Tag Archives: jesus

Why I Love Jesus AND Religion

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Mary| 271 Comments

[Please, if you would, take a moment right now to pray for a special intention of mine today.  Thank you so much!]

This video was making the rounds on my Facebook news feed yesterday.  You may have seen it:

Now I was a fan of this guy’s last video.  And in this video, he does say some things that are right, and I get that his heart is in the right place.  Where I take issue is that he is not merely saying that Jesus is greater than Religion (which, by the way, I agree with).  He is saying that Jesus hates religion.  And while it may be tempting to play the, “yeah, I think religious people are lame, too” card in an attempt to get more people to hear our message, we need to be careful that our message does not fly in the face of the Gospel.  I don’t have time to cover everything misleading in the video here, but I will try to hit the main points.

What if I told you Jesus came to abolish religion?

…Then I’d say you probably haven’t read the New Testament very carefully.  Jesus is pretty clear in Matthew 5:17 when He says,

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the prophets.  I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”

The Law, of course, being the Law of Moses, i.e. The Old Covenant, i.e. RELIGION.

In the Old Testament, God actually calls religious people whores

Yes, God called some religious people whores in the Old Testament—when they were being unfaithful to the Law (in other words: when they were disobeying the laws of their RELIGION—their religion given to them by God, by the way)

In the New Testament, Jesus refers to the scribes and Pharisees as hypocrites an awful lot, but remember the definition of a hypocrite: a person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings.  Jesus actually told the disciples that they should DO what the scribes and Pharisees tell them.

“…practice and observe whatever they tell you, but not what they do; for they preach, but do not practice” (Matthew 23:3).

“Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven…For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:19-20)

Doesn’t sound like Jesus hates religion to me.  In fact it sounds like He takes it pretty seriously.

When individuals use religion as a mask or for personal gain?  Yes, Jesus hates that.  But only because religion is not (and never was) meant to be a mask.  It’s meant to be an aid.

If I’m sick, knowing the doctor is definitely going to be important.  I’m going to need a relationship with him in order to let him know what is hurting me so that he can heal me.  But the fact of the matter is, if there’s no hospital, I’m not going to be able to find a doctor.  If I don’t go in for regular check-ups (even when I don’t feel like I’m sick), I’m not going to remain healthy.  If there’s no medicine when I am sick, my relationship with the doctor isn’t going to be enough to make me well again.  There’s a reason the doctor prescribes medicine, just like there is a reason God gave us the rules of religion.

Posted in Pop Culture, Stuff Catholics Do, You & God

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The Rules

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Mary| 2 Comments

As young people, we’re generally not huge fans of rules.  We like to make up our own minds using our own reason and we hate being told what to do—especially if we are told to do something for seemingly no reason at all (like making your bed in the morning when you’re just going to sleep in it again at night).

At first, we may just put up with the nonsensical rules out of fear of getting in trouble.  When this is no longer enough, we’re faced with two options:

1)   We decide that we know better and we figure that the fun we’ll have breaking the rules is worth the consequences or punishments that will most likely befall us.

2)   We talk to the boss (usually mom and dad) and figure out what the deal is with the rules.  And even if we still don’t quite understand them, we figure that our parents have our best interest at heart, and the love and respect we have for them is enough to get us to obey the rules.

If you paid attention closely, you may have noticed that it all really comes down to some form of love.  When we obey rules out of fear of punishment, it’s because we’re smart enough to love ourselves enough to not want to get punished.  On the other hand, when we break rules, we’re declaring that we love pleasures or laziness so much that we don’t even care that we’ll eventually be hurt by the punishment our actions bring with them.

This is why our faith cannot be merely a set of rules.  Faith, in order to be fruitful, has to be based on the love of a person outside of ourselves—the person of Jesus Christ.  We need Jesus to teach us how and why to love.  We need Him to teach us why the rules are there, and if we don’t understand some of them, we need to know that, like a father, He only gives us rules for our own happiness and well-being.  We can’t know this simply by being told.  We have to know it for ourselves; we have to know Him.

Posted in You & God, Young & Stupid

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Merry Christmas!

Posted on December 27, 2011 by Mary| 1 Comment

Merry Christmas!

My God, if my tongue cannot say in every moment that I love You,
I want my heart to repeat it to You as often as I draw breath.”

-St. John Vianney

Posted in You & God

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Being Catholic vs. Following Christ

Posted on December 6, 2011 by Mary| 7 Comments

Question:

Why do Catholics refer to themselves as “Catholic” and not as “Christians”?  For instance, when I am asked what I believe, I don’t say I’m Lutheran or Presbyterian, I say I am Christian. But I have noticed that my Catholic friends identify themselves not as Christian, but as Catholic. 

Do not we all believe that Christ died for sins and rose again, and that this is the essence of our faith? So then why does there seem to be this distinction between us? I know that there are many theological and liturgical differences that separate Catholics from the denominations, but I think that we should all come under one umbrella on one point: that we are all professors of Christ’s redeeming grace and, therefore, all Christians.

