Assumption

Assumption of Our Lady 2020

Apocalypse 11:19, 12:1-6, 10; 1 Cor 15:20-26; Luke 1:39-56

A priest friend of mine, now deceased, recalled standing in St. Peter’s Square, as a student at the English College, Rome, in 1950, as Pope Pius XII promulgated the definition of the Assumption of Our Lady as a doctrine to be believed by all Catholics.

What struck my friend was something which the Pope didn’t say. He didn’t state that this was a unique privilege granted to Mary: instead, he set Mary very firmly within the Church, and declared that what God had done for Mary, He would do for the whole Church—that Mary’s Assumption was a sign and pledge of what awaits us all.

In many ways, this is what defines Our Lady. She is OUR Lady because she is OURS. She is our fellow-creature, redeemed by her Son as we are redeemed by her Son, though in her case redeemed in advance by virtue of her Immaculate Conception, which was to prepare her to be Theotokos, the God-bearer, the Mother of God.

Like us, Mary is a member of the Church. She is THE member of the Church par excellence, the one truly faithful member, the one who said “Let it be done to me according to your word” and who was faithful to that pledge to the full.

Yet even in uttering those words, Mary was speaking on behalf of the Church. The whole Church prays, and we as individuals pray, “Let it be done to me according to your word”. The whole Church brings Christ to birth, making Him present in the world of today, the difference being that Mary, the first and only fully faithful member of the Church, responded to God perfectly, and so brought Christ bodily into the world.

“Blessed is she who believed” says Elizabeth, “that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.” Mary’s faith was complete. Her understanding wasn’t complete: she wasn’t spared the anxieties faced by any mother. In fact, she was given those anxieties in abundance; hearing puzzling and disturbing prophecies about her Son, losing Him as a twelve year old for three days; being baffled by, and yet pondering and doing her best to understand the responses made by that twelve year old; not being able to grasp some of the finer points of His mission.

Yet, without always understanding, she kept believing, with a faith and a love which took her to the foot of the Cross, and later to the Upper Room, where she mothered the Church into existence as the Spirit which had filled her descended upon those who were to be the continuation of her own Spirit-filled life, and of the life of that Son whom she had brought to birth.

“My soul glorifies the Lord” is Mary’s response to that blessing proclaimed by Elizabeth, as she declaims that prayer which is also a prophecy, and which we know as the Magnificat. Filled with the Spirit, she accepts Elizabeth’s declaration of her blessedness, and takes it further. Henceforth, all generations will call her blessed. That blessedness is a gift from God, and every generation of human beings must acknowledge it, must recognise her as blessed by God, the all powerful one who has done great things for her.

Since the earliest days of the Church, Christians have believed that this blessing has been brought to fulfilment, a belief ratified by Pius XII as he defined the doctrine of her Assumption. Yet it has been fulfilled not only for Mary as an individual, but for Mary as the first member of the Church. What HAS been done for her WILL be done for us. This then is our Feast. Let us rejoice in it.

19th Sunday

19th Sunday 2020

1Kings 19:9, 11-13; Romans 9:1-5; Matthew 14: 22-33

Where then is God to be found? Is it in the earthquake, fire and storm? Or is it in quietness and stillness? Or is it, perhaps, in all of them?

Elijah is in turmoil. He has fled for his life, terrified by the threats of Queen Jezebel to wreak vengeance on him for his massacre of the prophets of Baal: he is deeply depressed and longing for death. These are the circumstances in which he makes his way to Mount Horeb, and spends the night in the cave which, according to tradition, is that same cleft in the rock in which God revealed Himself to Moses.

Now he is called from the shelter of the cave to stand exposed before the Lord God. “Then,” we are told, “the Lord Himself went by” just as He had gone by Moses centuries before. We hear of the destructive gale, of the earthquake, and of the fire, and yet we are assured that God was not in any of these. They are merely the forerunners, preparing a way for God. It is only when these have passed, leaving stillness and silence in their wake, that Elijah recognises the presence of God.

Can we transfer Elijah’s situation to our own lives? Is there anyone who hasn’t experienced turmoil at some point in their existence? You or I may not have undergone the destruction brought about by fire, storm, or earthquake—or you may.  We will surely though have found the smooth tenor of life disturbed at some point, whether by outward circumstances or inner distress. Indeed that may be a regular situation for us.

Is God present in that turmoil? Is He there in the gales, the earthquakes and the fires, actual or, more likely, metaphorical, which can disrupt our lives?

With all due respect to the author of this part of the Books of the Kings, I would maintain that He is. We may not be aware of His presence until “the storms of destruction pass by” as the Psalmist expresses it, until the tumult dies down and we find calm in the gentle breeze or the still, small voice; but He is there. At the very heart of the storms in our lives, God is present, probably unrecognized, holding us firm, ensuring that the turmoil doesn’t destroy us, but serves in the longer term to strengthen us, to teach us to recognise Him in darkness and danger and in the unlikeliest places.

Then, when we emerge from the storm, we can come before Him in the stillness of our prayer, allowing Him to speak to us, revealing to us His presence in the very situation which, we had thought, demonstrated His absence.

The truth of this assertion is shown very clearly in the Gospel passage. Jesus appears to the hard-pressed disciples in the very eye of the storm, and when they cry out in terror He reassures them with the words “Courage! It is I. Do not be afraid.” The very thing which frightens them is, in fact, Jesus the living God. Notice that the Greek, of which “It is I” is a translation, is ego eimi –I am—the name, if such it can be termed, by which God identified Himself to Moses from the burning bush. That which they fear is revealed to be God Himself, inviting them to courage, calling on them to have no fear.

Peter believes that he does indeed have trust in this awesome presence, and sets out across the water, yet even when his courage and faith fail, the Lord reaches out to him, prevents him from sinking. From the depths of the tumult, God in Jesus holds Peter up, making up for the deficiencies in Peter’s faith.

In the same way, in and from our storms, the Lord speaks those same words to us—“Courage! It is I. Do not be afraid”—compensating for our own lack of faith, revealing His presence to us in what we had believed to be a sign of His absence. Then, when the storm is past, let us make sure that we give ourselves time and room for the gentle whisper of God to speak to us anew in the stillness.

18th Sunday

18th Sunday 2020

Isaiah 55:1-3; Romans 8:35, 37-39; Matthew 14:13-21

After listening to today’s readings, I am tempted to say “Read that Second Reading again—in fact, go back a bit further and read from verse 31. Then read it again. Then read it again. Then read it again. Then ponder it throughout the day. Now please stand to profess our faith.”

You might very well be relieved, nay delighted, if I did that. However, I have to keep in mind a saying of my grandmother’s: “Do summat for your living if your clothes cost you nowt.” Many of my clothes have been gifts, so I feel that I ought to do “summat for my living” by speaking a little more.

That is a glorious reading, often chosen for a funeral Mass. It is a reading which, perhaps, we do not always take seriously enough. “Nothing can come between us and the love of Christ.” Seriously? Nothing? Yes, that’s right—nothing.

“But sometimes God seems far away.” He is still loving you through and in Jesus: that sense of His absence is one of “the trials through which we triumph” not through our own efforts, but “by the power of Him who loved us”.

“All sorts of bad things seem to happen in my life.” God is still loving you, sharing with you the sufferings of His Son; those sufferings which have redeemed us and which, when we are given a share in them, draw us closer to Him.

“What about my sins? Don’t they get in the way of His love?” Think about it. If you really love someone, I mean truly love them with the love which a mother has for her child, a totally unselfish love, do you (does she) stop loving them, whatever they do? We can reject God’s love, but He never stops loving us. He puts up no barriers: all that we have to do is to turn back to Him and to accept His love once more.

St. Paul’s assertions are borne out by the signs of God’s love for us. These are hinted at in the reading from the prophecies of Isaiah, the promises of an abundance of water (always an issue in dry climates) and of fine food and drink, and are demonstrated in Our Lord’s feeding of the five thousand plus.

That miraculous feeding is a foretaste of the still more miraculous gift from Jesus of His own Body and Blood, which itself foreshadows the marriage supper of the Lamb, the Messianic banquet to be enjoyed in the Kingdom of heaven. Thus the feeding of the five thousand, who receive more than they need, is a foretaste of a foretaste.

Inevitably that causes me to think of the present situation in which millions of people, throughout the world, have been deprived by the current pandemic of the ability to receive the Body and Blood of Christ. It is difficult to imagine, as someone who has been able to celebrate the sacred sacrifice daily, in the setting of a community, the anguish which that entails for the people of God.

