. He just needed to give up his Jewishness. His mother’s response is interesting. It’s not what you might expect. She leans over and whispers in her son’s ear: “I have reared you, brought you up, and taken care of you.” And then she says this: “Look at the heavens and the earth. See everything. Recognize that God did not make them out of things that already existed. So too you came into being” (2 Macc 7:27-28). Here’s what we must see: she reminds him in this moment of who God is. She reminds him that, as much as she is his earthly, biological mother ― the one who has helped to provide for his earthly goods ― God is the one who made him out of nothing. God is the one to whom he owes everything. “Do not fear this butcher,” she concludes. “Accept death” (2 Macc 7:29). Accept that the God who made you is worth giving everything up for, even your earthly life.

It is a remarkable, gritty, even gruesome level of faith. There is a reason the Church honors the martyrs with a special reverence. It is the same reason Jesus insists that those with this kind of faith, along with the “poor in spirit,” are already inheritors of the kingdom of heaven.

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~Anthony Rosselli (PhD cand., theology, University of Dayton) writes out of St. Luke and Ascension Parishes in Franklin County, Vermont. These columns are archived here.

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Those Who Mourn

*Over the next several weeks, I will be reflecting on the beatitudes of Jesus.

~Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted~

We normally associate mourning with death: those who mourn, mourn their dead. We also associate Jesus’ beatitude ― “blessed are those who mourn” ― with death. “Blessed are those who mourn their dead. They shall be comforted. They shall experience the consolation of God. They shall see their loved ones again.” Something like that. This is not wrong. Jesus is, in part, talking about this kind of mourning. But he’s also talking about something much more fundamental. 

“Those who mourn” are not just those who have lost someone. In this case, those who mourn are those who look out at the world and grieve. Blessed are those who grieve for the world. “Woe to those who rest easy in Zion… who are not grieved over the ruin [of their brethren]” (Amos 6:1, 6). It is not a pleasant thing to say, but this world is a ruin ― not just today, in the midst of extraordinary turmoil, but all days. 

We live in a world scarred up by wounds and by pain. The scriptures call it a “valley of tears” (Ps 84:6). Everyday, we move among people who endure extraordinary suffering. Most of them hide it. But when our eyes pierce the façade and see all this, Jesus calls it a blessing.

“Those who mourn” are those who see that the world is not as it should be and weep for it. They see and mourn for those this world has discarded ― the elderly, the aborted, the racially oppressed, the immigrant. “Those who mourn” are blessed precisely because they know this is not the inheritance God left for humanity, and that things will someday not be this way.

On the other hand, in Luke’s gospel, Jesus reformulates this beatitude from the other direction. “Woe to you that laugh now,” he says. “You shall mourn and weep” (Lk 6:25). What startling and harsh words! Nobody has them hanging above their mantle. The point is this: you don’t want to be totally at home in this world. This is a world that runs by the logic of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” (Deut 19:21). The cup of suffering runneth over here. If somehow you rest easy in this world, perfectly content as all manner of agonies and injustices stream by, then woe to you. Blessing comes, rather, in mourning and in lifting the burden from those this world has discarded.

One day, no one “shall hurt or destroy in all God’s holy mountain” (Is 11:9). One day, God will “wipe away every tear” (Rev 21:4). But that day has not yet come. And so Jesus says that the blessed ones are the ones who mourn, the ones who “hunger and thirst for righteousness.” But this is not the whole of the story. 

Jesus closes these very beatitudes by insisting his disciples also “rejoice and be glad” (Mt 5:12). It might be the case that the world has not yet been consummated, that there are one-thousand agonies at each moment. But, for the Christian, after Jesus has walked with us ― after God himself has mourned with us ― the whole story has been rewritten. Christians believe that, on account of Jesus, this heartbroken world “shall be comforted.” Even now, Jesus has left the aroma of redemption upon all things, especially upon our suffering, our mourning, and our weeping. [1] And so, for the Christian, there are so many more reasons for joy then there are for sadness. There is so much pain in the world, so much injustice. But the last word has been Jesus’ word. And so even if the Christian is never quite at home in this world, joy is nevertheless the decisive theme and rhythm of her life. [2] “Rejoice always!” Saint Paul wrote to the Philippians (Phil 4:4). “Rejoice always!”

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~Anthony Rosselli (PhD cand., theology, University of Dayton) writes out of St. Luke and Ascension Parishes in Franklin County, Vermont. These columns are archived here.

