Palm Sunday

The Longest Lent: some thoughts for Palm Sunday 2020

“The Longest Day” was the title given by Cornelius Ryan to his documentary book on the Normandy Landings of 1944. It was later used for a film based on the same events. In the early eighties, Bob Hoskins starred in a gangster film entitled “The Long Good Friday”. I would suggest that the present situation deserves the title of “The Longest Lent”.

At the beginning of Lent, pondering on Our Lord’s call to take up the Cross, I suggested that, whatever penances we undertake as our way of sharing in the Cross, we will find that we have to carry a Cross not of our choosing, and that it is in the bearing of this Cross that we shall come closest to Jesus the Christ. Neither I nor, I suspect, anyone else, had any inkling at the time that this Lent would bring a Cross for the whole world; one which will almost certainly outlast the current Lenten season.

In terms of the liturgy, Lent will soon draw to a close. Easter will come, perhaps the strangest Easter in history. All over the world, priests will carry out some form of the Holy Week ceremonies without the presence of a congregation. Even the Pope will celebrate in an empty St. Peter’s Basilica and Square. This situation is unprecedented. Even in wartime, public worship continued: it is as if the entire world finds itself in the position of an underground Church.

Easter will arrive, but it will not interrupt the Lent, indeed the Passiontide, which the world is suffering. Or will it? Perhaps that is up to us. Even in this time of pain and darkness, we need to recall that Christ is risen, that suffering is temporary, that life has conquered, and will conquer, death. Our celebration of Easter will be more sombre than usual, but it will be genuine nonetheless as we are reminded once more that Christ has overcome all that is evil; that, whilst it is true that, “in the midst of life, we are in death”, it is even more true that, “in the midst of death, we are in life”. The Paschal Candle may be a solitary light this year, but it will burn, piercing the darkness, signalling to the world that the last word is not “death” but “victory”.

As the world continues its longest Lent, the light of Easter will burn in the hearts and lives of Christians, shining out for that world, and for all who suffer. Yet we must not be blasé: we must be conscious of the deep suffering all around us. It is all very well to speak of the opportunities for reflection and spiritual renewal, provided we do not forget the plight of families cooped up with children, wondering how they are to put food on the table. It is fine to consider the healing of the planet, less troubled for a time by the ravages of human industry and travel, but it would be unbearably smug to ignore the plight of those for whom this fallow time brings unemployment and loss of livelihood. Whilst the north of Italy is ravaged by the virus, in the south of that country the greater fear is of starvation, as money can neither be earned nor withdrawn from the closed banks, and the purchase of food becomes increasingly difficult.

All of us must take our share by prayer, by giving, by compassion, and by any practical means available, in the Passiontide of the world, but we must do so in the context of the suffering and death of the Lord—and of His resurrection!

5th Sunday Lent

5th Sunday of Lent 2020

Ezekiel 37:12-14; Romans 8:8-11; John 11:1-45

I recall being summoned some years ago to a death bed. Shortly after my arrival and my administering of the Sacrament of the Sick, the lady died peacefully, surrounded by her family, and I began the prayers for the dead, which included part of today’s Gospel. When I read Jesus’ words to Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life. If anyone believes in me, even though they die, they shall live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die—do you believe this?”, the whole family shouted “YES!”

Faith in the resurrection, faith in Jesus as the resurrection; this is the heart of today’s readings. During the exile of the Jewish people to Babylon, God’s promise to Ezekiel entailed a metaphorical raising of the dead from their graves. The exile was a form of living death: it was from this that the Lord promised to raise them, restoring them to the land of Israel. In and through Jesus, the metaphor became reality as He literally raised Lazarus from the dead, as the foretaste, sign, and promise of His own resurrection, in which we shall share in the fullness of time.

For the author of the Fourth Gospel, all the miracles are signs, and the raising of Lazarus is no exception. It was not the equivalent of Jesus’ resurrection—Lazarus would die again—but it was a sign that Our Lord’s resurrection would happen, not for Himself only, but for us.

Notice who it is who provokes Jesus’s words about resurrection. It is Martha, the bustling, hustling sister who, along with her sister Mary, displays the same characteristics as on the occasion of Our Lord’s visit to their house, as described by St. Luke. On that occasion, Martha was gently rebuked for her excessive busyness: it is Mary who has chosen the better part by listening to the Lord. This time it seems fair to say that the more active sister has chosen the better part. She is the one who engages with Jesus, who draws out His prophetic words about resurrection, and who professes her faith: both reflection and action have their appropriate time and place.

Something else emerges from this account: namely, the humanity of Jesus. Edakrusen ho Iesous—Jesus wept—is said to be the shortest sentence in the New Testament. I do not know whether that is so, but certainly those words, and those which surround them and which speak of His distress and heartfelt sighs, demonstrate the depth of His compassion and His capacity for grief.

Why was He so distressed? He has already indicated what He plans to do. If He knows that He is about to raise Lazarus to life, why is He now so moved by the grief of the sisters?

As Pascal wrote, “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know” and he goes on to say “God felt by the heart, not by the reason.” Again, it is the deep humanity of Jesus which is displayed here: even the Son of God could be overwhelmed by emotions which defied strict logic.

Once He has spoken to both sisters, Jesus proceeds to the tomb, and after a prayer to His Father he calls to the dead man: “Lazarus, come out!” It is striking that when Lazarus emerges from the tomb, he is still bound by the grave cloths; he still needs to hear Jesus’ command “Unbind him. Let him go free.” He needs the help of others to liberate him completely.

This is in sharp contrast to Jesus’ own resurrection, when Jesus freed Himself from both grave cloths and tomb, something which Lazarus was unable to accomplish. (Incidentally, Our Lord even left the grave cloths folded—clearly His mother had brought Him up well.) As an exercise in imaginative prayer, you might like to put yourself in the place of Lazarus, entombed in the dark, hearing the Lord’s voice calling you “-------- come out!”

As you emerge, you hear His second command “Unbind him/her. Let him/her go free” and as you feel helping hands stripping away those things which still hold you captive, you might reflect on what those things may be. Let them be taken from you, as you progress further along the road to sharing in the resurrection and the life which is Jesus, the risen Lord.

Laetare Sunday

4th Sunday of Lent 2020

1 Sam 16:1, 6-7, 10-13; Ephesians 5:8-14; John 9:1-41

“There are none so blind as those who will not see.” I am sure that you are familiar with that saying. You may even have used it about those who seem to be wilfully blind. But have you ever applied it to yourself?

Are there things that you or I are unwilling to see? When you or I are criticising other people, do we ever ask ourselves whether we have the same faults? And if we do ask ourselves, do we truly look into our hearts to see if those faults are there? And if we don’t see them, is that because they are genuinely not there, or because we are blind to them?

Even if we really don’t have those faults, shouldn’t we see that we are breaking Our Lord’s command “Do not judge”? If we saw clearly the meaning of that commandment, would it not rule out all but the most constructive criticism? And, hand on heart, how much of our criticism can we honestly say is constructive?

There is another issue. We claim to be clear-sighted about all that is wrong with the world, with the Church, and with other people. Does that blind us to what is good? If you are familiar with the Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis, you may remember the dwarves. They are constantly negative in their outlook, criticising everything, until they literally create Hell for themselves, because they make themselves incapable of seeing anything good.

Thus, they are treated to a lavish banquet, but so negative have they become that all they can taste is straw. They are standing on a sunlit expanse of grass and trees, yet they are convinced that they are trapped in a gloomy prison. If we constantly see the bad in everything, then eventually we shall lose the ability to see the good, and everything will indeed become bad for us.

Do we see the presence of God in our lives, or are we blind to it? Do we recognise the generosity of God in the daily sunrise? Do we see His presence in the people whom we encounter in the daily round? Do we understand that our difficult times are a sharing in the redemptive sufferings of His Son? that our moments of joy are a foretaste of the resurrection? Does it occur to us that , when we set aside times for prayer, God is there before us, already present in the moment, however much we may become distracted, however difficult we may consider prayer to be?

