Christ’s Story Is Our Story, Too

We often approach Lent as the opportunity for a fresh start, a time to make changes in our lives, to let go of bad habits, to grow spiritually. And we approach it sort of like a liturgical marathon, with the final push to Easter taking place during Holy Week. But Easter is more than a goal or a destination. It’s a new way of life.

Today we begin a fifty-day celebration and unfolding of the great mystery of Easter. Jesus’ resurrection may have happened in a flash, but it took his closest followers a long time to understand the implications of that event.

Over two millennia later, we are still growing in this same understanding. In the early days of the church, Lent and Easter traditions grew up around the experience of those who were just being baptized into the Christian faith. In our own time, the revival of the Rite of Christian Initiation has returned to this experience. The days and weeks following Easter are a time to reflect on the experience of Baptism, Confirmation and Eucharist.

Our liturgical year follows a cycle of birth, death, resurrection, discipleship. We have seasons of penance and seasons of rejoicing. Our faith tells us that both are celebrations. What we come to realize in our own spiritual journeys, however, is that these cycles are neither mechanical nor predetermined. Like the seasons of nature, the seasons of the church year flow into one another in a swirling mix of life and death.

Father Ronald Rolheiser, in his book The Holy Longing, shows us how the paschal mystery is not just something we celebrate at the Sunday Eucharist and in the great feast of Easter, but something that governs the very rhythm of our lives. He uses these phrases to describe the events from Good Friday to Pentecost:
1) Name your deaths;
2) Claim your births
3) Grieve what you have lost and adjust to the new reality
4) Do not cling to the old, let it ascend and give you its blessing,
5) Accept the spirit of the life that you are in fact living.

This struck a chord with me when I first read it. It made sense to me. And it helped to make sense of things that I’d experienced in my own life and relationships. In his rephrasing, I discovered a way to connect the story of Jesus with my own story.

We are all called to do this, and maybe Easter is a good time to begin. Over the course of the past week, we’ve heard all the great stories of our faith tradition, from the very dawn of creation through the dawn of a new world on the first Easter morning. Now it’s time to discover our own story. Whether we have recently been baptized or whether we have lived all our lives in the embrace of the church, that experience shapes us.

Take some time in the next seven weeks to reflect on your faith life. You might want to use Father Rolheiser’s five steps as a starting point. What comes to mind when you think about death? About birth? What causes you to cling to the old? What scares you about trying something new? Learn to recognize the power of the Spirit blowing through your life.

Easter is not an end, but a beginning. As a community and as individuals we have much to celebrate in the coming months. Promise yourself that you will live this new life to the full.

Through the Cross to New Life

The next week marks the high point of our Church year. The French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus once wrote, “There is no sun without shadow. It is essential that we know the night.” Christians know that there can be no resurrection without the cross.

We hear two different versions of Jesus’ Passion this week. On Palm Sunday we hear Matthew’s account, sprinkled with references to the Old Testament and the way that Jesus fulfilled the words of the great Hebrew prophets. On Good Friday, we hear the Passion according to John, the same story but told from the other side of the resurrection, when there’s no doubt about the outcome, no question of who is in control of everything that takes place. It reminds us that faith is often a question of perspective. God’s truth shows itself in our lives in different ways.

It’s not quite 40 days since we were signed with the ashes of last year’s palms, praying that this time we wouldn’t run from the cross. The cross is before us now with its wordless challenge to love beyond death.

We gather at church on Palm Sunday and wave our palm fronds in the entrance procession. During the reading of the passion, we may take the parts of the crowd, shouting almost in spite of ourselves, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”

We might think this is merely a bit of liturgical playacting. It may be that we come to church because it’s what we’ve always done or because someone is telling us that we have to. We may not give much thought to why we gather here for these holy days.

Like the Jewish celebration of Passover, which not only remembers the historical event that changed forever their lives at the chosen people of God but makes that saving event a reality in the lives of those who celebrate it down through time, the events of Holy Week are far more than a dramatization of the last days of Jesus’ life. We enter into the saving mysteries of the passion, death and resurrection. Jesus’ gift of his Body and Blood at the Last Supper takes place each and every time we celebrate the Eucharist.