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Endnotes:
[1] See Luis Martinez, The Sanctifier (Boston: Pauline, 2003), 313-314.

[2] See Dietrich von Hildebrand, Transformation in Christ (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2001), 464.

The Poor in Spirit

*Over the next several weeks, I will be reflecting on the beatitudes of Jesus.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Without fail, when I taught the beatitudes each semester, some student would ask about the “poor in spirit.” “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Jesus says, “for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Who are the poor in spirit exactly? It’s a little clearer the other time Jesus talks like this, in Luke’s gospel ― “blessed are you poor” (Lk 6:20). We know who they are ― the poor ― even if we’re often unsure as to why they’re blessed.

There’s a temptation to think of poverty of spirit as a kind of timidity or small-spiritedness. There’s a temptation to think of the poor in spirit as a bunch of wimp-chickens. “Blessed are those you can hardly hear when they talk.” You’d be surprised how many people implicitly believe holiness has something to do with how loudly one speaks.

The poor in spirit are the broken of this world. Yes, they are the materially poor, the beggars, the laid off. But they are also the cast down. The anxious and the addicted. They are the heartbroken and alienated. They are the ones whose families have been taken away from them, “Rachel weeping for her children because they are no more” (Jer 31:15). The depressed. The seriously ill. Forgotten and beaten children. Les miserables. The poor in spirit are those who know nothing of this world’s joys. And painfully ― absurdly even ― Jesus says that they are blessed.

This is precisely what makes Jesus a shocking and radical figure. Recall that, when he finished this sermon, the text says “the crowds were alarmed at his teaching” (Mt 7:28). How is it that the world’s most broken can actually be blessed and fortunate?

Let’s exclude one solution straight away. There’s a temptation to think that, when God looks upon these poor in spirit and sees their misery, he will someday in this life wipe it all away and bless them. “Blessed are the poor in spirit because God will eventually dissolve their troubles and give them more than anyone else.” This is not what Jesus is saying. In fact, the Greek word he uses for “blessed” ― makarios ― implies that they are blessed because they are poor in spirit. Indeed, the poverty of spirit itself is somehow paradoxically blessed. It is precisely the place in which, to use Jesus’ words, one inherits the Kingdom of Heaven. There is no getting around the radicalness of Jesus. [1]

So what are we supposed to do with this? How is it that earthly misery is actually a blessing? How is it the place in which one inherits the Kingdom?

In short, when we are poor in spirit, we have nothing. When we are poor in spirit, we possess not a single one of this world’s joys. And so we must turn to the next world. We must turn to God. But most of the time ― for you and I, anyway ― we are not poor in spirit. Most of the time we enjoy the things of this world. We are happy to indulge its services. But the reason we are called blessed when we are poor in spirit is because it is only then that we actually see rightly. Indeed, when we are poor in spirit, that is the moment when it becomes all too clear that this world is devastated and broken and there is nothing that can save us except God. And that is a fundamental truth. And the reason this poverty of spirit is called blessed is because, at every other time ― when we are not poor in spirit ― we simply don't see it. The poor in spirit recognize that there is nothing in this world that can make one happy except God. But more often than not, we think that our jobs will make us truly happy. Or marriage. Or ice cream. Or not dying. Or some other thing besides God.

It's not that earthly goods are bad. They're good. They can be enjoyed "in God," so to speak. But they can't satisfy us in an ultimate sense. They can't save us or make us finally happy. When we are poor in spirit, we know this. Most of the time, though, we do not. Our familiarity with this world's comforts ― our attachment to them ― makes us forget that they won't take us very far. In short, the poor in spirit are blessed because they are the ones who recognize our deep dependence upon God and God alone.

Recall for a moment the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Recall the elder son’s anger at seeing a party thrown for his brother. “These many years I have served you and I never disobeyed your command; yet you never gave me a goat, that I might make merry with my friends” (Lk 15:29). What he wanted was a goat. “Son,” the father replied, “you are always with me. All that is mine is yours” (Lk 15:31). The father is not talking about his possessions: “You are always with me.” The son wanted a goat. “Forget the goat,” the father is saying, “you have me.”

