Striving, together...
thinking about the nature of things
Tuesday of the 5th Week of Lent + March 24, 2026 + IJC + Dunfee, SJ
Numbers 21:4-9 + John 8:21-30
This is not an easy gospel to hear. It reflects the sense of urgency that Jesus must have felt at this point in his mission. Time was short. Jesus faced increasing opposition from powerful men – and they were men – who were determined to preserve the status quo even if doing so included sending him to his death. Everyone knew what became of rebels, agitators and wannabe prophets: They went to the cross. Indeed crucifixion had been crafted – carefully and thoughtfully, by those obsessed with empire – to effectively deter and prevent rebellion. For Jesus and his followers there was no time to waste and so the message is stated simply and starkly: To reject the revelation of God, as a whole or in part, is to embrace death. There’s no threat here; Jesus is simply stating a fact, and in fact his words echo those of Moses, spoken centuries earlier: “I set before you life and death” (Deuteronomy 30:19). God’s ways are the ways of life.
But first, a necessary digression, made so by John’s use of “the Jews” and by the sad fact that again and again the fourth gospel has been pressed into service by antisemites in general and especially by those who would vilify “the Jews” as supposed “Christ-killers”, even though the Catholic Church has authoritatively rejected this particular abomination at least twice: In the 16th century with the Council of Trent and again in the 20th at the Second Vatican Council in 1965. John’s gospel, composed in the latter years of the first century, reflects a growing division between those who followed Christ and the Jewish mainstream. It was largely a division among Jews. The earliest followers of Jesus were Jews; Jesus himself was a faithful Jew from first to last. And here John’s “the Jews” did not mean Israel as a whole but rather groups of Jewish leaders, most notably the Pharisees. They’re the ones – though not to a man, for even the Pharisees were not univocal in opposing Jesus – who saw Jesus as a threat to the status quo and a problem to be dealt with decisively.
OK? Back to it: God is self-giving love. God’s way – the way of life, as in “I set before you life” – is the way of self-giving love. To live in harmony with the fundamental realities of the universe is to love as God loves – albeit imperfectly, given our limitations and given that we inhabit a fallen realm in which we see “through a glass, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12). Right action for the Christian is to behave so as to reveal, affirm and cooperate with the reality of self-giving love. And the thing about reality is that, being real, it prevails, regardless of anyone’s cosmology. Things are the way they are. That’s not a reason to despair but a reason to rejoice, for this is God’s world and God is love.
You can posit another reality if you like. Say, I don’t know, the Lord of the Flies? Spoiler alert: Whatever things look like at the start it’s not going to end well; but at least you won’t be the only one heading toward calamity. As Jesus put it in Matthew 7:13, “for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it”. In that vein, the other day I came across a piece by Nathan Schneider in the Jesuit publication America. The title made me sit up straight: “The U.S. Government is at War with the Catholic Church”. Unnuanced as titles go, but not hyperbole; not by a longshot.
With the possible exception of the Vatican city-state (population 882), it’s a given that the world’s governments do not align themselves with Catholic teaching. They’re not trying to do so. Most people don’t see this as a problem. It becomes a problem when Catholic teaching articulates moral and ethical norms that apply generally. Which is one of the aims of Catholic teaching, and indeed Catholics say that moral norms exist objectively and even that they – to express it poetically – are written in the book of nature, meaning that they are discoverable and comprehensible by anyone who might care to look for them. Morality is part of the fabric of the universe.
Please note I am not suggesting that the Church’s leaders and moral theologians always get it right when it comes to articulating moral norms. Simply put, the Church is, um, imperfect. With a couple of notable exceptions, everyone who has ever been or is now associated with Catholic Christianity has been and is – brace yourself – sinful. We’ve gotten things wrong even when we were trying very hard to get things right. Through a glass, darkly….
Back to Dr. Schneider, who teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He’s not the first to note that Catholic teaching and American public policy are not one and the same or even congruent. What caught me was the breadth of his assertion that the lack of congruence is so fundamental and all-encompassing as to amount to America’s having declared war on Holy Mother Church.
For many Americans the perceived disconnect between law and Catholic teaching is limited to the usual short list of hot-button topics. It’s a list we could all recite. For some the list includes but a single topic; so much so that after the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade (the 1973 decision that recognized a constitutionally-protected – though limited – right to abortion) in 2022 a fair number of American Catholics rejoiced to think the nation had at last aligned itself with the Church. It had not, and not even with respect to topic at hand. Certainly not with respect to the body of teaching that has to do with building just and equitable human societies and with living in harmony with creation as a whole.