Our actions here at Mass may give us a deeper insight into our relationship with God. How often do we turn on God when things don’t go the way we had so carefully planned? How often do we stand waiting for a glorious celebration of victory, only to find ourselves staring in confusion at a cross? The palm branches drop from our hands and we raise our firsts to heaven, hoping to hide deep disappointment in self-righteous defiance.

A long-standing tradition among Catholics has been to braid palms into crosses. There are many different methods for doing this. I was surprised to find a variety of patterns and instructions on the internet. Crosses take many different shapes. Whether or not you take part in this folk tradition, it’s a metaphor of the way this day begins with a palm and ends with a cross.

Take some time this week to think about events in your own life that have given you an experience of Jesus’ command to pick up your cross and follow him. You might find that something you always wanted has turned to bitter disappointment. See beyond that disappointment to the God who is in control even in the blackness of death.

Finding Life in the Midst of Death

For much of our lives we wander in a hazy routine of daily tasks and comfortable relationships. But when tragedy breaks into our lives, even the most orderly among us can’t prevail against its chaos. We see this in the reaction of Martha, so familiar as the woman too busy with her domestic tasks to listen to Jesus teaching. She meets Jesus alone on the road, her household chores forgotten, and simply says, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would never have died.”

She challenges him out of her pain. Intense grief calls forth the deepest questions of our faith. Instead of closing herself off and becoming bitter, Martha allows her pain to open her to Jesus’ challenge to believe. In turn, strengthened by this risk, Jesus accepts her challenge.

Mary, too, can be present to Jesus only in the depths of her grief and suffering. Gone is the time of leisure when she would sit quietly at his feet while he talked of the kingdom. Mary challenges him with the wordless power of her tears and stirs him to compassion. This, perhaps more than anything else, reveals the source of his power and strength.

The love poured out in this scene at Bethany will be exceeded only in the love poured out in the blood from the cross. Only great love can challenge the darkness of death itself.

Like Mary and Martha, we have to be able to see through and beyond the intensity of our pain, challenging even God himself with utter belief in his statement, “I have promised and I will do it.” Like Jesus we have to use all the strength that compassionate love gives us to call those around us to a newer and fuller life. But perhaps most of all, like Lazarus, we ourselves need to be challenged to rise from our sleep of routine and complacency.

Death always startles us with its suddenness, its finality. Even when a loved one has been sick for a long time and death comes as a release and relief for both the one suffering and those left behind, the initial reaction is one of shock and dismay. In cases of sudden, tragic, accidental death, this reaction is magnified. We who believe in the resurrection are no less likely to experience this very human reaction. We resonate with Mary’s response to Jesus about her belief in the resurrection at the end of time. Our minds and our faith tell us one thing, our hearts and our bodies often balk at the appearance of separation and loss that for a time is all too real and unavoidable.

Like so much of our spiritual lives, we have to learn to live with this paradox. We see it differently at different times in our life. When we’re young, death is an infrequent and scary interruption of life. When we’re old, we sometimes feel like we’ve seen too much death over the course of a long life and it seem almost unbearable in its familiarity.

We might envy Mary and Martha in their experience of their brother being restored to life. The Gospels don’t tell us what happened afterward, because the far greater event of Jesus’ resurrection now takes center stage. And there’s no more need for envy, because what Jesus experienced, we will all experience. This is the promise that’s at the heart of our faith. It’s what allows us to celebrate our loved ones even in their passing, because we know that life, not death, is the final reality.

Seeing the Unexpected Possibilities

Today is the middle of three Sundays that explore the great metaphors of water, light and life, all key images for the baptismal promises we celebrate at Easter. In today’s Gospel, John tells the story of the man born blind and what happens when he encounters the Light of the world in the person of Jesus.

It’s no coincidence that so many of the miracles in the Gospels involve healing someone suffering from blindness. Sight is a common metaphor for faith. So much depends on our ability to see. Our Scripture readings today are filled with people who are blind and yet see, who claim to see and yet are blind, who could see but choose to keep their eyes closed.

At the beginning of the Gospel, Jesus sees the simple reality of a man blind from birth. Because blindness and other physical sufferings were considered symptoms of sin, his disciples immediately question him about the moral implications. They see only an abstract theological debate. Jesus sees someone suffering, someone in need of healing compassion. As the light of the world, he was sent to give vision to all who want to see. The message should be as straightforward as the healing itself. The man who was healed states it so simply: “I was blind. Now I can see. He is a prophet.”