“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Jesus said, “theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” In the Kingdom of Heaven, everyone is a beggar, because everyone has given everything away. They’ve recognized how unsatisfying everything is that isn't God. This is what it means to be rich for Christians. This is the inheritance of the Kingdom of Heaven. This is what it means, as Saint Paul said, to “have nothing, and yet possess everything” (2 Cor. 6:10). And once one becomes poor of human things, one becomes rich with God. In the Kingdom, everyone has given away their goats. They have the Father. “Son. Daughter. You are always with me. And all that is mine is yours.”

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~Anthony Rosselli (PhD cand., theology, University of Dayton) writes out of St. Luke and Ascension Parishes in Franklin County, Vermont. These columns are archived here.

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Endnote:

[1] See Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Fire of Mercy ― Heart of the Word: Meditations on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, vol. 1 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), 183-184.

My Grandfathers

When I was 11 years old, I went to college basketball’s Final Four with my grandfather. As we descended the stairs one morning into the hotel restaurant, I saw Tom Izzo, the head coach at Michigan State. Izzo is the real deal. By then, he’d already won a national championship and been named national coach of the year three different times. He’s since been inducted into the Hall of Fame. He’s been so successful in the NCAA Tournament, they call him “Mr. March.” When I saw him, my 11-year-old eyes got really big.

The strange thing, though, was that when Izzo saw us, his eyes got really big. He stood up and rushed over to my grandpa: “Dom? Dom Rosselli?” They exchanged pleasantries as I looked on, dumbfounded. Eventually, grandpa introduced me. I don’t remember much of what Izzo said. But I do remember he finished with something like, “You know... Your grandpa? He’s the real deal.”

I actually did know. In his time, my grandfather, Dom Rosselli, was a college basketball coach himself. He was more than that. He was a legend. In fact, the very day I trembled in the presence of Tom Izzo, my own grandpa had won 357 more college basketball games than him. 

Dom Rosselli coached basketball for 38 seasons at Youngstown State University in Ohio. He collected 589 wins. He’s one of the winningest coaches in the history of the game. Several different organizations named him “Coach of the Year” throughout the 50s and 60s. He was even named, hilariously, “Italian Coach of the Year” in 1958. Not too long after his retirement, Youngstown State painted “Rosselli Court” on the floor of their arena and, several years later, erected an enormous statue of him outside its door. When he died, it was on ESPN. Flags in the city of Youngstown were flown at half mast. Tom Izzo was right. Dom Rosselli was the real deal.

Growing up, both sets of grandparents were just a short drive away. After the Final Four, we visited with my other grandparents. They wanted to know about the trip. My Grandpa Johnny did not move in the same circles as Dom Rosselli. While Dom was becoming a legend for the city of Youngstown, John Slovasky was making it smoke. For 35 years he worked in one of its famous steel mills. As a kid, I was just told that Johnny had “worked at the mill,” and so I pictured him as a man of the blast furnace and of molten iron, a hardened laborer. It turns out he did bookkeeping in one of the offices. But when the Youngstown steel industry was decimated in the late 70s, Johnny was one of the now unremembered 40,000 who lost their jobs. For years afterward, he wallpapered homes to make a living. 

I knew my Grandpa Johnny as an older man and, as I knew him, there wasn’t much to him. He was a quiet man, a calm man. He was a Buick man. He liked to talk about routes and avenues, about “the construction over on Tibbetts Wick.” He could always remember a good restaurant about halfway to someplace, but he could never remember its name. He hated the New York Yankees, but let his wife do the yelling at the TV. He had one of those senses of humor where you really wanted to be certain your girlfriend liked you before you let her meet him. He liked John Wayne. He fixed things with duct tape. When he died this week, it was not on ESPN.

Neither of my grandfathers were the sit-you-down-and-teach-you-a-lesson type. They weren’t going to leave you a book of aphorisms. The lesson was in the very doing of their lives. Simply moving among my grandfathers ― passing one the chocolate, losing to the other in chess ― was the lesson. It was on you to observe it. 

A few years before his death, Youngstown State made bobblehead dolls of Dom Rosselli. They were pretty hilarious. When I opened up the box, I noticed that Grandpa had actually written on the back. It was autographed. “Coach Dom Rosselli.” I was surprised by it. I’d never seen him autograph something. But it made sense. Dom Rosselli was, after all, a sportsman. Grandpa’s living room had more cups and plaques than did my small college’s trophy room. But even after spending hundreds of hours with the man ― after playing countless games of chess with him in that very living room ― I’d never heard him tell a single story about even one of those trophies. Not one story. That’s why, when I met Tom Izzo, I couldn’t attend to the fact that my own grandpa had, at that point, outgunned him by several hundred wins. In my mind, that’s just not who the man was. He wasn’t “Coach Dom Rosselli.” He wasn’t a legend. He was just “Grandpa,” who never held it against me for not improving at chess.