Our First Reading tells us that “the Spirit of the Lord seized upon David and stayed with him from that day on.” Can we see, do we consider, that the Spirit of the Lord has seized on us through our baptism and confirmation? that this Spirit stays constantly with us? Like David, we may act in a way contrary to the Spirit, as he did when he committed adultery with Bathsheba and caused the death of Uriah: even then, the Spirit did not abandon him, but gave him the means and the gift of contrition and repentance. We too need, in every circumstance, to be alert, with the eyes of our mind open to the presence of the Holy Spirit, calling us to repentance.

The blind man of the Gospel not only recovers his physical sight: by degrees he also develops an increasing understanding of Jesus, the source and giver of life and light. Hence he is able to give his gloriously cheeky responses to the Pharisees: “Why do you want to hear it all again? Do you want to become His disciples too?” and “Now here is an astonishing thing! He has opened my eyes and you do not know where He comes from” after which he proceeds to give them a lecture in theology. Finally, he comes to worship Jesus.

What about us? Do we ask and allow Jesus to reveal to us our blindness and to cure it? Do we open ourselves to recognise His goodness, His presence, and the beauty of all His gifts? Do we open our eyes, so that He can bring us to an ever deeper, ever fuller understanding of Him, and of His call to us?

3rd Sunday Lent

3rd Sunday of Lent 2020

Exodus 17:3-7; Romans 5:1-2, 5-8; John 4:5-42.

Living water, light and vision, resurrection; these are the themes of the next three Sundays. It isn’t easy for us in the Western world to grasp the literally vital significance of water. Indeed, at the moment, we are likely to be slightly cynical about water. We have seen too much of it in recent weeks. It has inundated the fields, made the roads impassable and, in some parts of the country, flooded people’s houses. Consequently, we may struggle to enter the mindset of people for whom, even today, water is a rare and precious commodity sometimes obtained only through a back-breaking trek to and from a well perhaps miles away.

The Israelites in the wilderness were, we are told, “tormented by thirst”. You and I will have been thirsty at times, but can we honestly claim to have been tormented by thirst? To such people as the tongue-cracked, gaspingly thirsty, the promise which Jesus makes, of springs of living water, must have seemed like paradise.

Notice to whom He makes this promise. It is to a woman, a Samaritan woman, a Samaritan woman of ill-repute. There are three grounds there for excluding Jesus from speaking to this person at all, let alone entrusting her with one of His most significant promises.

Firstly, she was a woman. In first century Palestine, as in the Muslim world today, men did not speak to unknown women. Secondly, she was a Samaritan, a heretic, someone who had broken away from the true faith, who actively repudiated aspects of it. It is as if the Lord was speaking to one of the followers of Archbishop Lefebvre, who, you may recall, rejected many of the Church’s teachings embodied in the Second Vatican Council, and effectively set up a rival Church whilst claiming it to be the true Church.

Thirdly, the woman was a public sinner. It is conceivable, I suppose, that she was particularly unfortunate in her choice of husbands, and that all five of them died, leaving her free to marry again; in fact, though, she hasn’t married again, but is living with someone who is not her husband. Presumably that is why she is compelled to come to the well alone, at the hottest time of the day, the sixth hour being noon: the other women have ostracised her, probably suspicious of someone who may have designs on THEIR husbands.

So there is every reason, social, religious, and moral, why Jesus should steer clear of this woman, a  sort of schismatic Christine Keeler or Mandy Rice-Davies, God rest both of them. Yet not only does He engage her in slightly racy conversation, He reveals to her His identity, with one of the “I am” sayings which express His self-identification with the God of the burning bush, as He declares Himself to be the Messiah; and He expounds to her one of the most important themes of His teaching, namely the presence of the Holy Spirit as a spring of living and life-giving water, welling up in the heart of the believer.

Why does Jesus do this? Is He expressing His frustration at the hard-heartedness or, at best, indifference of the chosen, Jewish people? Is He reminding us, in a very practical way, not only of His concern for outsiders and sinners, but of the startling truth that such people may be closer to the Kingdom of God than we are, though we are members of the new chosen people? There is much to ponder there, along with the richness of the promise of living water, the Holy Spirit who has come to dwell within us and who, if we are responsive, will quench our spiritual thirst as we make our own way through the desert of Lent and of life.

2nd Sunday Lent

2nd Sunday of Lent 2020

Genesis 12:1-4a; 2Tim 1:8-10; Matt 17:1-9

Have you ever experienced a moment of sheer joy, a moment which you wanted to last for ever? Have you felt in that moment that it was good to be alive, that you were truly happy, that you could accomplish anything, that everything had been transformed? I hope that you have. Indeed I hope that you have experienced many such moments.

They do not happen every day. They may not occur every month, or even every year. There is no way of predicting them: indeed, their unexpectedness, their suddenness, is part of the joy. I can remember such days from childhood, usually on a Wednesday afternoon or early evening, when our shop was shut, and we would go for a long walk along the riverbank or the canal, before returning home by bus. I can remember them from student days and from adult life. Take a moment now to remember some of your own such days, to wallow in the memory, to thank God for them.

You know the problem with such moments, don’t you? They don’t last. However much we may wish to cling onto them, to pitch our tent in them, they will fade. Please God they will leave an afterglow which will sustain us during the times when life feels less rosy, when we experience the wilderness, rather than the mountain of Transfiguration.

Because that is what we are really thinking of, isn’t it? We are experiencing God-given Transfiguration moments, sharing some of the joy, and the ecstasy, and the awe of Peter, James, and John, as they saw Jesus transformed before their eyes, and realised, however dimly, that they were receiving a precious gift from God; that God was indeed very close to them.

They too want to seize the moment, to “pluck the day” as the Roman poet Horace expressed it with his famous aphorism carpe diem. They wish to fix that moment forever, to make their present experience permanent.

“It is wonderful for us to be here,” exclaims Peter, before volunteering to make three tents, the underlying thought being “so that we can stay here forever”. The moment was to become more wonderful yet. Not only were they to be in the presence of their transfigured Lord, and of Moses and Elijah, the representatives of the Law and the Prophets, but they were to be enveloped by the cloud, the shekinah , in which God made Himself present to the Israelites in the wilderness, and to hear the voice of the Father witnessing to the Son. Even our most awesome moments cannot match that. No wonder they wanted to stay.

Yet even for them the moment had to pass. Like us, the three disciples had to leave the mountaintop and head back to the valley of everyday life. Their closeness to Jesus was soon to take them to a much darker place, for they were the three chosen to accompany Our Lord into the Garden of Gethsemane, where the Transfiguration was replaced by the Agony, and they were to hear, not the Father commending the Son, but the Son praying in anguish to the Father.

Did they then recall their time on Mount Tabor, which, we can say, was given to them to prepare them for this starkly different event? If they did, the contrast seems to have unnerved rather than strengthened them, for they took refuge in sleep.

What about us? We too have to leave those moments of joy, which we can regard as our Mt. Tabor moments, and return to the valley of everyday. Sometimes, we will find ourselves in the wilderness; at times, we will enter the Garden of the Agony. Will the recollection of the joyful experiences sustain us then?

We have one advantage over Peter, James, and John. We know, as they couldn’t, that the Passion of Our Lord was the prelude to His Resurrection, of which the Transfiguration was a foretaste. That realisation will not banish the confusion of the wilderness, or the anguish of Gethsemane, but it should enable us to bear them better, knowing that our own Transfiguration times are a tiny reflection of the fullness of joy to come.

1st Sunday of Lent

1st Sunday of Lent 2020

Genesis 2:7-9; 3:1-7; Romans 5:12-19; Matt 4: 1-11

Where are you? Are you in the wilderness? It is not a pleasant place to be. I suspect that everybody spends some time in the wilderness at least once in their lives. That is the time when you lose your sense of direction, when things go wrong, when fixed points no longer seem stable, when perhaps the black dog of depression is prowling, barking, biting.

