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Tomorrow is Palm Sunday, and Christians the world over will celebtrate Jesus' royal entry into Jerusalem. It is the beginning of the last leg of Jesus' journey to the cross. He has made it clear to His apostles on more than one occasion at this point that He must suffer and die. He is never swayed, nor ever deterred.

How did He do it? How did He just cruise into Jerusalem on a donkey, knowing what was about to happen to Him? He never lost sight of or confidence in His Father.

No strength is greater than that which comes from confidence in God. The prophet Isaiah writes*:

The Lord GOD is my help,
therefore I am not disgraced;
I have set my face like flint,
knowing that I shall not be put to shame.

This is a perfect description of Jesus. Many of us would love to have that kind of confidence in God, but the difficulty is how to get there.

I would say there are two kinds of confidence in God. One is to be confident that God loves me and wants me to be happy. The other is to be confident that God will support my decisions and actions. The first, I can have completely right now.

The second is more difficult. For the second requires one to be confident that one understands His will and so can confidently execute that will. That is how one can be able to say, with Isaiah, that "God is my help."

As Abraham Lincoln put it: "Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right."

Some would say that a thorough understanding of God's will is not possible, and to presume it to be so is prideful.

I answer that to assume that God is unable to communicate His will effectively to us is to insult God, not ourselves. It is, however, prideful to assume that we can know God's will without the requisite effort.

In our everday life experience, how can we be confident that we understand the motives and wishes of another person? We have to get to know him well, and become good friends. It is not enough to greet him fleetingly at the water-cooler. It is not enough merely to read his facebook page, no matter how generous he is with the details of his life.

Those life details are certainly necessary. They can help us to listen more attentively to him when we talk to him. But we must talk to him. A real exchange of thoughts and ideas is absolutely crucial, if we are interested in being truly loyal to this friend. We must engage him in real conversation. We must ask questions. We must listen attentively for his answers.

This is what Jesus did with His Father. His confidence in God grew from two things: His exhaustive knowledge of Scripture, and His constant conversation with God. The first laid the groundwork for the second.

In relation to a friend, our knowledge will not be perfect immediately. Rather it will steadily grow more complete over many years of steady conversation. So with God. The confidence that Jesus had, that He was doing His Father's will, when He rode into Jerusalem may not be immediately attainable for us because we are still getting to know God.

But we can be absolutely confident that as soon as we enter into relationship and conversation with God, He will be just as invested in the relationship as we are. Even more so. He is not like an ordinary every day encounter with another person, in that sense.

He will not use us for His own advancment. He doesn't need us for that. He has all of Himself to give. If we sincerely ask Him probing questions and seek to understand what He wants from us and for us, He will answer. And then we can know that we won't be put to shame, no matter where we are going. There is no greater strength than that.

*Isaiah Chapter 50, verse 7

From the Lord's Prayer:

And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.

When we ask God to "lead us not into temptation," we are recognizing our own weakness. There's an apocalyptic character to the petition that does not come through in the language of the prayer that does come through in the New American Bible's translation:

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

The New American Bible explains that "final test":

Jewish apocalyptic writings speak of a period of severe trial before the end of the age, sometimes called the "messianic woes." This petition asks that the disciples be spared that final test.

Temptation happens. Without the grace of God we would not be able to handle even the slightest temptation, much less a final test. In a way, we are again asking God for mercy and grace.

I am not aware of God ever having led someone into temptation to sin. What I am aware of is people leading themselves and others into temptation. And of course, temptation is often the work of "the evil one," of whom the New American translation speaks.

The translation can go either way, "the evil one," as in the Scriptures, or simply "evil," as in the prayer.

A few important conceptual points about evil. One, evil has no Supreme Origin. It is wrong to think of the Devil as equal in any way to God Himself. The Devil is a creation of God.