John Slovasky never autographed anything. He didn't even sign his checks correctly. His real name wasn’t Slovasky, after all. In the 50s, just after getting married, John decided that his original family name was a bit of a mouthful. He should just be Slovasky. But instead of legally changing his name, he just began to fill out paperwork with Slovasky. Who’s going to know? This isn’t significant, right? Eventually his identity was fudged over and he just sort of became John Slovasky. 

There is something very Johnny about that. There is something very Johnny about the simple shrug he would surely have offered if told he would need to legally change his name. This swings several ways. When Johnny was in the war, he was ordered to swim to retrieve nurses into a lifeboat in the Azores Islands. He didn’t know how to swim. “I was told to do it,” he shrugged just the same,

looking around for more chocolates. Johnny’s life was not very complicated. His business was that which was right in front of him. Johnny was sheer straightforwardness. He just, as the Buddhists like to say, “chopped wood and carried water.”

In reflections like these — recalling fathers and grandfathers — there’s a temptation to reflect on the way they embodied some bygone sense of toughness, how they taught you the meaning of strength. Oddly enough, my grandfathers taught me far more about weakness and about losing than they did about strength. Grandpa Rosselli had not a word to say to me about his 589 victories. To me, at least, when he talked about basketball he talked about losing at it. There were a few seasons when Dom Rosselli could have won a national championship. Across a few different divisions, he

coached in 13 postseasons. The year they were the tournament’s overall #2 seed, they were upset in the Elite Eight. There were seven times he coached in what is now the equivalent of the Sweet Sixteen. But a national championship never came. “Grandpa, how many games did you win in total?” I once asked him. He never gave me the answer. “I lost several hundred.”

When he was drafted, Johnny told the sergeant at the draft board that he had no interest in combat. His older brother had been killed in the Army while in France. When the letter came, he had to read it to his mother, who didn’t know English. He had no reverence for war. War was not a moment of strength, but of fear and of trembling. War killed his brother and broke his mother. He never told stories of the war. My aunt had to press the story about the nurses in the Azores out of him some 65 years later. [1]

One of the unspoken lessons of my grandfathers, as I gather it, is that strength is far less meaningful or important than we often think — that the real contours of who we are are formed, not in our strength, but in our failure, our fear, and in our trembling. 

At heart, I am an academic. And as an academic, one of the last things I would ever give up is my narcissism. I’m certain of my call to do extraordinary things with my life, convinced of the exceptional urgency of my projects. But this puts me at odds with everything my grandfathers taught me. Dom Rosselli was one of the best coaches in the history of college basketball. “They wanted to fire me,” he once remembered in an interview, thinking of a bad stretch. “Eh. I could find another job... maybe make more money. Maybe they would’ve been doing me a favor.” As an academic, I’m desperate for everything I do to be taken seriously. Johnny didn’t want to be taken seriously. He wanted to be at home near his wife. He wanted to read the newspaper. He wanted Derek Jeter to strike out.

We live in a meritocracy, a society that insists we must hustle to do singular and exceptional things. A central dogma of modern life is that we have to be strong and independent. Johnny’s later life, on the contrary, was one of physical weakness and radical dependence upon his wife. His world was one where even just sitting and standing were extraordinarily difficult. The insistence that we “not mention those kinds of things” is precisely the lie of the meritocracy, the false dogma that the only beautiful part of life is the part that’s lived in strength and health. On the contrary, Johnny’s weakness was precisely the space in which it became all too clear how much he was loved. In the last months of his life, as my Bubba would help him get situated around the house, she’d sometimes stop for a hug. “Why do you want to hug me?” he’d ask. Screaming, because he could hardly hear: “because I love you!”

