Where the Body is

Jesus leaves us today with a discomforting and obscure image: “where the body is, there also the vultures will gather.”[1] …

I think here of corpses in the desert, dead from dehydration and become carrion for scavengers.

And this is Jesus’ answer to his disciples’ question, “Where, Lord?”[2]  … “where the body is, there will be vultures.”

Jesus had just been telling them about something called “the Day of the Son of Man”[3] or sometimes “the apocalypse.”[4] At this time, Jesus says, “Two will be in a bed[5] – one will be taken, the other left.[6] Two will be grinding grain[7] – one will be taken, the other left.”[8] So the disciples’ question might mean, “Where will the saved[9] be taken?” or, “Where will the condemned be left?” And Jesus strikes back with this difficult expression: “where the body is, there the vultures will also gather.”

Jesus often says things difficult for us to understand. Maybe the meaning of this expression is clear to you, but it was not to me. I can certainly relate to Jesus’ foolish and tedious disciples who so often exasperate him with their incomprehension.

So, I studied the question and soon discovered many ways of understanding these words of our Lord.

Many think this is an idiom, rather similar in meaning to our expression, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” -“Where there’s corpses, there’s vultures.” In other words, Jesus may be saying, “You’ll know the day has come when you see it.”… “Keep watch, for you know not the day nor the hour that that Son of Man is coming,” as he says in Matthew.[10] This stands as a caution to us not to follow after those who claim to have cracked the bible code or unlocked the date of doomsday.[11] When the Lord comes back, we’ll know – it will not be any secret knowledge.[12]

But in a most important way, Jesus is already with us. He is God with us – Emmanuel – right here and right now. He is coming, but he is already come. We particularly remember his becoming present among us during the current season of the Nativity fast. Yesterday, we read that the Kingdom of God is already among us and within us.[13]

In the Divine Liturgy – which is outside of time, which takes place at once in heaven and on earth – after the words of institution, we “remember… all that has come to pass in our behalf,” including “the second coming in glory.” The “second coming” has already “come to pass” for us from the eternal kairotic perspective of the Divine Liturgy.

In light of this reality, Ambrose offers a different understanding of this body surrounded by vultures.

First of all, “vultures” may or may not be the best translation. It works for the idiomatic understanding I mentioned before, but the Greek word here is usually translated “eagles.” This expression is the only instance in which it is rendered “vultures,” because many suppose that works better in the context.

In scripture, however, an eagle is a far nobler creature than a vulture. Eagles do not eat the dead. Because they live so long, eagles are associated with youthful and vigorous souls.[14] Isaiah prophesies, “They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles.”[15] Those like eagles, then, are those who believe and hope in the Lord.

With this understanding then, the Lord’s words could have another meaning. "Where the body is, there the eagles will be gathered together."[16]

Ambrose is quick to see this body as the body of Christ. The eagles, then, are first of all those of Christ’s disciples that stayed with him to the end – Mary, Mary, Mary, and John.[17] These are the eagles gathered together around the body of the Lord on the day of the Son of Man. … Christ’s death on the cross is the consummation[18] of his loving sacrifice for us and for our salvation. The day of that sacrifice is the day of Lord in which his victory over death is accomplished[19] once and for all.[20]

“Where Lord?” we ask. “On the cross, and nowhere else” he answers. That is the place where the saved are saved and the damned are damned. In his body. On the cross.

Secondly, Ambrose writes, “Jesus says this concerning this body [surrounded by eagles]: ‘For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.’”[21] The body is the one body of the Lord re-presented to you and me. If we approach him with the fear of God and with faith[22] – discerning this body[23] – it is the place of our salvation. Here, he shall forgive our iniquities, heal our diseases, redeem our lives from the Pit, crown us with love and mercy, and renew our youth like the eagles’.[24]

“Where, Lord?” we ask. “Here, in this holy place, from this holy table,” he answers us today.

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[1] Luke 17:37 NAB

[2] Luke 17:37

[3] Luke 17:22, 24, 30

[4] cf. Luke 17:30

[5] the wealthy (Cyril of Alexandria)

[6] Luke 17:34

[7] the poor (Cyril of Alexandria)

[8] Luke 17:35

[9] the virtuous and good (Cyril of Alexandria) – the faithful (Ambrose)

[10] Matt 25:13

[11] cf. Luke 17:23

[12] gnosis

[13] Luke 17:21

[14] Ps. 102:5; Is 40:31

[15] Is 40:31

[16] Luke 17:37 RSV

[17] John 19:25-26

[18] consummatum est

[19] τετέλεσται

[20] Rom 6:10

[21] John 6:55

[22] Liturgikon, 91

[23] 1 Cor 11:29

[24] Ps 103:3-5

God has become our neighbor

The lawyer looks for justification in the letter of the law. I’ll spoil the surprise for you right at the beginning – he’s not gonna find it there.

