North of the Shire

Scripture from the Mass of June 18, 2009

 

First Reading;

2 Corinthians Chapter 11

1 If only you would put up with a little foolishness from me! Please put up with me.

2 For I am jealous of you with the jealousy of God, since I betrothed you to one husband to present you as a chaste virgin to Christ.

3 But I am afraid that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts may be corrupted from a sincere (and pure) commitment to Christ.

4 For if someone comes and preaches another Jesus than the one we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it well enough.

5 For I think that I am not in any way inferior to these “superapostles.”

6 Even if I am untrained in speaking, I am not so in knowledge; in every way we have made this plain to you in all things.

7 Did I make a mistake when I humbled myself so that you might be exalted, because I preached the gospel of God to you without charge?

8 I plundered other churches by accepting from them in order to minister to you.

9 And when I was with you and in need, I did not burden anyone, for the brothers who came from Macedonia supplied my needs. So I refrained and will refrain from burdening you in any way.

10 By the truth of Christ in me, this boast of mine shall not be silenced in the regions of Achaia.

11 And why? Because I do not love you? God knows I do!

 

Psalm 111;

1 Hallelujah. I will praise the LORD with all my heart in the assembled congregation of the upright.

2 Great are the works of the LORD, to be treasured for all their delights.

3 Majestic and glorious is your work, your wise design endures forever.

4 You won renown for your wondrous deeds; gracious and merciful is the LORD.

 

7 The works of your hands are right and true, reliable all your decrees,

8 Established forever and ever, to be observed with loyalty and care.

 

Matthew 6;

7 In praying, do not babble like the pagans, who think that they will be heard because of their many words.

8 Do not be like them. Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

9 “This is how you are to pray: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name,

10 your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven.

11 Give us today our daily bread;

12 and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors;

13 and do not subject us to the final test, but deliver us from the evil one.

14 If you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you.

15 But if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions.

 

Here is  transcript of Father Mitch Pacwa’s sermon from EWTN, (I’ve highlighted a particularly poignant passage from it.) 

 

Today’s reading from second Corinthians chapter 11 is an extremely important one, not only in our time and in past times too but a certain proliferation of the problems St. Paul is mentioning here.  First of all, something that he will develop later in his writings is already brought up here, where he says I am jealous of you with the jealousy of God since I betrothed you to one husband as a chaste virgin to Christ.  This is something certainly rooted in our Lord’s teaching.  Think back in Matthew, chapter eight, where when asked about why don’t your disciples fast he said, “How can they fast when the bridegroom is still with them?”  Also in the parable of the wedding feast, clearly he is referring to himself as the bridegroom.  But here St. Paul is mentioning , and making a little more explicit, Christ is the bridegroom of the Church.  Something he’ll develop far more in Ephesians chapter five.  And that this relationship of Christ to the Church is exactly the relationship that the prophets Hosea, Jeremiah and Ezekiel had already mentioned between the Lord God and Israel.  The Lord God is considered to be the husband of Israel and Israel the bride of the Lord God.  But now this is applied to Christ, God the Son made flesh, and his relationship with the Church, the new Israel.  And this is a very important attitude that we need to have toward the Church.  Sometimes we have people who are very critical of the Church but as most husbands might note; they may have a dispute with their wives now and again.  That may happen.  But if some other man starts criticizing their wife, back off.  Same thing with dealing with Christ’s bride.  If you deal with a certain kind of criticism of his bride it is him to whom you will answer.  That’s a very important element.

But he also then takes this marriage imagery by going back to the first marriage just as Christ had done when he taught on marriage, he went back to Adam and Eve.  And in this case, St. Paul is afraid that they’re going to be deceived in this community, not by Satan but by a group that he calls the super apostoloi, the super apostles, and that these super apostles are going to appear as super apostles but in fact they’re going to be apostles who, though looking like angels of light, will be the instruments of the evil one.  And that’s the issue that’s at stake, not only for his community but for ours as well.  Because, he says if someone comes and preaches another Jesus than what we preached, or, if you receive a different spirit than what you received or a different gospel from the one you accepted.

