Going to the heights

 An audio recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (John 8: 21-30) sees Jesus in teaching mode but now with the Jewish crowd at the forefront of whom were the Pharisees and the Sadducees. At this point, there are no parables for them; only mysteries, riddles even. Where I am going you cannot come…You are of this world; I am not of this world…he who sent me is true, and I declare to the world what I have heard from him. Rabbinical disputation was a refined art, but this was of another order all together. Jesus could play that game and played it sometimes to shut up the Pharisees, such as when He asked them where the baptism of John came from. But here we simply find mystery upon mystery, and all of it falls on deaf ears:

And the light shone in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it.

Indeed, just before today’s extract, Jesus had declared Himself the light of the world.

The light of the world! It has a soft, even a whimsical sound to it. We like it since we find it comforting. Yet if we thought carefully about it, we would realise what it implies: that the world without Jesus is deprived of light; that all the supposed enlightenment of self-admiring humanity is but a feeble flicker of a flame in comparison to His ardent fire; that there is darkness not only around us but also within us, and that without His help, that darkness will overcome us.

Where then is our healing, where our enlightenment, where our salvation? Jesus in this extract declares where we need to look.

When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He.

These are words that recall the nighttime meeting with Nicodemus, and the message Jesus shared then is worth recalling now. He is evoking a moment in the history of Israel when so many Israelites were being bitten by a poisonous snake, and Moses had to craft a serpent of brass and place it on the crotch of a tree. Then, all those who looked at this artistic but harmless figure of the evil serpent were cured of the poison.

These parallels between the history of Israel and Jesus' life are the poetry of God in which happenstance and circumstance, at least to our eyes, are woven into the song of His love that calls us back to Him: I stress here the word call. Hearing our vocation is the beginning of our answer to the poetry of God’s saving invitation. We too have been attacked by a serpent and are suffering from the poison that this has left in our system. It renders us ignorant, ill willed, weak, and self-indulgent, wounded in our minds, our wills, and in our lower appetites. These are the blemishes in our nature which only the grace of God can heal. In fact, one of the distinctions that identifies the effects of God's grace in sinners is between gratia sanans - healing grace – and gratia elevans - grace that raises us up. God’s grace does both, curing our ills and bringing us to a place no purely human power could reach.

                In this gospel we are also given to understand another reason why we too must be raised up. For if we are members of the mystical body of Christ, then we too must be raised up on the cross in order to share in the eternal life of the blessed Trinity: where the Master is, there must the disciple also be. In the cross there is also a sign of the expansive love of God who wills to bring us into His very heart. Just as we stretch out our arms in order to embrace those we love, so God - who loves the world and sends His Son to save it - stretches out His arms in the crucifixion of that Son, casting the mighty from their thrones and raising up the lowly anawim, His servants.

                We face here one of the many paradoxes, one of the apparent contradictions, which are part of God's poetry also. As Saint Paul tells us, this cross, an instrument of torture, pain, and despair, is a scandal to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles. For the people of Israel, it represents the apparent abasement of the God Most High, and for everyone else, it represents yet another example of human stupidity. But the folly of God is greater than the wisdom of men, and the greatness of His folly would rescue us unworthy ones from a condemnation that we have only too often deserved. Thus, the great hymn Crux Fidelis captures this mad poetry of God's love on Good Friday:

 

Sweet the nails, and sweet the wood,

Laden with so sweet a load!

 

When we listen to the cross, we hear the call of His love to rise above the misery of our current condition. And from the heights of the cross – the exaltation of the Cross literally means ‘from the heights’ ex altis – we can see into the distant country of our eternal home.

 

But, only from its heights...