We live by and through the Eucharist. Without it, we starve. I think of the stories of imprisoned priests and bishops, in China and elsewhere, who have managed to conceal small fragments of bread and sips of smuggled wine to enable them to celebrate Mass in their cells, and my heart goes out to those who, for months, have been unable to receive that life-giving food.

Some bishops (not ours) have spoken airily of spiritual communion and of the “value” of fasting from the Eucharist, while themselves continuing to receive the Body and Blood of Christ. Those bishops need their backsides kicking , as does the priest who was reported a couple of weeks ago to be refusing to admit Mass-goers to Holy Communion “until it can be done reverently”, whatever he means by that. What cruelty, to deprive people of their life-giving sustenance on the grounds of his own prejudices.

Of course God has continued to love people throughout these months. Of course He will have nourished them spiritually. Of course, by His grace, people will have grown in that grace, and especially in longing for the Eucharist—these are indeed “the trials through which we triumph”—but we need to pray earnestly that very soon all God’s people will once more be able to partake of God’s promises by being nourished again by the Body and Blood of that same God.

17th Sunday

17th Sunday 2020

1Kings 3:5, 7-12; Romans 8:28-30; Matthew 13: 44-52

Three more parables of the Kingdom today, with a crucial difference among them: in the first two, the Kingdom is presented as something for which we are searching, whilst the third sees the Kingdom as something which searches for us, and of which we may or may not be worthy.

The third parable, of the dragnet which brings up fish of all kinds, some of which will be retained whilst others are rejected, has echoes of previous parables of the sower, and of the wheat and the weeds. God is the agent, the actor, throwing His dragnet into the sea, just as He sowed the seed which fell onto all types of soil, and planted the wheat which was contaminated by darnel. Both of these earlier parables included an element of selection, whether it be self-selection by the seeds, which may succeed or fail in producing crop, or selection by the landowner who instigates the weeding process.

Here we have the fishermen separating, as it were, the sprats from the mackerel, keeping some but rejecting others for whom a less than happy fate is in store. As always, we have to be careful not to push the analogy too far. Just as a weed cannot help or change its nature but will always be a weed, so a sprat will always remain a sprat, however much it may aspire to become a mackerel.

People, however, can and do change. In human term, today’s couch grass may be tomorrow’s orchid, today’s tiddler may be tomorrow’s best salmon. We have to keep in mind at all times the promise held out in last week’s readings of the possibility of repentance, of a change of heart, and must strive to be people who allow ourselves to be changed, indeed transformed, by the grace of God. Whether we think of ourselves as crops in the field or fish in the sea, we must always be conscious of, and open to, the love and mercy of God which have the power to transform us in the very depths of our being.

In the other two parables which we encounter today, there is a subtle shift of approach. Instead of being objects of selection by and for the Kingdom, we are presented as active searchers for the Kingdom, whether as merchants on the trail of fine pearls, or as treasure hunters seeking the discovery of a lifetime.

Success is available to us in both instances, but it comes at a price. Both the treasure seeker and the pearl tracker sell everything they own to procure the object of their search. Possession of the Kingdom of God is worth everything, but it costs everything. From TS Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, the Scottish priest and spiritual writer John Dalrymple borrowed the phrase “Costing not less than everything” as the title of his book about the search for holiness today.

What then does it mean to sell everything we own in order to purchase the Kingdom? In what sense does the Kingdom cost “not less than everything”? Presumably it isn’t a matter of getting rid of all our material goods. It is, rather, a radical call to put the Kingdom of God before everything else; to seek God’s will in everything and before everything. It is a call, not simply to avoid sin, but actively to strive to draw closer to God in and through our prayer and everything we do. It is a demand that we seek God, rather than regard Him as a vague background figure in our lives.

I suspect that it is possible to see a link with St. Paul’s words to the Christians in Rome when he comments that God “turns everything to their good,” in the case of those who love Him. If we do seek the Kingdom, we shall experience trials and difficulties, but God will use them to help us grow. Through them, we may change from sprats to mackerel, from weeds to wheat, from barren earth to soil which bears fruit.

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16th Sunday

16th Sunday 2020

Wisdom 12: 13, 16-19; Romans 8:26-27; Matthew 13:24-43

Once again we have three powerful readings, and again there are links joining them all, and including the Psalm (85). The underlying theme is, I would suggest, God’s concern for us, His willingness to forgive us, and His dependability in every aspect of our lives.

That dependability is expressed in the first line of the First Reading: “There is no god other than you who cares for everything.” That care, combined with His power, is the source of God’s mercy and His eagerness to forgive, which are set out, not only in this extract from the Book of Wisdom, but also in the Psalm.

“O Lord, you are good and forgiving, full of love to all who call” begins the Psalm, which continues by celebrating God’s greatness, and concludes with a prayer for forgiveness, a forgiveness which arises from God’s nature as a God of mercy and compassion. This echoes the closing of the Wisdom passage, which states confidently that “you have given your sons and daughters the good hope that, after sin you will grant repentance”.

Am I overstating the case if I suggest that even the first of the three parables of the Kingdom related in today’s Gospel holds out the possibility of repentance and forgiveness? The servant wants to root out the darnel, but the landowner counsels patience: “Let them both grow until the harvest.” The reason which he states is that the wheat may be pulled up with the weeds, and it is obvious that, if we are looking at the literal terms of the parable, darnel cannot turn into wheat: it will remain as a weed until it is destroyed at harvest time.

If however, we consider that, in the parable’s underlying meaning, both wheat and weeds represent human beings, might we surmise that the landowner, the loving Father God, hopes that the people represented by the darnel may change over the course of time, thus providing a link with our closing words from Wisdom, about the “good hope that, after sin, you will grant repentance”?

The parable does seem to imply that, in the embryonic state in which it now exists, the Kingdom needs both good and bad. Indeed, when you bear in mind that each of us is a mixture of good and bad (and maybe even ugly) it is possible to see that we need that stay of execution in order that, in the course of our lifetime, God ‘s grace may achieve the impossible by turning the weeds within us into wheat.

God’s care and dependability are evident in all three of today’s parables, which serve as a reminder that the Kingdom is ultimately God’s work, not ours; that, though we have to play our part, everything does not depend on us.

Both the grain and the mustard seeds have to be sown; the woman must add the yeast (or the “barm” if she is from Lancashire) and knead the dough, but as St. Paul reminds us elsewhere, it is God who gives the growth. I remember my predecessor as school chaplain addressing a meeting of chaplains and urging us to avoid thinking “It’s a shambles, and it’s all my fault”. It may indeed be a shambles, but it is not all my fault, or yours. We do our best, we make our contribution, but we cannot make the Kingdom grow, any more than the farmer can make the seed germinate, or the woman the bread rise. In terms of the Kingdom, “it is God who gives the growth”.

This brings us to the Second Reading, and our problems with prayer. Here again, we have to remember that prayer, like the growth of the Kingdom, is God’s work, not ours. “The Spirit intercedes for us with ineffable groaning” is a more literal translation of St. Paul’s words, or “with sighs too deep for words” as another translation puts it. Perhaps our best approach is to make ourselves available for prayer—to sit, kneel, lie, or stand before God—and let the Spirit do the work. There may be need for words at times, but sometimes they can get in the way.

15th Sunday

15th Sunday 2020

Isaiah 55: 10-11; Romans 8:18-23; Matthew 13:1-23

Three very powerful readings today and, perhaps more unusually, three inter-connected readings. To begin with the first, from the prophecies of Isaiah, I can’t resist repeating the story which I have told every year for more than thirty years on the first Tuesday of Lent.

It concerns a walk up Walla Crag, above Derwentwater, with a group of fifth years (Year 11 in new money) from St. Joseph’s HS Workington when I was based at the Diocesan Youth Centre at Castlerigg Manor, Keswick. The year was 1987, and the setting the final stages of a hard winter by present day UK standards. On that particular Tuesday afternoon, a golden sun beamed down from a cloudless blue sky on fields and paths gleaming white under a blanket of snow. It was easy, that afternoon, to picture the grass growing lush and green as the snow gently soaked into it, the frozen ruts on the paths gradually softening and melting.

We returned to the house for Mass, and what should the first reading be but that same passage from the Book of Isaiah: “as the rain and the snow come down from the heavens....”. My homily wrote itself.

That, says the prophet, is a metaphor for the word of God, blanketing us, soaking into us, melting and softening us, and making us fruitful, if only we allow it. There’s the rub: just as the fields and the paths have a different reaction to the influence of the snow, so do we human beings, depending on the different surfaces which we offer to God’s word.