Yet nothing that God created is essentially evil. The Devil chooses to do evil, and so makes himself into a living lie. God created him to be good (he is an angel after all), just as he created us to be good. But the Devil, for reasons we ultimately won't know in this life, hates truth. And beauty. And love. He hates them so much that he is constantly lying to himself about who he himself is. He is stuck forever in constant state of denial. He know he is fundamentally good and he hates that.

So he wants you and me to subscribe to his lie about who we are. He wants us to believe that we are rotten, filthy degenerates no more meant to love than a dung beetle. He wants us to believe this about ourselves, and each other, forever.

Evil is fundamentally not. St. Thomas Aquinas said, "Mal est nihil." Evil is nothing. It is nothingness -- the privation of some good. Now some evils are more terrible than others, because some goods are more fundamental than others. The more fundamental the good, the worse it is to be deprived of it. Mild physical hunger due to fasting is a kind of evil, because it points to the absence of nourishment. But it is arguably not so terrible as personal loneliness that comes from a lack of loving relationships. And neither of those is so terrible as the ultimate privation, which is the loss of the ultimate good, which is God Himself.

And it is that from which we pray to God to be delivered. Just as He delivered the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. When we ask God to deliver us from evil, we simply ask Him to hold us close to Himself. Without God we are slaves to evil and the evil one in the same way the Hebrews were slaves to Egypt. We will inescapably lose sight of the truth about ourselves and about our neighbors and the world around us.

God is not an abusive, scrooge-like tyrant who imposes on his children pointless rules designed to make them unhappy. He is deliverer. He provides us with the complete shelter of His kingdom, the ultimate bread of His Son, the ultimate release of forgiveness, and the strength to forgive. In short, He frees and fulfills us. The Our Father is a prayer for freedom, freedom from evil, and freedom to be good as God wills, and thus for the complete happiness that comes from God.

From the Lord's Prayer:

... and forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Forgiveness is a sign of strength, not of weakness. It is anger, not forgiveness, that damages one's happiness, and so weakens him. But forgiveness makes the victim happier. A Shakespearean character once said, "The quality of mercy is not strained. It is twice blest. It blesseth him that gives and him that takes."

This portion of the prayer, recall, is sometimes translated as "forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." This alternate translation sheds some light on its meaning. When we "trespass," i.e. sin, we place ourselves in debt to the one against whom we have trespassed -- whether it be a friend or an employer or the government or God Himself. Point of fact, God is ultimately the victim of any and every sin we commit.

When I sin against you, you have at least a theoretical right to expect me to make it up to you somehow. If I steal some of your money, you have a right to expect me to pay it back, for example. Forgiveness, then, means not just saying, "It's okay," to someone after they hurt you in some way. It means we are in a position to require someone to somehow make up for their injury against us, and we do not.

That is what the Father does. He is in a position to expect us to make all kinds of stuff up to Him. The debt we owe to Him is more than we could ever afford, more than we could accomplish in an eternity.

Yet He forgives us. Christ takes onto Himself the burden of our wrongdoing against Him and His Father.

But if we cannot give the gift of forgiveness ourselves, then we will not be disposed or prepared to receive it from God. For to harbor anger is to insist on debts that we believe are owed to us. And those debts weigh on us needlessly, preoccupying us with other people's need for our forgiveness, rather than our need for God's forgiveness. Only by forgiveness can we jettison those burdens to ourselves. It is not easy, of course, and we need God's grace to do it. But then again, perhaps that is why his part of the prayer comes right after our petition that God give us our daily bread.

Forgiveness and reconciliation are closely linked but they are not the same thing. Forgiveness only takes one. I can forgive a person his debt to me without him even knowing or believing that a debt is owed. But reconciliation takes two. In reconciliation, he must recognize that a debt is owed, and ask forgiveness for it -- at which point it is granted. That's reconiciliation. And it is what God wants for us. His forgiveness is the easy part. What He wants is for us to recognize the debt we owe Him, and place ourselves at His mercy and trust Him. When we do that, He will always forgive us.