That is a wilderness which we do not enter voluntarily. We are driven there, and we long for rescue. Yet sometimes it is the case that, rather than being driven there by the forces of darkness, we are actually, like Jesus, led by the Holy Spirit. If we cling on, however feebly, in faith and hope, perhaps we will realise that we are not alone; that the Spirit of Jesus is in the wilderness with us; that the times of loss and emptiness will prove to be times of growth and renewal; that, as Isaiah prophesied, the wilderness will bloom.

Lent is a slightly different aspect of the same experience. In Lent we do enter the wilderness voluntarily, as we ask the Holy Spirit to lead us in the footsteps of Jesus. We undertake penance to loosen our dependence, at least for a time, on some of the elements of everyday; to sharpen our awareness of the presence of the Holy Spirit, and of the call of the Son of God.  We pray, we practise self-denial, we give of what we have, to remind ourselves that we do not live on bread alone, but that the true giver of life is very close to us in our apparent emptiness.

Sometimes the voluntary and the involuntary wilderness times coincide. My most difficult Lent came 25 years ago, when a heavy bout of clinical depression compelled me, under medical direction, to leave my parish on the Wednesday of the second week of Lent and to spend time in a nursing home. To add to my sense of wilderness disorientation, the principal celebrant at Mass the following Sunday focused his homily on one sentence from the Gospel: “Unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.” Yippee! Just what I needed to help me feel better—or perhaps not.

That wilderness time passed, and I recall another Lent, ten years earlier, when the wilderness did indeed blossom for me. I was based at St. Mary’s Morecambe at the time, as well as being chaplain at Our Lady’s. That Lent, everything came together at once to provide a deep experience of joy in the Lord.

There was an excellent Castlerigg course with the Lower Sixth, a Caring Church Week which brought four hundred pupils voluntarily to Mass every day, and a fund raising effort for charity which raised huge sums, not least through a sponsored run along the riverside to Halton. I remember, a few days after the latter, acting as marker for the school cross country, and as I stood near Greyhound Bridge, I recall thinking how good it was to be alive.

Good times and bad come and go throughout our lives, but through them all the Lord is with us. When we make our Lenten journey with the Lord, He may share with us His suffering, or His joys, or both, but we can guarantee that, if we are faithful, He will make us better for the experience.

As we share His journey, will we also share His temptations? I shall be surprised if we don’t. The tempter who was in the garden for the first Adam, was also in the wilderness for the Second Adam, Jesus the second founder of the human race. We can be almost certain that the tempter will lie in wait in our wilderness. We too may be tempted to turn stones into bread, by giving up the journey with Christ in order to satisfy our own wishes, our own way, even our own compulsions. We may be tempted to leap from the Temple pinnacle, not so much to put God to the test, but in despair, unable to accept and to realise that God is with us and that He will bring us out of the wilderness. We may be tempted to rule the kingdoms of the world, or at least to lord it over people in our own petty kingdom, the circles in which we move.

Temptations there will be, difficulties there may be, but if we are faithful we will emerge from the wilderness ready to enter with the Lord into Holy Week and to find deep joy in the Resurrection.

7th Sunday

7th Sunday in OT 2020

Leviticus 19:1-2, 17-18; 1Cor 3:16-23; Matt 5:38-48.

Are you holy?

 “No!” I hear you cry. “Am I heck!” I beg your pardon, but you are. Weren’t you listening to St. Paul when he said “Didn’t you realise that you were God’s Temple, and that the Spirit of God was living...” well, where exactly?

The Jerusalem Bible says “among you”. That is a possible translation, but a more obvious one would be “in you”. The original Greek is en humin which can be translated “among you” but “in you” would be the more usual way of expressing it.

Either way, St. Paul is stating very clearly that you and I are holy. He goes on to emphasise the point: “The Temple of God is hagios”—the Jerusalem Bible says “sacred” but we could equally well say “holy”—“and you are that Temple”.

So Paul leaves us in no doubt. He tells us twice that we are God’s Temple. How can that be? Remember that Jesus is the true Temple, replacing the Jerusalem Temple: we are the Body of Jesus, as the Church. Therefore, we are the Temple. So by definition, we are holy.

What is it in particular which makes the Temple holy? It is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. So as the Body of Christ, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, we couldn’t be much holier, not because of anything that we have done, but simply by the actions of the Holy Trinity.

Perhaps when you go home today, or to your room, you should look in the mirror, and say to yourself “That person at whom I am looking, who is looking at me, who is me, is holy: that person is the Temple of God, and the Holy Spirit lives in him/her”. Convince yourself that it is true, and then look at the people around you, and realise that they too are holy, because they are your neighbour and you are commanded to love them “as yourself”—in other words, as being you.

Right then, we have established that you are holy, but are you perfect? “No!” you say again, All right, I will grant you that one. Why are you not perfect? Because “perfect” comes from the Latin “perfectus” meaning “thoroughly made”, “complete”, and none of us will be complete this side of eternity. We are working our way towards it: in this life, perfection is a process, not a state. Remember that the Letter to the Hebrews states that Jesus was made perfect through suffering. Even the Son of God was incomplete until He had shared and surpassed human suffering.

Yet that same Son of God tells us to be perfect, so we have to work at the process of becoming complete. How do we do that? Two messages seem to stand out from the Gospel: to love our enemies, and to be constantly willing to give.

“That’s all right” you may say. “I don’t have any enemies”—or you may have. But is there anyone who really winds you up, makes you angry, so that you find yourself shouting at the telly, for instance? I tend to become furiously angry when people attack the Church, either from without, or from within. Are these the people whom I must make a special effort to love? As a first step, I make myself pray for anybody with whom I have become especially cross; but I have still a long way to go.

As for the giving and the non-resistance, I think of how priests in parishes are driven up the wall by the stream of people who come to the door with endless cock-and-bull stories as an attempt to obtain money. When I was in Morecambe, I called at the vicarage of the local Anglican church, which was about half a mile further into the notorious West End than was my own church, and the vicar’s wife burst into tears as she described how such people were driving her to the edge.

How do we respond to the habitual doorbell ringers and tale spinners? We have to muster as much patience as we can, whilst recognising our own needs and limitations. The story is told of a holy and generous parish priest who, during the Toxteth riots of 1981, was constantly on the front line, counselling people, mediating between opposing parties. One night, some rioters broke into his home and threatened him, and he was subsequently seen chasing them down the street, belabouring them with his walking stick, and shouting “Get out of here, you people of questionable parentage!” Even saints have their limits.

6th Sunday

6th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2020

Ecclesiasticus 15:15-20; 1Cor 2:6-10; Matt 5: 17-37

Jesus came not to abolish the Law and the Prophets—in other words, the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament—but to fulfil them. The Law, the Scriptures, were now embodied in Him. The Law was no longer a written code, but a human being, a human being who was also God, with all the authority of God, the giver of the Law, and all the humanity of those to whom the Law was given.

In Jesus, the Law took flesh, in a man who could weep, who was moved in His guts with compassion in the face of human suffering, who could say that “the Sabbath was made for human beings, not human beings for the Sabbath” but who had the divine authority to declare that “the Son of Man is master of the Sabbath”.

He could make the point, with all the authority of the Lawgiver, that the Law, like all God’s gifts, is a means to an end, not an end in itself. This was the mistake made by the Scribes and Pharisees, who saw the written word of the Law as the be-all-and-end-all, and who would tolerate no deviation from that word, even in the interests of human well-being.

That is why they were horrified by works of healing done on the Sabbath, by compassion shown to outsiders, by Jesus’ demonstration by word and action that the Law existed to bring human beings closer to God, not to shut them out from God’s presence.

There are many Scribes and Pharisees today, who see the rules as all important. We find them among the extreme Sabbatarians, who would padlock playgrounds on a Sunday, forbidding anything which savoured of frivolity or enjoyment. We find them too within the Church, in the likes of Cardinal Burke and his followers, chiefly in the United States, but also in smaller numbers and generally less extreme form in this country, who bitterly oppose all the present Pope’s attempts to make the Church more Christ-like, and who insist instead on a rigid adherence to rules and regulations.

Rules are important—without them we have anarchy and chaos—but they must always be directed towards the love and service of God, to freeing people rather than imprisoning them.