So we are brought to today’s Gospel, and the parable of the Sower, spreading the seed of God’s word on differing types of soil. Some of the ground is too exposed, some is hard and unyielding, some already strewn with suffocating thorns. Not all of it will be fruitful after the manner of the grass blanketed with protective snow: so much will depend on the ground’s receptivity.

Again an incident at the Youth Centre comes to mind, from a different course at a different time. I was leaving the chapel during the final hymn at Mass, which the young people were belting out with fervour and enthusiasm, when an expression from that parable came unbidden into my head: “They have no root in them.” For some, that fervour and enthusiasm might linger for a week or two; for others it would not outlast the coach journey home.

That doesn’t mean that the Castlerigg course would be wasted. I am frequently encouraged by a saying of a former parish priest of mine, the late and great Mgr. Gregory Turner, who was fond of commenting “If you throw enough manure at the fan, eventually some of it sticks,” though he didn’t actually use the word “manure”. Greg was well aware that you would yourself end up caked with dung, but he felt, rightly, that it was a price worth paying.

How do we encourage people to become rooted in faith and in deeper understanding? It will not be achieved, as is sometimes suggested, by turning the clock back. To attempt that would be doomed to failure, and would involve a misunderstanding of where our roots lie. Liturgically, for instance, our most ancient roots lie in active participation of the people in Mass, celebrated in the vernacular, and receiving Holy Communion by making of their hands a throne for the Body of Christ. In any case, our roots provide an anchor, and a basis for growth. They are vital, in the literal sense of that word, but they enable us to flourish and spread, not to turn inward. We have to begin with a deepening of our own prayer life, a closer adherence to God’s word, a more wholehearted surrender of our lives to Him.

The metaphors of sowing, silent growth, and flourishing are turned into literal reality by St. Paul, who looks at creation, and speaks of it striving to attain its full purpose. This is a remarkable passage, which chimes with the efforts of Popes Benedict and Francis to make us more conscious of the role which the environment plays in God’s plan for the world. As we seek to become more deeply rooted in Christ, to become more fruitful soil for the seeds of God’s word, and to enable others to do the same, we need to remember that the whole of creation belongs to Him, and that we, as creation’s stewards, must do our best to enable it to fulfil its God-given purpose.

14th Sunday

14th Sunday 2020

Zechariah 9:9-10; Romans 8:9,11-13;Matt 11:25-30.

“A paradox, a paradox, a most ingenious paradox.”

If you attended a school with an annual diet of Gilbert and Sullivan, you may recall that line from “The Pirates of Penzance”. I mention it because paradox—an apparent contradiction which turns out to be the truth--is at the heart of today’s readings.

We encounter it first in the extract from the prophet Zechariah: “See now, your king comes to you; he is victorious, he is triumphant, humble and riding on a donkey.” There is a classic paradox here: in fact, if you wish to recall long past English lessons, there is also bathos—anti-climax—a descent from the sublime to the ridiculous, as this victorious king comes trotting on a donkey like a four year old at the seaside. (Imagine if you like, William the Conqueror riding along the seafront at Hastings brandishing a wooden spade.) To move from older to current English usage, we might ask “What’s that about?”

At first sight, it makes no sense. Victorious, triumphant kings don’t ride donkeys; they ride warhorses, chargers, probably gloriously apparelled, and the words “triumphant” “victorious” don’t make natural bedfellows for the word “humble”. What point is Zechariah attempting to make?

To discover that, we have to read on. This triumphant king is a peacemaker “who will banish chariots from Ephraim and horses from Jerusalem…he will proclaim peace for the nations.” I suppose that you can impose peace by dictat, ordering it of a defeated nation, but it will be an uneasy peace, with rebellion probably bubbling beneath the surface. To return to the classroom once again, it recalls the description of the Romans put into the mouth of a British chieftain by the historian Tacitus: “they make a desert and call it peace”. If a victorious king, or anyone else, wants genuine peace, a touch of humility is called for, an element of give and take, a willingness to meet the other on his/her own terms. Looking back a century, the refusal of the victorious nations to bring this approach to the Treaty of Versailles, at the end of the First World War, sowed the seeds of the second, even bloodier conflict.

So Zechariah’s prophecy has lessons in itself, but for Christians it clearly points beyond itself to Palm Sunday, and to Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, an event replete with paradox. Here is the Messiah entering His Temple, but doing so in the same manner as the humble triumphant king. His triumphal procession is a paradoxical affair. He is cheered and feted, but His mount is that same miserable ass, and the authorities of His Temple will reject Him, will bring about His utter downfall, His complete defeat. Yet, paradox of paradoxes, in that most comprehensive of failures, He achieves total victory, and reveals the whole mystery of salvation: that triumph masquerades as utter failure, that victory is gained only when it is surrendered.

As this is the basis of salvation, it is also the pattern of life in Christ, as He points out in the Gospel. The mysteries of the Kingdom are hidden from the “learned and clever” and revealed to “mere children”. I remember, many years ago, a not particularly learned twelve year old explaining that the creation accounts in the Book of Genesis were written in a particular way that the people of biblical times would be able to understand, a concept which the brilliant scientist Richard Dawkins is apparently totally incapable of grasping.

Think too of the ordinary, common-or-garden folk to be met in every parish, who have a simple yet intense prayer life, and a close relationship with Jesus, yet are sometimes sneered at by more sophisticated Christians. Of course we need brilliant scientists and learned theologians—the brutal horrors perpetrated by jihadis and the psychological damage often inflicted by literalist biblical fundamentalists show the danger of ignorance in religion—but such scholars may well be further from the Heart of Jesus than Mr. and Mrs. Suchabody from the two up and two down on the corner.

Finally, we come to the most difficult paradox, as Jesus claims that His yoke is easy and His burden light. Many of those who come to Him, labouring and overburdened, may feel that His yoke weighs heavily upon them.  Are the ease and lightness of His yoke and burden wishful thinking? I would answer “No”, but at times that can be a matter of faith rather than of current experience. Sometimes we have to carry the Cross a long way before its lightness is revealed—but it will be.

Peter and Paul

SS Peter and Paul 2020

Acts 12:1-11; 2Tim 4:6-8, 17-18; Matt 16:13-19

If you were founding the Church, whom would you choose to lead it? Would you choose a rather bombastic character, who tended to speak and to act without thinking, who was quick to promise and slow to deliver, and who, when push came to shove, would let you down completely?

Or would you choose a man who was something of a fanatic, who would persecute his enemies before he met you, and who would then have a massive change of heart? This would be a man who was sensitive to the point of paranoia, who would fall out with everyone, who would sneer at the authority of others, who would brag about disobeying your instructions, and who would display a Uriah Heep-like tendency to boast of his humility?

Did you say that you wouldn’t choose either? Nor would I, which shows how much we know, for these are Peter and Paul respectively, whom the Lord chose as the foundation stones of His Church.

Obviously, I have exaggerated their faults and declined to mention their good qualities, but I don’t think that I have actually told any untruths. Peter did have a tendency to leap before he looked, to fall short of what he had undertaken. Thus he invited Jesus to call him across the water, until his nerve failed him and he began to sink.

On being named the rock on which the Church was to be built, he was quick to take responsibility, but in completely the wrong way, as he tried to use his new authority to turn Our Lord away from his appointed path of suffering. He showed his impetuosity by first refusing to let Jesus wash his feet, and then demanding a full cleansing, and later by cutting off the ear of the High Priest’s servant. Most seriously, his promise to die for the Lord was followed by a three-fold denial, after which he became upset when the risen Christ demanded a three-fold declaration of love, failing to see that this must wipe out that triple negation.

Paul, on the other hand, was the prickliest of characters, a converted persecutor who could have picked a fight in an empty room. He had no patience with Mark, or with others who left his company, even falling out with his mentor Barnabas. He needed love and affirmation from the churches which he founded, and to which he wrote letters, but he spent much of his time scolding them. He was dismissive of the other apostles, claiming that a person’s rank meant nothing to him, yet he was desperate to claim the title of apostle for himself whilst, with the faux humility of the insecure, asserting that he “hardly” deserved it. Finally, his bragging to the Galatians of his humiliation of Peter flew in the face of Jesus’ clear instruction that such matters must be dealt with in private.

