Robert Barron - You Can't Give What You Don't Have
Peace be with you. Friends, on this third Sunday of Ordinary Time, I want to talk to you about walls and bridges. Those old enough to remember, I’m referencing a John Lennon album from the mid-1970s, Walls and Bridges. There’s I think, a tendency today to be simplistic and one-sided about walls and bridges. Walls bad, keep people out. They’re standoffish. It’s xenophobic to have walls. Bridges are great. Bridges connect us to people. Bridges mean we’re all in this together. I’m against walls. I’m for bridges.
Well, again, I suggest with John Lennon in mind, it’s not walls or bridges. It’s walls and bridges. The point is, it depends on where you are in the life of the church which one you want to emphasize, because I would say you need both walls and bridges to live the Christian thing correctly. Now, what am I talking about? I want to go back to our first reading. It’s from the book of Nehemiah in the Old Testament. Well, Nehemiah is not read that often in the liturgy, but along with the book of Ezra, they’re coupled together, this is a very important moment in the Old Testament revelation. We’re talking about a time in Israelite history when the Babylonian captives are kind of trickling back from their foreign exile. They’re returning to their homeland.
Now, most probably never knew Jerusalem. Maybe some of the older ones did, but they come back to find their once glorious capital city destroyed. It was leveled. It was burned during the Babylonian captivity. They come back and you can sense it in the pages of the book over many, many centuries. You can feel the anguish of the people. Imagine if Paris were destroyed and 70-some years later, an old Parisian returned looking about at the ruins of this once great city. Suppose Rome was once again sacked as it has been many times in its history. And then a Roman 70 years later came back to see it. Bringing it to my own country, a Chicagoan, after Chicago had been attacked in war, let’s say, and they came back many years later and saw the ruins of the city they loved. And you can feel, as I say, the anguish of the hearts of Israel as they look at their ruined city. So one of the first moves that Nehemiah makes is to rebuild the walls.
Now, keep in mind, especially in the ancient world, it’s hard for us to imagine now like a walled city, but in the ancient world, that’s how a city defined itself, by its walls. It kept a certain form of life in, kept other forms of life out. It’s the way a city defended itself. If its walls were breachable, it was vulnerable to all of its enemies, vulnerable to any influence coming from the outside. So Nehemiah says, okay, if we’re going to come back and make Jerusalem the capital city again, the first thing we have to do is build up its walls. And so the people get to work on this great project. But there’s more to it because it’s not just a matter of the physical walls that define the city, it’s also the culture and the heart and the soul of the people.
See, keep this in mind everybody. You’re an Israelite. Now you’re taken away in exile. You’re taken away from your country, your capital city. You’re in a foreign land. You’re amidst alien people with different ideas and stories and cultural traditions. Now you give rise to the next generation and they give rise to still another generation. Now, those kids, the grandchildren of the first exiles, what do they know of Israel? They’ve heard the stories probably of the country where they live. Maybe it’s down to a handful of people who even remember the great stories that defined Israel.
I thought of this not that long ago as I record these words, I was in Prague in the Czech Republic just a few weeks ago, and Prague, this magnificent city, the physical artifacts of Prague remain. But almost everyone there witnessed to the fact that the Catholic faith that was so strong that in fact gave rise to those beautiful buildings, is largely compromised. Why? Well, because the communists came and they knocked religion out and then a generation and then another generation, so that now even the grandparents of young people today don’t have the Christian faith. You can knock out a philosophical or religious tradition that easily in a couple of generations.
So Nehemiah understands, I got to rebuild the physical walls around the city, but Ezra understands, he’s the priest, Ezra understands. I’ve also got to build up these people psychologically and religiously. I’ve got to restore their soul to them. Because if you want to put it this way, the walls around their Israelite souls had also been compromised. So that’s what our reading’s about. Listen. «Ezra, the priest brought the law before the assembly, which consisted of men, women, and those children old enough to understand». See, he knows what he’s doing. He wants the kids especially to hear this. «Standing at one end of the open place, he read out of the book».