This is not to say that Catholics are not Christians, but to ask why I do not hear my friends who are Catholic referring to themselves as Christians.

 

Answer:

Thanks for the question!

First of all, you are absolutely right.  Catholics are Christian.  In fact, before the Protestant Reformation, most people who identified themselves as Christians were Catholic-Christians (give or take a few heretics).  Saint Peter was the first Pope of the Catholic Church (and I don’t think anyone would argue that he wasn’t a follower of Christ!), and we have had an unbroken line of popes since Saint Peter, that goes all the way to our current pope, Pope Benedict XVI.

Catholic actually means “universal,” so when someone says, “I belong to the Catholic Church,” they are really saying, “I belong to the universal church.”  So it’s a little ironic that nowadays it can sometimes feel divisive among other Christians.  Our earliest written record of the term “catholic” to describe the Church is from Saint Ignatius of Antioch, in AD 107.  Ignatius was a bishop who, like a lot of the early Christians, was arrested and killed for his faith.  In his final letter to his fellow Christians in Smyrna (a city in modern-day Turkey), he wrote, “Where the bishop is present, there is the Catholic [universal] Church” (To the Smyrnaeans 8:2).  The term sort of caught on after that.

Why don’t your Catholic friends refer to themselves as Christians, you ask?  I can’t be sure.  It could be that they don’t know for sure whether Catholics really are Christian.  I’ve been asked this question a lot by kids on retreats or at youth group, and I often get the sense that most of these young people know that Catholics are Christian, but they also know that our brand of Christianity is different than a lot of their friends’, and they’re not really sure how to articulate why that is.

For me, if someone asks if I am a Christian, I unhesitatingly tell them yes.  I am a proud believer in Jesus Christ.  But if asked what faith I am or religion I am apart of, I proudly say that I am a Catholic.  Why?  Because while all Catholics are Christian, not all Christians are Catholic.  To be a Catholic means that I am under the authority of the Church that Christ established over 2,000 years ago when he gave Peter the keys to the kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 16:18).  To be a Catholic means that I can run to Christ in the sacrament of reconciliation when I have sinned, and truly know that I have been forgiven.  To be a Catholic means that I believe that Christ meant it at the Last Supper when He said the words, “This is my body…take and eat,” and I get to receive Him on a regular basis in the Eucharist.  Jesus commanded us to follow Him, but I believe He gave us the Catholic Church as a means to do that in the fullest way possible.

You are right, though.  It was Christ’s prayer that we “may all be one,” as He is one with the Father (John 17:21).  There is definitely a balance to strike between only focusing on our differences, and ignoring them completely.  In the end, we will only ever be truly united when we all believe in the one truth that Christ Himself meant for us to believe in.  Until then, we love each other as Christ has commanded us to :)

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Posted in Ask Mary, Stuff Catholics Do

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Word.

Posted on November 22, 2011 by Mary| 3 Comments

Humanly speaking, the word, our human word, is almost a nothing in reality, a whiff of breath. No sooner said, it vanishes. It seems to be nothing. And yet the human word has an incredible power. They are words that make history, they give shape to our thoughts, thoughts which give rise to words. Words shape history and reality.

-Pope Benedict XVI

It’s a bit ironic for me to be writing about this, since I’m sure, as a blogger, I waste words all the time.  However, I wanted to write a post about words.  How we use our words, what our words mean, and how we can [hopefully] waste fewer words.

I have two main reasons for coming to this topic.  The first is profanity; the other is Facebook (and, oh my, when the two combine…).

To be honest, I’ve always found profanity unattractive and, quite frankly, pointless.  Usually the defense of people who use profanity is something along the lines of, “So what?  It’s just a word.  How can a word be ‘bad’?”

And that sort of gets at the heart of my pet peeve.  Words are supposed to have meaning. If they didn’t, well then I couldn’t be writing this post, no one would be able to talk to each other, and the world would pretty much stop functioning.  It is a very good thing that we assign meaning to words.

But probably even more upsetting than when we try to devalue words and their meaning, by using profanity, is when we do it without even realizing—to our most personal thoughts.  And thanks to the age of social media, we now do it all the time.  Whoever said the saddest words are those unspoken clearly lived in an age before the Internet.  As powerful as words have the potential to be, we actually devalue our deepest desires, thoughts, and feelings when we subject them to a Facebook status or tweet for 1,000+ other people to read, pass judgment on, or comment on.  The really tragic part is that we don’t fully realize what we are doing until it’s done.  Our tweet is another one in a million; and suddenly the worth of our thoughts are determined by the number of times they get retweeted.

It’s so important to be able to speak your mind.  But it’s just as important to guard your heart.  Words are often where the two meet.  So think before you speak (or tweet).  Your words are too precious to waste.

 

Posted in Pop Culture, Young & Stupid

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