He knows the law as well as Jesus, insofar as it is written and they have both read it.

We have all read it as well, I hope. The law we’re talking about here is the Torah, which is the first five books of the Bible. If you have not yet read them all, read them! Somewhere along the line, it got out that we Catholics don't read the Bible – but our own saints would beg to differ.  St. Jerome, for example, admonishes us to exercise and feed our minds daily with Holy Scripture. “May your hands never set the Holy Book down,” he says. We should read on even into the night, he says. “Let sleep find you holding your Bible, and when your head nods let it be resting on the sacred page.” Well, anyway, read it!  We are not illiterate any longer, most of us. That was our only excuse for not reading scripture. If we can read, that is first of all so that we can read the scripture, which God has given us. When Jesus asks the lawyer, “What is written in the law?” the answer should be as ready on our lips as it is on the lawyers.

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might." That’s from Deuteronomy  (6:4-5). And “Love your neighbor as yourself.” That’s from Leviticus (19:18). It also says in Leviticus that those who keep the commandments of the Lord shall live (18:5).

What is necessary for life is love of God and neighbor. For everlasting life, what is necessary is love of God above all with your whole heart, soul, strength, and mind and love of neighbor as of yourself. Love is what is needed. This is the true center and purpose of the law. Love – not attention to detail – Love – not cleverness – Love – not a great memory – Love.

We don’t enter into life even by fighting evil – but by love. St. Porphyrios says “You don’t become holy by fighting evil. Let evil be. Look towards Christ and that will save you. What makes a person saintly is love.” Anyway, you can’t drive the darkness out of a room by arguing with it or by waving your fists around. The only way is to turn on the light. Only love – and not vain energy, effort, will, or struggle – can fill our hearts with light and give us life. Stop trying to fight and instead Love himself reign over your heart. Anyway, if it came down to fighting, he’s the only one who could win the fight anyway. Only grace will save us, not our effort. Only love.

So the lawyer knows these words about love. He’s read the sacred page, at least. It’s a start. But his approach to the words is all wrong. He tries to twist the ambiguity that words have to justify his own lack of love. “Who is my neighbor?” He asks.

Words are ambiguous, but being clever about words and attentive to detail will not give us life. That may be the way out of an earthly prison when we’ve committed a crime and come before a human judge – to find some loophole or ambiguity in the law that’s gonna get us off the hook.  But it is not so with God.

The lawyer seems to imagine that if he can just define "neighbor" in a way that excludes all those to whom he has not been neighborly, he’ll escape the judgment. Perhaps that is a way to escape the judgment of men, but the Lord sees our heart. His parable of the Good Samaritan cuts right through the confusion about words that the legalist tries to introduce. While legalism darkens truth, our Lord is the light and the life.

It turns out that the lawyer already knows the truth. We all already know, if we are honest and examine our hearts, that we have sometimes been unloving. When Jesus asks him at the end, "Who, in your opinion, was the neighbor to the man who fell in with the robbers?" The lawyer is able to answer, "The one who treated him with compassion." We already know the truth of it, and we're not going to hide it from the Lord. We do not love him as we should. We do not love one another as we should.

How often do I hear someone say in confession, "I have been unloving?" Not very often, I can tell you. Yet this is the only sin – the sin behind every sin. Failure to love. Lack of love. If we were just to confess being unloving, we will have confessed every possible sin we may have committed by that one word. Then, we can go into the particulars of how we have failed to love without any anxiety about forgetting something. Love – and not a particularly good memory – is what gives us life. If we were loving, we would not sin. It is the light that casts out the darkness.

The Good Samaritan is a model of love and compassion. This story pricks our consciences – and rightly so. We ask ourselves, are we the Priest, the Levite, or the Samaritan? Have I neglected my neighbors or shown them compassion?

What we need to realize is that, really, we are the man half dead on the road. We are half dead because we are unloving, or not as loving as we should be, and that is death and darkness in us. We are immortal spirits and mortal bodies – half dead and half alive. Alive as immortal creatures of God and doomed to die due to our sins. And who is the Good Samaritan really? Above all, he is Jesus. Jesus is the one who shows perfect mercy, love, and compassion.  He is our God and has become our neighbor. Let us love him who first loved us (1 John 4:19).