Why then did Our Lord, both before and after His resurrection, choose such an unlikely pair? Firstly, along with their faults, both men had immense virtues. The very zeal which made Paul both a successful persecutor of the Church, and a difficult person to live with, made him also the greatest preacher and spreader of the Gospel in history. He had deep insights into, and could write sublimely about, love, about the Body of Christ both as the Eucharist and as the Church, about the relationship of the Church to Christ, about faith and grace, about our ability to rely totally on Christ, and about the value of weakness.

Peter was the first to articulate the Church’s faith in the true identity of Jesus, he was straightforward in both his faults and his virtues, and he was a living example of that repentance which was Our Lord’s first demand, responding to the Master’s gaze by going out and weeping bitterly. Finally, he, like Paul, showed the deepest expression of love by accepting a martyr’s death.

Perhaps though, Our Lord’s principal reason for His choice of these two was less a recognition of their good qualities than a demonstration of the power of grace. “My power is at its best in weakness”, He told Paul. The Church, built on flawed people, will always consist of flawed people—people like you and me. Thank God for that, because it means that the Church, and you and I as members of it, will always be driven back to our reliance on the power and the grace of God, poured out upon us by Christ Jesus Our Lord through the Holy Spirit.

12th Sunday of the Year

12th Sunday 2020

Jeremiah 20:10-13; Romans 5:12-15; Matt 10:26-33

“Do not be afraid, for everything that is now covered will be uncovered, and everything now hidden will be made clear.”

“I beg your pardon Lord, but that is precisely what makes me afraid. I really would prefer to keep some things undercover: I definitely don’t want them revealed to all the world and his wife.

“You see, it’s all right for you, and your mother. You are without sin, but it’s different for the rest of us. And, come to think of it, it’s not just about sin. There are all the mistakes we have made throughout life, all the daft things we have said and done—things that make us cringe whenever we remember them. Are they going to be uncovered and made clear? And if so, will anyone cope?”

Leaving aside for now my conversation with the Lord, I recall that our relatively recently retired bishop, when he was new to the Episcopal purple, mentioned that, before being ordained bishop, he had been asked whether there were any skeletons in his cupboard. I didn’t ask him how he answered but I suspect that he said “No”, in which case I should then have asked him “Why not?”

Anybody who has put in a few years of life must have made a few serious errors, fallen flat on their faces at times. If anyone tells me that they haven’t, they are either the Angel Gabriel or a liar—or they haven’t properly engaged with life, haven’t committed themselves wholeheartedly to living in God’s world.

We are brought back to the account, which I mentioned a few weeks ago, given by the late Fr.Tony Pearson, of the advice given to him by his parish priest as he was about to enter the seminary to begin his studies for the priesthood. In a nutshell, the older man told him that, if he adhered very carefully to all the rules, he would end up as a bishop, before adding “and Tony, you’ll be NO BLOODY GOOD.” (Incidentally, the priest in question was Fr. John O’Connor, on whose personality, though not his appearance, Chesterton admitted to having based Fr. Brown.)

I have a sneaking suspicion that, with a few honourable exceptions, including our own present incumbent, that remains the criterion for selecting bishops. The powers-that-be want safe men, who will not rock any boats or cause any ripples, who will neither possess nor acquire any skeletons in their cupboards, and who will, in the words of Fr. O’Connor, be “no bloody good”.

Anybody who has married and raised a family, anybody who has lived a single life, anybody who has been a priest or a consecrated person for any length of time, indeed anybody who has genuinely entered adulthood, will have committed howlers along the way, and be likely to have acquired a cupboardful of skeletons.

As far as priests are concerned, the Holy Father has told us to live with the smell of the sheep, to get our hands dirty. If we have truly been involved in working for the Kingdom, we will have been up to our ears in the mess of people’s lives, and some of that mess will have rubbed off on us. To quote the aforementioned fictional Fr. Brown, any priest who has been doing his job will know more of evil than the great majority of the population.

Nor is it only priests. As the Church, we are the people of mucky feet, as Our Lord reminded us by washing the stains and the dust and the mud from His disciples in the context of His self-giving at the Last Supper. If we don’t have mucky feet, if we don’t have skeletons in our cupboard, WHY NOT?

Are these the things which Jesus says are to be made known?  Maybe. But to whom are they to be made known? To ourselves first and foremost. We mustn’t kid ourselves, we mustn’t pretend to ourselves that our cupboards are skeleton-free. Firstly then, we must open ourselves to the searing light of Christ, allowing Him to illuminate the dark recesses of our lives, showing us the skeletons lurking in the corners, that we may bring them before Him, and allow Him to crumble them into dust. If they are matters of sin, we must bring them to the sacrament of reconciliation, allowing the priest to dispose of them in the name of the whole Church.

Should they be revealed to anybody else? That, I suspect, is a matter for God to deal with, unless of course they involve criminality. Jesus says that hidden things will be revealed, but we can leave the which, when, and how to Him. And remember those words with which we began: “Do not be afraid”. That revelation will be a matter, not for fear, but for joy in His healing grace.

Corpus Christi

Body and Blood of Christ 2020

Deuteronomy 8:2-3, 14-16; 1Cor 10:16-17; John 6: 51-58

I wrote this on Monday in the wake of the reading at Mass about the drought and famine in Israel, allegedly brought about by the prayer of Elijah. For one thing, it reminded me that drought and famine are still a reality today for millions of people, a situation which is likely to worsen because of deforestation and environmental degradation. That in itself served as a call to prayer and to consideration of what actions we can take as individuals and as the Body of Christ.

And there comes the cat, leaping out of the bag: the Body of Christ, formed by the Holy Spirit in Our Lady’s womb, but formed anew as the Church, as you and me, by the outpouring of that same Spirit, and maintained, kept alive, as all bodies are, by food and drink.

We are what we eat, say the nutritionists. What are we, and what do we eat? We are the Body of Christ, and we eat the Body of Christ. Without food, we die, we cease to exist as corporeal beings, living and walking on the earth. Without the food which is the Body of Christ, we die as the Body of Christ, we cease to exist as that Body, living on earth and in eternity.

Nor is it only the nutritionists who tell us this: it is our own experience as we see the television pictures of people with skeletal forms and swollen bellies, dying of hunger before our eyes. In the case of the Body of Christ, we also have the authority of Christ Himself, of Him whose Body we are, who describes the reality baldly, almost brutally: “If you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you will not have life in you.”

Pardon? Exactly! The Lord Himself tells us that if we do not eat and drink His Body and Blood, we are dead as far as being His Body is concerned.

This is a breathtaking statement. Many of those who heard it at first hand refused to take it. “This is intolerable language,” they said. “Who can accept it?” These were not only hoi Ioudaeoi, shorthand for the Jews who refused to accept Jesus, and who had already been questioning His words: they were, says John, hoi mathetai, His disciples.

What was Jesus’ reaction to this grumbling? Did He explain more fully? Did He water down the starkness of His words? No; He was prepared to allow “many of His disciples” to leave Him rather than have His words compromised. Indeed so fundamental was His declaration that He would have allowed all His followers to leave, asking the Twelve “You don’t want to go too, do you?” the Greek negative meh denoting a question which expects, but does not insist on, the answer “No”.

So Jesus will not water down those shocking words “The bread which I shall give is my flesh for the life of the world.....if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you will not have life in you”. Even some Christians have attempted to compromise, insisting that He was speaking about a metaphorical “eating” of His word, about the Bible, but this will not do. He has spoken about the necessity of His word quite clearly many times. If He was speaking about it again, why would He not have said so? Why would He have allowed His disciples to leave Him over a misunderstanding?

No, it is undeniable that Jesus is saying “If you do not receive the Eucharist, you are dead as parts of my Body.” There are no maybes, no buts, no compromise. And these last few months have shown how vital the Eucharist is. People are starving for want of the Bread of Life, the Body of Christ which is their food. They are suffering from a spiritual drought and famine.

They can follow Mass on line, they can pray, and hold services of the word, they can make spiritual communions, but they know that none of this is enough. Without food we die: without the food of the Eucharist, we are at best half alive, maintaining that degree of life only because the desire to receive is still there—people would if they could: they will when they are able.

“When your people were starving you gave them new life” says the psalmist. Let us pray that the day may be near when all God’s people may once again receive that food without which they cannot be fully what they are, that food which is the Body of Christ and which makes us the Body of Christ.

Trinity Sunday

Trinity Sunday 2020

Exodus 34: 4-6, 8-9; 2Cor 13: 11-13; John 3:16-18

I suspect that I am correct in saying that every priest dreads having to preach on Trinity Sunday. The thought of having to find something new and inspiring to say about something which is, by definition, beyond our comprehension, fills most, if not all, of us with deep foreboding.