From the Our Father:

Give us this day our daily bread ...

The daily bread that we ask God to give to us is simply Himself. It is all that He is. God alone can sustain our souls, the way food sustains our bodies.

Asking Him to give daily bread to us implies a certain disposition on our part. When we ask someone to speak, we listen. When we ask someone to come out where we can see them, our eyes are open. When we ask someone for a high five, our hand is raised and ready.

When we ask God to give us our daily bread, we imply that we are ready to receive it. All of it. All of Him. We can hardly ask God to give us all of Himself and then run from Him..

To ask someone to feed us is also to admit a kind of helplessness. Like a baby who has to be spoon-fed. We cannot obtain for ourselves the fulfillment that conquers our hunger and comes from God HImself. We must rely completely on Him to grace us with the gift of Himself. We have to quiet and still ourselves in order for God to give us what we need -- and nowhere more completely and literally than when we receive the body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ in the Eucharist.

Nowhere on earth is the gift of God's very self so completely and literally given to us than in that sacrament. The bread and wine mysteriously and actually become the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

And it illustrates what God must do in order to give himself to us -- which is to make Himself, by comparison to His original form, unfathomably small. C.S. Lewis uses the image of a man turning himself into a slug, and living among slugs. But, he observes, the distance between a slug and a man is infinitely less than the difference between man and God.

Yet God became man. It is how God relates to man, and fills man up and sustains him. He makes Himself small. And then He makes Himself yet smaller, taking on the form of bread and wine so that he can really truly enter into our bodies, and thereby communicate His grace in the most intimate way possible.

Humans pay a lot more attention to what we eat than to what we touch, or look at or listen to. We obsess in a particular way over over our diets. There are many filthy things out there that we might touch that we would never eat. Why? Because we can't just wash off what we eat.

I can look at a hamburger on the table in front of me and know what it is. I could have a Ph.D in hamburger and be able to write a dissertation on what would happen if I ate it -- where all the different ingredients would go, etc. But no level of detailed knowledge about the hamburger and what would happen in my body once I ate it would actually sustain my body. I have to take it into myself. When we eat something it becomes a part of who we are. Only then does the meal truly energize us.

It is not enough merely to know who Christ is. It is not even enough to know a lot of details about Him. He wants to enter into us and change us from the inside out.

What we eat is both more crucial and more potentially hazardous to our health than anything else we come into contact with. If something is bad for us to eat, and we eat it, we may die sooner than we wish. If something is necessary and crucial for us to eat, and we don't, we may die of malnutrition or starvation. Nothing is more necessary and crucial than Christ Himself.

It is not enough simply to know God. If we are to be holy as He is holy, we must literally feed off of Him.

From the Lord's Prayer:

Thy Kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
on earth as it is in Heaven.

God's dominion is not a democracy. It is not a constitutional republic. It is a Kingdom. There is one who rules and His rule is absolute. You and I don't get a vote.

If God's rule is absolute, then that means nothing and no one else in the universe can assume absolute dominion over us. We cannot be totally dependent on anything or anybody except God. No addiction to any substance or sensation, no allegiance to any flag, no loyalty to any political figure, no love of anything or anyone else can ever override our love of, our need for, our allegiance and loyalty to the King of Heaven and the King of our lives. Any country or politician worth their salt will freely admit this.

Now it's true, you and I don't get a vote. But the point of a vote in a representative republic like the one in which I and my fellow-citizens reside is to consent to the government of those whom we wish to empower, in hopes that their political work will help our freedom and happiness, or at least not encroach on either.

But God is a benevolent King, not a tyrant. He does not force His royal will upon us his subjects. His people are a free people. He has always desired them, since He first created them, to be free. Free from the devil's manipulation, free from slavery to Egypt, free even from slavery to their own passions. Thus He invites us to freely submit ourselves to His absolute rule. This portion of the Our Father is a direct response to that invitation.