Strangely, as Our Lord goes on to point out, the approach to Law which He embodies, actually makes greater demands on us than mere adherence to the letter. Love is actually more exacting than the Law. Thus, as Jesus goes on to state, it is not enough to comply with the rules against murder, adultery, or oath-breaking; love impels us to go much further by avoiding anger, contempt, lust, misogyny, and frivolous swearing, being by contrast loving and respectful in all our dealings with others. Instead of asking ourselves “What must I avoid doing?” which implies the subtext “How far can I go?” or “What can I get away with?” we should be asking “What is the Christ-like thing which I should do?”

One example may illustrate how mere rule-keeping can defeat its object. It used to be laid down that, in order to fulfil the obligation to attend Mass, people had to be present for the offertory, the consecration, and the priest’s communion. This was intended to indicate the bare minimum, yet a considerable number of people took it as a yardstick, arriving just before what we now call the Preparation of the Gifts, and walking straight out of the church after receiving communion.

Thirty years ago, in my then parish, the other priest of the parish was celebrating Sunday evening Mass. I had to run an errand, but timed my return to be able to greet the people as they left at the end of Mass. As I approached the church, I saw people pouring out. I was shocked, assuming that I had mistimed things, and that Mass was over. In fact, it was communion time, and people were leaving because they had “fulfilled the obligation”. I struggled to see where the love of God was in that.

Jesus embodies the Law. He is a loving and generous God, and He reminds us by His words and by His life that our attitude to Law and to rules in general must be motivated by love of God, and must lead us to Him.

5th Sunday

5th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2020

Isaiah 58:7-10; 1Cor 2:1-5; Matt 5:13-16

This week’s readings follow neatly from last Sunday’s feast of the Presentation of the Lord, of Candlemas. Then, if you recall, the infant Jesus was proclaimed by Simeon to be “a light to enlighten the Gentiles, and the glory of [God’s] people Israel”: effectively, as the light of the world. Today, the adult Jesus tells His disciples, who include us, that they are the light of the world.

Notice that Jesus doesn’t say “You ARE TO BE the light of the world,” He says “You ARE the light of the world”. Whether we like it or not, the world sees us here and now, looks at us, and expects something from us, both as individuals and as the Church. And, let us add, as often as not it is looking for us to mess up, to get things wrong, to say or do things on which it can pounce.

We are, as the Church, the city built on a hilltop. Nothing that we do goes unnoticed. And to be fair to ourselves, the Church has always striven to be a light to the world, to cause the world to give glory to God; though, of course, it hasn’t always succeeded.

Isaiah spells out how we are to be the light. “Share your bread with the hungry and shelter the homeless poor. Clothe the man you see to be naked, and do not turn from your own kin. Then will your light shine like the dawn, and your wound be quickly healed over.”

These words of the prophet were echoed by Our Lord, and made strictly personal in His parable of the Last Judgement: “I was hungry, and you gave me food.....”. Let’s abandon the cynicism to which our age is prone, and state clearly that, for centuries, the Church was the main, if not the only, provider of practical care for the needy, of healthcare, of education, of provision for orphans and for unmarried mothers. Of course it made mistakes, sometimes treating these mothers harshly by today’s standards, sometimes compelling them to have their children adopted, in the belief that this was in the best interests of the child—but who else was doing anything to [FK1] help?

And if the state has now taken over many of the Church’s functions in these areas, it has built upon foundations laid by the Church. That is illustrated vividly in the health service, where the nurse in charge of a ward is still known as a sister, as a reminder tht her predecessors were nuns.

Yet we cannot and must not rest on our laurels, otherwise we will become that tasteless salt which can only be discarded and disregarded. There are, perhaps, more people than ever in need of care of one kind or another—or perhaps it is simply that we are more aware of them. There are hungry people, homeless people, people who are stressed and distressed in this country and throughout the world; people who need our light, both as individuals and as the Church; people who need us to bring them the light of Christ in many different ways.

To our other responsibilities in this area has been added one of which the prophets were blissfully unaware. I remember studying science as a subsidiary subject in Sixth Form in the mid-60s, and being introduced to two words which none of us had heard before, and which had to be carefully explained. These words were “environment” and “ecology”. Who would have thought, fifty years ago, that the contents of our dustbins might be a moral issue, might relate to our life in Christ? Yet as Benedict XVI declared, and as Francis has reiterated, particularly in his encyclical Laudato si, care for the environment relates very firmly to the Gospel.

There can, of course, be overkill. Twice, in the current series of Dr. Who, I have been irritated by preachy environmental messages. I watch Dr. Who for good escapist hokum, not for sermons, but the prevalence of the latter does at least remind us of the urgency of the problem.

We are the light of the world: we are the city built on a hilltop. Today, no less than in the past, we must lead the world in serving Christ in our neighbour, and now in protecting the world in which we and that neighbour live.

Presentation 2nd February

Presentation of the Lord 2020

Malachi 3:1-4; Hebrews 2:14-18; Luke 2:22-40

What is happening here? What are we celebrating today? At one level, we are observing the activity of a pious Jewish couple, observing the Law by presenting and offering their new born, first born son to the Lord. That in itself is significant. This child has come to fulfil the Law, to become in His own person the new Law, so it is appropriate that He should begin His earthly life in conformity to the Law.

There is another factor. Jesus, who is God the Son from all eternity, is having His humanity dedicated to the Father. Both as God and as man He is totally committed to the Father’s will.

Yet Jesus, Son of God and Son of man, is not only a child. He is also the Lord and in being brought to the Temple He is fulfilling Malachi’s prophecy: “the Lord whom you are seeking will suddenly enter His Temple, and the angel of the covenant for whom you are longing, yes, He is coming, says the Lord of hosts.”

Jesus is the Lord whom the people are seeking: He is the angel, the messenger, of the covenant—of the new covenant which was to be sealed in His blood. This is not simply a child being presented to God: it is the Lord taking possession of His Temple, as He was to take possession of it again at the end of His life, when He cleansed it, preached in it, and announced by word and action that the time of the Temple had passed; that from then onwards He Himself IS the Temple, and that the Temple sacrifices are now fulfilled by the offering once and for all of His body; an offering made present for us every time the Mass is celebrated.

So this is an important feast for us, as it indicates that the time of true worship is to be inaugurated, as the Temple is changed from a building of stone to the living body of Jesus, a body which we worship, and receive, and are.

The Letter to the Hebrews pushes our understanding further. Jesus is not only the Temple, not only the sacrifice; He is also the priest who, as the writer of this letter says elsewhere, has entered the Holy of Holies, taking His own blood. Thus when we celebrate the Mass, it is Jesus the High Priest who makes for us and in us the sacrifice of Himself.

Lest we should be in any doubt that all of this involves us, Simeon’s prayer, the Nunc Dimittis, underlines it when he speaks of the infant whom he is holding as “a light to enlighten the pagans and the glory of your people Israel.” We are the pagans, the Gentiles, the non-Jews. Jesus has come both to be a light for us, and to complete God’s self-gift to the Jews. Hence, as St. Paul writes to the Romans, as the Second Vatican Council teaches, and as Pope Benedict XVI underlined in Volume 2 of his seminal work Jesus of Nazareth, God will bring the Jewish people into the Kingdom in His own way and His own time: meanwhile, we too are brought into that Kingdom.

Simeon is spelling out what was shown in action by the visit of the wise men to the stable: that the coming of Jesus as it were extends the franchise, opening salvation to the nations of the world. To these nations Jesus is a light, which explains our blessing of candles on this day; but we should remember that, as an adult, this same Jesus told His disciples, who again include us: “YOU are the light of the world.” Jesus is the light of the world to make us also the light of the world. These candles which we bless today impress upon us our responsibility to, as the Lord expressed it, “so let [our] light shine before men and women that, seeing [our] good works, they may give the glory to the Father in heaven.”