Perhaps, rather than attempting to explain the inexplicable, to analyse the deepest of all mysteries, we should simply sit or kneel in awe before the God who is three in one, opening our hearts and minds so that the Father and Son may pour into us their own personalized love which is the Holy Spirit.

At its heart, the Trinity is not a numbers game, a sort of celestial one two three O’Leary, but a relationship; the Father eternally generating the Son with a love which is itself a person—the Holy Spirit—and the Son returning that love in the same personalised manner. Having said that, I am aware of having said nothing, and I am becoming increasingly conscious that this is the point. What can we honestly say about the nature of God? We have our doctrinal definitions, but they, while true, are liable to strike us as dry and meaningless—what Rudyard Kipling makes one of his characters call “your cold Christs and tangled Trinities”.

All that we can do, in reality, is to allow the Trinity to live in us, and to inspire in us that same interpersonal love which is God’s nature. “God loved the world so much,” says Jesus to Nicodemus, “that He gave His only Son”, a giving accomplished by the Holy Spirit. We enter into that love in the Eucharist, where the elements are transformed by the Spirit into the person of the Son, who offers Himself to the Father, drawing us into His self-offering.

That Eucharistic self-offering, brought about by the love which is the life of the Trinity, should epitomise the way we live from day to day and from moment to moment. I think that it is time to stop woffling, and to do it.

Pentecost

Pentecost 2020

Acts 2: 1-11; 1Cor 12:3-7, 12-13; John 20: 19-23

How did you receive the Spirit? Indeed, how do you receive the Spirit? Did/does the Holy Spirit come to you as the Pentecost Spirit, in wind and flame and spectacular gifts, or does that same Holy Spirit come as the Easter Sunday evening Spirit, in a gentle inbreathing?

Either way, make no mistake about it: you have received the Spirit, and you do receive the Spirit. You received the Holy Spirit when you were baptised, you received the Holy Spirit when you were confirmed; and be very clear that these two sacraments (if indeed they are two separate sacraments rather than two parts of the same sacrament) are manifestations of God’s love for you and of God’s gifts to you.

The sort of catechesis which sees confirmation as the action of the candidate, making some sort of commitment to God as if it were some sort of Christian bar mitzvah is downright heretical, for sacraments are always a gift from God, and the coming of the Holy Spirit is a gift OF God, for the one who comes is indeed God.

Are these though the only occasions on which you have received the Holy Spirit? Surely not. As St. Paul states, there is nothing good or godly which we can do without the intervention of the Holy Spirit. Unfortunately, the Lectionary omits verses 8-11 from that passage in 1 Corinthians, verses in which Paul lists some of the gifts which the Spirit gives, and the verbs of giving are all in the present tense. In other words, the Holy Spirit is still giving us gifts here and now. The Spirit came to dwell in us at our baptism/confirmation, but that Spirit is still active in enabling us through His/Her/Its gifts.

“No one” declares St. Paul, “can say Jesus is Lord unless under the influence of the Holy Spirit.” So every time we proclaim our faith in Jesus, every time we perform a work of service, the Holy Spirit is, at that moment, active in us.

Which brings me back to my original question: how did, and how do you receive the Holy Spirit? There may be people who are conscious of the action of the Holy Spirit, who are driven by a wind of change, moved by fire in their bellies: perhaps more of us than we may have thought enjoy that experience from time to time. I distinctly remember one afternoon in my teens being struck by the thought, completely out of the blue, “You must become much more aware of the needs of other people, and especially much more grateful to your Mum and Dad.” There was no spectacular appearance or sound of wind or fire, but it was a very clear moment of inspiration to which I knew I had to respond, and which remains with me to this day.

Similarly, I can point to the exact spot in St. Peter’s Cathedral, Lancaster, where I was kneeling during my dinner hour from work at Whiteside’s Laundry when I knew that I must consider seriously the possibility of a vocation to the priesthood, and I have read the account by Lancaster lass Edwina Gateley, founder of the Volunteer Missionary Movement and social justice prophet, of her similar experience, likewise in the Cathedral.

Such moments tend to be few and far between. They are the Pentecost moments of the gift of the Holy Spirit. Much more frequent are the Easter Sunday evening moments, as described in today’s Gospel, when the risen Christ breathes the Spirit into us, and thus empowers us to be agents of forgiveness and healing. Whenever we perform some positive action, we are being guided by the Holy Spirit to help build the Kingdom of God. Every such moment is, in reality, a Pentecost moment, though the Spirit’s action may be closer to that of Easter Sunday evening.

7th Sunday of Easter

7th Sunday of Easter 2020

Acts 1:12-14; 1Peter 4:13-16; John 17:1-11.

After the Ascension, the apostles return to Jerusalem and establish themselves once more in the Upper Room. To do what? To cower in fear? No no no no no no no......NO! To do what they were told by Jesus, which was to await the coming of the Holy Spirit. While they are waiting, they pray proskarterountes homothumadon, says St. Luke, literally “persevering unanimously”: in other words, they stick at it—all of them.

Who are they? Luke tells us that they were the eleven apostles, whom he lists by name, women, Mary the mother of Jesus, and His relations (“brothers” in the extended sense in which the word is still used in many parts of the world today).

That is an interesting combination. Tell me, when you have seen representations of the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, who has been shown? I will lay you threepence (well, twopence halfpenny) that you will have seen the apostles, Our Lady, and no one else. That is naughty: it implies that these were the only people to receive the Spirit.

“Ah,” you will say, “but next Sunday, for the Feast of Pentecost, my missal says that the APOSTLES had all met in one room.” Your missal may say that, but St. Luke doesn’t. He simply says “they all”. Doesn’t it make more sense to assume that this means all those who had been there already? After the miracle of tongues, he tells us that “Peter stood up with the Eleven” which seems to imply that this was the first time that the apostles had acted on their own: prior to this, the women and the “brothers” had been with them, along with Our Lady.

So it seems to me that those who prayed for the coming of the Spirit, “persevering unanimously”, as we have been told, AND WHO RECEIVED THE SPIRIT, were a cross section of the Church—the apostles as the leaders, as what we would now call the magisterium, but also the women and the relations, representing the laity.

In other words, the whole Church, men and women, clergy and laity (insofar as it is reasonable to use such terminology at this stage) received the Holy Spirit, something which the hierarchy has sometimes forgotten. It is interesting that Our Lord’s relations are included, as they had tended to be somewhat reluctant followers. Is this implying that the Spirit is given to everyone, those on the margins as well as the fervent, provided they are willing to pray and to ask?

Where does Our Lady fit in? Again we are faced with a mistranslation. The Lectionary states that the apostles were all “persevering unanimously in prayer”, though it actually translates it as “joined in continuous prayer” which is not quite the same thing, “together with several women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, and with His brothers.”

So the Lectionary includes Mary among the women, which is not accurate. St. Luke actually puts Mary in a category of her own, saying “with women AND Mary the mother of Jesus AND with His relations”. Mary is NOT included by Luke among the women, but is separated from them by kai (“and”), with the relations separated again by kai sun (“and with”).

This may appear to be playing with words, but it isn’t. Mary had already received the Holy Spirit. As Catholics, we believe that she was filled with the Holy Spirit from the moment she was conceived, thus preserving her from sin: our separated brethren would agree that she was filled with the Holy Spirit when her Son was conceived. Thus she is in a category of her own—she, the woman filled with the Spirit praying with the Church that it may become the woman filled with the Spirit, the Bride of Christ. As we pray for a new outpouring of the Spirit, may we ask her, the mother and model of the Church, to continue to pray with us—and to guide the compilers of the new Lectionary to be more accurate with their translations.

Sixth Sunday of Easter

6th Sunday of Easter 2020

Acts 8:5-8, 14-17; 1Peter 3:15-18; John 14:15-21

I don’t think that the late Bishop Brewer of this diocese would have objected too strongly if he had been described as a Jack-in-a-box, bouncing from one enthusiasm to another. Some of his ideas caught hold, but the majority were abandoned almost as soon as they had been seized, as another notion caught his attention.

One idea which he floated, but which sank immediately, deserved, I believe, much fuller consideration. At Christmas dinner one year in Cathedral House, he expounded his plan for combining the sacraments of baptism and confirmation for infants, as is already done for adults, and as has always been the practice in the Orthodox Church.

Present at the table was Bishop Emeritus Bernard Foley who, with that touch of mischief of which most people were probably unaware, interjected “Ah, shouldn’t the laity be consulted about that?”, which caused his successor to subside, rather like a punctured balloon. 