Although we are free to refuse to submit to God's will, there is in a sense no escaping it. We may refuse to live according to His desires, but we may not refuse to live according to His desires and still be happy. The consequences of defying God are nonnegotiable and inevitable. That's what it means not to have a vote. Either we will freely subject ourselves to His rule and, by letting go of our desires for selfish and self-centered autonomy, and thereby come to know true freedom and happiness; or we will flee from Him and find that we have become slaves to powers and passions not only beneath Him, but beneath ourselves. When you're addicted, when you're a slave to your bottom line or your political interests, or whatever else, you still don't get a vote. In the end, you get nothing.

Where is the Kingdom of God? It is easy and understandable, given that imagery, to picture God's Kingdom as some geographic place where everything is beautiful and there is no injustice at all. And we may strive for that in our own geographic place.

But the Kingdom of God does not begin by works that we do. It begins by the work of grace from one who is greater than us. God's Kingdom has to consume us, and take root in our very hearts. Our works for justice flow from that.

That work of grace from God is what sustains and strengthens us to work to build the Kingdom. The work of grace is what is called in the prayer, "our daily bread." That's tomorrow.

The prayer that is today known as "The Lord's Prayer" or "The Our Father" was first taught by Jesus of Nazareth in the Sermon on the Mount, recorded in the Gospel of Matthew Chapter 6, verses 9 through 13:

This is how you are to pray: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread;
and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors;
and do not subject us to the final test, but deliver us from the evil one.

I'll be dedicating one entry each day this week to each line above. The Our Father contains several different types of prayer: worship, surrender, petition, and contrition.

Today I look at the first (in the more traditional language): "Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name." This is adoration, a worshipful acknowledgment of who God is. He is Father. He is the one who gives each of us life.

Notice also though that He is "Our" Father. Not "My" Father. I do not pray to Him merely on my own individual behalf. When I pray the Our Father, I am to pray to Him on behalf of all the faithful.

Part and parcel of acknowledging God's identify is praising Him -- acknowledging His exhaulted place far above ourselves, and recognizing that his name is "hallowed," meaning holy, or revered.

That reverence is important. In addition to being an expression of the reality, I think of this first line also as an expression of one's attitude. With what kind of attitude are we approaching God? We cannot pay attention to and understand the meaning of these first words of the Our Father and still approach Him with flippancy.

The words of the prayer after all are so familiar to so many of us who have been hearing them since our pregnant mothers prayed them, that we can zip right through these first crucial words. Perhaps a good practice would be, the next time we pray in solitude this prayer that Jesus taught us, to make a point to say each clause slowly and deliberately. "Our Father," ... "who art in heaven," ... "hallowed be thy name." Think about those words as we pray them. Let them to flow out from our hearts, the same as if we were to tell the love of our life, "I love you. You're beautiful."

It also may behoove us to consider whether we "hallow" the name of our Father in heaven not just as we begin the prayer but in the general practice of our lives. Prayer, particularly the adoration and respect that we pay to the Father, is not merely lip service. It has to be backed up in our lives through our faithfulness to His plan. That's surrender, which is what follows logically. And that's tomorrow.

Today's Gospel is the one where Jesus says whoever is without sin should cast the first stone. In other words, take care that in our very right and proper zeal for righteousness, we do not, in our challenges to others to live a better life, abandon charity. If we abandon charity we may do more harm than good to a person's spirit -- both theirs and our own.

We are all, basically, fallen and therefore sinful. The mercy God has shown to each of us is not the result of us having met some minimum standard that others have failed. Mercy is to be shown to all. In other words, hate the sin, and love the sinner.

To love the sinner is precisely to hate the sin. And it applies also not just to how we approach our neighbors but how we approch ourselves.

We might ask: Do I throw stones at myself when I sin? When I fall, do I beat myself up over it? Or do I allow Jesus to pick me up and invite Him into my weakness, asking Him for the grace I need to correct my behavior?

***

The second to last week of Lent is already upon us! This coming week I will be looking at the prayer that Jesus taught us. It begins with the address: "Our Father."