This then is an important feast, not only in itself, but also for us. It marks the fulfilment of prophecy, the entry of the Lord into His Temple, foreshadowing the replacement of that Temple by His body, the body which we are and which He, the eternal High Priest, offers to His Father in the Mass; whilst reminding us also of our responsibility to be, in Jesus, a light to the world, drawing others to Him by the light cast by our lives.

3rd Sunday in Ordinary time

3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time 2020

Isaiah 8:23-9:3; 1Cor 1:10-13, 17; Matt 4:17-23

“Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is close at hand.” Here we have the kerygma, the basic proclamation of Jesus, the heart of His preaching. What does it mean, and especially, what does it mean for us?

When we use the word “repent”, we usually think of sorrow, of being sorry for what we have done or failed to do; for sins that we have committed. That is certainly one aspect of repentance, but taken to its fullest extent, it actually goes much deeper, is much more comprehensive, more demanding of us.

The Greek word which we find in the New Testament, and which we translate as “repent” is metanoeite which really means to change in the deepest part of us, to have a change of heart, a re-orientation; so that, in our living, we are focused completely on God. That involves sorrow for our sins, but it also involves much more: a transformation of the innermost part of ourselves.

For my spiritual reading at the moment I am using a book which I was given for Christmas: “Newman, the heart of holiness” by Mgr. Roderick Strange. On Monday morning, just before I sat down to prepare my homily, I came across this quotation from St. John Henry Newman himself: “For in truth, we are not called once only, but many times; all through our life, Christ is calling us.”

“All through our life, Christ is calling us.” That is the heart of repentance, fully understood. This may involve a change of lifestyle, as when someone is called to marriage, or to priesthood, or to the consecrated life; but it also entails much subtler changes, as we are called, perhaps, to deepen our prayer life, to change our attitude to someone who irritates or annoys us, to recognise our responsibilities to the wider world, and to modify our response in the light of events whether far away or close to home.

Newman himself wrote “to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” He is not advocating change for change’s sake, running after every daft new idea which comes along, but being alert to the presence of Christ in our lives, and to His ongoing call to us. It is possible to argue that the reason why the Second Vatican Council caused such an upheaval in the Church is that, for a long time, the Church had been seeing itself as the perfect society which had no need, or even no right, to change: in other words, it had neglected the call to fundamental, ongoing repentance. Hence, when St. John XXIII “threw open the windows of the Church” and summoned the Council, the Holy Spirit blew away many cobwebs and set in motion a whole host of changes—of aspects of repentance—which should have been taking place by degrees throughout the decades.

We can see how this works in the calling of the first disciples and in their subsequent following of Christ. In today’s Gospel, we hear that fundamental call to a complete change of lifestyle, a call for which they have been prepared by the time which they have spent with the Lord after being directed to Him by John the Baptist. Hence, when Jesus now utters His command “follow me” they are ready to respond AT ONCE.

This corresponds to the initial call of our baptism, and to the other life-changing calls which we may receive. Afterwards, though, as they followed the Lord, they were being called to an ongoing repentance, to keeping their relationship with Jesus and His Father fresh. Thus, they heard the Sermon on the Mount, turning the world’s values upside down. They were told to change their view of what constitutes greatness, to imitate the innocence and simplicity of children. They learned that it isn’t enough to avoid sins like murder, but that they must avoid anger and self-centredness, learning the true meaning of the commandments of love of God and neighbour. They were urged to perseverance and endurance, and were taught a new approach to prayer.

All of these were aspects of repentance: all of these are demanded of us, as we follow Christ day by day. They are demanded because “the Kingdom of heaven is close at hand”. Christ has come into our world. He is Emmanuel, God-with-us: and He is calling us anew, every day and every moment. We must be alert, to hear and to respond.

2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time 2020

Isaiah 49:3, 5-6; 1Cor 1: 1-3; John 1:29-34

I can’t help feeling that Holy Mother Church needs to get her liturgical act together at this time of year. By now, you must be sick of me talking about the three aspects of the Epiphany—the visit of the Wise Men, the Baptism of the Lord, and the marriage feast at Cana—but it is an issue on which the Church doesn’t seem to know whether to stick or twist.

In the Divine Office, there are constant references to the three elements, but where the Holy Mass is concerned there is no mention. After a lapse of centuries, the Feast of the Baptism has been restored, but without reference to its relation to Epiphany, whereas the marriage feast crops up only one year out of three—and this is not such a year—but as the Gospel of  a Sunday in Ordinary Time , with no hint of a link. And yet, there is what might be termed an “Epiphany quality” about each of the Gospels of the three year cycle on this Sunday, with Years A and B giving us passages from St John in which the Baptist “shows forth” the Lord as the Lamb of God, to complement St. John’s account of the marriage feast in Year C. It is almost as if the liturgists want to restore the three parts of the Epiphany, but can’t quite make up their minds to do it. Am I the only person to be confused by this?

Anyway, let’s look at what we have today. John the Baptist sees Our Lord coming towards him, and points to Him as the Lamb of God, before bearing fairly lengthy witness to Him. Jesus’ role as the Lamb of God is an important element in the Fourth Evangelist’s writings. Scholars seem to disagree about its exact origins, but it seems to combine a reference to the paschal lamb, slain at Passover to rescue the Israelites from slavery, with the Suffering Servant of Deutero-Isaiah, led like a lamb to the slaughter.

Then in the Apocalypse, John (if he is the author) depicts the Lamb as the central figure in heaven, the object of adoration—and therefore as God—and also as the bridegroom of the Church in its perfection.

All of this comes together for us in the Mass, at the moment of communion, when the priest holds up the consecrated Host and proclaims “Behold the Lamb of God. Behold Him who takes away the sins of the world. Blessed are those who are called to the supper of the Lamb.”

What are the implications of this? The sacred Host is the person whom John the Baptist pointed out. That Host is the “one who existed” before the Baptist: therefore, this is God, because it is only as God that Jesus existed before him. Indeed, the Baptist goes on, effectively, to affirm that this is the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, on whom he himself saw the Spirit descend like a dove after the Father’s voice had attested to Him.

That person is also the true paschal lamb, whose blood was shed to rescue the Israelites from slavery, and is the Suffering Servant foretold by the prophet. He is, as John the Baptist declares, the one who takes away the sins of the world. This is the person who is before us under the appearances of bread and wine, whom we are about to receive, to absorb into our bodies, to possess in such a way that He becomes part of us.

There is the further point of our being called to the supper of the Lamb. There are two meanings both concealed and expressed there. We are sharing in the Last Supper, that sacrificial meal in which the Lord first gave Himself to His disciples, that meal which reached completion in His death and resurrection. We are also anticipating the marriage supper, about which we read in the Apocalypse, when the Lamb of God is united definitively to His bride, the Church, and we share in the Messianic banquet foretold by Isaiah and foreshadowed in the miraculous feedings about which we hear in the Gospels.

These few sentences spoken before communion are overwhelming in their implications. They arise from the words of John the Baptist and the writings of John the Evangelist, and they link, implicitly at least, with the Epiphany, the showing forth of God the Son.

Baptism 2020

Baptism of the Lord 2020

Isaiah 42:1-4, 6-7; Acts 10:34-38; Matt 3:13-17

So we come to the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, originally the central and most important part of the Epiphany, when Jesus was revealed—shown forth—as the Beloved Son of the Father. The three synoptic Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—all describe the event, whilst John reports John the Baptist’s account of it. In other words, all four evangelists considered Jesus’ Baptism important enough to be included in some way in their Gospels.

It is worth comparing the accounts given by Matthew, Mark, and Luke. All of them describe the Baptist’s declaration of his own unworthiness in comparison with Jesus: only Matthew describes him as trying to dissuade Jesus from being baptised, saying “It is I who need Baptism from you, and yet you come to me.”

Scripture scholars suggest that the Early Church became embarrassed at Jesus’ having received John’s baptism, which was a baptism of repentance, as Jesus had nothing of which to repent. Jesus’ reply to John—“Leave it thus for the time being: it is fitting that we should, in this way, do all that righteousness demands”—suggests that Our Lord wished to show that He was a pious, observant Jew. It also shows that, as one of the early Fathers of the Church pointed out, we shouldn’t be worried when Jesus does something which seems beneath His dignity as Son of God. As the Letter to the Philippians makes clear, the whole point of the Incarnation is that the Son of God was willing to abandon His dignity.