This is what is at stake for him.  Not only what it might mean to criticize the bride of Christ but it is the issue of presenting a different Jesus, a different spirit and a different gospel.  And we don’t know the content of the changes exactly.  What he describes here a little bit is that first these super apostles were criticizing Paul.  “We’re better preachers than Paul is; we’re more eloquent;” and Paul doesn’t disagree, he says maybe they are more eloquent.  And they also were saying “we make more money than Paul does.  Paul never dared to ask you for money.  Obviously a sign he’s not as good as we are, and that we obviously are better qualified because we make more money.”  We do… and Paul says look, I did not take any money from you; I preached the gospel to you without charge; for free; and I accepted help from other Churches rather than take it from you.  And he will go on is this letter to say that’s because it is not right for parents to take money from their children, but rather for parents to take care of their children; (something that all of these politicians of both parties who are racking up debts that our children will pay, should pay attention to.)  But here he’s saying I don’t take money from you but rather I’m supposed to take care of you.  So that was the criticism that the super apostles were making, to go against Paul and take away his authority, and by criticizing him then they would start to criticize his gospel.  “Well Paul’s obviously not as good an apostle as we are, we make more money et cetera, we’re better qualified; and furthermore the gospel he preached is incorrect.”  And then they present a different Jesus, a different spirit, a different gospel.

 

Now is that any different than what we see going on through the centuries.  Did not the arch-heretic Arius, back in the fourth century AD, teach a different Jesus Christ, one who is an angel, not God the Son.  And the Church stood up against it.  And the great saints of the Church, without… even though politicians like Constantine were open to it.  The Church had to stand up against the Emperor and against this false teaching; and they struggled with Arianism for a good long time.  And we have the same thing going on today where the doctrine of the Jehovah’s Witnesses is that Jesus is the arch-angel Michael.  How can that be?  When as they and everybody should recognize, you worship the Lord God and him alone.  But in the letter to the Hebrews chapter one verse six it says that the angels of God worship Christ.  Now if they worship Christ and they’re the angels of God, how can he be anything except God?  They change the gospel and make Christ merely an angel, a creature; and that’s a different Jesus.

 

We have other versions that have come on through the centuries.  We see in the Koran that in chapter four, serah four, verse 157, that the death of Christ on the cross is denied.  This is a different gospel.  We see in the Book of Mormon that there’s a completely different version of Christ and that there are multiple Gods, he’s just one God among many Gods, and God the Father is one God among many Gods, and the promise is given that every man will become the God of his own planet.  And that’s what Joseph Smith taught, that as God is, you shall be; as you are now, God once was.  God was just a man like us.  But then he’s no longer God.  It’s the elevation of creatures in a way that is a change of the gospel; and what they will say is that the Church changed the words of the gospel.  They’ll accuse us, without giving any evidence; they’ll accuse us of changing the gospel. 

 

And then, in addition to these, that have been very successful differences in the gospel of Christ, and different Christs; we have so many that have arisen from different quarters in modern times.  Have we not seen that when the new agers were channeling various spirits, they would always talk about Christ, but it was never the Christ of the gospel, and in fact they too would say, as in the most successful of their false Christs in the course in Miracles, that that book was meant to correct what the Apostles misunderstood?  They attack the Apostles exactly as Paul was attacked and say that we are going to give a different gospel that corrects it, saying, for instance, that self-sacrifice and love are incompatible.  A quote in that book.  As soon as I read it I said the woman that wrote this obviously never had children.  Because nobody that loves children can ever say that self-sacrifice is incompatible with that love.  That’s what that love is about, is self-sacrifice. 

 

And you go on and on and on.  Now we could go through all of these, but it would be futile for us and foolish to try and study every form of false Christ.  There would be a swarm…a swarm of confusion if you try to study every one of them, before you study the gospel. 