From Matthew Chapter 16, verses 24:

Then Jesus said to his disciples, "Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me."

This does not mean that we wish pain and punishment upon ourselves, or that we directly seek such things.

I used to think wrongly that the example of Christ is a kind of masochism. I could live my life my way, or I could live it God's way. And my way would be easy and feel good, at least by comparison, while God's way would hurt and be very difficult. It might even make me miserable. So what. I deserve it, right?

I thought God's way meant foregoing all my desires, even those which He gave me that are not sinful. The result was that in trying to decide which path I would choose in life -- ordained priesthood, marriage, whatever -- I could not admit to myself what I really wanted.

Lots of people are afraid to admit to themselves what they really want. I'm convinced a lot of guys out there are afraid to admit that they really do want to be ordained priests. They're afraid to do something so radically different with their lives. Still others are afraid to admit that they really want to get married and have kids. Others are afraid to admit they want to do missionary work, or that they want to write, or be a doctor or a musician or an accountant. The main reason devout religious folks are afraid to admit what they want is because they think -- again, wrongly -- that it is somehow selfish. To admit what I want means I focus on that instead of what God wants for me.

That may be a common error to find amongst Catholics, but that does not mean the error is itself Catholic.

Let me put this very simply. God does not play games. If He wants you to do something in particular with your life, He will place that desire in your heart. It is Satan's chicanery that makes you believe you are selfish to follow it. Admit to yourself what you want, because chances are* you want it because God wills it.

But the key is, once we admit to ourselves what we want in life, and once we start pursuing that good that God wants for us, we have to really pursue it. We can't take a detour from the suffering that we encounter in pursuit of the good because we think God wants us to never encounter any suffering.

Jesus came with a clear mission. He pursued it and it was His joy, and His Father's joy -- the salvation, redemption and sanctification of mankind. He did not directly seek to bring suffering upon Himself. But as it began to appear that He would face great suffering and revilement and defilement for His pursuit of this mission, He did not flee. That, His apostles did. It is Jesus who shows us "God's way," and the disciples who show us "our way." It is not that the disciples did something with their lives that they really did not want to do. They wanted to follow Jesus and share in His mission. But they shared in it only until the threat of suffering and death revealed itself. Then, they ran.

Jesus begged His Father to spare Him suffering and death. So we may.

But when, if He was to do the will of His Father, His suffering proved inevitable, He did not run. He did not retreat in the face of pain. John Paul II wrote in 1995** that our current cultural climate

... fails to perceive any meaning or value in suffering, but rather considers suffering the epitome of evil, to be eliminated at all costs. This is especially the case in the absence of a religious outlook which could help to provide a positive understanding of the mystery of suffering.

The Holy Father was saying not that suffering is the greatest thing in the world, but that it is not the worst thing in the world. What is the worst thing in the world is to retreat, to at one moment enthusiastically pursue the path down which God is calling us, only to run in fear the next moment. We may know that the one will hurt for a time, but we know with even greater certainty that fleeing like cowards will surely make us miserable wretches for the rest of our lives.

Because deep down, we want to follow God. We want to live our lives the way He wants us to. We know that the only way we can really be happy is to follow Him, even if, and perhaps partly because, it will often require great courage.






*It is necessary to examine, of course, the moral legitimacy of the desires in our hearts. For example, it is possible that someone may desire something which is morally illegitimate, like the death of his roommate***. In those cases, one often has to look deeper for the good that he hopes to achieve by killing his roommate, and find morally legitimate ways to achieve it.
**Evangelium Vitae -- "The Gospel of Life," paragraph 15
***Don't worry, roommate. We're cool.

When Jesus was a boy, He stayed behind in His Father's house, the temple in Jerusalem, even after His family had left to go home to Nazareth. Why did He do it?

My guess: He was homesick.

Jesus would speak of His Father's house again about twenty-one years later to His disciples:

In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. ... And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be.