Of course, Bishop Foley was correct, and more aware of the mind of the Church than most bishops before or since, but I can’t help feeling that Bishop Brewer too was on the right lines. What a pity it was that he didn’t flesh out his idea more fully, and press ahead with consulting the laity about it.

In so doing, he would have closed the artificial gap between baptism and confirmation which was brought into being many centuries ago by historical accident, he would have emphasised more fully the centrality of the Holy Spirit, and he would have struck a blow at the heretical theology which drives some current interpretations of confirmation, which see the sacrament, not as God’s gift to us in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, but as the young person’s act of commitment, something which they do for God, an interpretation which reeks of the Pelagian heresy.

(Actually, Bishop Brewer himself could have been accused of Pelagianism, when he explained the sacrament as the young person saying for him/herself the “Amen” which was said on their behalf at baptism—dodgy ground, Fiery Jack!)

The intimate relationship between baptism and confirmation is underlined by today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles. As soon as the Jerusalem Church hears that the Samaritans have been baptised in the name of Jesus, they send Peter and John hotfoot to complete the process of initiation by calling down the Holy Spirit on the new converts. There is no “act of commitment”  here: it is pure gift from God, and it is delayed for as short a time as possible.

In today’s Church, baptism is administered in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, rather than in the name of Jesus alone, so that the baptised person, whether infant, child, or adult, receives the Holy Spirit. It is difficult to avoid the feeling that confirmation is retained as a separate sacrament purely to retain the link between the bishop and the rite of initiation which existed in the early Church.

From now until Pentecost, the Holy Spirit will feature prominently in the Mass readings. The Spirit has been described as the “forgotten member of the Holy Trinity” and the charismatic movement arose in the Church partly in response to the perceived imbalance. (The story is told of a disgruntled organist in a parish which had made her redundant in favour of a more charismatic mode of singing, and who complained “Them there charismatics seem to think the Holy Spirit is God Almighty!” Er.....) In today’s passage from St. John, Jesus underlines the centrality of the Spirit who is with and in the Christian, and whose presence and role are inextricably bound up with those of the Father and the Son.

Let us be ever more conscious of the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives, of the Spirit’s self-gift in baptism and confirmation, and of the Spirit’s role, together with Father and Son, in all that the Church is and does.

Fifth Sunday of Easter

5th Sunday of Easter 2020

Acts 6:1-7; 1 Peter 2:4-9; John 14:1-12

Over the years, I must have driven the people of Claughton daft by the number of times I reminded them of the prayer said over them when they were anointed with chrism during the rite of baptism. In the previous translation, the one which I (and by now, probably they) know by heart it runs: “As Christ was anointed priest, prophet, and king, so may you live always as a member of His body, sharing in everlasting life.” The current translation has altered the wording slightly, but the essence is the same.

That prayer is rooted largely in the words from the First Letter of St. Peter, which appear in today’s Second Reading: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a consecrated nation, a people set apart.”In his turn, the author of that letter, whether it be St. Peter himself, or one of his disciples invoking his authority, is drawing on words applied by God through Moses to the people of Israel in the Book of Exodus, and on certain sayings in the prophecies of Isaiah.

So both St. Peter and the Church’s present day liturgy tell you that, through Christ and in Christ, you are priests, prophets and kings. What does that mean? A priest is someone who offers sacrifice, and you and I, as the Church, are a priestly people, a people who offer sacrifice. Both you and I offer the sacrifice of our lives to God—and bear in mind that the root of “sacrifice” is sacra facere , “to make holy”. Potentially, because you are a priestly people, everything that you do is holy, everything is done in Christ and through Christ.

Then, you bring your holy lives to the altar, and I, the ordained priest, chosen from among this priestly people, present those lives, along with the Body and Blood of Jesus, as He makes His once-and-for-all-sacrifice present for us, uniting our sacrifice with His in His self-offering to the Father.

In the Sacrament of Reconciliation, the ordained priest pronounces the words of absolution on behalf of the priestly people: in the Sacrament of the Sick, he brings healing and forgiveness on behalf of that same priestly people. These sacraments will have their full effect, will be lived out in the world, if the people of God are a forgiving and healing people. The priest’s words and actions bring about the effects of the sacraments, but something of the sign will be lost if the healed and forgiven person doesn’t experience that same healing and forgiveness among the whole people of God.

Furthermore, says St. Peter, you are a ROYAL priesthood—you are both priests and kings, as Jesus is both priest and king, “like Melchizedek of old” as Psalm 109 (110) expresses it. How did Jesus exercise His kingship? He did it by serving, and by giving His life “as a ransom for many”. As kings in Christ, as a royal priesthood, we too must be people who serve, who are prepared to suffer, who are willing to give our lives in love for Him and for the world.

As a prophetic people, our words, and more particularly, our actions, should be signs of the presence of Christ. It is the presence of Christ, dwelling in us through our baptism, which is all important.

“I am the way, the truth, and the life” He said to Thomas. “No one can come to the Father except through me.” Only by uniting our lives to Christ can we live out our calling to be “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a consecrated nation.” Only by uniting his life to Christ can the ordained priest live out his particular vocation in and for the people of God.

Where does that union with Christ lead us? It leads us to the vision of, and union with, the Father, who is in Jesus, as Jesus is in Him. Thus is the purpose of our lives fulfilled. “The glory of God is human beings fully alive,” wrote St. Irenaeus in the second century, “and full life for human beings is the vision of God.” Through prayer rooted in God’s word, through the sacraments, and through service, we are led to that union with Christ and vision of God which makes us fully alive.

5th Sunday of Easter 2020

Acts 6:1-7; 1 Peter 2:4-9; John 14:1-12

Over the years, I must have driven the people of Claughton daft by the number of times I reminded them of the prayer said over them when they were anointed with chrism during the rite of baptism. In the previous translation, the one which I (and by now, probably they) know by heart it runs: “As Christ was anointed priest, prophet, and king, so may you live always as a member of His body, sharing in everlasting life.” The current translation has altered the wording slightly, but the essence is the same.

That prayer is rooted largely in the words from the First Letter of St. Peter, which appear in today’s Second Reading: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a consecrated nation, a people set apart.”In his turn, the author of that letter, whether it be St. Peter himself, or one of his disciples invoking his authority, is drawing on words applied by God through Moses to the people of Israel in the Book of Exodus, and on certain sayings in the prophecies of Isaiah.

So both St. Peter and the Church’s present day liturgy tell you that, through Christ and in Christ, you are priests, prophets and kings. What does that mean? A priest is someone who offers sacrifice, and you and I, as the Church, are a priestly people, a people who offer sacrifice. Both you and I offer the sacrifice of our lives to God—and bear in mind that the root of “sacrifice” is sacra facere , “to make holy”. Potentially, because you are a priestly people, everything that you do is holy, everything is done in Christ and through Christ.

Then, you bring your holy lives to the altar, and I, the ordained priest, chosen from among this priestly people, present those lives, along with the Body and Blood of Jesus, as He makes His once-and-for-all-sacrifice present for us, uniting our sacrifice with His in His self-offering to the Father.

In the Sacrament of Reconciliation, the ordained priest pronounces the words of absolution on behalf of the priestly people: in the Sacrament of the Sick, he brings healing and forgiveness on behalf of that same priestly people. These sacraments will have their full effect, will be lived out in the world, if the people of God are a forgiving and healing people. The priest’s words and actions bring about the effects of the sacraments, but something of the sign will be lost if the healed and forgiven person doesn’t experience that same healing and forgiveness among the whole people of God.

Furthermore, says St. Peter, you are a ROYAL priesthood—you are both priests and kings, as Jesus is both priest and king, “like Melchizedek of old” as Psalm 109 (110) expresses it. How did Jesus exercise His kingship? He did it by serving, and by giving His life “as a ransom for many”. As kings in Christ, as a royal priesthood, we too must be people who serve, who are prepared to suffer, who are willing to give our lives in love for Him and for the world.

As a prophetic people, our words, and more particularly, our actions, should be signs of the presence of Christ. It is the presence of Christ, dwelling in us through our baptism, which is all important.

“I am the way, the truth, and the life” He said to Thomas. “No one can come to the Father except through me.” Only by uniting our lives to Christ can we live out our calling to be “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a consecrated nation.” Only by uniting his life to Christ can the ordained priest live out his particular vocation in and for the people of God.