(It is not totally beside the point that someone was telling me last week about his own Anglican parish church, which had plans to make alterations to the church building. These plans were delayed because one lady objected to putting a toilet in a church, presumably on the grounds that it was improper, irreligious. It was almost as if she could not bring herself to believe that Our Lord Himself would have needed to carry out normal bodily functions.)

Be that as it may, Jesus clearly chose to be baptised. All three synoptic Gospels declare that the baptism was completed: Matthew and Mark speak of Jesus coming up from the water, whilst Luke comments that Jesus,”after His own baptism, was at prayer.”  All three then describe the Holy Spirit descending on Him like a dove, and the Father’s voice identifying Him as “my Son, the Beloved”, on whom His favour rests.

Whilst Matthew reports the Father’s voice as declaring “THIS is my Son, the Beloved: my favour rests on HIM”, the other two have Him address the statement personally to Jesus: “YOU are my Son, the Beloved. My favour rests on YOU.” This implies that the Father’s words also apply to us. We are baptised into Jesus: we are parts of His Body, and so the Father is saying to each one of us: “You are my son/daughter, the Beloved. My favour rests on you.”

What we have here is the first account of the Holy Trinity “in action” as it were, as the Spirit descends on the Son, and the Father acknowledges that same Son, recognising and affirming that the man Jesus is the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, present in human form. That is an awesome moment in our understanding of Jesus, recognising that He is both God and man.

There are also implications for the direction His earthly life is to take. The Father is pointing Jesus out as the Suffering Servant of the Lord spoken of by the prophet known as Deutero-Isaiah (Second Isaiah). We encounter the Suffering Servant songs particularly in Holy Week, but we have heard one of them today.

According to the prophet, the Servant is, in God’s own words, “my chosen one in whom my soul delights”. This dovetails, if you will pardon the pun, with the Father’s words at the Baptism, and indicates that Jesus, the Beloved Son, is the Servant who will bring true justice, who will be “covenant of the people and light of the nations”, who will “open the eyes of the blind, free captives from prison, and those who live in darkness from the dungeon”.

Thus, Jesus the Lord is baptised to inaugurate the Kingdom of God, and we are baptised in Him to help in the building of that Kingdom.

Epiphany

Epiphany 2020

Twenty one years ago, I was looking after Carnforth parish while the then parish priest was in Jerusalem. Come the Feast of the Epiphany, came Our Lady of Lourdes Primary School to morning Mass.

I read the Gospel, and everybody settled down. “Right,” I said, “can anybody tell me anything about today’s Feast?” A forest of hands shot up, with one boy fractionally in the lead.

“Yes” I said encouragingly. “It’s the Feast of the Epiphany,” came the reply, “which means ‘showing forth’, and it’s important  because it shows that Jesus came not only for the Jews but for the Gentiles as well, which is us, because the Wise Men were Gentiles.”

BINGO! Got it in one. The children of Our Lady of Lourdes knew their onions, and knew their history, and their theology as well. St. Paul himself couldn’t have put it better.

In fact, St. Paul put it in a very similar way, as we have just heard: “It means that pagans now share the same inheritance, that they are parts of the same body....”

Epiphany is the feast of the Gentiles, of the pagans, of you and me. Christmas was a thoroughly Jewish affair: Mary and Joseph were Jews, Jesus was a Jew, the shepherds were Jews, and so, I daresay, was the innkeeper. The Gentiles were conspicuous by their absence. It is only with Epiphany that the net is spread wider, that the news is given, by the arrival of the Wise Men, that Jesus is the Universal Saviour, that membership of the Chosen People has been extended to the whole human race.

That is why, in the early Church, Epiphany was a more important feast than Christmas—or rather, Epiphany encompassed Christmas. Today’s feast, in fact, comprised three parts: the showing forth of the Saviour first to Jews and then to Gentiles; the Baptism of the Lord, showing Him forth as the Beloved Son of the Father; and the marriage feast at Cana, showing forth His glory, as God.

Round about the fourth century, Christmas became established as a feast in its own right, and gradually overshadowed Epiphany, which lost the elements of the Baptism, formerly the most important part, and the marriage feast, though these are now gradually creeping back.

Is there anything else which is of significance about today’s feast? Of the gifts, gold is generally interpreted as being offered to Jesus as a King, frankincense to Him as God, and myrrh to prepare for His burial, but I am indebted to a priest friend who informed me that St. Bernard interpreted them in more mundane terms: gold to meet the family’s material needs, incense to ward off smells, and myrrh as an antidote to nappy rash. You pays your money and you takes your choice!

What though of the First Reading and Psalm? It is to the prophecies of Isaiah and to the psalm that we owe the idea of the visitors being kings, rather than Wise Men (Magi) as Matthew describes them. “Before Him, all kings shall fall prostrate, all nations shall serve Him.”

Perhaps, though, the nations are more significant than the kings. Do all nations serve the Lord? “Far from it” we would have to say. There are demagogic politicians in central Europe, in Italy, and in the United States who invoke the name of Jesus to justify their own policies, but this is effectively a form of blasphemy, as was the case when Franco in Spain and the Latin American dictators did the same. Ireland attempted to build a nation on Christ-like lines, but this has unravelled spectacularly in recent years, not least because of the revelations of clerical child abuse.

Perhaps Isaiah’s vision, and that of the Psalmist, will have to wait until the fullness of the Kingdom before they are realised: meanwhile, we must accept that the Redeemer will continue to reside, as He was born, among the poor; that the importance of the Epiphany visitors lay in their status as Gentiles rather than in their rank; that it is in our inclusion among the people of God and in the hiddenness of the Kingdom that we must rejoice.

Fourth Sunday of Advent Year A

4th Sunday of Advent 2019

Isaiah 7: 10-14; Romans 1:1-7; Matt 1: 18-25

“Never underestimate the determination of A QUIET MAN.” These were the words of a politician some years ago. Whether he has remained determined, I do not know. Unfortunately, he has not remained quiet, but has had, perhaps, rather too much to say for himself, but that is beside the point. I quote him, not for his own sake, but because his words apply to that quiet hero, St. Joseph.

We do not have a single recorded word of Joseph’s, yet he is truly a hero of the Incarnation, the coming of God in our human flesh. The first thing said about him by Matthew, is that Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, was betrothed to him. Immediately after saying this, Matthew puts the proverbial cat among the equally proverbial pigeons by stating: “but before they came to live together she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit.”

Now bear in mind that Matthew does not tell us about the Annunciation or the Visitation, narratives with which we are familiar from the Gospel of Luke. He comes out straightaway with this bald statement. It is difficult for us to imagine how it would have struck us, if we had not already heard Luke’s account, if this had been our first inkling of Mary’s pregnancy.

It is, perhaps, easier to imagine how it must have struck Joseph: with shock, dismay, horror, one feels. How is he to react? He was dikaios, says Matthew. The Jerusalem Bible translates this as “a man of honour”, but this misses the point. Dikaios means “just”. What makes someone just? “Faith” says the Book of Genesis, speaking about Abraham (Gen 15:6), a point taken up and emphasised by St. Paul (Romans 4:1-12).

Joseph’s faith is perhaps, not as evident as his kindness, in his initial decision to divorce Mary informally, but it becomes clear in all his subsequent actions, as he responds, not only to the initial summons of the angel “Do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife”, but to the further angelic  commands which were to follow. Indeed, Joseph may be said to surpass Abraham as the archetype of the person who is justified by faith.

Is there a message there for us? I would suggest that there are two: firstly, that we too are called to be justified by faith. We too must put our trust in God, especially at those times when faith is difficult, as it must have been for Joseph.