How frustrating and lonely it must have been for the man whose sight was restored to give his testimony so clearly, to see the truth at last, only to be met with the unseeing stares of those blinded by the fear of lost power and authority. Even his own parents had learned the cynical lesson that sometimes it’s easier not to look, or if you must look, not to see. They couldn’t deny that their son’s sight had been restored, but to see beyond that to the implications of Jesus’ identity would be to commit themselves to something with unknown and possibly terrifying consequences.

We’ve probably found ourselves on both sides of this story. How often have you been in a conversation with someone and said, “Can’t you see what I’m saying?” Sadly, too often they can’t. We wonder how they can be blind to something that we see so clearly and believe so passionately. But we’ve also closed our eyes to sad realities in our world. We prefer darkness to light, comfort to confrontation. In both cases, it takes the healing touch of the Lord to open our eyes and heal our hearts.

The Gospel shows us what happened to the blind man as he recognized Jesus as a prophet. He’s willing take chances, he’s willing to believe his own eyes, newly opened though they are. We’re left to imagine whether the Pharisees and even the man’s own parents ever came to see the truth.

Just as spiritual blindness can be far more devastating than the loss of physical sight, so having our vision of God’s grace restored can bring healing far beyond the physical. We see hope where once we knew only despair, and more than that we see new ways to communicate that hope to others. We see light instead of darkness, and in that light we discover a side of ourselves that we thought we had lost. We look with new eyes on the people around us and see how they, too, are children of God.

Being open to possibilities is part of the experience of Lent and Easter. Seeing a path where once there was only confusion and chaos, understanding a truth that once seemed complex and incomprehensible, recognizing that not having all the answers can open us to the mystery of God’s grace. Sometimes all it takes is opening our eyes.

Our Stories and God’s Story

Lent calls us to step aside from our ordinary routines, to spend time listening to God, to believe that we can tell our stories in a new way. The word of God challenges us to explore the story of our faith once more and discover for ourselves that Jesus really is “the savior of the world”—and what this means in our own lives. We come to believe not because others have told us we must, but because our own hearts tell us we must. The Samaritan woman has known pain and disappointment and the restless search for a life of happiness and meaning. She has known the deadening routine of coming each day to the same well for water that will enable her to live just one more day. She thinks sometimes that there must be more to life, if only someone would tell her a new story. But she has heard so many stories and always they end the same way. We, too, thirst for something real, something genuine, something that will refresh us. But in our desperation we often settle for far less than we feel we deserve, because the life we know demands less of us than the life we dream.

She wants to believe, but she fears yet another disappointment, so this time she wants to be sure. Her opening challenge is filled with suspicion and mistrust. Belief always makes vulnerable lives that are accustomed to strong defenses. And the brutal reality is that at times belief will be disappointed, trust will be betrayed. But Jesus challenges the woman to believe once more, to risk one more time, to give new life one more chance. He challenges her to tell her story, to listen to the story he has to tell, to believe that this time it can be different.

The Lord is never surprised by our restlessness, our disappointment, our fearful, hurting challenges. Just as God calmed Moses’ ruffled authority and gave the people water from the rock, Jesus responds to the woman at the well with challenges of his own that promise life and refreshment. Deeper and deeper they reach into the well of self, of faith, of trust, where the living and life-giving water is to be found. Together Jesus and the woman explore the stories of needs and wounds and beliefs.

We might be surprised by this woman’s questions about the right place to worship God. This was a big issue for the people of Jesus’ day. Many of our friends and family members have questions about religion. We might have questions ourselves. Jesus listens and responds with an openness to truth that we would do well to remember in the midst of heated discussions. The Gospels remind us again and again that often God’s truth is bigger than the little rules that we find so reassuring, those things that tell us that ours is the only way.

Today’s Gospel reminds us that at the center of our faith is what has often been called “The Greatest Story Ever Told.” We are the stories of our past—stories we tell, stories other people tell about us—but we can become the stories God tells for our future. This is the message of the story of the Samaritan woman at the well. This is what we do when we read Scripture, when we gather with others to talk about the Scriptures. We immerse ourselves in the big story, in God’s story, and then we see where the stories of our own lives reflect a piece of that story. And in that intersection, we find the living water of faith.