Where does that union with Christ lead us? It leads us to the vision of, and union with, the Father, who is in Jesus, as Jesus is in Him. Thus is the purpose of our lives fulfilled. “The glory of God is human beings fully alive,” wrote St. Irenaeus in the second century, “and full life for human beings is the vision of God.” Through prayer rooted in God’s word, through the sacraments, and through service, we are led to that union with Christ and vision of God which makes us fully alive.

Fourth Sunday Of Easter

4th Sunday of Easter 2020

Acts 2:14, 36-41; 1 Peter 2:20-25; John 10:1-10

It is generally considered that sheep are daft. “Talking is cheap, people follow like sheep” sang the Tremeloes, turning a Four Seasons’ B side into a massive hit. The stupidity of sheep is legendary.

But is this justified? In both the Lake and Peak districts I have seen sheep trampling over picnickers in order to rummage in open bags where they suspected, usually correctly, that food was concealed. Bad mannered they may be, but stupid? I am not so sure.

Indeed, if Our Lord’s claim about sheep is correct—and He knew far more about them than a townie like me—His claim that “they never follow a stranger but run away from him; they do not recognise the voice of strangers”, then sheep are considerably less stupid than human beings.

Abraham Lincoln may have been correct when he claimed that “you can’t fool all of the people all of the time”, but remember that he prefaced that conclusion with the build up: “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time...”. How applicable his words may be to the present situation in his own country, I leave you to decide.

To move from politics to the less contentious world of advertising, it is worth mentioning that I grew up behind, and over, my parents’ sweets and tobacco shop. My father used to dread a new bar of chocolate or a new brand of cigarette being advertised on TV, because he could guarantee that, next day, he would be swamped by requests for the novelty in question, from people who had been persuaded by the slick marketing techniques of the advertisers that this was a “must have”; that their lives would be unbearably impoverished without it. As often as not, within a fortnight they would have returned to their old brand, and the newcomer would languish unsold on the shelf.

Not so with sheep, says Jesus. Why not? Because they know their shepherd, and the shepherd knows them. They are not fooled by outsiders, no matter what is on offer. Transfer that assertion to the human context: how well do you and I know Jesus? How well do the people of God in general know Him? Do you and I spend time with Jesus, learning to recognise His voice in our inmost being, in the scriptures, in the sacraments, in the events of our lives? Do the priests among us encourage God’s people to do the same?

Do the people, the sheep of God’s flock, hear the voice of Jesus in our words, recognise His presence in our attitude towards them? These questions are addressed not only to priests, but to all God’s people, because each of you, in your own sphere of influence, has a shepherding role.

To what extent do we know the flock of the Lord? Leaving aside the present problem of social distancing, that question is becoming more problematic for priests because of numbers, and because of changing social patterns. It is no longer feasible to trot around the parish, armed with our census book, expecting doors to be opened to us. Increasingly, though, the question must be asked of the laity: do you know the other members of God’s people, and how many of them meet Christ in you? Do people recognise Christ in us, both priests and laity, sufficiently clearly to discourage them from chasing off after every daft idea, whether religious or anti-religious, which comes along?

Jesus takes the analogy still further. The Palestinian shepherd does not only know His sheep: he loves them enough to sacrifice his life for them. At night, he lies down across the entrance to the pen, so as to form a gate, which will deter wild animals or, at worst, will provide a possible victim for them, so that they may leave the sheep unmolested.

Furthermore, the sheep are so familiar with the shepherd that, like their rummaging brethren with the picnickers, they will hop over his body, wandering in and out, knowing that, even if they stray along devious paths, they will be sure of a welcome on their return. Are our people, our fellow Catholics, our fellow Christians, at ease to that extent with us? Do they know, do we know, that we would make any sacrifice for them?

Sometimes, God’s people, including us, may be considerably dafter than sheep, but can they nonetheless rely on us for love and care, and are they, and we, being constantly drawn to a deeper knowledge of, and a stronger love for, Jesus the Good Shepherd?

Third Sunday of Easter

3rd Sunday of Easter 2020

Acts 2:14: 22-28; 1 Peter 1: 17-21; Luke 24: 13-35

I loved the previous missal’s translation of the opening prayer of today’s Mass. It ran “God our Father, may we look forward with hope to our resurrection, for you have made us your sons and daughters and restored the joy of our youth”.

“You have restored the joy of our youth.” In other words, you have made us young again. It reminds me of a verse in the Latin translation of Psalm 42, the psalm which used to open the Tridentine rite of Mass: “Introibo ad altare Dei. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.” “I will go in to the altar of God. To God who gives joy to my youth.”

The resurrection makes us young again, and gives us joy. Indeed, it makes us neonates, as Our Lord told Nicodemus in last Monday’s Gospel, informing him of the need to be born again, whilst the 1st Letter of St. Peter tells us that we are, indeed, new born.

We are new born, we are infants, we are young lads and lasses, with the world as our oyster, able to run and jump and, especially, laugh again, at least mentally and spiritually. I find that concept especially attractive, having just celebrated one of those birthdays with a nought in it. I really fancy having the joy of my youth restored.

And remember, that youth isn’t a matter of years: it is a matter of attitude. I have met youngsters in their 80s and 90s, still young because still interested, still enthusiastic. On the other hand I have met little old men and little old women in their teens, grown old before their time, because they knew everything, or because they found everything BORING! Please God they may have grown younger as they grew older; which brings to mind an old advertisement for a Scottish brewery, which featured an old man with a long beard and a twinkling eye, supping his pint under the slogan “Get YOUNGER every day”.

One youngster whom I particularly recall was Kate, who, I would estimate, was in her late 70s or early 80s when I was at St. Mary’s, Morecambe. Every day, Kate would bounce into church for 12-15pm Mass. She would genuflect to the Blessed Sacrament, bow to the altar, and then turn and stick her tongue out at her fellow worshippers.

At one stage, Kate went into Nazareth House for respite care. “How are you Kate?” I asked. “Well, compared to some of these in here I feel like Zola Budd,” was the reply, referring to the current teenaged prodigy of the athletics world. Kate also recounted two conversations she’d had with a girl on the staff.

Learning that this lass was a Catholic, Kate had asked her if she went to Mass. “No,” had been the reply, “but I believe in God.”

“That’s all very well” rejoined Kate. “You believe in your granny, but if she lived in the next street, you would go to visit her, not just believe in her.”

A week or so later, Kate encountered this same staff member again. “Have you been to Mass yet?” “No,” was the quick response, “but I’ve been to see my granny.”  Kate felt that this was a reasonable start.

Kate’s greatest joy was to receive Our Lord in Holy Communion, and one of her happiest moments came when the Church permitted the laity to receive  communion at every Mass they attended, instead of limiting them to once per day. This meant for Kate that, on her regular visits to Boarbank, she could receive Jesus three times a day: she would say to Him “I’ve got you now!” and indulge in deep conversation with Him.

Which brings us to today’s Gospel, and the encounter between the Risen Christ and the Emmaus disciples. What does Jesus do? He celebrates Mass with them. The first part of the Mass, the Liturgy of the Word, takes place on the journey, as He explains the scriptures to them, “breaking the word” as we say: the second part, the Liturgy of the Eucharist, in the house, where He breaks the bread which has become His Body, before disappearing, since He is now present in the broken bread.

Thus, from its very beginnings, the Church has been rooted in the Eucharist, “the source and summit of the Christian life” as the Second Vatican Council expressed it. That is why Catholics are grieving their current inability to attend Mass, but rejoicing that they can follow Mass online, and so make a spiritual communion. Without the sacramental encounter with Christ, part of ourselves is lacking: without the Eucharistic Christ, we struggle to stay young.

Second Sunday of Easter

2nd Sunday of Easter 2020

Acts 2:42-47; 1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31

Something to note today, and to remember right through to Pentecost: on what day are the events of the first part of today’s Gospel taking place?

“Don’t be daft!” you will say. “That’s obvious. It’s Easter Sunday evening.”

Exactly! So when you hear this Gospel again at Pentecost, remember what you have just said; don’t go thinking tht it refers to Pentecost, or making it the basis for re-hashing that old nonsense about the disciples being scared until Pentecost. They weren’t. Between the Ascension and Pentecost, they were doing what the Risen Lord told them to do, which was to wait prayerfully for the gift of the Holy Spirit; and if anyone tries to tell you otherwise, knock them down and sit on their heads.

To be honest, it doesn’t say a great deal for the disciples that they were so scared on Easter Sunday. They already had the evidence of the empty tomb, and John, assuming that he is the Beloved Disciple, had told us earlier that he had seen and had believed. There was also the evidence of the women: Mary Magdalene had seen the Risen Lord, and so, according to Matthew, had the other women. Meanwhile, we have the testimony of St. Luke, who tells us that the Lord had appeared to Peter, so what business had they really to be afraid?