Are there times when you struggle to trust in God? Times when everything seems to be going wrong, when you see no way forward, when your hopes and dreams appear to have been dashed? Think then of Joseph, whose plans apparently lay in ruins, whose trust appeared to have been betrayed, for whom the way forward presented itself as an act of justice, but also as an act without hope. Yet Joseph put his trust in God, and his faith and hope were vindicated—that same faith and hope which are demanded of us, at the very time when they seem most difficult to maintain.

The second message is not to neglect Joseph, who deserves to be honoured for his role in the Incarnation, who can be for us a powerful patron, who received the message that Mary’s Son was to be Emmanuel “a name which means God is with us”.

And that is the ultimate message of today’s Gospel: that God is with us. Not “God was with us” or “God will be with us” true though both those statements are, but “God is with us”, here and now, in every circumstance and every situation of our lives. If we, like Joseph, are people who are just, who have faith, sometimes against the odds, God will occasionally allow us the faintest glimpse of His presence; but whether we glimpse Him or not, we can be assured that He is there, for He became one of us, born of Mary, cared for and protected by Joseph.

Third Sunday of Advent Year A

3rd Sunday of Advent 2019

Isaiah 35: 1-6, 10; James 5:7-10; Matthew 11:2-11

Lord, give me patience, and do it now! Are you a patient person? Can you wait in hope, or do you, like so many in our world today, demand instant gratification?

One problem which we have with patience is that instant gratification is, in so many ways, available, and so we come to expect it as the natural order of things. You switch on the TV and without leaving your armchair, you have access to programmes from all over the world. You don’t even have to wait for the telly to warm up any more, as used to be the case when we had one, or at most two channels, and the notice “There is a fault: do not adjust your set” was a regular companion to daily viewing.

You push a button or two on your phone, and are instantly in touch with whomever you wish—no need to write a letter, and wait for an answer. You want some food that is out of season, and you can guarantee that you will find it in the supermarket, along with inexpensive clothes, toys for the children, and anything else you may have persuaded yourself that you need. You buy tickets on line , without the need to queue; we all heat our homes at the press of a switch; you click another switch for instant hot water. There is rarely a need to wait for anything—apart from a doctor’s appointment—and the art of waiting patiently has largely been lost.

It was not always thus. The Jewish people, whom Isaiah is encouraging with the vision of a joyful return to their homeland, had waited through seventy years of exile in Babylon: indeed the original exiles, and even their children, would have died with their hopes unfulfilled. Nor should we forget that the instant gratification which we take for granted  is not available to millions of people today, not least to refugees and exiles, to the victims of war, to the poorly paid and the unemployed even in our own society.

Presumably farmers, like those about whom James wrote, still have to do their share of waiting, and there are many who share the condition of John the Baptist, languishing in a prison cell and longing for freedom.

For John, this must have been particularly disturbing. He had confidently introduced Jesus to the world as its Messiah, who would usher in the Kingdom of God, who would overthrow tyrants and set free the downtrodden; yet, not only are the tyrants still in power, but he, the appointed messenger and forerunner, is now the victim of one of them, uncertain of his fate, trodden down by those whose sins he had denounced in the name of the Kingdom—small wonder that he has begun to entertain doubts.

What is Jesus’ response? Effectively, He calls for patience. He points to the signs of the Kingdom—“the blind see again, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear; the dead are raised to life, and the Good News is proclaimed to the poor”—the Kingdom which is present in embryo, though its glory is not yet, and He tells John not to lose faith, even though gratification is delayed.

As it was for John, so it is for us. We too must have eyes to see the signs of the Kingdom already present, where disease is conquered, goodness and kindness are displayed, welcome and generosity are shown, and the Good News is still proclaimed, however few are receptive to it. But also like John, we must have patience, and not lose faith. Rather we should do our best to shed our desire for instant gratification, acknowledging the God who is present in small things, whose Kingdom has indeed taken root, but who will bring that Kingdom to fulfilment in His own way, and His own time.

Lord, give me patience, but do it when and as you will.

Second Sunday of Advent year A

2nd Sunday of Advent 2019

Isaiah 11: 1-10;  Romans 15:4-9; Matthew 3:1-12

“Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is close at hand.” That is John the Baptist’s message as recorded in today’s Gospel. It is also the message of Jesus. Matthew records Our Lord’s basic proclamation, which scripture scholars refer to as the “kerygma”,  in exactly the same words as those used by the Baptist: Mark varies the words only slightly.

So if the Kingdom of heaven (or of God, as Mark puts it) is close at hand, we may be excused for asking “Where is it?” We read Isaiah’s idyllic prophecy of the Kingdom, to be established, it seems, by the Messiah, when the whole of creation will be in harmony, and we scratch our heads in bewilderment.

Nature continues to be red in tooth and claw: meanwhile, humankind, the pinnacle of creation, never ceases to show itself capable of unspeakable vileness. We did not need further terrorist atrocities to remind us that even religion, supposedly rooted in the worship of God, can be a source of practically sub-human evil.

We look around the world, and may gain the impression that violence, hatred, selfishness and sin hold sway almost everywhere. The Holy Land, where John and Jesus declared the closeness of the Kingdom, appears to be a crucible of hatred, with many forces dedicated to the destruction of Israel—and, by extension, of Jews—while the Israeli government, with the support of Trump’s White House, pursues ever more repressive policies towards its Arab citizens.

Latin America is a seething cauldron; China is intent on clamping down on religious freedom at home, while sabre-rattling beyond its frontiers; North Korea is apparently more unhinged than ever; a resurgent Russia seeks to resurrect the Soviet Empire; so-called “populism”, heavily laced with xenophobia, stalks the western world.

In our own country, political discourse has been replaced by vitriolic abuse on social media, on the streets, and even in Parliament; and a looming General Election gives rise to more fear than hope, as the largest parties veer to the extremes. Of the woes and sins of the Church, enough has been said to create widespread dismay.

So, whereas we may understand the Baptist’s (and Our Lord’s) call to repentance, we find it more difficult to recognise that the Kingdom is close at hand. Yet, if we accept the first part of the kerygma, we must also accept the second.

The Kingdom IS close at hand, not only because Christ has come, or even because He will come, but because He DOES come, in every moment and situation of our lives. He is, as Carlo Carretto wrote, the God who comes. He comes to us in other people—He who said “Whatever you did to the least of mine , you did to me”—He comes to us in the moments of anguish, sharing with us His own anguish in Gethsemane and on Calvary; and in the moments of joy, giving us a foretaste of the Resurrection. He comes to us in our times of prayer; in His word, spoken in the Scriptures, and in the sacrament and sacrifice of His Body and Blood and His abiding presence in the tabernacle.

As the great German Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner wrote: “And your coming is neither past nor future, but the present, which has only to reach its fulfilment. Now it is still the one single hour of your Advent.”

So the Kingdom is here, and in the light of this reality, we can begin to view our world more positively. We can see the acts of kindness which take place on a large or small scale, and recognise them as signs of the Kingdom. We can see the sacrifice of the victims of the London Bridge terrorist as their final act of commitment to the reclamation of offenders, and as showing that the Kingdom, though present, is far from fully realised. And we can commit ourselves, this Advent, to a new repentance, consisting of a determination to nourish the seeds of the Kingdom, and to open our minds and hearts to recognise and receive the God who comes.

Christ the King

Christ the King 2019

2 Sam 5: 1-3; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23: 35-43.

“Ha ha” said the clown,

“Has the King lost his crown?”       and so on...

Those of you who are of a certain vintage may recall that song, a hit for Manfred Mann, with Mike D’Abo on vocals, somewhere around 1967. I can’t help feeling that there is, in some ways, more of the clown than the king about this feast, and that this has been the case since it was instituted in 1925.

Why do I say that? Even in 1925, the notion of kingship was outmoded; even in those days, the number of kings had been greatly reduced, and those who remained tended to be figureheads, rather than people of power. Since then, kingship has declined still further. Our own queen is regarded with great respect because of her personal qualities, but in general royalty is seen to belong in the pages of “Hello” magazine, rather than on the world stage.

So is this feast an anomaly? Yes, in some ways, and yet...Today’s readings suggest that, even in scriptural terms, there is something rather ridiculous about kingship.