Neither of my grandfathers were the sit-you-down-and-teach-you-a-lesson type. They never really told me a lot of stories. They told their stories in the very doing of their lives. It was on you to observe it. As I look back, it seems like their lives taught me the odd lesson nobody ever wants to tell a story about. My grandfathers taught me that the far more significant moments in life are the moments when you lose, when you never win a championship, when you get laid off, when you’re not the real deal. They taught me that, compared to the family itself, a family name is interchangeable, that it deserves nothing more than a shrug, even if it’s memorialized on an arena floor. They taught me that you come into contact with what’s really important when you’ve been humbled, or when your body is broken, or when you’re afraid, and not when you’ve won by 20. Life is very rarely about the impressive stuff ― about blast furnaces or 589 wins ― but is more often about straightforward humility and about weakness. Neither of my grandfathers were the sit-you-down-and-teach-you-a-lesson type. The lesson was in the very doing of their lives. It was in the sitting and in the standing. It was in John Wayne. A good restaurant about halfway to someplace. In 589 wins. 388 losses. 0 national championships. It was in humility. Weakness. And it was on you to observe it.

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~Anthony Rosselli (PhD cand., theology, University of Dayton) writes out of St. Luke and Ascension Parishes in Franklin County, Vermont. These columns are archived here.

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Endnote:

[1] Maribeth Slovasky, Of Lessons Learned: An Interview with My Father

Christ in the Wilderness - 1st Sunday of Lent

Ivan Kramskoi's Christ in the Wilderness (1872)

Matthew 4:1-11
At that time Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert
to be tempted by the devil.
He fasted for forty days and forty nights,
and afterwards he was hungry.
The tempter approached and said to him,
“If you are the Son of God,
command that these stones become loaves of bread.”
He said in reply,
“It is written:
One does not live on bread alone,
but on every word that comes forth
from the mouth of God.”
Then the devil took him to the holy city,
and made him stand on the parapet of the temple,
and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down.
For it is written:
He will command his angels concerning you
and with their hands they will support you,
lest you dash your foot against a stone.”
Jesus answered him,
“Again it is written,
You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.”
Then the devil took him up to a very high mountain,
and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their magnificence,
and he said to him, "All these I shall give to you,
if you will prostrate yourself and worship me.”
At this, Jesus said to him,
“Get away, Satan!
It is written:
The Lord, your God, shall you worship
and him alone shall you serve.”
Then the devil left him and, behold,
angels came and ministered to him.

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One of my favorite paintings is Ivan Kramskoi’s 1872 Christ in the Wilderness. It depicts Jesus sitting on a stone near the end of his forty days in the desert looking utterly broken and in misery. “There is nothing festive, heroic, or victorious” about that Jesus, one art critic wrote. It is hard to believe that “the future fate of the world and of all living things is concealed under the rags of that miserable, small being.” 

Our Gospel reading this week directs us to this Jesus who, tempted by Satan in the desert, is also sleepless, shivering, and hungry. “If you are the Son of God,” Satan challenges him, “command that these stones become loaves of bread” (Mt 4:3). The premise of Satan’s argument is especially potent: “if you are the Son of God...” Don’t we often use the same premise, not necessarily to tempt Jesus, but to plead with him? “If you are the Son of God, cure my migraines…” “If you are the Son of God, heal my father’s cancer…” “...dissolve my depression; stop the wars; contain the diseases.” “If you are the Son of God…” “Are you not the Son of God?” 

In the face of all this, it can be very confusing and painful to see Jesus just sitting there ― as he does in Kramskoi’s painting ― himself awash in the same pain and devastation. Somedays I want to shout into that painting what one of the criminals who was crucified with Jesus shouted at him: “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and save us!” (Lk 23:39)

So why doesn’t Jesus turn the stones into bread? Why doesn’t he dissolve all our troubles? Why is he just sitting there? 

When Kramskoi’s Christ in the Wilderness was first displayed in a public exhibition, many critics noticed that Jesus’ face was painted to look just like the face of the artist. It had the same sharp lines, the same angled cheekbones. It was Kramskoi. Some people were offended. But Kramskoi was not trying to elevate himself ― he was not trying to say that he was as righteous as Christ. He knew that was delusional. 

What he meant to convey, rather, was that Jesus is truly one of us, that Jesus desires to identify with our stories. Jesus has a human face that is like ours, a story like ours, agonies like ours. The larger point is this: the fact that Jesus is sitting on that stone at all ― the fact that God is, like us, a tired and broken human being ― is precisely his answer to all our pleading: he is in solidarity with our pain. The reason he won’t take any food is because he wants to be as broken and hurt as any human could be. God wants to place himself in the fray of human misery, not above it. It is true that God is not necessarily going to dissolve all your suffering, but he will experience it with you. This is what Kramskoi was able to depict so vividly: the migrainous, cancer-ridden, depressed Jesus ― the Jesus who looks exactly like you and me because he is racked with all the same miseries.