Stop

Jairus, a ruler of the synagogue, falls at Jesus’ feet and begs him to come heal his twelve-year old daughter, who is dying (Luke 8:41-42). And so Jesus sets off to Jairus’s house to heal her and prevent her death.

As he is going, the crowds crush in on him on all sides (8:42). Nonetheless, Jesus presses on toward his vital task of healing. That is, until a woman touches the fringe of his garment (8:44). She had had a hemorrhage of blood for twelve years, but she knew Jesus to be a great and powerful healer, and so she believed that just by touching the fringe of his garment, she would be healed (8:43, 47). So with faith she touched him, and she was healed. 

The healing of a bleeding woman

Rome, Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter

4th century

But what does Jesus do? Remember Jairus and his daughter, who is dying not far away. Surely that should lend some urgency to the situation? Surely Jesus should press on through the crowd to get to her and save her? Shouldn't Jesus hurry past and get going? Shouldn't Jesus finish the one task he has set out to do before stopping to attend to another one? But Jesus stops. He stops and starts inquiring who has touched him (8:45). Peter is dumbfounded by his question because Jesus has been crushed on all sides by the crowd (8:45).

Having two parishes now, I can relate somewhat to this situation. That is, very often I will be attending to the needs of one person or group of people of one parish, and I will receive a call from another person or group of people from my other parish who have needs equally as pressing. Unfortunately, I am not enough like Jesus. And I don't know how to put things in their proper order and respond to all things in all charity and all justice. Nonetheless, I will pray and I will try.

I'm sure many can relate to this. Many have both jobs and families for example – or school and jobs and families and friends and so on. Many of us know what it is to have many groups competing for our attention – all people whom God has created in his own image, all people we are called to love and serve and respect. Well, how do we do this?

Jesus – he stops. This makes sense to no one. Not to his disciples. Not to Jairus. And not even to the woman he has healed. The disciples were dumbfounded by his question. Jairus is eager for his own daughter to be healed by the Lord. He is standing there in great need. Also, he is a leader – a ruler in the synagogue – and is probably used to more deference. The woman with the hemorrhage who had been healed tried to hide and thought that she could just touch the fringe of Jesus’ garment as he went by, that she would be healed, and that he would keep on going (8:47).  

But no, they all have to stop and wait for Jesus to question a crowd pressing in all around him, “Who touched me?” It would take a lot of faith not to get exasperated with Jesus at this moment. Jesus stops. And he engages the people in front of him. Maybe we should learn something from him.

Stop what you're doing. Behold the one before you. Not to deny the one you're rushing toward at all, but to love the one before you. When you're being interrupted by someone, it is tempting to become exasperated at them. Anyone with children knows the pain of constant interruption. It's natural to feel a momentary annoyance. Even Jesus may have felt this when he was touched and the power went out from him. But when you do, stop. 

Remember, before you snap back some sharp remark of irritation, like I sometimes do, that the one interrupting you is a child and an image of God. God is interrupting you. Trying to break in through your will to accomplish something. An interruption is an opportunity for patience, for grace, for self-sacrifice, for immolation of our self-will – not of our true selves, but of our stubborn and willful adherence to our own desires.

Jesus stops and engages the crowd, and meets the woman who touched him and was immediately healed. And he says to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace” (8:48). He treats her with patience, with kindness, and in peace. All while a twelve-year-old girl, who he can save, is dying nearby. And, in fact, while he’s still speaking, a man from Jairus’s house comes and says, “Your daughter is dead” (8:49).

How crushed Jairus must have felt in this moment. The man who could have saved his daughter’s life is here dawdling with other people’s concerns and his daughter has died. “Do not trouble the teacher anymore,” says the man from Jairus’ house (8:49). What would be the point?

Well, we know that death is no reason to stop petitioning Jesus for life. Jesus has power even over death – and he tells them, “Do not fear; only believe and she shall be made well” (8:50). Just as the woman with the twelve-year-old hemorrhage had believed and was healed, so now, if they believe, the twelve-year-old girl, who has died, will live. And live she does. Jesus raises her up (8:54-55). He has power even over death, which he calls “sleeping” (8:52).

Faith in this, more than anything, can give us the gift of patience and peace. I often say, you only live once, but at least it’s forever. “I don’t have any time,” we often complain. “I am too busy to stop and attend to the needs of passersby or of my family. I’ve got work to do. I have no time to stop and pray or to go to church.” You have all the time in the world if you live in Christ. There is no reason for wasteful haste or anxiety in Christ. Sure, some things are a matter of life and death, but, in Christ, even death will not keep us from life.