 

The way that we must protect ourselves against other Christs, other spirits, and other gospels, is exactly the way bankers learn how to detect counterfeit money.  They don’t get all the different kinds of counterfeit money and check each one out and look for it.

 

It’s not the way they do it.  They have them sit and count real money, U. S. dollars, right from the mint and they count it for hours and hours a day, for day after day.  And then, as they’re counting this money, every so often their teachers will slip in a counterfeit.  Because they are so familiar with real dollars, as soon as they touch the counterfeit they recognize it, and they know the false one from the real because they know the real so well.  Their fingers feel it.

 

So also must it be with us.  We must know the gospel of Christ.  Throughout the centuries, Christians have died for the sake of having copies of the gospel.  That hasn’t changed from the first century to the present.  The evangelists themselves were martyred, and those Christians that had copies of the gospels were martyred when they were caught, and others risked their lives for it.  We ourselves can trust that this gospel that we have was passed on to us at the cost of the blood of the apostles, the disciples, the witnesses to it who preferred to be tortured and executed rather than change any part of this.  And that this gospel’s one that we must become absolutely familiar with by reading it, by praying over it; by hearing God speak to us through the words of this gospel, so that we know the real Jesus Christ through his words.

 

When we have people who, not from new age or other spiritist things, but people who come from certain forms of theology that want power within the Church; and they’ll say, we have to move beyond Jesus.  This is what some pseudo-theologians have said.  They re-interpret and say well Jesus didn’t really know that he was God.  Read the gospel and see that that is not what is presented here, and that we don’t move beyond Jesus.  When you do that, you move beyond Jesus the way that Elmer Fudd and Wiley Coyote moved beyond the edge of the cliff and then fall right down into the abyss.  That’s what happens when you move beyond the real Jesus Christ.  Instead we stay with the real Jesus Christ who is as firm as the rock that the Roadrunner is on as he watches Coyote go off the cliff.

 

Christ is that rock of our salvation and this is what we stand upon without changing it, but rather allowing Christ to change us by his gospel.  So that even though, as you read in the Kadish prayers, that the rabbi’s have, that they… you’re name that is great be exalted and sanctified or hallowed, and it’s a…matter of fact the words of the Jewish Kadish are very similar to the Hebrew and Aramaic form of the Our Father. (Quotes)  But even that great prayer, may the name be exalted and sanctified, is still not going to be what Christ said.  He even has us say “our Father” may your name be sanctified; taking it to a more intimate and personal way, transforming the Kadish prayer far beyond itself to giving us the sense that our father in heaven, that is, our father that is so close to us that we can address him as children to a father, something that was distinctive of Christ.  The rabbi’s did not call God their father.  The only one I heard of was Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai who lived forty years later after Christ’s resurrection, and perhaps he heard this from the Christians.  I don’t know where he got that, but no other rabbi even approached that idea. And if it was approached maybe from influence by Christians, I’m not sure. 

But Christ transforms our relationship with God so that we recognize, yes, he’s our heavenly father; he’s beyond us, but he’s still our father and he’s close to us.  He maintains that balance and calls us to pray that God’s will may be done.  This means God is going to be the one that accomplishes his will.  That’s why its “may” be done, it’s that passive form indicated that God is the one operative and yet it is also a call for us to be transformed so that we seek to do God’s will.  If God’s will may be done I better cooperate.

 

And may your Kingdom come; again God is going to make the Kingdom happen.  Those who try to say well we make the Kingdom happen, we bring it about… God is the one who brings it about.  That’s a change to the gospel.  It’s God who brings about his Kingdom and yet we are to cooperate, that each aspect of this is a transformation of us and our understanding of God and of who we are. 

 

And by this process of staying true to the faith that Christ gives us, true to the gospel, he has left us…he will transform us into the image and likeness of God for which we were created and in so doing make us far better than anything that those who present a false Christ, a false spirit or a false gospel, would ever be capable of doing. 

They would reduce us to their level.  Christ will elevate us to his.