We often think of Lent as the time where we participate in Jesus’ suffering in the desert. But ― in light of all this ― it is much more important that we see Jesus’ forty days in the desert as his own exhausting effort to participate in our suffering. Lent is that time where we remind ourselves that Jesus decided to suffer alongside us. Lent is that time where we go back into the desert, not so we can grind it out and earn points before God. That’s delusional, offensive even. On the contrary, Lent is the time where we go back to the desert so that we can see and unite ourselves with the Jesus who is refusing food in order to be in solidarity with us, with all of us who are starving, cold, and hurting.

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~Anthony Rosselli (PhD cand., theology, University of Dayton) writes out of St. Luke and Ascension Parishes in Franklin County, Vermont. These columns are archived here.

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A Pair of Turtledoves - The Presentation of the Lord

Luke 2:22-40 (22-24)
When the days were completed for their purification
according to the law of Moses,
Mary and Joseph took Jesus up to Jerusalem
to present him to the Lord,
just as it is written in the law of the Lord,
Every male that opens the womb shall be consecrated to the Lord,
and to offer the sacrifice of
a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons,
in accordance with the dictate in the law of the Lord.
...

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There is something strange about today’s feast ― the Presentation of the Lord. The reading says “Mary and Joseph took Jesus up to Jerusalem.” In part, their purpose was “to offer the sacrifice of a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons” (Lk 2:22-23). This was a very old Jewish ritual. Forty days after the birth of a male child, its mother would “bring to the priest … a lamb or, if she could not afford it, two turtle doves or two young pigeons” (Lv 12:1-8). So they were simply following the Law. 

But that’s not what’s strange about it. We should also notice that the text says Mary “took Jesus up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord” (Lk 2:22). Indeed, that’s where this feast gets its name: the Presentation of the Lord. Mary and Joseph are offering their child to God. But that’s a little odd, isn’t it? I mean, he is God? How can you offer God to God? What kind of offering is this? What’s going on here? To answer this, we need to reflect on what it means to even make an offering to God. And perhaps it’s best to look at the very first sacrifice that was ever made. 

Do you remember Cain and Abel from the Book of Genesis? Do you remember why Cain killed Abel? Recall that Cain’s sacrifice was found unacceptable: “The Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was angry… and when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him” (Gen 4).

There’s a question that very rarely gets asked about this story. That is: what was wrong with Cain’s sacrifice? Well, if you read closely, you’ll notice that Abel is said to have “brought the firstlings of his flock” for his offering (Gen 4:4). He did not wait until he had a larger and more secure flock to make his sacrifice. Cain, on the other hand, is vaguely said to have made his grain offering “in the course of time” (Gen 4:3). In short, Abel was willing to offer sacrifices even if he could lose much. Cain was not. 

This tells us something about what Mary and Joseph were up to the day they presented Jesus in the Temple. Indeed, here’s the interesting thing about that old Jewish ritual: when a new mother would go to the Temple forty days after the birth of her son, there was no need for her to bring the child along with her. The point was for the mother to make an offering: a lamb if she could afford it, two birds if she could not. But there was no need to present the child alongside the sacrifice.

That Mary and Joseph offered turtledoves indicates that they were poor. But that they presented Jesus along with their turtledoves indicates that they had something far more valuable to offer. And, like Abel, they wanted to offer “the firstling of their flock,” the most valuable thing they had: their son. Indeed, this son also happened to be God’s Son. They could offer God to God. 

In life, it is often the case that we are so sick, tired, broken, and poor that we can only offer God “a pair of turtledoves,” that we can only offer God our problems, our weaknesses, and our pain. But just when we think that all we have are two measly birds, Mary and Joseph show us that it is precisely in our pain and brokenness that we possess the most valuable thing of all: Jesus. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Jesus said. “Theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 5:3). It is by being poor in spirit that we come to possess Jesus, that we find ourselves able to offer him up in a Temple.