The book here is the Torah and it’s the prophets. It’s the great book of Israel. «He read out of the book from daybreak until midday again in the presence of the men, the women and the children old enough to understand, and all the people listened attentively to the book of the law. Ezra opened the scroll so that all people might see it». Get that image in your mind that people gathered around. Here’s the priest. He has the scroll of the law. Think of the synagogue today when they take the scroll of the Torah, and now he’s going to read from that. You think you listen to long sermons. From daybreak until midday he reads the law and the people see the scroll upon which these words are written. They hear the stories of Israel.
And the people are so moved, it says, that they break into tears. Now, why? Because they were realizing again, who they are. They were rediscovering their soul. The walls of the soul had been breached. Think of the walls of a cell that allow that cell to function properly. If the walls are breached, the cell dies. Or use John Henry Newman’s example. Think of an animal making its way through its environment. If the integrity of the animal is compromised, its skin and its muscular structure, its skeletal structure. If that becomes compromised, the animal dies and its environment takes it over. That’s another way of expressing the fact of death, isn’t it? That’s when an organism is overtaken by its environment. We talk about a corpse that’s decomposing. That’s what it means. It means the walls have been breached and now the environment takes over.
Well, this is what Ezra and Nehemiah both see, the physical walls and the walls around the soul, and so they want to build them up. Now, do you see at the outset of the sermon, I mentioned how it’s naive to say walls are bad, bridges are good. Well, look, bridges are good and I’ll get there, but walls are good too because by means of the wall that we know who we are. Who are we as Catholics?
Now, look. I came of age right after Vatican II when there was an extraordinary stress I would say, upon cultural relevance. The church going out to meet the modern world, the church listening. Good and I’ll say more about it, I’ll say more about it. But the danger was, and believe me, my generation experienced it. The danger was that the walls came down in a way. We lost that vivid sense of who we are as Catholics. What are the laws and the practices and the convictions and the ideas, the moral acts that define us? Define, definire in Latin means end or border, line. Things that define us. In the measure that those were lost, we were like the Israelites coming back to Jerusalem. We had lost our bearings. And so walls, yes, yes, I want them.
Now, just a glance at the Gospel with Ezra and Nehemiah in mind. It’s Luke’s account of Jesus returning to his home town and he goes into the synagogue on the Sabbath and he too is handed a scroll. So Ezra has the scroll, Jesus now has the scroll. He unfolds it and he begins to read from the prophet Isaiah. «The spirit of the Lord is upon me. He’s anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He sent me to proclaim liberty to captives. Rolling up the scroll, he handed it back to the attendant and sat down, and the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently upon him».
Well see everybody, what was that moment? That was a moment of redefinition. This is now the Word, the Word proclaimed to Moses and to the prophets and to everybody else in the Old Testament, the Word made flesh. This is the Word by which Israel is defined. In proclaiming his identity, he’s re-establishing the wall that defines the people Israel. Okay. I’ve been praising the wall a lot because I think it gets underplayed. I think we simplistically dismiss walls. But now bridges, yeah, walls and bridges.
Look, having been defined, Israel is now meant to go out and to announce that Word to the world. Now its identity is secure, it proclaims the Word of God to the world. The purpose of Israel, the purpose of the church, the new Israel, is not to hunker down behind the walls. Now, here’s where all my teachers and everyone after Vatican II got it right, they got that right. The church is meant to Christify the world, bring the lumen, the light of Christ to the gentes, to the world. But again everybody, you can’t do that if you don’t know who you are. If you’ve allowed your identity to become compromised, then you won’t have a word to announce.
And see, I know we get caught in these simplistic, bifurcated views. Oh, I’m against walls. I’m for bridges. La-de-dah. I mean, that’s just the wrong way to think about it. You are for both walls and bridges because the bridge won’t mean anything unless the wall has properly defined you. See, the pastoral genius is not the one who says, «Hey, I’m all bridges, or I’m all wall». No, no, no. That’s a simplistic liberalism, a simplistic conservatism. No, no. The pastoral genius is the one who knows what’s the needful thing. Think of Ezra and Nehemiah. At that moment in Israelite history, they knew the needful thing was the wall, and it was the declaration of the law. Both walls and bridges, both identity and relevance, both the Word and now the Word proclaimed. Getting that balance right, walls and bridges, that’s the challenge. And God bless you.