The disconnect is not a right-or-left thing. To be sure, it’s worse – much worse and more glaringly evident – under the current reign-of-chaos in Washington, but it’s pervasive and long-standing. The current state of things may indeed be nightmarish; at the same time it’s pretty much where we’ve been heading for a very long time, across administrations and legislative sessions. Had we been paying attention we could have and perhaps should have seen it coming – as indeed some have. Just saying.
It’s the war in the Middle East, which is just the most recent episode in what looks like an endless war. It’s also ICE’s ruthless march from sea to sea. It’s our treatment of immigrants and refugees – at once exploited and made to feel unwelcome – in general. It’s our undeclared hot war on the poor, which is not in any sense a war on poverty itself but the demonization of its victims. It’s the rapaciousness of winner-take-all capitalism. It’s the ethic of power, empire and dominion. It’s the cutting away of an already-tattered safety net. It’s the calculated brutality with which we treat non-human creatures. It’s those in positions of authority who assure us that mercy and empathy have no place in American life or suborn blasphemy by associating the holy name of Jesus with “overwhelming violence of action”. You might say we have failed to grasp the meaning and purpose of human societies from the get-go. And it’s turning our backs to the unfolding cataclysm of climate change, even when the canary in the coal mine has keeled over. As Dr. Schneider sums it, “[T]his country should shame us before our Lamb”.
In today’s gospel passage Jesus characterizes his identity and mission with imagery that the learned and scholarly Pharisees would have readily understood: This is God’s world; divinity is revealed in the person of Christ, fully God and fully human; transcendent holiness is become not just part of the human story but the essence of the human story. This is reality in all its implications, with self-giving love as the core, foundation and center.
Though many Catholics know little about it, Catholic social teaching is not an add-on; it is neither anomalous nor optional; certainly it is not the fever dream of the unnamed bogy-people derided by some as “liberals”. Much of it has come to us via this or that supreme pontiff. It’s articulated in the speeches and writings of Pope Leo and his four most immediate predecessors, including a good bit of material having to do with wealth and economics that would surprise the dickens out of most American Catholics. In sum, Catholic Social Teaching (it merits the capital letters) is substantive, which is to say it is grounded in reality. It has been distilled, imperfectly but inspiringly, into a set of principles – four, five seven or ten, depending – that include the core concepts of dignity, solidarity, the common good, the preferential option for the poor, the way of nonviolence, and what we might as well call integral ecology. It doesn’t matter which principle you start with; you’ll meet the others along the way, because they are of a piece.
We ignore them at our peril. They’re as real as gravity, and as uncompromising. Insist that gravity is fake news or somebody else’s problem? Fine. Next question: Is your life insurance paid up? That’s how real this stuff is: “You will die in your sins.” Again, not a threat; no more so than warning someone at the edge of a precipice that the first step will be a doozy.
A body of teaching expressed as principles. Where to begin? I don’t know that it matters all that much, so long as we start somewhere. What’s called for – what God calls us to – is to start and to strive. Which is not to say that we have to get every bit of it right, right from the start, for Catholic Social Teaching is shot through with mercy, as are all the things of God. After all, and as Pope Francis was fond of reminding us, the very nature of God is mercy. We’re asked to strive; to work at it; to engage with others and to build connections. And even to find joy in doing so, in the way that old-fashioned barn-raisings were joyful occasions. We make friends along the way; we discover meaning and purpose in the everyday; we see a better world on the horizon. We strive, together and together with Christ and the saints, in the direction of health and holiness.
Numbers 21:4-9
From Mount Hor the Israelites set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.”
Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.”
So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.
John 8:21-30
Jesus said to the people, “I am going away, and you will search for me, but you will die in your sin. Where I am going, you cannot come.”
Then the Jews said, “Is he going to kill himself? Is that what he means by saying, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come’?”
Jesus said to them, “You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world, I am not of this world. I told you that you would die in your sins, for you will die in your sins unless you believe that I am he.”
They said to him, “Who are you?” Jesus said to them, “Why do I speak to you at all? I have much to say about you and much to condemn; but the one who sent me is true, and I declare to the world what I have heard from him.”
They did not understand that he was speaking to them about the Father. So Jesus said, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I am he, and that I do nothing on my own, but I speak these things as the Father instructed me. And the one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what is pleasing to him.”
As Jesus was saying these things, many believed in him.