That is an easy question to ask, isn’t it? Fear is a strange emotion, which isn’t always susceptible to logic. Think for a moment of your own fears: how many of them are really justified? And what about your fears in relation to faith, to the presence of God, to salvation? Admittedly, neither you nor I have physically seen the Lord, but I suspect that all of us have experienced his presence in many ways; through being led into and through darkness, through our own experience of Gethsemane and Calvary—and of the Resurrection, through otherwise inexplicable events in life, through encounters with people, through the emptiness and the fullness of our times of prayer.

As the Eleven had the witness of the women, we have the witness of saints who have gone before us through two thousand years: of visionaries and of martyrs, and of ordinary common or garden folk who have radiated the presence of Christ, many of them again being women.

We have too those words from the First Letter of St. Peter, about our being plagued by trials which test, refine , and purify our faith, and about the joy which fills us and sustains us through dark times, and which is the product of loving the Lord even without seeing Him.

Those words from this letter echo those of the Risen Christ to Thomas: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe”. Thomas is a belting reinforcer of our faith, because here and elsewhere he asks the questions which we ourselves would like to ask, raises the objections which we would like to raise, and demands the demonstrations which we would like to demand.

Thomas is the down to earth, no nonsense realist. “You have seen the Lord? Prove it!” And the Risen Christ does exactly that. But then Thomas is prepared to make a leap of faith, being the first to proclaim explicitly the divinity of Christ. Seeing and touching demonstrate the Resurrection: faith takes Him further, to recognise that this Risen Lord is actually God.

In our case too, faith enables us to take the ultimate step. The witness of others, our own experiences, lead us so far, enabling us to go further, accepting for ourselves the divinity of the Risen Christ, and His Eucharistic presence. Perhaps like me you were taught in childhood to pray silently Thomas’s words “My Lord and my God” at the elevation of the consecrated host and the chalice. If not, why not begin the practice now? If so, continue it. If you learnt it but lost it, resume it. And every now and then thank St. Thomas for it.

Holy Thursday - old sermon

HOLY THURSDAY 2015

The biggest mistake of the new Mass translation wasn’t something which the translators did, but something which they failed to do. They failed to clarify, in the words of consecration, the meaning of eis ten emen anamnesin.

Now you and I know, do we not, that this means “as a memorial of me” or “as my recalling to the present”. Unfortunately, the translators decided to stick with “in memory of me” which doesn’t make the meaning anything like as clear.

It wasn’t our fault, was it? I wrote to Bishop O’Donoghue before the translation was approved, and he passed my letter on to the powers-that-be. They sent me a very nice letter back, patting me on the head, and saying “There, there. That’s very nice. Now go out and play.” Dozy puddings!

“In memory of me” suggests simply an act of thought—something happened in the past, and we bring it to mind. That is not what Our Lord meant: it is not what He said and did: it is not consistent with the Jewish concept of “memorial”. When the Jews keep Passover, as they still do year after year, they are not simply calling to mind something which happened centuries and indeed millennia ago. They are making the past present. They are travelling with their ancestors from slavery into freedom. They are keeping the same feast which their ancestors kept, and with the same purpose: that the blood of the slain lamb may liberate them as it liberated the Israelites of Moses’ day through the power of God.

As with the Jewish people, so with us. Jesus was a Jew, as we cannot state often enough, thoroughly steeped in the faith of His people. When He spoke those words, recalled for us tonight by St. Paul, “Do this as a memorial of me” He knew the significance of them. He was saying to the disciples “Make this event present. Do over and over again in the present what I am doing now.”

What was He doing? He was inserting Himself into the Passover narrative. He was stating, though the disciples wouldn’t have known this at the time, that He was the true Paschal Lamb who would be slain, and whose blood would liberate believers every time they celebrated the true Passover, which is the Eucharist, or Mass, eating His Body and drinking His Blood as His memorial, as the making present of the whole sequence of Supper—Death—Resurrection.

So that is what we do, year in, year out; week in, week out; day in, day out; as the Risen Christ makes the past into the present. But tonight we do something else as well. We recall the action of loving service which the Lord attached to His sacrifice, and about which John has told us.

To wash the feet of guests, those sandalled but otherwise bare feet which would have been coated with the dust of the roads, was the duty of the slave. Jesus whilst claiming the title of Lord and Master, takes on the slave’s role and insists that we must do the same; and He does it in the context of the Supper, of the Eucharist, as a sign that our Eucharist is complete only when we too humble ourselves in loving service.

Pope Francis underlined the starkness of this demand when he took this loving service out of the Vatican into a Young Offenders’ Institution where, instead of the traditional washing of the feet of priests, he instead washed the feet of a group of prisoners, including a young Muslim woman. In doing so, he ruffled some feathers among the liturgical purists who pointed out that the rubrics speak about “men” having their feet washed, but as the Son of Man is Master of the Sabbath, I daresay the Holy Father can claim to be master of the mandatum, as we call the foot-washing, particularly as he was bringing out, perhaps more clearly than ever before, the breadth of the implications of Jesus’ actions.

So tonight, as you watch me washing (presumably) clean feet, bear in mind what it means. If we are to enter fully into the saving sacrifice of Christ, instituted on this night by His remaking of Passover, we must take with us, at the end of every Mass, the willingness of the Saviour to assume the condition, and perform in  love the service, of a slave. If we are truly to proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes, we must take, eat, drink, and SERVE.

Easter Sunday

Easter Sunday 2020

Acts 10:34, 37-43; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-9

Unless the old brain cells let me down, I will remember to my dying day my first Easter in the seminary. The Vigil was spectacular, all bells and whistles—well, maybe not whistles, but tubular bells, kettledrums, lights flashing on, purple drapes falling, music to die for, and a brief and succinct homily from the legendary Mgr. Laurence McReavy.

Easter Sunday morning Mass was memorable in a different way. The principal celebrant was Mgr. Philip Loftus, another iconic figure, who laboured under two handicaps, his voice and his face. The latter was that of a lugubrious bloodhound, whilst the former was the source of his nickname, Clank. With mournful face and beautifully imitable voice, he began his homily with the words “TO-DAY—IS A DAY—OF UNRESTRAIN-ED JOY.”

Despite the delivery, I agreed at the time with the sentiment. There was, and is, no doubt that Christ is risen, that He has conquered sin and death, that ultimately we have no more evil to fear. That was true then, and it is true today.

As the years have passed, however, I have become less sure about the exact terms which Mgr. Loftus used. Certainly it is a day of joy; indeed it marks a lifetime of joy, because the Resurrection has changed the world irrevocably and for ever.

Can, and should, however, our joy be unrestrained? Suffering, death, and evil still exist. Can our joy be unrestrained when millions of people lack basic necessities? when bombs are still falling in Syria? when Iraq still teeters on the brink? when the Holy Land continues to be a powder keg, with much of its population deprived of land and freedom? when refugees are pouring across the Mediterranean, facing misery and death, and causing grave difficulties for the countries in which the survivors land? when churches are being bombed and worshippers blown to pieces as happened last Easter in Sri Lanka? Can our joy be unrestrained when a pandemic is ravaging the world, killing people in their hundreds of thousands and bringing associated problems of financial hardship, and mental and social stress?

Even for the Easter disciples, joy was not unrestrained. The reaction of the first women at the tomb, as described by St. Mark, was terror: for Mary Magdalene, Peter, and John, as it appears from today’s Gospel, there was initial bewilderment.

The penny may have dropped for the Beloved Disciple, but that did not prevent the Eleven, later that day, from cowering in fear, or the Emmaus disciples from being whelmed in misery. Even when the risen Lord had appeared, there was still a degree of ambivalence, as we notice in the episode on the shore, around the charcoal fire of Peter’s denials and repentance.

So joy—yes: immense joy which cannot be destroyed even by suffering, and which will sustain us through our most difficult times, those times when we are called to return to the Garden of the Agony or the road to Calvary; joy which will remind us, in the darkest of days, that Gethsemane and Calvary are stages on the route to resurrection.

But unrestrained joy—I suspect not. That would be an insult to our own suffering, and to the suffering of the world. Let us indeed rejoice today, and let that joy take deep root within us, so that nothing can destroy it, but let it be inextricably linked with compassion. The Lord is risen indeed but, as we shall be reminded next week, He still bears the marks of His wounds.