Living With Questions

The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet, “…have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and…try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

Jesus, though divine, was born into a fallen human world and had lived a life of questioning and being questioned from the moment of his conception. His mother asked the angel, “How can this be?” As Jesus grew, he questioned the elders in the temple, he questioned his parents and they questioned him. John the Baptist questioned Jesus when he came to him for baptism. So it was probably no surprise that after forty days in the desert, he would be questioned once more.

Surely Satan’s questions were no more challenging than the questions he had been asking himself about his ministry, his mission, his message. The questions of the desert would prepare him for a public life of questioning in the marketplace, in the temple and finally on the cross. Jesus is able to respond to the questions of the Tempter because he knows the genuine love of God supported by a faith made strong in suffering, in need and in questioning.

Like Jesus, we must live both the struggle of the questions and the faith of the answers. Our temptations aren’t likely to come to us from a mysterious figure in a deserted place. But often they revolve around the same basic human drives: hunger, emotional security, safety, status, ambition.

Some lie awake too many nights wondering if they’ve made the right choices for their lives, their careers. Others question whether a successful position with a company engaged in questionable ethical practices is a compromise they’re willing to make. Many people fight against the demon of self-doubt and insecurity, afraid they don’t deserve more than the bad hand they’ve been dealt in life.

Sometimes the questions themselves are coming from God, asking us to make life-giving changes in our lives. It’s the easy answers that are the temptation, the decisions that seem to bring happiness and success but are really driving us further away from our center. Like Adam and Eve in the garden, if we reach for the first thing that promises us health and wealth, we might be in bigger trouble than we imagined.

The responses Jesus gives to his tempter are deeply rooted in the words of Scripture. He’s not rattling off memorized verses. He’s speaking out of a lived awareness of the power of the word of God.

Lent is the perfect time to deepen our own immersion in Scripture. The story of God’s undying care for the people he has chosen as his own can mirror the stories of our own lives. The Psalms are a good place to begin. Let the words wash over you. Let them speak to the situations and emotions of your daily life. The words of the Gospels challenge us to a life of Christ-like compassion. The prophets of the Old Testament remind us to put God first before anything else.

The Word has its own power to move us and inspire us and to remind us of God’s presence. It is this power that is, in the end, the answer.

Daring to Be Transfigured

Lent, perhaps more than any other season, gives us permission to focus on our spiritual lives, to take time apart from the everyday demands to listen to what God might be asking of us. Today’s Scripture readings can seem beyond us, describing those events that we might label “Significant Religious Experiences,” things that happen to saints and holy people.

Indeed, for Peter, James and John, it must have been unimaginably startling to experience the transfiguration. Suddenly the itinerant preacher and miracle-worker whom they had been following around Palestine was so very much more. But even that was nothing compared to the resurrection they would experience a short time later.

The transfiguration was an extraordinary moment even in the midst of Jesus’ extraordinary ministry of preaching and healing. We know that such moments don’t happen all the time or even very often. But we also know that when they do, they change everything we know about reality.

Many of the saints have indeed had such moments in their lives. Nearly everyone has heard the story of Mother Teresa on a train journey and hearing God call her to go to India and minister to the dying there. But many ordinary people have had similar experiences in their own lives, perhaps not as dramatic, but equally life-changing. Sometimes the only difference is that the saints have developed an awareness of God’s presence. They’re more readily attuned to the deeper significance of the things that happen to them.

The transfiguration reminds us that Lent is a time of purification, a time of going beyond our limitations. Even during Lent we know that the blessing of Easter is ours in Jesus Christ. But we only arrive at the fullness of the resurrection through the passion of the cross. As we share the vision of the apostles, we also know what happened after it. And we also know that it will happen in our own lives.

We need to let our experience of God transform us into something we never dreamed we could be. For some of us this is a startling notion. We think of our faith as something to tuck away in the Sunday corner of our life. When we think about the changes that Lent can bring, we’re more likely to think about quitting smoking, losing a few pounds, maybe giving some money to a good cause.

