Angelus News | April 19-26, 2019 | Vol. 4 No. 15

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SUNDAY READINGS BY SCOTT HAHN Acts 10:34, 37–43 / Ps. 118:1–2, 16–17, 22–23 / Col. 3:1–4 / Jn. 20:1–9 Jesus is nowhere visible. Yet today’s Gospel tells us that Peter and John “saw and believed.” What did they see? Burial shrouds lying on the floor of an empty tomb. Maybe that convinced them that he hadn’t been carted off by grave robbers, who usually stole the expensive burial linens and left the corpses behind. But notice the repetition of the word “tomb” — seven times in nine verses. They saw the empty tomb and they believed what he had promised: that God would raise him on the third day. Chosen to be his “witnesses,” today’s First Reading tells us, the apostles were “commissioned … to preach … and testify” to all that they had seen — from his anointing with the Holy Spirit at the Jordan to the empty tomb. More than their own experience, they were instructed in the mysteries of the divine economy, God’s saving plan — to know how “all the prophets bear witness” to him (see Luke 24:27, 44). Now they could “understand the Scripture,” could teach us what he had told them — that he was “the Stone which the builders rejected,” which today’s Psalm prophesies his resurrection and exaltation (see Luke 20:17; Matthew 21:42; Acts 4:11). We are the children of the apostolic witnesses. That is why we still gather early in the morning on the first day of every week to celebrate this feast of the empty tomb, give thanks for “Christ our life,” as today’s Epistle calls him. Baptized into his death and resurrection, we live the “The Resurrection of Jesus Christ,” anonymous, 1480. heavenly life of the risen Christ, our lives “hidden with Christ in God.” We are now his witnesses, too. But we testify to things we cannot see but only believe; we seek in earthly things what is above. We live in memory of the apostles’ witness, like them eating and drinking with the risen Lord at the altar. And we wait in hope for what the apostles told us would come — the day when we, too, “will appear with him in glory.” Scott Hahn is founder of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, stpaulcenter.com. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS 10 • ANGELUS • April 19-26, 2019
IN EXILE BY FATHER RONALD ROLHEISER, OMI Our own Good Friday When the Romans designed crucifixion as their means of capital punishment, they had more in mind than simply putting someone to death. They wanted to accomplish something else, too, namely, to make this death a spectacle to serve as the ultimate deterrent so that anyone seeing it would think twice about committing the offense for which the person was being crucified. So crucifixion was designed to do a couple of other things beyond simply putting someone to death. It was designed to inflict the optimal amount of pain that a body could absorb. Hence, they sometimes gave morphine to the person they were executing, not to lessen his pain, but to keep him conscious to feel more pain. Perhaps most cruel of all, crucifixion was designed to utterly humiliate the body of the person being executed. So the person was stripped naked, his private parts unprotected, and when his body went into spasms, as surely it eventually would, his bowels would release, all in public view. Is there a humiliation worse than this? Well, there are, I believe, human sufferings that approximate or equal that; and sadly these are common. There are daily instances of violence in our world that mirror the humiliation of the cross. As well, you sometimes see this kind of humiliation of the body in death by cancer and other such debilitating diseases. The person here doesn’t just die, but dies in pain, the body humiliated, its dignity compromised, that immodesty exposed, as it was for Jesus when dying on the cross. I suspect that this is why God allowed (though not intended) for Jesus to suffer the pain and humiliation he suffered in his death. Looking at how Jesus died, it’s hard for anyone to say: “Easy for him, he didn’t have to suffer the way I did!” The humiliation of the cross puts Jesus in real solidarity with everyone who has ever known the pain and shame of humiliation. But the fruit of Jesus’ solidarity with us is not just having the consolation of knowing that Jesus felt our suffering firsthand, it’s also that we get to share in what follows after crucifixion, namely, as Scripture says, a share in his consolation. Curious words, really. What consolation is there in being humiliated? What’s gained through this shameful kind of pain? In a word, what’s gained is depth of soul. Nothing pushes us to depth of heart and soul as does humiliation. Just ask yourself this question: What has given me character? What has given me depth as a person? What has given me deeper understanding? The answer in every case, I suspect, will be something that you’d be ashamed to talk about, some stinging humiliation whose pain and shame pushed you to a deeper place. The Gospels, I believe, teach that. For example, when the apostles James and John came to Jesus and asked him whether he could arrange that when he came into his glory they would be given the seats at his right and left hand, Jesus didn’t take the opportunity to lecture them on humility. He instructed them instead as to their lack of understanding both of what constitutes glory and what constitutes the road to glory. They had confused the notion of glory with everything that’s antithetical to humiliation, vulnerability, and solidarity. Glory, for them, and I suspect for us, too, was understood instead as being set apart from the crowd, above it, the most valuable player, the winner of the Nobel Prize, the movie star with the body everyone envies, the attractive one who is invulnerable to humiliation, the one above the rest. And so Jesus asks James and John whether they can “drink the cup,” and that cup, as we see from Jesus’ own struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane, is the cup of humiliation. Drinking the cup of humiliation, accepting the cross is, according to Jesus and according to what’s most honest in our own experience, what can bring us genuine glory, namely, depth of heart, depth of soul, and depth of understanding and compassion. However, as Jesus warns, drinking the cup of humiliation, while automatically assuring us of depth, doesn’t automatically assure us of glory (“that glory is not mine to give”). Humiliation will make us deep, but it might not make us deep in the right way. It can also have the opposite effect. This is the algebra then: Like Jesus, we will all suffer humiliation in life, we will all drink the cup, and it will make us deep; but then we have a critical choice: Will this humiliation make us deep in compassion and understanding or will it make us deep in anger and bitterness? That is in fact the ultimate moral choice we face in life — not just at the hour of death but countless times in our lives. Good Friday, and what it asks of us, confronts us daily. Oblate of Mary Immaculate Father Ronald Rolheiser is a spiritual writer, www.ronrolheiser.com. April 19-26, 2019 • ANGELUS • 11
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Angelus News | April 19-26, 2019 | Vol. 4 No. 15

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