One's house is a place of security. It provides shelter. A house is where one eats, and where one rests, the way God Himself rested on the Seventh Day. A house is one's home, where one belongs.

Was Jesus of Nazareth, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, at home on earth? In one sense, there is nowhere in the universe that God cannot be found. All the universe belongs to Him. At the same time, where Christ was always really "at home" was in the presence of His Father who sent Him. Before his entrance into the created world, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity lived in a perfect communion of love with and knowledge of the Father and the Holy Spirit. He not only lived the beatific vision that we mortals hope to achieve when we pass from this life, He was that beatific vision.

Now think, He had to go from that to ... this. A beautiful and awe-inspiring creation, of course. But what is it compared to the complete bliss of God's own life? Obviously you and I can't make the comparison. But He could. He knew what more there was to life than this world that passes away.

Not that He begrudged it. He was happy and willing to humble Himself to take on human form. But He always felt drawn back to the place He had always been -- in the shelter of His Father. That was Jesus' home.

Now, the revolutionary idea of Jesus is that He now intends to make that home, our home. Your home. My home.

What do families do when they have a baby on the way? They prepare a room for her. A place where she can be kept safe and receive everything that she needs to be happy. So with the family of God, the Trinity, and us. Jesus' promise that He will prepare a place for us in His Father's own house means that He is telling us -- not just how we ought to live, although that is important, and not just Whom we are to worship, although that is crucial, but where we belong. It is what we search for in life so frantically. A sense of belonging. It's why people yearn for romantic relationships. They desire terribly only that they might belong with someone. Just to belong somewhere, with someone, is enough to make life mean something, to make it worth living. Not a bad thing either. God gave us those desires. He made us a people that yearns to belong with someone else besides ourselves. We yearn to belong with each other.

But those wants only point to the ultimate yearning of our hearts -- to belong with something greater than we are. And the message of Jesus is that He intends to satisfy that ultimate longing in our hearts, by making a home for us with His Father. So that where He is, at home with His Father, we may be also. His belonging becomes our belonging. We belong because we are one with and in Christ. Because He belongs, we belong.

We are not going to some strange place when we follow Jesus to His Father's house. We are not leading some strange life when we live the way He does. We are being who we were meant to be. We are going where we were meant to go.

Home.

Jesus said to them "Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?"

When Jesus was about twelve years old, after He and His family had journeyed to Jerusalem for the feast of Passover, His mother and father lost Him.

I'm the kind of guy who sometimes gets preoccupied with details, so I am inclined to wonder: How did it happen?

The best explanation I've heard has to do with the culture of the Jews. Their extended families lived close together and traveled likewise, to a point that it was not necessarily uncommon, while traveling, for the children to be in the company of their aunts and uncles, and thus for immediate parents to not see their children for a prolonged period. Mary and Joseph assumed, as they had on previous road trips and other occasions, that Jesus was off with this or that aunt or uncle.

But this time, He was not.

It took them three days to rediscover Him.

Three days. Again, with the foreshadowing. Approximately twenty-one years later, Mary would lose Jesus again, for three days.

But at that time it would be because He went somewhere without her. In his childhood, it would be because He stayed behind in His Father's house. Think of the anxiety with which she and Joseph searched must have searched for Him. All the places they looked for Him but did not find Him. After His three days of absence twenty-one years later, those close to Him would search for Him again.

We may be reminded of how frantically we search for -- happiness, redemption, success, whatever will fulfill us. Especially when we have been blessed with it before. If we know the fulfillment of a blessed life, we will be stricken with a kind of panic when we realize we have lost it. Like Mary, we will search frantically for it in countless places, with heightening anxiety at each new failure.

Unlike Mary, who at least knew what she was looking for, if not where to look, we often don't even realize that what we are looking for is Jesus. That He alone can conquer the anxiety and the hunger that we have inside. And that He is in the last place we would normally think to look, the house of His Father.