It would never occur to us that God might say, as he did to Abram, “Go forth from the land of your kinsfolk to a land that I will show you.” But sometimes God does exactly that. A job opportunity takes us someplace we never imagined we would be, and our experiences there change us immeasurably. Or we meet someone who brings us to a completely new awareness of the power of faith in our everyday activities.

We don’t go looking for extraordinary, mountaintop experiences. Those who do often delude themselves with vision of grandeur and fame rather than a life of deep faith. God breaks into our lives in both familiar and unexpected ways. He constantly challenges us to go beyond, to be transfigured. The dynamic, ever-changing pattern of bright sunshine and dark cloud can be startling and even terrifying. But in the midst of it comes reassurance. We hear an extraordinary challenge, but we also hear, “Be not afraid.” The faith that we cultivate day by day flowers into brilliance in the presence of God’s grace.

Those Who Know They Need God

In Madeleine L’Engle’s novel A Wrinkle in Time, 12-year-old Meg Murry sets off with her youngest brother, Charles Wallace, and her best friend, Calvin O’Keefe, to find her father, who disappeared into space several years before. A trio of supernatural beings, manifested as eccentric old women known only as Mrs Who, Mrs Which and Mrs Whatsit, guide them on their quest, offering them gifts—graces—unique to each individuals gifts and strengths. Before the final and most difficult task, Mrs Who, who arranges her thoughts mostly in quotations, tells Meg, “What I have to give you this time you must try to understand not word by word but in a flash.” And she goes on to quote the marvelous passage from Paul that we hear in today’s second reading: “God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and the God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something.” Though Meg doesn’t realize it at the time, she discovers that this is a promise of great strength in time of need. In the end, love proves to be more powerful than anything her adversary wields.

We know all too well that the way of our world is too often the powerful crushing the weak and defenseless without giving it a thought. But in reflecting on Paul’s words, I’m reminded of several examples of celebrities who make a point of using their status to help the less fortunate. The Irish rock star Bono has traded on his fame to speak tirelessly to the most powerful leaders of the world, working to persuade them to hear the cries of the poorest of the poor in Africa. He said in one talk, “God is with the poor, my friends, and he is with us when we are with them.”

Legendary Green Bay Packer quarterback Bret Favre was honored by the Make-A-Wish Foundation for the many times he and other members of the team had met with seriously ill children. During the presentation, a little girl named Anna moved him to tears. He pointed out that it wasn’t anything extraordinary that made him support this cause, just the way he had been raised to care about those less fortunate.

Late-night comedian Stephen Colbert often spends time on his breaks and vacations supporting a wide variety of worthy causes. By using the draw of his popularity, he can generate more interest and donations for those in need. These are just a few examples of people who know that their fame and fortune is fleeting and that because they have been fortunate, they have a special responsibility to those who have been less fortunate.

We who have been blessed with so much are called upon to give to others. The God revealed in the Scriptures has always been on the side of the least, the lowly, the poor, the powerless. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus reminds us of this truth about his Father: Blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. These are the people who know the limits of their own strength. Above all they are people who know their need for God. Whatever earthly influence we may or may not have, blessed are we when we realize that the greatest thing we can do with what we have is to give is as generously as God’s grace has been given to us.

Hearing God’s Call

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” This line from the words of Isaiah in our first reading has long been a personal favorite. As I reflected on today’s reading, though, I discovered the line that precedes it: “Anguish has taken wing, dispelled is darkness: for there is no gloom where but now there was distress.” In many ways it’s simply a rephrasing of the same idea.

The wonder of the Sacred Scriptures is that they’re the living word of God. We hear them differently depending on what is happening in our lives, on what kind of mood we’re in, even on how closely we’re paying attention or not while they’re being proclaimed at Mass. And then sometimes God hits us with  a line of Scripture in the manner of what a friend describes as “the divine clue-by-four.”

Today’s Gospel is the familiar call of the Galilean fisherman. Jesus invites them to leave their boats and nets and follow him. At different times in our lives, we might think they’re crazy. At other times, we think they’d be crazy not to follow his call. And then it dawns on us that the Lord calls us in much the same manner.