And so our two pathetic turtledoves are not so pathetic after all. They are precisely the thing that allow us to make a sacrifice like Abel’s or like Mary’s. Our poverty is what places us in contact with God. Our pain is what gives us something valuable to sacrifice. It’s what gives us Jesus. And so when we offer our measly turtledoves to God — when we offer him our weakness and our poverty, “the firstlings of our flock” — we find that we have actually offered to God something much more than turtledoves. We have actually offered our most intimate contact with God. We have actually offered something akin to Jesus himself.

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~Anthony Rosselli (PhD cand., theology, University of Dayton) writes out of St. Luke and Ascension Parishes in Franklin County, Vermont. These columns are archived here.

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The Lion and the Lamb - 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

John 1:29-34
John the Baptist saw Jesus coming toward him and said,
“Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.
He is the one of whom I said,
‘A man is coming after me who ranks ahead of me
because he existed before me.’
I did not know him,
but the reason why I came baptizing with water
was that he might be made known to Israel.”
John testified further, saying,
“I saw the Spirit come down like a dove from heaven
and remain upon him.
I did not know him,
but the one who sent me to baptize with water told me,
‘On whomever you see the Spirit come down and remain,
he is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.’
Now I have seen and testified that he is the Son of God.”

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Why do we call Jesus a lamb? Why does John the Baptist, upon seeing Jesus, shout to the crowd, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”? How exactly is Jesus a lamb? And how do lambs take away sin?

For an answer, we need to go way back in time. Nearly 700 years before Jesus, the prophet Isaiah recorded a series of poems about a mysterious figure called the “suffering servant of the Lord.” In the fourth and final poem, we read about how this servant will undergo agony and humiliation: “He was despised and rejected.... He was oppressed and he was afflicted.” Yet, because of this, the suffering servant will receive honor, prosperity, and life (Is 53).

What is interesting is that this “suffering servant” is strangely described as “a lamb that is led to the slaughter, a sheep that before its shearers is dumb” (Is 53:7). On top of that, this lamb is supposed to “make himself an offering for sin.” Indeed he is supposed to “bear the sins of many” (Is 53:10-11). 

So when John the Baptist sees Jesus and shouts to the crowd: “behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” we now know the reference. John is recalling Isaiah’s suffering servant — the one who will be despised and rejected, oppressed and afflicted. The one who will bear the sins of many. 

That’s all fine and good. But is there something yet to learn from the image of the lamb itself? Why, of all things, a lamb? 

A lamb is nonviolent. A lamb is meek. They are followers, not leaders; hunted and never hunters. They do not defend their territory. They are silent when they feel pain. This is the exact opposite of another image the scriptures sometimes use to describe Jesus: the lion. 

In the last book of the Bible — the Book of Revelation — we see an extraordinary apocalyptic vision of heaven’s throne. We see people weeping because none of the angels are powerful enough to open a certain mysterious scroll. “Weep not!” a strange figure announces, “the Lion of Judah has conquered so that he can open the scroll!” (Rev 5:5)

But when we finally see the scroll opened, it is not by a lion. It is opened, rather, by “a slain lamb.” At that moment, the text says there broke out in heaven “the voice of many angels, numbering myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice: ‘worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing’” (Rev 5:11-12).

The slain lamb, of course, is Jesus. He is also the lion. Indeed, Jesus is both lamb and lion. He is, like a lamb, hunted. He is hunted by our sins. He is oppressed and afflicted, bowed down and killed by them — “like a lamb led to the slaughter.” Instead of defending his territory, he “turns to them his other cheek also” (Mt 5:39). Like a lamb, he is silent through the pain. 

But it is precisely in this that he is also like a lion. Jesus once said, “my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9). It’s one of the most startling things he ever said. “Although he was crucified through weakness,” St. Paul would go on to write, “[Jesus] lives by God’s power” (2 Cor. 13:4). He was killed, yes, but he lives. He was raised. The lion-like strength of God is revealed most vividly in the places of human weakness. Indeed, Jesus was only raised by way of a human death. He was a lion by being a lamb. It is the same with us. The place in your life where you are most weak and broken is precisely the place where you are most in contact with God’s mercy, with God’s strength. “When I am weak,” Paul said, “then I am strong” (2 Cor 12:10).

He is lamb and he is lion; he is death and he is resurrection. He cannot be resurrected unless he dies; he cannot be glorified unless he is humiliated. The lion needs the lamb. In the Book of Revelation, only the wounded lamb was powerful enough to open and read from the scroll of God. In life, how true it is that only the soul that’s been wounded can truly grasp what it means to live well, to love, to be merciful.


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