April 15, 2022 (Good Friday)

by Fr. Bob Glynn, S.J.

[This text is an automatically generated transcript. Minor edits have been made.]

A few weeks ago, I was having a conversation with my dear friend Peter Finch. Now Peter is a doctoral student here. It's all right Brandon. I asked him in advance if I could use his name. There's always someone worried here. And Peter does these unusual things in here like he is that NASA Ames and something involves shock tubes and measurement things and I pretend that I understand it. I'm beginning to which is frightening me. But Peter went to our school, our Jesuit high school in Manhattan called Regis. And Regis is really only for the very brightest boys in the tri state area. And so I know from having taught at Jesuit high schools that they're always trying to ask the judge with trick questions where you will look foolish. So Peter said to me one day further, do you know who Jordan Peterson is? Now, I figured this was a trick question because I definitely didn't know the answer. And I thought, okay, I could pretend I do I look really foolish or just say I don't. So I said, I don't, which apparently was the okay answer. Because Peter said, Well, I been listening to this podcast that was very interesting, and it has to do with biblical stories. And I was wondering if you would listen to it and give me your take? And I said, Okay, this is safe. I don't have to give any answers right here in person at the moment.

So I went home and I listened to this after I figured out how to listen to it. It was a podcast, and it involved two scripture passages and there are two passages that always go together when we hear them at mass. So the first passage was from the book of Numbers, and it's that happy passage where the Israelites had been starting to wander for a while in the desert and like any group of people, they begin to complain. We don't like the food. We don't like the heat. We don't like the desert. And we want to go back to Egypt and eat of the fleshpots and then be happy. And oh, this Jordan Peterson by the way is a psychologist and he has nothing to do with God. Okay. Just in case we were worried about this. Because he's going to give us a psychological interpretation here of what goes on. So the Lord in His wisdom sends serpents to bite everybody. That seemed well deserved, I thought. So they all get bitten and those are being bitten are dying left and right. And so they say, Please, Moses, Go to the Lord and tell him that we don't want to be bitten and die anymore. We'll do what he wants. So Moses goes and does what he does. And then the Lord says to him now this was the what he thought that Jordan Peterson thought was interesting, which I did too, which is that the Lord doesn't take the serpent, which would really be the simplest solution to this thing. Instead, he has Moses put an image of the serpent on a pole, and everybody who looks at the serpent is healed. Okay. Now, the psychological interpretation of this, which I thought was quite good, was that he says alright, what they are looking at is what they fear. Okay? And really what they fear is not the serpent so much as this traveling through the desert, of a change in life, of facing the future. And so when they look at their fears straight on, psychologically, they are healed. Okay, so this is the psychological thing that says, Okay, if we face our fears head on him, do we run from them, then we have a chance of moving forward.

Now then, that was okay. But the second part then, is the gospel that goes with this from John, where Jesus says, And you shall see the Son of man lifted up, like the serpent Okay, and now Jordan Peterson has a very interesting analysis of this, which I thought was really good. But he said, Okay, so what now when Jesus is saying Jesus is obviously not the serpent, but Jesus on the cross has an archetypal function. That's because people at Stanford know what archetypal means, I will not explain it right and are good typical function. And that, in this, we look upon our greatest fear, which is death. And in accepting that we are mortal, we can face any other fear.

Now, I thought this was okay. But I thought it may be captures the psychological to a degree, but it doesn't capture what it means in its greatest depth. I think both religiously and psychologically. Because I am going to make a daring statement here. Listen carefully. I do not think the thing that we fear most deeply is death. Because I would imagine in this church as I'm looking out most of the people here do not have the same color hair that I do. Okay, so you do not think about death a lot. I mean, yes, in the abstract and oh, yes, I will die someday, which we don't believe that happens to other people and I'll just go on or we say yes, we have whatever. It is not that because the cross has to be something Jesus lifted up has to be something that we fear every day. has to touch every moment of our lives. And we don't think that there. I think the great fear is that we are not loved and that I cannot be loved. Not really. And I spend my life trying to do all the things that will make someone love me and that will assure that someone loves me. So I am a wonderful friend. I am a great parents, I'm an excellent whatever. And all those things will earn me love but I know that if I stopped being a great parent for 10 seconds, or I stopped being a wonderful friend or I slip up in some way, that that love is merely contingent upon my performing the role that I must perform in order to get it.

Now Jesus on the cross is a peculiar thing because it is about something about this love. Because as Jesus hangs on the cross, the important thing for us is not to think Oh, my salvation that's all fine. That's theology. Grand. Okay, but is to think that here he is: abandoned of love, by his closest friends; denied that he's even known by his best friend; betrayed by one of the Twelve, those who had walked with him and known him and eaten with him and joked with him and listened to him; hated by his neighbors, and by his nation. His reputation in tatters. Nothing to love and on the cross, we know that he is intimately loved by the Father and has been loved through all of this and that. That love as a father is offered overflowing from Jesus' heart on the cross. It is not a punishment, it is not destruction, it is not defeat. Jesus does not have to earn that love and he knows it. It's the love that was been his from before time began. And it's that love that is given to us of love that cannot be taken away when we don't live up to others expectations or our own so it is when we face our fear that we will not be loved and cannot be loved. And we see that love on the cross authored for us forever and without limits. That we are healed.