St. Ignatius, in his Spiritual Exercises, encourages people to place themselves imaginatively in the stories from the Gospels, using all of their senses to enter into the experience of Jesus and the disciples. This passage is a common one to use for such a practice. The hot sun, the smell of fish, the breeze off the sea, the grittiness of the sand, the texture of the fishing nets, the rough wood of the boats—all these details make it easy to imagine what it was like for those fishermen who became Jesus’ first disciples.

But sometimes those very details that help us imagine a time two thousand years ago can keep us from  seeing ourselves in the same boat, as it were. For most of us, our lives are spent indoors, in offices and cubicles, in trucks and cars, operating heavy machinery or delicate medical instruments. And more an more of our time is spent with our hands on a keyboard and our eyes on an LCD screen.

It’s easy to romanticize the life of a first-century fisherman because it’s so far removed from our everyday lives. Most people in the first century had few occupational choices. But work is work. And no matter what we do our how many choices we had or even have in what we do to earn our daily bread, the day-to-day experience is going to have ups and downs, periods of great satisfaction and dry spells of boredom and frustration. I suspect it was the same for those first-century fishermen. We think of them as being dedicated to their work, their nets, their father and coworkers. But maybe at the time Jesus came along the beach, they were having a bad day and were eager for a change. Only later did they discover what they had traded in their nets to embrace.

One thing is certain in all of this: God may not pay very close attention to what we’re doing when he calls us. It’s up to us to hear the call, perhaps trading something we love for something we will come to love more, perhaps finding a welcome escape from a situation that has become difficult. God chooses to call us. It’s our choice to hear and to follow.

Not Needing to Be Right

A legendary and somewhat humorous epitaph reads, “Here lies the body of Michael O’Day / who died defending the right of way.” We laugh somewhat ruefully because we all know the truth of it. If we admit it, there have been times in all our lives when we’ve been willing to go to extremes to defend the rightness of our position on something.

Matthew’s account of the baptism of Jesus contains an interesting exchange that the other Gospels don’t include. John the Baptist protests, with some cause, that it is he who should be baptized by Jesus. He recognizes that his is the lesser calling, that he is the forerunner, not the Messiah. And he’s right. But Jesus tells him, “Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” This is a bit of a mouthful. We might be inclined to say, “It’s okay, let it slide for now.” It’s a recognition that there’s a larger perspective, a bigger picture, than the immediate issue at hand. In the case of Jesus and John, Jesus knows that his ministry is just beginning and must be seen to be part of the bigger story of salvation, that began with creation, with the calling of the chosen people, the exodus and the words of the prophets. He is the fulfillment of all that has gone before, not a renegade bursting on the scene set to take over and dominate everyone around him. He doesn’t need to prove that he’s greater than John the Baptist.

We see a similar attitude in the other two readings for this feast. The prophet Isaiah notes that gentleness is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Servant of the Lord: “A bruised reed he shall not break, / and a smoldering wick he shall not quench, / until he establishes justice on the earth.” And in the second reading, we hear a bit of the revolutionary turn of events in the house of the gentile Cornelius. Peter, the leader of the Jerusalem church in the days after the resurrection and ascension, has been somewhat uneasy about Paul’s mission to the gentiles. In the early days of the Christian community, the question of the place of Jews and gentiles in the new dispensation was one of the biggest questions that needed to be resolved. So this event dramatizes Peter finally accepting that the gentiles were equal to the Jews. He proclaims, “In truth, I see that God shows no partiality. Rather in every nation whoever fears him and acts uprightly is acceptable to him.”

Again and again the Scriptures remind us that God is bigger than our human boundaries and power struggles. At times it takes a great deal of faith to believe that God has a higher purpose than we can discern at any given time. And the more we’re invested in a conflict, the harder it is to let God be God. We fall into the trap of needing to be right, and needing others to see that we’re right. And we don’t always care who we trample in our stampede toward rightness.

It can be helpful in a difficult situation to take a step back and reflect on the difference between what’s merely right and what’s righteous, on the difference between human judgment and divine justice. The baptism of Jesus, like so many other events in his life and ministry, reminds us that while he closed the gap between the human and the divine, he did it in such a way that we would be able to resist the temptation in the Garden of Eden to be merely like gods. Through Jesus, we, too, are children of God. If we live that way, others will listen to us.