Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
“… that the love with which you loved me may be in them and I in them.” Jn. 17:26
This week witnessed the passing unto eternal life of Daniel Berrigan, S.J.
94 years of age at the time of his death, Fr. Berrigan is perhaps not well known to the present generation of American Catholics, but, in the words of a biographer, Fr. John Dear, he was “a prize-winning poet, an acclaimed Broadway playwright, a theologian, a professor, an actor, a social critic, a radical resister … a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and … a beacon of hope to peace-loving people everywhere.”
The only Catholic priest to ever make the cover of Time magazine, Fr. Berrigan’s entire public life was a living protest against violence and, what he called, “the culture of killing” – a phrase similar to Saint Pope John Paul II’s oft-quoted theme in describing the world we live in today: “the culture of death.”
Fr. Berrigan’s challenge to all of us, again quoting his biographer, is “to pursue God’s reign of non-violence as the main task of the spiritual life.” Or, to put it in Fr. Berrigan’s own words: “The only message I have to the world is: we are not allowed to kill innocent people. We are not allowed to be complicit in murder …. It’s terrible for me to live in a time where I have nothing to say to human beings except, ‘Stop killing.’”
When asked for advice, Fr. Berrigan’s response is one that we could all do well to follow: “Make your story fit into the story of Jesus.” That story is the story of peace and non—violence told in the Sermon on the Mount, and in the entire life and message of Jesus Christ.
Fr. Berrigan’s life was that of a “peacemaker in a warmaking culture” – a culture awash in violence. The violence of abortion. The violence of war. The violence of capital punishment. The violence of guns. The violence of rape. The violence of human trafficking. The violence of domestic beatings. The violence of the abuse of children and elders. The violence of pornography.
All of it brings about a distinct kind of death – if not always of the body, certainly always of the spirit. Something deadly happens inside us.
“Our plight today is very primitive from a Christian point of view,” Fr. Berrigan insists. “We are back where we started: Thou shalt not kill. We are not allowed to kill. Everything today comes down to that – everything.”
Fr. Berrigan was so passionately committed to Jesus’ teaching of non-violence that he took public risks to fit his life into the story of Jesus. As a consequence, “he became the first priest to go to jail for opposing war, and one of the most consistent anti-war priests in church history.”
Jesus himself experienced the most brutal and excruciating form of violence available at that time: crucifixion. His ultimate message in subjecting himself to this unforgettable shame and torture is this:
No more; never again; this must be the end of the killing; this must be the beginning of something radically different – peace, forgiveness, reconciliation, mercy.
Today’s gospel contains Jesus’ last words to his disciples before he undergoes his violent death. His words are an intimate prayer offered to his Father. But notice that his prayer, his final wish, is not only addressed to the disciples at meal with him in that moment, but to all of us – in every age – who “believe in me.”
And what he prays is: “that they also may be in us … that the world may believe that you sent me.”
How will the world believe that “you sent me?” By the way in which we live out the message of peace and non-violence that so scandalizes the world.
And how will we be able, as Fr. Berrigan did, to live out that counter-cultural message of love for one another? By our recognizing through prayer and the Eucharist and reflecting on God’s Word in sacred scripture that “the love with which you loved me may be in them and I in them.”
As followers of Jesus Christ we are not allowed to kill innocent people. And that “killing” includes words used to lie and gossip; it includes acts of betrayals and infidelities; it includes plotting revenge, as well as the more demonstrable forms of killing so commonplace in our society today.
Today’s gospel reading in the form of Jesus’ prayer to the Father, helps us understand perhaps more concretely than ever before that Jesus’ ignominious death becomes not a cause for despair, but a revelation called “Easter” – the radical reordering that in this miraculous event the world has found a new hope, a whole new vision of what can be.
Easter becomes the discovery that not just Jesus, but you and I can rise above our more primitive nature and embrace the realization that “death does not have the last word or even the loudest word.”
To borrow one last time from Fr. John Dear: the resurrection of Jesus means that “we have the resources and the power of putting death itself to death, of declaring war on war, of offering to others the pure and uncorrupted waters of love.”
To turn others towards peace, towards non-violence, then, becomes our mission. It’s our way of making our personal story and our church story “fit into the story of Jesus.”
“ … that the love with which you loved me may be in them and I in them.”
Ted Wolgamot, Psy.D.
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5/5/16