Take the case of David. When the Israelites came to make him king after the death of Saul, he was hardly a regal figure. In effect, he was an outcast, a guerrilla leader, accompanied by a rag tag and bobtail gang of outlaws, malcontents, and general scallywags; more of a clown than a king.

And yet, he was God’s chosen instrument, anointed to be king by the prophet Samuel when still a boy, long before the death of Saul. He was chosen as king by God, but, at the time, his kingdom lay many years in the future.

As it was with David, so it was with Our Lord. In earthly terms, His kingship was a farce. His throne was a cross, His crown was made of thorns, His entourage consisted of two criminals, one of whom abused Him, and His royal proclamation was a calculated insult both to Him and to His race.

The sign reading “This is the King of the Jews” was clearly intended to mock Jesus, but even more was it intended to offend the Jewish people. By the time of Jesus, the whole concept of an earthly king was anathema to the Jews, who recognised God alone as their king. That a mere man, as they thought, could be described as their king was appalling, especially a man under a biblical curse, as hanging on a tree.

Yet, even more than was the case with David, this farcical king was chosen by God and predestined to reign: though, as with David, the revelation of His kingship was delayed. As the Letter to the Colossians expresses it, Jesus is the source of all creation, whose sovereignty is universal, encompassing all of time and space; and had the Jewish people but known it, they would have been justified in acknowledging this king, because He is also God.

What, though, does this feast say to us? From the 1950s and 60s, I recall a triumphalist feast of a triumphalist Church. In the afternoon, there would be a procession of the Blessed Sacrament, with the parish priest carrying the best monstrance, and arrayed in his finest cope. Recent events have destroyed any grounds we might have entertained for triumphalism: the Church has been humbled, nay humiliated.

There is nothing positive that can be said about the reasons for this—they are a source of deep shame—yet a humble Church is more in keeping with the feast than was the former splendour. Christ is indeed king, but the fullness of His reign is not yet; in this world, we come closer to His kingdom when we are seen as clowns.

33rd Week

33rd Sunday 2019

Malachi 3:19-20; 2Thess 3:7-12; Luke 21:5-19

This is the penultimate Sunday of the Church’s year, and as always on this Sunday, our thoughts are directed to the Four Last Things: death, judgement, heaven, and hell. In this part of the world, it seems appropriate: the year is visibly dying around us. The days are short; the temperature is falling, though not as fast as the leaves; coughs and splutters are the order of the day, as the doctors’ surgeries urge us to have flu jabs.

In the dark days and long nights of winter, it becomes so much easier to recognise that we are not constructed to last: that we have built-in obsolescence.

Our readings reinforce what nature is telling us. Malachi prophesies the day of the Lord, a day of judgement, which will separate the wheat from the chaff; and we would be very foolish if we were so smug as to assume that we inevitably fall into the former category. Do we genuinely have fear of the Lord: not a servile fear, but a reverence which seeks God’s will in all things? Catholics generally have a healthy distrust of those self-satisfied people who ask “Are you saved?”, in supreme self-confidence that they are. We can only answer “By God’s grace, I hope so.”

St. Paul reminds us to be constantly doing the Lord’s work. This does not mean making a nuisance of ourselves, like those pedlars of instant salvation; but seeing God in every moment, every situation of our lives, and seeking to respond to His call. It is interesting that Paul urges us “to go on quietly working”, not making a show or fuss about what we are doing for the Lord, but simply getting on with the job.

Then we come to the Gospel, where Our Lord warns the disciples that even the Temple, the awesome symbol of God’s presence in the nation, will not last. In what Jesus says about the end of things, there is always a double strand. He speaks first of the destruction of Jerusalem, and of the Temple, which was to happen in 70 AD, as the Romans ruthlessly suppressed the ill-judged Jewish revolt; but He looks beyond that to the end of all things, and it is not always easy to separate the two strands.

We can see, though, how this double strand plays out in our own lives. For each of us individually, the day of our death and judgement will come. This will mark, not the end of the world, but the end of our earthly pilgrimage; yet it can serve as a reminder that the end of all things will eventually arrive.

Do we see other signs in our contemporary world? There are more wars and revolutions than you can shake the proverbial stick at. People thought of the First World War as “the war to end war”, yet in a little over twenty years, the world was convulsed by an even more bitter and destructive conflict.

Those of you who remember the 50s and 60s will recall how we lived in the shadow of the Bomb, expecting nuclear destruction to rain on us at any time. The fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to herald a new era of peace, but that proved to be a false dawn. And today the threat of ecological disaster menaces us with a destruction more comprehensive than any brought about by armaments.

Persecutions too, as prophesied by Jesus, are plentiful. Apparently the twentieth century produced more Christian martyrs than all previous centuries combined, and the trend continues. Wherever we look, we see signs of impermanence, and of the limits of time.

So how do we respond? As both St. Paul and Our Lord instruct us, we go on quietly working, fulfilling God’s call to us in the here and now. As we do so, we keep in mind that we live each day in the light of eternity; that whilst we strive to build God’s Kingdom on earth, we recognise that it will reach fulfilment only in the world to come. And while we live in reverence and awe, we do so trusting always in the Lord’s words: “Your endurance will win you your lives.”

32nd Week

32nd Sunday 2019

2 Maccabees 7:1-2, 9-14; 2Thessalonians 2:16-3:5; Luke 20:27-38

“As I was going to St. Ives”, you know the rest, don’t you? “I met a man with seven wives.                                

“Every wife had seven sacks, and in the sacks were seven cats. Every cat had seven kits. Kits, cats, sacks, wives: how many were going to St. Ives?” the answer, of course, being “one” because, if you met them, they must have been COMING FROM St. Ives.

It is a riddle, intended to catch you out, and the same is true of the tall story told by the Sadducees. They are not looking for a serious answer to what is a frivolous question: they are simply trying to catch Jesus out.

And Jesus is weight for them. He is not so naive as to attempt to answer in their own terms. Instead He cuts through their supposed argument by referring to something which He could presume that they would accept: namely God’s appearance to Moses in the burning bush. God speaks of Himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Because He is God of the living, they must be alive and must therefore have shared in the resurrection of the dead.

It may not seem the most convincing or earth-shattering of arguments, but it is more than the Sadducees deserve. It may at least teach them not to be smart-alicks. At the same time, it has a serious point, in asserting the truth of the resurrection of the dead, an important element not least in this month of November, when we pray for those who have gone before us on the journey to God.

You will probably encounter people who will play similar games to try to catch you out. Many years ago, I met a man who claimed to be a freethinker, which seemed to mean that his mind ran on very narrow lines through an extremely dark tunnel. He claimed to want to know where all the dead people are now. I made some sort of brief remark about the difference between time and eternity, but I wasn’t going to be fooled into attempting some sort of serious explanation. He wasn’t looking for an answer: he simply thought that he could score a cheap point. With people like that, I think that the message is “Don’t be drawn in.”

I see that Dicky Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, who seems to spend less time doing science than worrying about the God in whom he claims not to believe, has brought out yet another book on the subject of God. There will be some serious points in it, which people of faith will need to consider in order to refute them, but there is certainly, as always, a considerable amount of nonsense, of tilting at windmills, of demolishing Aunt Sallies, versions of God in which no Christian believes.

He apparently attacks the doctrine of the Atonement by describing it as a punishment for “the sin of Adam who didn’t exist” as he puts it. Hang on, Dicky! Adam is Hebrew for “man”, for “human being”. So you are saying that human beings didn’t exist? So what are you?

Of course he is playing his usual game of pretending that Christians read the creation stories literally, rather than as poetic accounts of underlying truths. Clearly, human beings have sinned, and have fallen away from God. It is unworthy of an intelligent man like Professor Dawkins to ignore wilfully the genuine Christian understanding, and to substitute his own version of Christian belief, which he can then knock down. In that respect, he is simply a successor of the biblical Sadducees, playing word games.

So what can we take from today’s readings? It is spelt out by the fourth brother of the Maccabees saga, and reinforced by Our Lord: it is nothing less than our belief in the resurrection of the dead.